28 Nov 07 Facebook Greed

The first rule of Facebook, is don’t talk about the Facebook (negatively at least).

Facebook recently launched their new advertising platform and have raised a lot of privacy concerns. This is compounded with other Facebook woes, as they have also been accused of censorship around the issue, and are fighting a constant battle convincing marketers of good returns on Click Through Rates, which have been estimated as low as 0.04%. This post from Carnegie4Life points out some of the creepiness of their new features, and the paradigm shift in how privacy is managed on the Internet. Your anonymity on the Internet when surfing corporate websites that opt in to Facebook Beacon (particularly those you purchase from) is taking a bit of a back seat compared to how things were prior to the release of Beacon.

It is legitimate for users to be concerned about this, mostly because it has totally avoided any sort of permission marketing principles, and because it is co-opting users as affiliate marketers without their consent, and without reward. Similarly, marketers should be aware of their brand reputation in this light.

This disregard for user rights seems to be the most astounding trend with Facebook, and posits a dramatic difference in cultural identity to that of Google. Now, Google isn’t infallible, but their actions seem to point to some sort of economic justice in sharing the wealth (AdSense for example).

At the end of the day, a Facebook profile is content driving traffic, a recommendation is affiliate marketing, and none of this revenue generated flows to the end user. This seems to be greedy from Facebook, and presents an opportunity for competitors to give users a better value proposition. Not that these value propositions always take off - eg Metacafe pays for views of videos, yet YouTube doesn’t, but it is still the market leader. Similarly, advertising in the newsfeed doesn’t seem too far removed for from soliciting exception in an email spam filter.

It seems open platforms, transparency, respect for users and shared spoils seem to be indicative of a company’s longevity in the new Web.