Ted Howard

I’m about to turn off Notes notifications because Facebook Notes have suddenly become the new method of sending Chain Letters and Chain Emails.

I remember in the early days of email getting these “Forward this on to 10 friends and Bill Gates will give money to sick children.” or similar things. This caused me to reply to my friends and teach them not to forward obvious spam. Now, it’s Facebook Notes and the Facebook platform is about to lose another form of notifications because the feature is becoming annoying to its users.

I’ve seen the “25 Random Things About Me” Facebook Note about three times a day each day for the last week. One of my friends even started a retaliatory Spam Note entitled “15 Things About Me … some of which are untrue”.

Why this matters is that Facebook succeeds or fails based on social networking touchpoints. When you get a notification that you were tagged in a photo, then go view that photo, Facebook has more traffic to sell to advertisers. When you then tag someone else in that photo or browse to a related photo and add a comment, Facebook has more content for people to view, a richer set of data about people, and can send a notification to the user you tagged and the user who uploaded the photo.

When a core piece of Facebook becomes used in an annoying way and when that causes users to either mentally ignore or turn off that Facebook feature, Facebook loses much more than that single user. Their lose is multiplied by a social network factor. I’m intrigued to see if Facebook will do something to retain Notes users while controlling Notes spam.