I cannot quite believe what just happened (well, I can believe it, but still…) - Facebook just turned a corner in my opinion. If you thought Apple were bad for their control freakish tendencies, you haven’t seen anything yet.
I have just spent the last half an hour choosing how to spend an iTunes voucher a friend gave me for my birthday back in March. I finally chose the new Natalie Merchant album “Leave Your Sleep”. I love singer/songwriters, and love clear, clean voices.
Here’s where it all turns ugly.
I thought “I know, I’ll tell some of my friends on Facebook what I spent the voucher on - I’ll post a link!”. All went well until I pasted the URL of the album at Amazon into Facebook to create a “link post”. Under normal circumstances, Facebook would show you images from the page, and short piece of text from the page body.
Not this time.
Facebook refused to let me post it publicly. I’m guessing it’s because they know damn well it’s a link to a product, and they are not making anything off the reader potentially leaving them for Amazon, and spending their money elsewhere.
I’m also guessing that not many other people will have realised what was going on there. We would all be fools to think this was just a “quirk”. Nothing in the Facebook world happens by accident.
It’s probably the last nail in the Facebook coffin for me. Rather than being an internet destination where I actively contribute, it has now become somewhere I might post links to things I have done elsewhere - which is a shame.
It’s looking increasingly like WordPress, and the “WordPress Foundation” are the only ethical guys playing the social game.