Facebook, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Why would you replace the option to fan pages with the watered-down ability to like them?
The Pages that I’ve chosen to fan over the last year and a half were entities, causes or companies that I was truly happy to champion. Now you’ve sullied that thrill of support with the extension of the “like” feature. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with liking things, but it’s so vanilla compared to the Cherry Garcia bliss of fanning things.
Rawr. I mean, seriously…what comes to mind when you envision fans, sports fans in particular? I envision a rabid throng of impassioned people who are roaring their support for a team.
Now compare that to someone who likes something. The change just doesn’t make sense to me, so I looked into the company’s reasoning, which I’ve posted below, straight from Facebook FAQs…
Why did “Become a Fan” change to “Like”?
To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we’ve changed the language for Pages from “Fan” to “Like.” We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.
In conjunction with this roll-out of universal liking, Facebook has also launched Community Pages, a collection of commentary about broad topics like fencing or country music. These work a little differently than Pages, culling through user-posted content and adding relevant posts to the Community Page, reminiscent of the hashtags that are so popular on Twitter.
How has your Facebook experience been affected by these changes?
