Do Real Friends Share Ads?

That's good for advertisers, but what about the rest of us? When you have a conversation among your buddies or your family, do you want Coke, Blockbuster and Verizon involved? The Beacon program in particular has upset some people. Facebook says it offers users a chance to opt out of having their activities circulated, but some people have reported that via Beacon they inadvertently exposed their Christmas shopping purchases to the intended recipients. The political action group MoveOn.org began a group within the service called Facebook: Stop Invading My Privacy, and in less than a week 30,000 members signed up.

Facebook's official response has been that it's listening to what its members say and will tweak the system to give them more control over what gets reported. Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's vice president of product marketing and operations, says that protests notwithstanding, member feedback has been positive so far, and though he won't give numbers, he says that the social-advertising program has exceeded Facebook's expectations. (Indeed, last Thursday they made changes that require users to give more permission before their purchases on other websites are broadcast on Facebook.)

Still, it seems to me that the best form of advertising comes when potential customers welcome the messages sent by advertisers. This is why Google has been so successful in selling ads targeted to search terms; those "sponsored links" offer at least the potential to supply information relevant to what people are looking for at a given moment. It's much tougher to see any user value in social ads. Who wants to broadcast the news that he's bought a can of Sprite? And who wants to see that on a News Feed?

Facebook has had a spectacular year, but it would do well to remember that it attained its lofty status by putting users first. The company should be particularly careful with its crown jewel, the News Feed; just last week rival MySpace announced that it was going to develop a similar feature. Hey, Facebook, consider yourself poked.

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