The general opinion seems to be that Facebook is making theise settings difficult to find in order to keep the average user from knowing what information they are able to keep private and what they are not.

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – Graphic – NYTimes.com.

An example of Facebook spamvertising.

Facebook has become big business thru its use of targeted advertising (revenue estimate $1 billion) but, as Brad Stone of the New York Times points out, advertisers don’t all seem to be using the information available to them in sensible ways.

I think Facebook is a powerful advertising platform, but you can’t deny that ads seen there seem to have more in common with spam than traditional advertising.  A Facebook representative from the article says that they’re adjusting their policies in order to reduce the spamvertising and exploitation of their advertising targeting system.

I would love to see Facebook clean up it’s advertising act.  If users get used to seeing creepy, senseless advertising on the site then they will be trained to ignore it.  Then when legitimate advertisers put up high quality, relevant advertising it will be ignored with everything else.  The New York Times article shows that people are aware of the problem, but doesn’t completely re-assure me that a solution is forthcoming.

New York Times: Ads Posted on Facebook Strike Some as Off-Key

Essentially, they’re adding some social networking tools on top of their Gmail web-mail platform.  I’m a big fan of Gmail, and a big user of many of Google’s other products (I spend approximately 75% of my time online in Google Reader) so I have a lot of faith in most new ideas coming out of Mountain View, but I have mixed feelings about Buzz.

Part of me wants to believe that Google Buzz is going to be a big hit.  Integrating it with email is an excellent idea.  Email is kind of the silent social network.  Most of the sharing and communication in the country is done via email, but as a tool it leaves much to be desired.  Maintaining an up-to-date address book is very difficult compared to adding someone as a friend on a social network, and email, with it’s To: CC: Subject: Body: structure is a little clunky for firing off quick updates to large groups of people.  Buzz looks like it will tie in with the people you already correspond with by email, so they may be able to tap into the people who are already using email to do their sharing.  I am pretty sure that Google Buzz will be a good social networking tool; Google is still tops at making efficient, functional web applications.  The fact that they can essentially force everyone on Gmail to use it may give it the critical mass that a social network needs to become self-sustaining.

On the other hand none of the features that Google is announcing really wow me, and they’re going up against a social networking juggernaut.  They really aren’t a threat to Facebook, which has everybody and their mother already a member, robust web integration features, and a singleminded focus on dominating social networking.  We are past the point where social networking sites are gathering users from the ranks of people who have not tried social networking before.  Only in the great Myspace to Facebook Exodus of 2008 has one social networking site managed to siphon away a large share of another’s user base, and that occurred during a time when Myspace was making some serious missteps.  Google’s Wave service shows that they are interested in innovating new methods for online communications, but also shows that their ideas can be a little too out there.  I’ll be trying Google Buzz, but at this point I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about.

Do your self a favor and read the rest of his analysis of the data.  It’s very interesting.

A while back we saw this in the fight between Time Warner and Fox over the fees that Fox wanted to charge the cable provider to carry its programming.  Time Warner took their case to the customers, making the case that Fox was being unreasonable, and even went so far as to educate their customers on how to watch Fox programming online.  This time, I found the issue particularly interesting, because of the way one side used the social marketing power of its artists as self promoters to achieve its goals.

Amazon and Macmillan’s fight this week boils down to the same thing: a pricing fight between contend producers and content distributors.  Essentially, Macmillan wanted to raise the price of their e-books on the Amazon Kindle from $10 to $15.  Amazon wouldn’t budge, and decided to pull Macmillan’s books from the Kindle store.  Macmillian responded with press releases and directly to fans through its authors.  I think that the best way to look at this is as a series of statements to the public.

Amazon’s Statements To The Public

Amazon pulled the Macmillan books from their shelves without warning or comment.  At best, the only message to consumers that this sends is “No, you can’t buy that here anymore.”  Amazon didn’t even put up a notice trying to shift blame to Macmillan for the disappearance of a quarter of their e-book catalog.  Time Warner Cable handled this exact issue much better with their public ultimatums and deadlines for Fox.  A deadline before the great removal would have given them a shot at making Macmillan look like the unreasonable one in the eyes of the public.

Macmillan’s Statements To The Public

They were the first to speak directly to the public, in a press release from Macmillan CEO John Sargent .

Then they made their appeal directly to the public, thru the authors they represent.  Authors today, like all artists, are self promotors. A large number of them have blogs and use social networking, which they use to communicate directly with their most passionate fans, who in turn have blogs and use social networking to spread their fandom.  The message going out from the authors was “I will loose money because Amazon won’t sell my books”.  Kindle owners are passionate readers; they’d have to be to drop over $300 on a gadget used exclusively for reading.  For Amazon, telling these people that their favorite authors are no longer available on their favorite gadget (and not saying why) was a catastrophic marketing move.  The information vacuum was quickly filled by impassioned pleas directly from authors.

Amazon’s responses to the messages from Macmillan and it’s authors were not very well received, but not because their message was weak.  Personally I would agree with Amazon that $15 is too much to pay for an e-book.  Unfortunately for them, they weighed in much too late in the game.  They went up against a class of professional self-promoters who express themselves in writing for a living, and they did so after almost a week of letting their opponents set the tenor of the public debate.  Amazon has now capitulated and is once again selling the entire Macmillan e-book catalog.

Why the controversy?

Beacon allowed 3rd party websites to connect their customers activity with those customer’s identities on Facebook, and in some cases to post those customers activity to their Facebook profile.  I first noticed it when some shoes I bought on Zappos.com showed up among my Facebook status posts. (Zappos is my favorite shoe-store online or off, and a great example of a company doing almost everything right online, but that’s a topic for another post.)

The complaints against the Beacon program were quite valid.  What if those shoes had been a gift for someone, and Facebook had ruined the surprise?  In my particular case it hadn’t been very clear that this purchase would be visible to my Facebook friends, though later the Beacon program was changed to require more explicit permission.  People don’t like it when companies exchange their personal information, particularly when it is done so publicly and without their consent.  One group created on Facebook by MoveOn.org in response to these privacy complaints gathered 50,000 members before Beacon was shut down.

Why did I like it?

I agreed with the privacy concerns about the Beacon program, but when I first found out about the program I was actually excited for the new ways to share it would make possible.  Imagine if you bought a ticket to a play or a concert, and the day after you saw it, Facebook asked you if you would like to write a mini-review for your friends to see.  Your review would go out to your friends, along with a photo from the show, links to positive reviews in local media, and a link for your friends to quickly buy a ticket themselves.  The best social advertising starts a positive conversation between your customers and their friends about your product.

What’s the alternative?

Beacon shut down as part of the settlement, but Facebook hasn’t given up on the idea of being the common factor in all your online commerce and communication, over all a little user backlash can be good for companies like Facebook.  Said Facebook representative Barry Schnitt, “We learned a great deal from the Beacon experience. For one, it underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared. We also learned how to effectively communicate changes that we make to the user experience. The introduction of Facebook Connect–a product that gives users significant control over how they extend their Facebook identity on the Web and share experiences back to friends on Facebook–is an example of this.”

Facebook Connect performs a lot of the same functions as Facebook Beacon did, but where Facebook Beacon linked your identity invisibly through the use of browser cookies, Facebook Connect is much more obvious, and a much more powerful tool for sharing online.  On a site that uses Facebook Connect, you’ll be able to log in using your Facebook account and password, saving you the trouble of creating a new username and password for the site, and allowing you to selectively share info from the site back to your Facebook account.  The good news is that this is easy for smaller arts organizations to set up.  When your patrons come to your site, instead of having to go through a laborious account creation process before they can join your discussion forum or comment on your news articles, they can dive right in using their existing Facebook profile, and share their thoughts with their existing Facebook network.

I’m trying to stay on the lookout for clever uses of this software.  One I’ve seen is this dead simple blog plugin that can let Facebook users comment on your blog, and share your article with their friends very simply.  Yelp.com, the best place on the web to find reviews of local businesses, also joined the party very early on, and it’s cross-posted reviews are a great example of how this can work for a local business or organization.

If you want to read what Facebook has to say about how this can help your organization or website, this page has their introduction to the service.

The definition of “moot” is moot (open to debate) but not the pronunciation: [mut] and not [myut].

Then please see the 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English .

Shane: Yeah I got you something :)

Julia: did you buy me a new weapon in WOW?

Shane: hahahaha I wish we were that kind of couple

Shane: and your gift to me could be you were giving up WOW so we could spend more time together

Shane: gift of the Level 60 Magi