Which speaks to your point about the “big Other” corporations. Indeed there has been great debate over the involvement of Facebook in surveillance and data mining, most of which raise flags over the sheer amount of personal information users voluntarily put on their profiles and how this can be used for target advertising and the like. It seems to me that there are two related issues here, and that the notion of depersonalisation inheres in both. One is that there is a distinct financial benefit in attracting a great number of users to a social networking site and requiring them to “flatten” our themselves in order to fit with the aesthetics of the site - the limited options make the processes of data gathering for advertising purposes much simpler. Secondly, perhaps the similarity of profiles can lead to an overall user mentality of “We’re all the same here” which greatly assists the advertisers on the site who rely on the sense of belonging that the site espouses to suggest that if one of your “friends” is buying a product, then you might like it too.

Facebook has that template because it makes it easier (though I don’t subscribe to it personally) for one to navigate through friends’ information pages. The moment friends’ begin to customise using free facebook applications navigating through their profiles turns into a nightmarish experience. So we see how even controlled customisation is a bit of a communication problem. This of course would be a challenge for the capitalists at facebook who would want a fair degree of user-customisation vs a standard look and feel.

So the issue, in my view is not customised pages vs templates but rather how those come about, the role of the big other (in this case the large corporations that create the products and services). Nobody went to facebook/orkut and asked for the service.