The latest slew of changes made on Facebook has seemingly not gone down well with the public with a lot of users complaining both on Facebook itself [1] as well as on other social forums such as Twitter. However, the social networking giant has a history of making radical changes to its website format, and it’s expected that users will take the recent changes in stride as well. Facebook is the leader in the online display advertising market, with competitors such as Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) and AOL (NYSE:AOL).
We currently value Facebook at around $45 billion.
What’s Facebook Attempting With These Changes?
While its facing ire from the Facebook community, the recent changes on Facebook are on the right track when it comes to competing against other players in social media such as Twitter and Google+. Grouping friends into categories is much like the Google+ “Circles” feature, which enables users to classif and categorize their social circles and share information accordingly helps drive engagement and increase communication.
Additionally, the real-time ticker feed is easily reminiscent of Twitter, and looks like Facebook is testing a new “Subscribe” feature that echos Twitter’s “Follow” system. You can now subscribe to pages to receive updates and individuals can allow their profiles to be subscribed to by the public.
These seemingly small changes are huge in terms of reslicing the privacy walls around one’s friends as well as what and how users share information.
Considering that people spend more time on Facebook than the next 4 websites combined, [2] the abrupt changes might see hostile reactions at first. However, it is a smart move from Facebook’s side given the obvious threat of web-giants like Google in the social networking space. Users can expect even more changes in Facebook’s developers conference – f8 happening today.
See our complete analysis for Facebook
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