GigaOM Pro

Last week the Wall Street Journal posted a story that Facebook was evaluating doing less filtering on its news feed. Myspace founder Tom Anderson, who’s an articulate observer of social networking, thinks this is a sign that Facebook is panicking in the face of Google+. He’s worried that Facebook will relax its user focus and make the feed more marketing-friendly to head off Google, which hasn’t spelled out its plan for company pages yet. But Facebook constantly tweaks how it presents information in its news feed. It has a new “story” type based on aggregating related posts identified through keyword interpretation, for example. It’s good for the industry for both companies to innovate, and to copy each other when it makes sense. Danny Sullivan’s defense of Google – the company is getting less love these days as it competes in multiple markets – relies a bit too much on using Microsoft and Apple as comparisons. As Om pointed out, Google is the new “evil empire.” At least to those who don’t think that’s Facebook’s role.