// Around the same time that Google+ is introducing features like automated tagging of posts and your photos can being searchable by their content, Facebook wants us to go a through a menu interface and state what we’re doing from a choice of options.
Of course this all comes down to advertising (as Slate pointed out). Explicitly declaring that you drink coffee or watch 60 Minutes puts you nicely in Facebook’s audience categorisations for better ad targeting. It is basically taking the systems of likes and advancing it on the status update box, removing the part where the user has to find a page and click “like” or adding movies/music/etc in his profile.
This seems like part of a trend showing that Facebook simply does not have the “horsepower” to handle all the data it gets and turn it into indexed information for advertisers. We also see it in Facebook’s reluctance to allow high quality photos while imposing terrible compression on anything you upload. They don’t have the capacity to handle it (see related note).
All in all, it has long been written that users in Facebook’s are the commodity. Now apparently we are also replacing Facebook’s computer infrastructure :)
Tags: Facebook, Google, Google Plus, social media
