Facebook Collections brings Pinterest look to Facebook with a catch

Facebook Collections is an initiative to make Facebook photos look as appealing as Pinterest. The issue? Facebook Collections are exclusively for companies that want you to buy their stuff.

According to AllFacebook, the premise of the Facebook Collections feature is that advertisers present “collections” which you can “Like,” “Want,” “Collect” or buy. Which is kind of a neat idea until you consider that Facebook offers this sleek and appealing feature only to people who have something to sell. The photos that users value the most are stuck in the Facebook format.

The feature is currently in testing with full-scale roll-out at a time to be determined.

What will Facebook Collections look like?

Facebook released some photos of Facebook Collections (shown below). It appears that the photos that show up in a news feed as a four box window. Subsequent clicks take users to product details. Much like Pinterest the photo is the feature and occupies most of the screen space.

Facebook Collections courtesy of AllFacebook

Where Facebook’s focus is

What’s most troubling about the Facebook Collections product is that it is clearly a great user enhancement, but is exclusively being offered to advertisers. By completely disregarding the user experience, Facebook appears to indicate that their myopic focus is monetization. Coupled with the recent wide-scale roll out of $7 “promoted posts,” Facebook seems to have made stockholder appeasement their #1 priority.

If Facebook Collections is any indication, the best things that Facebook creates in the future will be for advertisers. And that kind of sucks.

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Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.