Yeah, sorry guys but this is a total non-story. Marketers conduct tests all the time without your knowledge. Ever heard of A/B testing or Multivariate testing? Thousands of brands conduct it on their websites every single day, and dozens of web developments tools exist to streamline this kind of testing and provide analytics data from those tests.

Probably every single day you stumble, largely unknowingly, though a website's A/B test. Shop on Amazon? They're constantly A/B testing their product and category pages. Use eBay? Zappos? Any Gawker media site? 90% of the internet? Same thing. They're all testing. And you know what? You're not SUPPOSED to know they're doing it, because it would make the testing utterly useless if you did.

So, you can all just calm down about this Facebook thing. This is nothing new. You've all been guinea pigs for years to internet marketers - partly for "nefarious" reasons like increasing profits, but also partly to simply improve overall user experience on the internet. And really, speaking as someone who knows, testing is a big component of how the user experience on the internet evolves.

Either way, it doesn't matter what Facebook's motive was, and whether you like it or not. Obviously, they've done some pretty stupid shit, and have a number of terrible policies concerning privacy and other things (and personally, I can't stand Facebook). But testing on their website to see what kind of content people like/don't like?

Truly not something to get all bent out of shape over.