So I’m scrolling through Facebook, then I notice this:
Nice, huh? People I’m friends with are saying negative things about Obama, and Facebook helpfully collapses them so I don’t have to read them! And then they provide a link so I can “like” the President! Notice that none of the posts tag Barack Obama or even use his first name, so this is some sort of auto-tagging.
Guess that town hall meeting he had with Zuck really paid off!
(Note: I’m sure they’re just rolling out a new feature and if my friends were trashing Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin the same thing would happen. No, I’m not freaking out that Facebook has the ability to read status updates from their own servers.)
Later: To be clear, I’m not talking about collapsing comments or games or Twitter posts–I know those have been happening for a while. This is about regular status updates with nothing at all in common except a single word being grouped together and used as a campaign tool.
I’ve never noticed for wall-posts, but Facebook has been collapsing comments for a long time. Even on posts about my cat.
Maybe Zuck’s a dog person.
Facebook is evil.
@ Yu-Ain Gonnano: I’ve noticed the comments, the posts made by third-party apps like NetworkedBlogs and TwitterFeed, and the “xx people changed their profile picture” being collapsed.
That makes sense, as those are things that have something in common from a programmer’s standpoint.
In this case, the posts were collapsed because they shared a common word, and that commonality was then used to advertise for a politician.
It’s been collapsing wall comments for a long time. At least six months, because I know comments were collapsed when my friend was arguing for allowing homosexual couples to marry.
[...] I noticed this too. Others are reporting it happens on other things. But I only notice it for [...]
I think this is the first time I’d noticed it about something like this where a random comment is the only thing in common (unless they were all responding to each other which is different), but Facebook has been doing it in general for a while. I’ve a bunch of friends who play a bunch of games, and (before I blocked all messages from those games) it would regularly collapse all the comments from a specific game, or from all games played by a specific person in the same general time span.
As for the highlighting of the names….yah, it didn’t used to do it, now, if you start typing what it thinks might be a name it starts offering links to profiles….
It does the same thing for all of my Ron Paul posts, etc…. Not sure how I feel about it yet…
[...] [...]
The creepiness continues!
[...] pointed out facebook’s Obama-critical thread collapsing a couple weeks ago, and noticed that they also collapse the number of friends who like conservative politicians (a [...]