Recently the hosted social networking service called Ning decided to ditch the concept of free accounts in favor of focusing on paid services. Evidently the $100 million or so invested in Ning has not been returning enough to satisfy investors. The move is understandable for a variety of reasons. Paid sites will generally have better quality content, less spam, and more time invested by their owners. With all of the great services offered by Ning, like video hosting, user blogs, widgets, open social and more, you'd think that they would be able to grow the site and build revenue with both paid and free accounts. Unfortunately for Ning there's this little site called Facebook.

Facebook offers the option to create pages and those pages offer many of the same features that Ning's networks offer including blog posts, videos, photo galleries, and single sign on. Sign on to Facebook once and you can interact with thousands of pages created by everyone from Mom's concerned about lactose in milk to the local indie rock band. So given the choice between creating a presence on Facebook and creating a presence on Ning, many more people choose Facebook. In fact companies of all sizes are entrusting more of their online strategy to pages on Facebook simply because that's where the masses are. So Facebook pages are a BIG thing and that means changes to how the pages work should be a big deal to the people who rely on those pages.

This past week Facebook announced a major change to the concept of interacting with pages. You see, Facebook offers a free widget to page owners that they can place on other sites. Before this week that widget prompted visitors to "follow" the page promoted in the widget. This past week the folks at Facebook changed all existing widgets so that the prompt is now to "like" rather than follow. I think that there's a big difference between the concepts of follow and like. The concept of follow is more beneficial to the page creator whereas the concept of like is more beneficial to Facebook.

Think about it for a second. Following implies engagement. Liking is a more shallow concept. Following implies an ongoing connection. Liking implies a one time acknowledgement of a preference. That's one reason my the whole like vs. follow situation is bad news for people maintaining Facebook pages. The other piece of bad news involves how Facebook will use the "like" data. Of course there will be copious sharing with other applications and websites. Yes, you can opt out. But millions of people have automatically been opted in without even really understanding how their click data is being used. If you run a Facebook page (I have a couple) should you warn your followers (or likers) about this? To be honest I'm not even sure exactly how the data is shared. What I do know is that Facebook needs more clicks because more clicks means more data for marketers. And marketing data is the chief asset of Facebook right now. You, on the other hand need more engagement. What's a promoter of things on the web to do?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Don't put so much effort into Facebook that you neglect to build a strong presence on your own domain. Think of your Facebook page as an outpost. Put resources into it. Give it some attention. But focus the majority of your resources into a domain and experience that you control. If content is really important, post it on your own site first and cross post it to your Facebook page. The smarter investment is the investment into your own domain.