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Web 2.0 has been revolutionary not because we've been empowered to talk back at the powers that be, but rather because we can now talk to each other. We're connecting. The web is actually becoming a web. And the currency is trust.
What if the trust economy we're building in so many ways in the current internet age becomes the paid endorsement economy? We've had spam and splogs and phishing. Do we really want ads inserted into not just our media but in our relationships?
Facebook has announced a new kind of social network advertising project:
Facebook has become a primary relationship and identity broker for millions of people. Now outsiders can capitalize on that information in a safe way, pulling from users’ expressed interests in their profiles, building on their stated intention to attend events, or simply giving them more dedicated tools for expressing themselves. The outside apps will be woven into a structure that’s already been built and is utilized every day.
Might we call it the "spamwell network", or perhaps "social spamwork"? (No judgment here, folks!)
Let's get to the particulars, such as we can tell at this early stage....
Members can opt out of the behavior tracking ... sort of.
- Can consumers opt out of this?
- If yes, does their data get erased?
- Will the sites for example, Fandango, stop sending all personal and any kind of information to Facebook once the user opts out?
- Why didn’t they make this an opt-in feature, instead of being an opt-out feature?
Their PR spokesperson emailed me this response:
Users can opt-out of Beacon on a per-site basis. They can opt-out for each action, or they can opt-out to never have an affiliated site send stories to Facebook. For instance, a user that buys The Notebook from Blockbuster can stop a story from being published about it, or she can opt-out of having Blockbuster publish any actions she takes on the Blockbuster site.
The response doesn’t seem to answer my questions and basically makes it seem like users have control over this data, when in reality, this is a privacy disaster waiting to happen. The javascript on the Fandango site pops up a little screen which asks if you want to publish the information on Facebook. If you say no, your friends won’t see the information, but apparently Facebook still receives it. This means that if you are a Facebook member, Facebook will know what you are doing on each of their partner sites. And there is no way for you to opt out of that. Or is there? I asked Facebook to clarify and I am still waiting for them to write back.
While there's lots of kool-ade excitement in the blogosphere, there's also a lot of head scratching, nervous giggles and skepticism.
Are Facebookers walking around with signs hawking neighborhood restaurants and pitching the latest Coca-Cola product introduction to every last one of their friends? NO! But Facebookers are now required to do so for Mark Zuckerberg, as quid-pro-quo for the high-priced bandwidth he is shelling out for to keep the vaunted social graph in action.
Forget the penny ante stuff of Facebook employees entertaining themselves by snooping on "private" profiles and browsing habits. This is about following your wallet and broadcasting it -- as if Twitter were tweeting your every purchase.
Is this where things are going in social media? "Infect me. I'm yours"???
Susan Mernit says, "Not without a helluva lot of trust and transparency and control, fellas."
What will Zuckerberg’s 50 million Facebookers think, however, when they know he is giddily boasting to advertisers that Facebook knows “exactly” what they do, where they are, where they work, how they vote…
While Zuckerberg gives an old college try to portray the increasing efforts of Facebook to monetize the private lives of 50 million users as a weighty moment in history, he doesn’t need to try so hard: Facebook’s impressive roster of launch advertising partners speaks to BIG marketer interest.
The real test for Facebook will be user interest, or not, however. After all, social ads, by definition, can not fucntion if they are not socialized with.
So, is Facebook a cat about to cough up a privacy hairball? Or the harbinger of a newly friendly relationship between marketers and web users? It’s probably too soon to tell. But to the extent that Facebook and other such efforts get people paying attention to how their social data is used for commercial purposes, it could be a step
