Facebook has introduced a new feature to create more interest for its users. Till now, ‘Relationship Status’ was completely private affair. But company now wants it to be the centre of attraction. Company has introduced an ‘Ask’ button. This will make easy to know the relationship status of anybody on Facebook. If someone has not published his or her relationship status and you want to know, you can simply click on the ask button. This will send a message to the user about your interest.
One interesting thing about this feature is that the user can reply specifically to the person who has asked about his relationship status or he/she can make it public. It is an interesting way to engage users. It is obvious that it will attract more and more users to the Facebook. Young audience which got diverted because of various other platforms like ‘What’s App’, are surely going to consider this.
This is going to help marketers as well. As once the user updates his or her status, it is another set of data which can be helpful to them. No matter, the user just reply to single person about his relationship status and not to the general public, still this response will be stored in Facebook demographic data. Thus the marketers are going to benefit from this.
But the main issue is the privacy of the user. User has not answered about his or her relationship status because he or she does not want to disclose it to public. But by introducing such feature, it can hurt the privacy of the user. Also, by storing a private response in the database and making it available to the marketers is also a critical issue. Thus it is surely a controversial feature.
