Facebook Makes Changes. But Is the Internet Invading People's Lives?

"Facebook, the Web’s biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy," according to a NYTimes post. "The company announced new features here on Thursday that could unleash a torrent of updates about what you and your Facebook friends are doing online: Frank is watching 'The Hangover,' Jane is listening to Jay-Z, Mark is running a race wearing Nike sneakers, and so forth. That in turn, Facebook and its dozens of partner companies hope, will influence what Frank and Jane and Mark’s friends consume.Facebook, in short, aims not to be a Web site you spend a lot of time on, but something that defines your online — and increasingly offline — life." Read more.

The changes on Facebook though are creating new enemies. They simply do not want Facebook, or Google for that matter, to define their lives. Why? When others start defining an individual's life, he/she feels as if he is losing his control of his life. People want to define themselves, therefore. When that ability seems threatened, they become angry--as noted in a Gary Stein post on ClickZ.

My friend Tracy came this close to giving up on Facebook. A social person by nature, she had gathered a good number of friends on the service. She also connected with the people she worked with and others whom were just passing acquaintances. She hooked back up with people she knew in college and high school and even someone from third grade. Along the way, she also became a fan of (and later "liked") a series of brands that she had some connection to or affinity for. Facebook became just what the founders wanted it to be: the central hub of her social life.

But, then, slowly, it moved from a nice, orderly hub to a chaotic mess. Not a mess in the way that MySpace became a mess, with blinking backgrounds and odd color combinations. No, it became an information mess. People Tracy hadn't spoken to in years were now informing her of what they were having for lunch. Long lost and little cared about connections were giving updates on workouts they just finished, movies they were watching, and virtual fish that needed virtual feeding. Facebook was beginning to bend under the weight of its core value proposition and she was ready to just turn it off. Facebook would have been one of those things that she did for a while, a couple years back. Read more.

 "Honestly, it’s a bit annoying. Facebook users are starting to sound very much like Google haters," writes Frank Reed for MarketingPilgrim. "They recognize the importance of the platform and services as they relate to what they do in their lives but seem to want to see the mighty fall in process. I often wonder what would happen if so many Facebook haters got their wish and the service just got up and went away. That would be an interesting day because I suspect not too many of them would be genuinely happy." Read more.

Reed is describing the increasing common love/hate relationship individuals have with the major Internet service providers: People like the services but they do not like what these companies are doing with the information that they collect as people use the services. What does these mean for marketers--after all the only point of this class? Will this dislike grow or do the recent complaints amount to a tempest in a teapot? Should the hatred for these companies grow, will individuals use them? If they do not, what becomes of the marketers' social media marketing campaigns? More important, does a marketer want to have his/her product "associated" with a company whom others dislike?