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Facebook?

Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2010 12:02 am
by NHE
Time magazine ran an interesting article on Facebook. It turns out that Facebook is an advertising company in disguise. It's members share and they sell. The relationship is almost parasitic. The host rarely, if ever, realizes that it's being fed upon and continues to supply sustenance in quiescent oblivion. I'm sure that Lyon would be impressed.

If anything, the article does supply food for thought...

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How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy
By Dan Fletcher Thursday, May. 20, 2010

Helping bring about world peace would be nice, but Facebook is not a philanthropic organization. It's a business, and there's a tremendous business opportunity around Facebook's member data. And Sandberg knows it. She joined the company in 2008 after helping Google build its ad platform into a multibillion-dollar business. Much like Google, Facebook is free to users but makes a lot of money (some analysts estimate the privately held company will generate $1 billion in revenues in 2010) from its robust ad system. According to the Web-research firm comScore, Facebook flashed more than 176 billion banner ads at users in the first three months of this year — more than any other site. (See "Facebook Wants to Read Your Mind.")

The more updates Facebook gets you to share and the more preferences it entreats you to make public, the more data it's able to pool for advertisers. Google spearheaded targeted advertisements, but it knows what you're interested in only on the basis of what you query in its search engine and, if you have a Gmail account, what topics you're e-mailing about. Facebook is amassing a much more well-rounded picture. And having those Like buttons clicked 100 million times a day gives the company 100 million more data points to package and sell.

The result is that advertisers are able to target you on an even more granular level. For example, right now the ads popping up on my Facebook page are for Iron Man 2 games and no-fee apartments in New York City (I'm in a demographic that moves frequently); my mom is getting ads for in-store furniture sales (she's in a demographic that buys sofas).

This advertising platform is even more powerful now that the site can factor in your friends' preferences. If three of your friends click a Like button for, say, Domino's Pizza, you might soon find an ad on your Facebook page that has their names and a suggestion that maybe you should try Domino's too. Peer-pressure advertising! Sandberg and other Facebook execs understand the value of context in selling a product, and few contexts are more powerful than friendship. "Marketers have known this for a really long time. I'm much more likely to do something that's recommended by a friend," Sandberg says.

As powerful as each piece of Facebook's strategy is, the company isn't forcing its users to drink the Kool-Aid. It's just serving up nice cold glasses, and we're gulping it down. The friends, the connections, the likes — those are all produced by us. Facebook is the ultimate enabler. It's enabling us to give it a cornucopia of information about ourselves. It's a brilliant model, and Facebook, through its skill at weaving the site into the fabric of modern life, has made it work better than anyone else.

............................................................... The Web's Sketchy Big Brother
If Facebook wants to keep up the information revolution, then Zuckerberg needs to start talking more and make his case for an era of openness more transparently. Otherwise, Facebook will continue to be cast in the role of the Web's sketchy Big Brother, sucking up our identities into a massive Borg brain to slice, dice and categorize for advertisers.

But amid all the angst, don't forget that we actually like to share. Yes, Facebook is a moneymaking venture. But after you talk to the company's key people, it's tough to doubt that they truly believe that sharing information is better than keeping secrets, that the world will be a better place if you persuade (or perhaps push) people to be more open. "Even with all the progress that we've made, I think we're much closer to the beginning than the end of the trend," Zuckerberg says.

Want to stop that trend? The onus, as always, is on you to pull your information. Starve the beast dead. None of Facebook's vision, be it for fostering peace and harmony or for generating ad revenue, is possible without our feeding in our thoughts and preferences. "The way that people decide whether they want to use something or not is whether they like the product or not," Zuckerberg says. Facebook is hoping that we're hooked. As for me? Time to see if the ex-girlfriend has added new photos.

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2011 2:40 pm
by NHE
Image

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 2:33 am
by NHE
Here's an interesting article about Facebook from MIT's Technology Review.

Facebook experiements with social engineering...

What Facebook Knows
The company's social scientists are hunting for insights about human behavior. What they find could give Facebook new ways to cash in on our data—and remake our view of society.
"For the first time," Marlow says, "we have a microscope that not only lets us examine social behavior at a very fine level that we've never been able to see before but allows us to run experiments that millions of users are exposed to."
But some of his team's work and the attitudes of Facebook's leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users' behavior. Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook's employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.

In April, influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states.
:geek:

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 4:27 am
by DougL
people on FB say and do things they would not say or do in person - the insights about human behavior are not accurate.

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 1:30 am
by NHE
Facebook's photo-sharing site Instagram has updated its privacy policy giving it the right to sell users' photos to advertisers without notification.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20767537

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sat Feb 16, 2013 1:12 am
by NHE
FACEBOOK can insist that its customers use their real personal data when registering on the site, a German court ruled in a decision published on Friday.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/germa ... 6579279493

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 12:51 am
by NHE
Facebook wants to infect your phone...

Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy

http://gigaom.com/2013/04/04/why-facebo ... f-privacy/

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 11:11 pm
by NHE
How hackers are hijacking your Facebook 'likes'

http://www.channel4.com/news/facebook-l ... ternet-how

Facebook likes are at the heart of the site's interactive appeal. But Channel 4 News reveals that cyber criminals are hijacking users' accounts to like pages their victims want nothing to do with.

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sat Aug 31, 2013 7:43 pm
by Slumby
And there is NO cancelling an account.

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2014 9:55 pm
by NHE
You are the product being sold...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-576180 ... year-plan/
In the three-year horizon, Facebook expects dramatic increases in its average revenue per user, even as it adds a few hundred million more members. The increases will come from more personalized and contextually relevant ads that generate more engagement and command higher fees.

"This shift to personalization represents the biggest shift in marketing in generations, and it's one that we are uniquely positioned to lead," Sandberg said during the earnings call. "Facebook is the only place where 750 million people visit every day, increasingly on mobile, to discover what matters to them. As we continue to leverage our understanding of people to make marketing more personal, and do it at massive scale, we will dramatically improve the quality of ads and drive more personal discovery."
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Don't "Like" this

Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 1:30 am
by NHE
The Frontline documentary "Generation Like" takes a look behind the curtain of the "Like" button.

Watch the full episode online...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... tion-like/

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2014 8:38 pm
by NHE
Facebook manipulates user's news feeds in an experiment to test their emotional responses without their knowledge.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything ... xperiment/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/f ... tions.html

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 8:20 am
by itasara1
Yes, reading all this is somewhat discouraging, but I have to say it was b/c of Facebook that I learned about some of these MS groups that I do enjoy being a part of. I have not been in this one for a while and I don't remember where I first heard of it, but I did join a group called MYMSTEAM.COM (no caps) which I saw advertised on FB. This is a group where people who want discuss openly their situation with MS. It can get a little like FB and I think it is getting better but still needs some organization but so far so good.

I find FB a good way to find and connect with friends and relatives, some whom I haven't been in touch with for years and years. I find it easier via FB to keep in touch and send pictures rather than hunt up email addresses and send them that way. I do get fed up with some ads and politics but on the other hand it gives me a venue to say what I want to say. I do think one needs to be careful about what personal information one gives out. Supposedly you can defer you comments to just your friends, or yourself, or expand further.

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2014 12:11 pm
by Stillhaha
My account sits deactivated right now because I moved across the country and grew tired of seeing what I was missing.

Re: Facebook?

Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 5:13 am
by NHE
Facebook's members are the product that Facebook sells. So, what are you worth to Facebook? The average member in North America is worth about $48/year. Of course, this amount varies with the member's activity on Facebook.

http://mashable.com/2012/05/14/val-you- ... rPtiFRnaql