Facebook ‘become a fan’ or ‘like’

Facebook has stirred up some unhappy feelings with its users, especially page administrators. Its recent change from ‘Fans’ to ‘People like this’ clearly isn’t widely accepted, so much so that the page ‘We hate the new profile page...please change it back!’ was created and as of April 28th showed 2,135 fans...oops I mean ‘People like this.’

Users are not bashful about making Facebook know they’re not happy. On The Facebook Blog entry entitled ‘Connecting to Everything You Care About’ posted April 19th it says “If you want to add more connections to your profile, just click "Like" on any Facebook Page. We've replaced the expression "Become a Fan" for Pages with "Like." Clicking "Like" on a Page adds that connection in the related area of your profile's Info section’ among other things.” So far, there are 2,929 comments under that entry and most share their unhappiness.

Not everyone totally hates the set up, and with good reason. It does have advantages. It will definitely give pages more mileage, but that comes at the price of violating users’ personal profiles in small ways. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see whether users tolerate the new feature or quit using the social network, or whether Facebook makes any changes based on the feedback from its users.