Facebook Friend Activity... Needs Some Work

Facebook rolled out Timeline for Pages today (read all about the changes on the Atomicdust blog) and one of the new features is 'Friend Activity' on the right hand side. It shows how many of your friends like that page, and ideally, who's been interacting with the page - liking posts, commenting or sharing stories and updates.

But it looks like it also shows just general mentions of the brand on Facebook - even if the user doesn't explicitly tag or link to the page. 

In fact, flipping through some of the pages that have switched to the new look, the first five I looked at all had mentions from my friends featured.... and none of them tagged or linked to the page. In some cases, it was a complete misunderstanding! They weren't even talking about that particular brand in their update! And some were pretty old updates - one dated back to July 2011!

Here are some examples (Sorry to my friends I'm calling out..):

From the Today Show. This 'activity' doesn't even mention the show, just the word 'today.' And it's from July 28, 2011!

I'm sure people will have their own privacy issues with this, but I'm thinking more from a marketing viewpoint. Some of these had nothing to do with the brand pages they appeared on, but it doesn't seem like the brand has any control over what appears there or would even know what was showing up. I'd say this feature needs some work.