Is Facebook Going The Way Of Westbourne Park Grove?
May 20, 2010 at 3:03 pm
I used to live in Notting Hill, London – back in the day before ‘that movie’ was made… when you’d easily see Rastafarians and 4 wheel drive merchants living side by side. It was a great place and I really enjoyed my time there. I left in 1997 and only came back in 2001 on my way back through Europe. I was dying to see Westbourne Park Grove again, all the little funky boutiques and art shops, organic food places and local kitschy cafes. I was so disappointed because in the time that I had left, that magical little area had changed. The big stores had moved in, rents had gone up, and the small shop and cafe owners who had made the place what it was were pushed out. If you walk down Westbourne Park Grove today you’ll see the Guess Jeans shop, Pepe, Starbucks… which sucks.
Now I’m afraid that the latest change in Facebook-land will see the same thing happen.
On Monday, Facebook changed it so that page owners can no longer default landing tabs to anything other than wall or info tabs… well you can… but you’ve got to have more than 10,000 fans or an account manager (ie. you’re spending more than $10,000 on ads). This effectively blocks the little guys from promoting their competitions or apps. Read more detail on the change here.
Whatever about the changes made late last year that blocked little guys from running competitions without use of an app – I can see the logic in that from a legal point of view. Now this latest change will hit smaller brands and businesses hard… you’ve invested in an app that you’re hoping will drive substantial likes, and now you can’t directly promote it. You can refer people to it on your wall, but it’s 1 more click away and we all know about the attention span of the good citizens of Facebookland. I do hope this doesn’t push out the funky boutiques of Facebook and leave us with a generic environment with the usual suspects: Pepsi, Coke, Levis, etc. {yawn}
