What Made Beacon A Bust?
from the too-big-to-make-it-work dept
There's no question that Facebook's Beacon initiative has taken a beating over the past few weeks. The feature automatically collected and published users' activities at partner sites, and almost immediately attracted criticism. MoveOn launched a campaign in opposition to Beacon. Horror stories of accidentally disclosed purchases — like engagement ring purchases and Christmas presents — began to circulate. The early word was decidedly negative, prompting some partners to begin to jump ship. Facebook has weathered similar storms before: its minifeed feature was met with a hostile reception, but is now emulated by virtually every new social network. But this time they caved: on Wednesday founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a rather contrite blog post:We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.
...
Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely.
It remains to be seen whether users will opt out en masse — there are indications that many may still not be aware of Beacon. But the negative press seems likely to scare away potential partners. So while it would be premature to declare Beacon a failure, it seems very unlikely that it will ever achieve its intended net-spanning potential.
I think there are three reasons why this happened. First, Beacon's simply not a feature that people — as opposed to companies — were clamoring for. Facebook noticed its users expressing opinions about products and saw a great opportunity to make money. But they couldn't resist removing the messily inefficient human portion of the opinion-expression process. Unfortunately, users didn't get much value from having that process automated.
Second, and perhaps most obviously, Facebook bungled the deployment of the feature. As Zuckerberg admits in the above-linked post, the company didn't think hard enough about how users would respond, and was too slow to react to how they did.
But the third factor may be the most problematic for Facebook: they're just too big. I don't mean to call MoveOn's anti-Beacon campaign dishonest, but it's not exactly in keeping with the organization's style. It's hard to imagine they'd have undertaken the effort if there wasn't plenty of free press attention to be had by attacking Facebook. The social network has achieved a level of popular attention that makes them an attractive target (and, if you subscribe to the nightclub theory of social networking, one that could presage a no-one-goes-there-because-it's-too-crowded problem).
Of course it would be silly to spend too much time doomsaying — the site's pageviews continue to grow at a healthy clip. But in the wake of the partial collapse of Beacon, it's hard to imagine Facebook launching another initiative as ambitious — and it's even harder to imagine them launching one successfully.
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Filed Under: advertising, beacon
Companies: facebook
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Malware
Too many people are clueless about software they allow to run on their machine(s).
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how about opt in
but opt-outs haven't been welcome since day one and never will be, ever. I found out I had been signed for beacon and I couldn't even find the unsubscribe for quote some time.
Why should I have to hunt for this crap? Why doesn't facebook do something interesting (like tshirts) that might be worth us spending money on them instead of bullshit (like forced advertising basically).
It's not that peoeple don't have a voice, but they would have ignored and done beacon anyway if they felt that not enough people cared (even though most people don't even know WHERE to be vocal).
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Facebook is a crock of s--t.
Keep it private
At Facebook, we believe that people should have control over how they share their information and who can see it.
Obviously the privacy and development teams don't eat at the same tables.
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not 100% the same mechanism but exactly the same goal, i.e. tracking people and using that data for adverts.
except here they use your data to sell to other people.
the twist being *you* can use adblock all you like, but they still promote stuff to others.
one of these days people will learn, if adverts annoy they don't work as well as ones that don't
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