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November 27, 2007

Are Facebook users men or mice?

Facebook "friend": Find out what I'm doing!
Me: I don't care what you're doing, I'm trying to find/learn/write something.

As I blogged a few weeks ago, Facebook is using your own browser's "cookies," acquired when you buy something online at a merchant participating in Facebook's Beacon program, to tell your "friends" about it.

Charlene Li blogged about her bad surprise: Close encounter with Facebook Beacon:

...this is the problem for Facebook -- they aren't in control of what their Beacon partners do to notify people that this is happening. Facebook can only control this from their own interface, when the information has already been transmitted between sites, and without my explicit permission.

AP reported last week (Facebook Users Complain of New Tracking) that you have just 20 seconds to opt out of this when you buy something.

Facebook's software is designed specifically to elicit information: Your real name, your age, your city, your email address, your alma mater, for starters. Incrementally, people tell their "friends" everything about their activities, likes and dislikes. It's the hated site registration on steroids, willingly volunteered by the user this time because they're telling their "friends" (and Facebook's servers). Now it's added what you're buying. (Pharmaceutical companies would love you to advertise you're purchasing their prescriptions, wouldn't they?)

Doc Searls' project as a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is about "vendor relationship management," which aims to "provide customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties": Doc writes,

...we can’t just tell Facebook to stop grasping. We have do deals on our terms and not just theirs. We have to have real relationships and not just systems on the sell side built only to “manage” us, mostly by minimizing human contact.

Perhaps most of all, we need to come up with systems that help demand find supply, rather than just ones that help supply find (or “create”) demand. That means we need alternatives to the outmoded and inefficient system of guesswork we call advertising.

That doesn’t mean we make advertising go away. But it does mean that we find new paths between demand and supply. and it does mean that find ways to get unwanted advertising out of our face.

In such a system, I could easily find the price of ground beef today at any of several groceries I shop at. I can't do that now. I'm looking for a new portable cordless phone/answering machine for the house, and spent several hours last night swimming in a disconnected sea of well-recommended unavailable phones and unrecommended newer choices. I went to bed confused, without buying. Myriad vendors offer choices; what consumer software streamlines options, recommendations and prices to make buying transparent and easy?

Who's making the social network for us by us? Could its advertising model be a readiness to respond to, "I'm looking for this..."?

Perhaps at Facebook "consumer power" starts with, "I'll reveal what I want to reveal; I don't want you revealing what I buy, willy nilly. Especially at Christmastime."

MoveOn has a petition you can sign asking Facebook not to share without explicit permission and a Facebook Group on the same them. (You can't, of course, see the Facebook group unless you join.)

I don't care for Doc's metaphor of Facebook as a "walled garden" -- which, to this gardener, means tranquility with leaves and flowers. Facebook is a closed society, a focus group, a controlled experiment with electronically tagged, trackable buyers, something of a triumph of social engineering, AOL made cooler.

In a wacky column (Is Facebook banking that you’re a beacon of egomania?) at ZDNet, Chris Matyszczyk writes:

It really is up to Facebookers to decide what kind of human beings they are. Are they ushering in the New Age of the Engineers, in which we’re all just chips off the old rational block? Or are they prepared to force advertisers to treat them in ways that are thoughtful, funny, witty and wise? And social.

If Facebook is, after all, the pre-eminent social network, then the members have to prove, like any fine society (and I can’t include Turkmenistan in this description right now), that they can set the rules.

But if it’s a forum for social narcissism, then every Facebooker is just a fashion model with a bad habit. One that will very soon be telling us that they’ve just been online and bought two Shania Twain CDs, a skillet and the new James Patterson novel. And a Kindle to read it on, of course.

In an environment designed to make lives public, just what people consider "private" is interesting. From that AP story:

Mike Mayer, for instance, saw a feed item saying his boyfriend, Adam Sofen, just bought tickets to "No Country For Old Man" from movie-ticket vendor Fandango.

"What if I was seeing `Fred Claus'?" said Sofen, 28. "That would have been much more embarrassing. At least this was a prestigious movie."

Wait till your real sins get out there.

Related: At Webware, MoveOn to Facebook: We caught you red-handed. Moveon.org says "that early screenshots of Beacon posted by TechCrunch">posted by TechCrunch indicated that the advertising application once included a "global opt-out" that would allow members to block it entirely."

Yesterday, at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington writes, (Facebook Privacy Issue Won’t Die),

Notifications won’t be enough for MoveOn and many users who are seriously pissed off at Facebook right now. Facebook’s best move is to make the new Beacon service opt-in only. But that reduces the value of the service to third parties who supply the information to Facebook, and get free links in return.

This story clearly isn’t over.

TechCrunch, by the way, picks up a cookie from my blog-stats provider, and lists me as a recent reader.

You're in their sights: SocialMedia.com:

We serve advertisers and developers of social media applications with advertising, monetization and analytical tools on newly emerging social platforms from leading social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web, rambles about all this in Giant Global Graph. He supports portable formats that allow him to share what he chooses wherever.

In England, Facebook under fire for not deleting accounts. Responding to complaints, the government is investigating whether Facebook's policy violates the Data Protection Act, "which stipulates companies should not retain data for longer than is necessary."

Update: Doc points to this demo of how Beacon notifies Facebook users that their purchase is about to be displayed.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:54 AM | Permalink