Barack Obama, Lady Gaga, Megan Fox: Your Facebook Friends

What’s huge, takes up too much of your time, and delivers a constant stream of information you don’t want?

Facebook.

“The” Social Networking Site accounts for fully one in every fourteen pages viewed on the Internet, and if you use Facebook you’ve noticed that a lot of what it thinks should be important to you just plain isn’t. Yesterday, Facebook decided that since I follow The President of The United States, I’d be interested in Lady Gaga and Megan Fox:

At least I hope Facebook had drawn a connection between Barack Obama, Megan Fox, and Lady Gaga. Somehow, that bothers me just a little bit less than the two celebrities showing up on my home page randomly, or Facebook having accepted money to shill celebrity accounts.

Yes: social networking has now come to whether it’s worse that the President of The United States is a celebrity like Lady Gaga or Megan Fox, or whether Facebook is selling placement in my supposedly-personalized stream of information.

A great idea is getting worse, and worse, and worse. I thought it was bad when Jessica Biel’s placement as the most dangerous celebrity on The Internet was NEWS, but if mass-targeted news is unimportant at least the Internet makes it so you can move on to only the things that are important to you, right?

Hmm . . . I guess that’s wrong.

It’s more important than ever that you maintain laser focus on what’s important to your business. And more and more, social networking is the most important part of marketing. Sadly, though, the original purpose of social networking (you know . . . social networking ?) is disappearing, as “your” pages are co-opted by marketing interests.

Now go out there and friend somebody. And if you can pull it off, President Barack Obama is still a good place to start.

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