Facebook Beacon Isn’t Evil, It’s What We (I) Want

Facebook Beacon, the outreach program that extends Facebook’s news feed reach to actions that occur beyond Facebook’s walls, has been taking a lot of heat recently.  There have been stories of Christmas presents revealed one month too soon, of creepy connections made between sign in email addresses, and even posturing from the political attack group MoveOn.org, who try as they might, has not yet been able to link Beacon to George W. Bush.  Some believe that its demise is imminent, as Facebook wallows in bad press.

Beacon seems innocuous enough:

Add 3 lines of code and reach millions of users. 

Simply determine which user actions you would like publish to Facebook and add a few lines of code to your web page. Facebook Beacon actions include purchasing a product, signing up for a service, adding an item to a wish list, and more. When a user performs the action, they will be alerted that your website is sending a story to their profile and have a chance to opt out. No additional user action is needed for the story to be published on Facebook, and users remain in control of their information.

Three things in particular about the implementation seem to be getting Facebook in trouble: 1) The lack of a global opt out; 2) Botched notification on partner sites when a new item is published; and 3) Too much emphasis on commerce (especially during Holiday shopping season)

About six weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled “Plaxo and the Universal News Feed.”  In this post, I make the case that Facebook needs to open up its News Feed to actions that happen outside of Facebook:

There are two problems with the Facebook news feed.  First, it’s restricted to Facebook activities.  For example, if a friend of mine on Webmasterworld writes a great post, I’m not going to know about it unless I go to Webmasterworld.

And then later:

So, any site’s content can show up in the Facebook News feed, but first that site must build an app.  There’s an explicit, non-trivial action required, and the burden is entirely on the third party.  In other words, it’s a Facebook world, and you can participate if you want to, but you have to go to them.  And once your community’s activities are captured by the Facebook news feed, within the Facebook news feed they will stay – driving repeat traffic primarily to Facebook, and not your site.

Facebook Beacon addresses these issues.  It’s presumably a lot easier for a Facebook Beacon partner to “add three lines of code” than to build a winning app.

Most of the examples that people have given about how Beacon crosses a line have been around commerce.  I didn’t want anybody know that I bought that chicken costume.  My purchase of Kama Sutra is nobody’s business but my own.  I wish my boyfriend wasn’t alerted to his Christmas present via the Facebook news feed in November.

But I don’t see anybody complaining about say, Yelp’s implementation of Facebook Beacon. When somebody posts a review of a restaurant on Yelp that is also signed in to Facebook, a news feed story gets published to that person’s Facebook network, with a link to the Yelp URL.

I would argue that this is the MOST OPEN BEHAVIOR that we’ve seen out of Facebook yet.  They are willingly driving traffic to another social network’s site, without forcing that site to build an app.  This is beautiful, open behavior that could benefit a lot of sites, and make the Facebook news feed even more complete and enjoyable than it already is.

But instead of accolades, Facebook has gotten nothing but grief for Beacon.  Why?  Because of a clumsy implementation.  If Facebook had modeled its implementation off of Plaxo Pulse – who requires users to explicitly add the partner sites they would like to include in their Plaxo news feed – we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. 

Facebook Beacon is not a commerce feature – it’s bigger than that.  It’s the first step towards a universal news feed, and I believe, a defensive response to what Plaxo, Tumblr, and FriendFeed are doing.  I believe its early problems are a function of a clumsy launch, and should not be taken as indication of a flawed idea.

Beacon's launch missteps have jeopardized the program.  I hope Facebook PR is skilled enough to defuse all the politics and misguided attacks - and I hope that Facebook improves the opt  out and notification aspects of the program in a hurry.  The Beacon idea is too good to be railroaded out of town so soon.

For more on Beacon, see Carnage4Life, allfacebook, Steve O'Hear, and GigaOm. 

Comments

[King Rat]

That'd be great, if that's what was going on. Based on all that I've read, here's how it SEEMS to work out.

1. Facebook partners up with [Nike] (just an example)
2. You buy some shoes from [Nike]
3. [Nike] pops up a box asking if you want to share this purchase information with Facebook (the opt-in)
4. [Nike] sends that purchase information to Facebook whether you opt-in or not
5. [Nike] sends that purchase information to Facebook whether you are a Facebook member or not

[Nike] sends ALL the info to Facebook, and Facebook sorts it based on membership, opt-ins, or opt-outs. Then they delete all the info for the non-members and the opt-outs. Groovy, right?

WRONG! The advertisers have NO RIGHT to distribute most of this information, and Facebook has NO RIGHT to obtain most of it. Let's make up some numbers.

100 people make a purchase at [Nike]
25 of them are Facebook members.
5 of them choose to opt-in and share the info.

By my reckoning, the ONLY info Facebook should receive is the purchase info on the 5 opt-ins. But it gets the info on ALL 100 PURCHASES. That info is then filtered down and the 95 non-members/opt-outs are deleted. So they say. Whatever.

I am not a lawyer or a cop. But this seems HIGHLY ILLEGAL. BAD BUSINESS. SETTING THINGS ON FIRE WITH TYLER DURDEN.

If I'm wrong, please, source me. Cause I'd love to be wrong about just how much power Big Business has over my life.

Info found here:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/03/more-facebook-advertisers-bail-from-beacon-plus-new-concerns/