Obama buys ads in video game

Interesting.

Obama ad appears in Xbox 360 car racing game

Michael Arrington is suing Facebook

Why We’re Suing Facebook For $25 Million In Statutory Damages

In a round of negotiations over the lawsuit with Facebook led by Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, things got out of hand. When our [Arrington’s] team of lawyers offered to settle for a mere $50 million, Kelly told me Facebook would “bury you and bury your crappy blog” if we filed the suit. He then threw his steaming hot triple soy latte espresso at me, which caused extensive second degree burns over the top half of my body. Later on, he also unfriended me.

And he unfriended him. That’s cold.

Internet ads on TV

This sounds like a horrible idea.

What would it take to run ads like this on regular TV? Even if the ads are not clickable, simple banners or graphical buttons that appear in sync with what you are watching would grab your attention. Imagine a Nike logo popping up when you are watching basketball, or cruise ship when someone in a movie mentions the Bahamas. It could be annoying, but not if used judiciously. And it would certainly solve the problem of people fast-forwarding through ads with DVRs.

I already can’t watch anything on TNT because they have so many pop-up promos for their shows.

Deleting a Facebook account

According to the New York Times, it’s hard to delete your Facebook account.

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

Apparently, to successfully delete your account, you have to delete all the information it contains:

Facebook’s Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to close it fully — meaning that they may unwittingly leave anything from e-mail addresses to credit card numbers sitting on Facebook servers.

Only people who contact Facebook’s customer service department are informed that they must painstakingly delete, line by line, all of the profile information, “wall” messages and group memberships they may have created within Facebook.

Based on what I read here, it seems like the basic conflict is between Web 2.0 principles—you want to keep customer data, because “data is the next Intel inside”—and customer usability. This is a site-wide problem for Facebook; their global settings aren’t comprehensive enough, and too many privacy settings have to be set individually for each app. However, I think Facebook has a good track record of responding to problems noticed by readers, so I wouldn’t be shocked if this issue was dealt with soon.

Facebook’s Beacon ad platform: Criticism and censorship

Facebook has launched a new ad platform called “Project Beacon”:

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. Partners can participate in all three components of Facebook Ads, or a combination of them. “When you put this all together, you get some pretty amazing things,” Zuckerberg said of the program, which he said took “four months or so” to develop.

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.

“When people engage your page on Facebook, that’s going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph,” Zuckerberg said. “It becomes a trusted referral.”

For MoveOn.org, this new program is going over about as well as news feeds did when they were launched. MoveOn’s Adam Green argues that the platform is “a ‘glaring violation of (Facebook’s) users’ privacy,’ and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a ‘protest group’ on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.” What bothers MoveOn is that Beacon captures online activity outside of Facebook, and then publishes that activity in the users News Feed. While it is possible to opt out of Beacon, the organization complains that the process is complicated, and has to be repeated at each Facebook partner site.

Facebook has responded to these charges, claiming that users’ privacy will not be invaded because News Feeds can only be seen by friends, and that MoveOn’s campaign has misrepresented the difficulties in opting out of the program. The sticking point here is what counts as privacy: Facebook claims that only publishing information to friends is private, while Green claims, somewhat hyperbolically, “If Facebook’s argument is that sharing private information with hundreds or thousands of someone’s closest ‘friends’ is not the same as making that information ‘public,’ that shows how weak Facebook's argument is.” On the one hand, I think Facebook is correct: it is easy to set the privacy features of the site so that the News Feed can only be seen by those you want. However, even though Green may be overstating the case with the numbers he quotes,—which seems somewhat typical of MoveOn’s emotional rhetoric, considering that their other major argument is that Facebook is ruining Christmas—I believe he is correct that users are going to be somewhat blindsided by this feature and will want to have the ability to opt out completely, at least until they get used to it.

I think this new program clearly illustrates the growing importance of Facebook as a networking tool. If people didn’t find Facebook necessary, they would abandon it, rather than try to reform it. Also, I think it suggests that Facebook needs to do some serious thinking about how it introduces new products. Between this issue and the news feed reaction, it seems obvious that the company needs to pay much more attention to how its users react to its new offerings.

Finally, there is another disturbing question related to this issue. In his post responding to MoveOn’s arguments, Josh Catone at Read/Write Web suggests that Facebook users aren’t nearly as outraged as MoveOn is making them out to be, citing as evidence the fact that he couldn’t find any Facebook groups protesting Beacon. However, Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch is suggesting that Facebook may be censoring anti-Beacon groups:

Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.

The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable.” But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.

If this is true, and Facebook did try to limit the spread of the group, then that should make users concerned about the role the company seems to be making for itself in the search and social networking fields.

Finally: Targeted ads for your alarm clock

This is just what I’ve always wanted:

The simplest way to describe the Chumby is as an Internet-enabled alarm clock. It actually is a Linux-powered, WiFi-connected computer with a touchscreen in a palm-sized bean bag that is intended to replace your alarm clock.

You connect the Chumby to your home’s wireless network and then configure it from the company’s website by selecting various software widgets and organizing them into channels which then cycle endlessly on your Chumby’s 3.5-inch color LCD display.
...
the terms-of-use on the Chumby Website reserves the right for the company to insert its own widgets (a.k.a. advertisements) into my widget stream. Like everybody else in the Web 2.0 era, Chumby is hoping to subsidize its business and the Chumby network by selling ads.