Facebook, the social network that is no longer social.

Over the last month or so I’ve seen a few articles going around about the most recent changes Facebook has made to it’s fan pages, and especially to who sees the updates. There’s two good articles about it on the New York Observer (Broken On Purpose) and on Dangerous Minds (Facebook: I Want My Friends Back). Both of these focus on the impact to fan pages for small businesses, blogs or similar, but mention in passing that the “promote” button was starting to show up for ordinary users as well.

A couple of days ago I noticed that I could see it, got curious, and decided to do an experiment to see what difference promoting a status actually had.

Yesterday lunchtime I posted two status updates, which both read:

Testing something. Can you ‘like’ this post if you see it?

(may appear more than once, please do same for both)

Set privacy settings on both to friends only, paid the money to promote one of them, and then say back and waited a day. What happened is after the break.

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