anythings.org

Facebook just unveiled their latest advertising program. This plan utilizes information from user’s profiles to display ads appropriate to their interests when they browse through their friend’s pages:

Additionally, Facebook has unveiled targeted advertisements that will allow marketers to target by any information inside Facebook profiles, from relationship status to favorite television shows.

This makes sense. Gmail utilizes a tool that skims through your inbox and displays appropriate in-line advertisements. Users are accustomed to this type of privacy invasion.

One thing about the new advertising program that irritates me is Facebook is essentially encouraging advertising companies to provide users with the tools to sell their product for them. Without paying any additional advertising fees:

Called Facebook Ads, the new program is threefold: advertisers can create branded pages, run targeted advertisements, and have access to intelligence and analytics pertaining to the site’s more than 50 million users. […] Through the branded pages program, advertisers can design custom pages with information, content, and custom applications–”any application that was written for users on the Facebook Platform,” Zuckerberg explained. Facebook users can sign up as “fans” of that brand, install branded applications, and other activities that will all show up in their profiles’ “mini feeds” and on the “news feeds” that are broadcast to their friends lists.

So as soon as this program rolls out, I’ll be seeing “Jessica loves Hershey’s! She added the ‘Give me Kisses!’ application to her profile.” and the like scattered throughout my News Feed. Which, by the way, you cannot customize. While you can adjust your News Feed settings to show you “more” or “less” of your friends pictures, relationships status changes, and other options, you cannot opt out of forced announcements such as advertisements and applications. There’s motivation behind this: corporate-branded applications are one of the new components of Facebook’s advertising scheme.
It is one thing to provide companies with access to user information in order to reach a more applicable audience, but it’s another to open the Facebook coding to companies with a desire to create applications in which their only motivation is to make a profit. Facebook is basically allowing advertisers to recruit mindless college students to advertise their products for them. Who needs employees, commercials, and expensive marketing schemes when you have Facebook? The idea of Facebook applications alone irritates me, but applications whose only purpose is advertising and profiting from that exposure? Irritated doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I wonder what social networking site researcher danah boyd has to say about this one…