Facebook: Use and Abuse = Revenue
by Miki Saxon
I’m not on Facebook, but Option Sanity™ is, so if I am forced to sign into Facebook to comment I sign in using the Option Sanity login. I rarely do it, because I have no trust in how Facebook might use it.
Turns out my distrust was prescient.
Typically, endorsements are a paid deal, i.e., company X pays whomever for saying publicly that they use or like the product.
Social networks like Facebook provided a way for people to tell their friends about their preferences by tweeting, sharing or liking.
Facebook is constantly looking for ways to increase revenue and they found it in millions of ‘likes’ and shared links.
Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant. … he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.
Of course, algorithms have no sense of humor, nor can they tell the difference between sarcasm or irony and simple statement.
I sent the article to a friend with a biting wit who posts hysterically funny comments about political candidates and other subjects—or he used to. I sent him the article and he said he’s going back to sending them by email, “I’ll be damned if I take a chance on Facebook algorithms twisting my comments into an endorsement.”
Think my friend is over reacting?
It [Facebook] matched its users political affiliations with where their physical locations. The map went far beyond the red state versus blue state divide, with far more fine grained information about where Facebook users checked in in various parts of the country.
Twitter has analyzed usage to figure out when users sleep, allowing it to maximize its advertising.
All this intelligence is potentially lucrative for a global communications business like Twitter. It can inform when to serve up advertisements on the site and potentially for what kinds of products. It also produces very cool graphs and charts.
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And while we’re on the subject of Facebook, don’t expect any help if your account is hijacked unless you go to the media—they seem to believe you would rather fix it yourself.
Fred Wolens, a spokesman for Facebook said that Facebook believes that its users prefer “self-remediation” — basically, online solutions they find without help — to dealing with Facebook employees.
But does Samuel Reed, the guy who was hacked, agree?
“Facebook makes its money from my personal information and the personal information of millions of other people,” he said. That creates an obligation, he went on. “My big thing is this — what kind of corporate culture does Facebook want to convey?”
Flickr image credit: weisunc
