Have you ever stopped to think what’s happening behind the scenes at Facebook with regard to all those “pages” that you “Liked” and forgot about?

We all know FB aggregates and sells that data, but what about my “Wall” and the things I see?

I did a little experiment and “un-liked” all the pages I had “liked” in Facebook. The results were sort of amazing.

After un-liking only a few pages, I could tell Facebook’s “show this guy, this stuff” algorithm started to freak out. I started getting older and older content from pages I liked.

Finally, after un-liking around 30 pages, I started seeing different content. I started seeing posts on pages my “friends” liked. I didn’t ask for this content, it just force-fed me. I also see all my friends updates… and even that is more interesting. I have a few friends that update all the time, but most don’t.

Do you think my friend “Kristen” really likes Men’s body wash??? Well, well…

All-in-all, it’s interesting to reveal FB has evolved into a catalog of ads for vendors it thinks I prefer and if I remove those preferences it becomes what it was supposed to be in the first place: a way to keep up with people I know, not products FB thinks I will buy.