Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features

Facebook Requires Social Fixer Browser Extension to Remove Features
socialfixer.com

Your writing mentions this interesting piece: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-end-of-the-power-u...

I am just waiting for a more powerful entity like Google or Facebook to take on Ad-block, that's when it'll get really interesting. I'm guessing Facebook is just testing the waters for now by taking you on, and demanding you to take down ad-blocking features for now.

edit: I just read in your article:

    I asked about both of these cases, as examples, and I 
    was told by the person at Facebook that she was not 
    aware of these apps or Pages, but would check into them.

Because it's too popular and too many of their users have it.

> I asked about both of these cases, as examples, and I was told by the person at Facebook that she was not aware of these apps or Pages, but would check into them.

Yeah, right. I'm sure they've got top men working on it right now. Top men.

every user I talk to now seems to think that Facebook is going downhill and increasingly making decisions that benefit their stock holders rather than their users

Why would you expect them not to? Facebook is a publicly traded company; they have to make decisions that benefit their stockholders or they will go bankrupt.

Also, Facebook's users are not customers; Facebook gets its revenue from ads, not users. So benefiting users only helps them if it increases their ad revenue. That might happen indirectly if an improvement to the FB user interface gets them more users or keeps existing users on the site longer so they see more ads. But FB already has a billion users, and many of them already seem to spend most of their available free time on FB, so the relative benefit to FB from improving the UI is going to be pretty small.

Finally, I think it's worth mentioning a historical parallel that seems relevant to me. I believe pg mentioned in one of his essays that many companies who made third-party Windows software ended up basically doing market research for Microsoft: MS just took all the popular features from third-party apps and added them to their own apps. Developers of FB apps like SocialFixer seem to me to be in a similar position. Caveat programmer. :-)

[Edit: I see that the "End of the Power User" article that was linked to hits some of these same points.]