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So in case you missed the news, Facebook's Beacon has been refactored into an opt-in program, making it, of course, much less interesting to the marketeer forces eager to monetize our friendships. And so the pro-Beacon lemmings have realized nobody's following them.
And so it begins: People starting to realize what "free" services really mean. I wonder at how clueless Facebook was about this.
[H]ow in the world is a company with $150mm in revenues that is fooling itself that it REALLY has a value of $15bn – I think that is a 100x revenue multiple – going to double its value other than seriously pushing the envelope with its users. If the choices are (1) subscription and (2) ads and subscription isn’t working so much for them that leaves, well, ads....
...Think the advertisers reeeaaaallly wanted an opt-in strategy where you have to sign everyone up or do you think they would be happy saying “let’s spam everyone because the opportunity to advertise is WAY too good here to risk that people won’t sign up in droves…”.. my guess: they may have picked the spam now and apologize if it doesn’t work and somehow people get upset. And low and behold the folks at Facebook are apologizing today.
But--
50,000 complaints sounds like a lot but from Facebook’s user base -- last I saw 55mm users (probably low) – isn’t so overwhelming at all....
...The long tail is running the Internet. A portion of the long tail cared enough about opt-in and privacy in combination and used all their might in a very short time to burn a company at the stake but managed to inspire a mere .1% of users to care. But THAT was enough.
Beware the power of the long tail!!
Yes, the elite. Or should I say l33t? Of course, at the foundation of this sarcastic argument is the conceit that we all have an equal voice, that we each have one vote in the matter. Never mind that sometimes, just sometimes, the few are influencing the many. That sometimes, just sometimes, when others are looking the other way, the few may just have a point. Look at political leaders. Okay, maybe not those people. Look at reporters of yore like Edward R. Murrow. Look at media stars like Oprah. Sometimes .1% can carry the argument. Sometimes one person.
One, there are a lot of studies on privacy issues that show that most people don't want to spend the time to understand or defend it, but if one percent of the populace, that the other 99% cede their interest in privacy to and are trusted, express distrust of something, the other 99% will follow. Chris Kelly, privacy czar at Facebook, has conducted some of those studies and therefore probably saw the tipping point coming and urged retreat. Just a guess, but that was my interpretation of what Facebook may have been discussing internally.
Facebook's attempts to quantify and monetize selective exploitation of people's privacy don't stand alone, either. For example, Google is making a new push against the Do-No-Evil envelope.
Unlike Facebook, where you have to actively add friends, Google Profiles tries to figure out who its users' friends are. One way it will do that is by deeming everyone you exchange messages with a friend. This can have obnoxious consequences.
Your new Google friends, to use VentureBeat's example, can tell which stories you're sharing with other users in Google Reader. Most of us talk to our frenemies as much as our friends over IM and email. What better way to taunt the competition? This social nuance, of course, is lost on Google.
Isn't that reassuring?
Seriously, though, what I see are reactions couched in theories embedded in attitudes. What I don't see is the simple recognition that Facebook's Beacon represented an attempt at a paradigm shift in not only advertising potentials but, on the flip side, invasion of people's basic sense of privacy in their lives.
When I go to Facebook or BlogHer or my own blog, I am deliberately reaching out and sharing. But when I am home, alone, ordering a book on the internet, I am being private. To try to rip that line between the two apart -- with a one-off opt-out, no less -- is nothing less than an advertising insurgency. People squawked. Okay, maybe it was only a tiny fraction of the total user base. But Facebook can than the stars that they did, because otherwise what would have happened
