Also, Silverspawn, I'm sorry to hear that. Sometimes people just change. Also, it might not be your fault, since Facebook does weird things. Ever since it was revealed that statuses weren't showing up not because of bad code but because of deliberate code, I don't take anything for granted. Hell, even before that happened, I knew that people were spontaneously being unfriended without notification. This can lead people to thinking the other person snubbed them unless they can talk with that person about it (which is how I learned that it happens).
I just read up on this now. So what, about 4/5ths of your followers won't see a given status update unless you pay pet post to promote the message? Da hell is up with that? And now the mobile app moved personal chat to another app that can apparently hijack your phone if it wants?
Ugh, this all makes me want to use Facebook a lot less. I still need it to communicate with groups though.
Why would you be outraged at this? That's like being mad at Gmail for not sending your emails to random people in your address book, even people you didn't send it the email to.
If you want someone in particular to see your Facebook update, you can tag them in it. And if someone visits your profile, they will see all your updates. And even if neither are applicable, if the story is active or interesting enough, Facebook will move it up in your friends' News Feeds.
Speaking from an armchair (is this an expression?)...
It's an interesting problem of content curation that Facebook has to deal with here. From an individual perspective, I intuit that something I post publicly should be visible to all of my friends by virtue of us having "connected" on Facebook. That link is like a pipeline between us, my content should be shuttled to that other person, and vice versa. Perhaps a better analogy -- Facebook is like a bulletin board where I can post messages that I want all of my friends to see.
The fact that Facebook prevents this message from reaching all of my friends is akin to my posted message being torn down against my will. I posted it for everyone to see, but now you're not letting them see it? How dare you?
From a practical perspective, this is ludicrous. There are so many messages being posted that nobody will be able to see all of them. Some will inevitably be buried. Instead of letting it be an unchecked free-for-all, Facebook tries to bump up items that it thinks will interest you more. There are pros and cons to this, but I have armchaired enough for now.
This is only concerning the personal updates stuff. All the stuff with actual advertising fraud and like-click-farms is a whole other can of worms.
(semi-ninja'd)