"Good Morning, User! Welcome to the New Intimacy Economy"

http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/welcome-to-the-new-intimacy-economy.html

I saw this headline and couldn't believe how relevant it was to our class, especially our last class discussion about privacy online.

Recently Facebook has started putting banners at the top of news feeds with greetings along the lines of "Hi Anna! We hope you have a great night here on Facebook!" I remember when I first got one of these messages and how much it threw me off. It felt like Facebook was making small talk with me, which is completely disconcerting because I think of Facebook as a tool for social interactions, rather than a partner to interact with. This article explores this trend of online companies trying to forge intimacy with their users, and the important that intimacy plays in generating interest and responses: 

"Of course we don’t want creeper spy colony Facebook to be our friend. But creating the impression of intimacy is becoming increasingly crucial to the content economy today, and it’s happening everywhere."

I also wondered if this was another Facebook experiment, where they only give these messages to some users, thinking that those users will engage more on FB because of the warm and fuzzy greetings. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case. I think they learned from the social contagion incident that people don't appreciate being experimented on, but as long as FB doesn't publish their results or make it known that they're studying users, it seems like there's nothing that anyone outside can do to prevent them from during internal studies.