The recent removal of the business landing page on FB in favour of the Timeline, is the exact reason why I steer away from learning & teaching features and functions of social spaces.

Occasionally I forget, and when someone requests ‘how do I.. ?’ type questions – I wobble. Sometimes, I get nervous if I think people are going to ask me about a feature comparison of tool ‘a’ over tool ‘b’. Finally there are moments when I get frustrated that I have to dig through the help pages (or Google) how to add a certain level of customisation to my service space.

Then after a couple of breaths and a moments thought, I stop worrying completely.

I believe it is a complete trap to try and ‘master’ the social web. Sure we can try, but very often, unless we’re monitoring the changes and updates like a hawk, we’ll miss something and trip up. Facebook is a classic example. Their security settings are all over the place and always have been. I prefer to focus more on the service ideologies and concentrate on the best way of using it for my (clients) needs without relying too heavily on that service.

As far as I’m concerned the ideology of Facebook is:
We _are_ the Internet and we’ll do whatever we want to keep it that way; you’re just along for the ride’

How about Google?:
We _are_ the Internet and we’ll do whatever we want to keep it that way, you’re just along for the ride.

Twitter:
We _are_ the Internet and we’ll do whatever we want to keep it that way, you’re just along for the ride.

LinkedIn:
We _are_ the Internet and we’ll do whatever we want to keep it that way, you’re just along for the ride.

My point? Well if you haven’t noticed, chasing features and functions is a short term fad, like being cool: it will take a lot of effort and you’ll always be behind the trend.

These sites are needy enough of their users to design and keep features we like, but big enough to take them away in an instant because we’re all hooked anyway and besides there will be some other economic / monetisation reason we’re not aware of.

I suggest it’s better to spend your time, effort and money on figuring out the way you can leverage them for your personal and professional needs, without leaning too heavily on one particular, feature, tool, technique or service. At least then, when they pull the rug out from under your feet, you’ll still be standing.