Mark Lyn­der­say

Mark Zucker­berg's so­cial net­work­ing Web site has been in the news quite a bit re­cent­ly, and most of it is for all the wrong rea­sons.

Face­book is los­ing its teenage au­di­ence. Face­book will lose 80 per cent of its mem­ber­ship by the end of the decade. No, wait, Face­book isn't los­ing its teen au­di­ence.

Amid all this fuss about pop­u­lar­i­ty lost and found is a very re­al shift in the way that Face­book shares your posts to its pages and the pro­found ef­fect it's hav­ing on peo­ple who have trust­ed the com­pa­ny to bring their mes­sages to po­ten­tial cus­tomers.

Here's what Face­book has done in sim­ple terms. The ser­vice is plac­ing more em­pha­sis on posts that link to ma­te­r­i­al out­side the site and re­duc­ing the per­va­sive­ness of posts that don't. The com­pa­ny al­so has a of­ten ref­er­enced aver­sion to sites that spe­cialise in posts de­signed to be vi­ral, such as Buz­zfeed and Vi­ral­no­va, so ex­pect links to those sites to be dep­re­cat­ed as well.