Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps has made a statement on his Facebook fan page apologizing for a photograph that shows Phelps smoking marijuana at a college party. At least Phelps is being proactive about the situation, given his celebrity status as an athlete. Perhaps he’s taken cues from other athletes that have had to deal with a number of different drug-related situations–the public tends to be more forgiving when a celebrity is forthcoming from the start.

The Facebook fan page post from Phelps reads as follows:

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment. I’m 23-years-old, and despite the successes I have had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner that people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public - it will not happen again.“

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It’s a common problem. You are having a conversation and suddenly you can’t remember what you were about to say as you get lost in some irrelevant tangential discussion. I’m not sure why but the fan page “Odio olvidarme de lo que iba a decir“, or in English “I hate to forget what I was going to say”, has surged in popularity over the past few days to become one of the fastest growing fan pages on the site.

The fan page is growing at around 60 percent a day, growing from 62,820 fans two days ago to over 130,000 fans as of the time of this post. So what are the fans actually a fan of? I have no idea! The fan page is now among the top 1,500 fan pages on the site and it continues to be growing at a feverish rate. Can you make a fan page about nothing though? I though that’s what Facebook groups are for.
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Facebook has revamped the public profiles for users and their are some noticeable changes. First of all, Facebook has increased the number of visible friends for an individual from 5 to 7. Even more significant is the increase in the number of visible fan pages, from 5 to 20. This means brand pages will receive more more SEO juice. It also appears that those fan page listings on public profiles are static.

So why on earth would Facebook be providing so much information on the public page? Easy, they want more search engine traffic. Getting traffic from Google can be pretty addictive and Facebook knows this better than anyone. While you can argue that the company wants to attract more traffic to brands, I’d suggest that it’s a fairly self-serving activity.
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