Close Friends in Facebook, Another Marketing Angle?

Are you sure you know how Facebook is handling your profile information, if you've given that much info up?

Facebook is all about "breaking down the barriers" on the web and making much about your marketable information public.  This is how they key in on advertisers and tease them to play along.  When you admit a FB app into your profile, it can then start looking at profiles of that person's friends.  Of course, as time goes on, this can get more controlled by the users if they pay attention to how they have their privacy settings established.

Then there's this thing where they ask you to submit your email address to see if any of your friends are out there on Facebook.  Which is curious, considering that all this is doing is having you willingly give up your address to this search function.  I'm not paranoid, just not fond of flinging my personal information out into the digital darkness of the web.

But now Facebook started asking me to add select folks to my "Close Friends" category.

Really?  Why add to or have another category?  What are they up to now?  Is this some new marketing angle to determine who you think are close friends, then come flying in with some new marketing aimed at these relationship?

Probably.  But we won't find out about it unless some watchdog group digs and finds out what's up.

Until then, meh!  I'm not voluntarily offering up information.  And though I'm not advocating anything against Facebook, I do strongly suggest that if it interests you, you should look into your privacy settings to make sure they concur with what you think your settings are.  And if you get them the way you like them, to check them after each change or update that FB makes to their system, because they seem to change with the changes.