Your Facebook profile is about to get a lot more dynamic. Today, Facebook is starting to roll out an all-new way to share your likes and interests, and it’s all about Community Pages.
These changes are related to the new “like” terminology Facebook introduced at the end of March. Instead of becoming a fan of pages — which, at the time, were limited to brands and organizations — users could simply click a button stating that they liked the page/brand/organization. The new lingo gave users less commitment and more ability to easily express affinity.
Very shortly thereafter, Facebook launched Community Pages. Now, users can “like” topics, such as cooking or hip hop, in addition to brands, such as Sur La Table or Eminem. These community pages aren’t run by individuals, so they don’t have a wall and don’t send updates to users’ feeds. Instead, they import streams of related, public content from user status messages.
Status text is split into updates from friends and updates from all Facebook users. E.g., if I write in a status update to everyone, “I love this new hip hop album,” Facebook recognizes the term “hip hop” and imports my public update to the hip hop community page. Community Pages also include relevant information from WikipediaWikipedia
under a Wikipedia tab.
With today’s changes, “liked” pages and community pages can be linked to user profiles in categories of the “Likes and Interests” section of the profile. Instead of being merely static text, the profiles can display links to active community or brand-owned pages. Each page’s link will open up a hovercard with more information on the page. The pages you already like will be linked to your profile in the appropriate category, such as music or movies, and interests you’ve stated can be linked to related community pages.
Current users who log in will see a dialog box like this to guide them through the opt-in process:
Users can choose to link to some, all, or none of the suggested pages for their profiles:
When a page is successfully linked to a profile, a hovercard will be shown on mouseover:
Of course, since information around pages is public, privacy and sharing settings for these new settings are editable. In a new profile editing workflow, users will be given page suggestions when they add text to their profiles. Pages can be dragged and dropped from the profile, or even hidden if the user doesn’t want his profile to be a billboard for that particular page.
And privacy settings will be changed, as well, for “friends, tags and connections” so users have more control over who sees what areas of their profiles, including friends lists, cities and pages.
A Facebook spokesperson said the reasons for these changes lay solely in emergent user behavior, telling MashableMashable, “This could be positive for pages, they’re going to be a lot more prominent. But this isn’t really for page owners, this is from our observation of how users use the site and changing our model to be in line with user behavior.”
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