Facebook wants your Moon on a Stick

If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world, just after the US, but bigger than Russia, Brazil or Argentina. Two-​​thirds of ComScore’s top 100 US websites and half of the their global top one hundred websites have imple­mented Facebook Connect, letting you log in to their sites using your Facebook account.

It’s already a super­power on the Net; but it wants a lot more.

You’re probably already well-​​aware that the company intro­duced a couple of new features this week:

Community Pages – new pages around the hobbies, brands and favourite things you’ve included in your profile that auto­ma­gic­ally link from there. Your profile link will also appear auto­mat­ic­ally on these pages. You say you like ‘cooking’ – now you’re visible on the cooking com­munity page.

More con­nected profiles – not just your favourite things, but also the places you studied at and the com­panies you worked for might have auto-​​generated pages. Again, your profile will be added to these pages without you having to do anything, such as make your own choice on the matter.

Like Button – instead of ‘become a fan’ buttons, there are ‘like this’ buttons. I actually appre­ciate this bit in some ways. Saying that I was a fan of a brand always seemed very fake. My rela­tion­ship with most brands that I don’t hate is more along the lines of ‘it’s alright’. I would be 10X more likely to agree that I like them as opposed to being their bitch fan. The other side to this is that it’s avail­able as a plug-​​in to third-​​party sites – giving pub­lishers more inform­a­tion about yourself if you click their ‘like this’ buttons than you ever did by clicking on the old ‘share on facebook’ equi­valent that you’re used to.

So, to sum up the changes…

What’s in it for Facebook?

Advertising place­ment oppor­tun­ities: creating a page that links from your hobby of – say – archery allows archery-​​supplies advert­isers to know that their ads are appearing on a very targeted page.

Better ad-​​profiling of your tastes through your ‘likes’ enabling more accurate delivery of beha­vi­oural advertising.

What’s in it for you?

Nothing.

Oh wait: the ‘like’ not ‘fan’ semantic distinction.

If you believe the hype, Facebook says that it’s “helping people find con­nec­tions”. Like you need more random stalker oppor­tun­ities and entrance vectors from spammers and malware dis­trib­utors in social media.

How to get rid of it

You can switch off the auto­matic com­munity and profile-​​connection pages in Facebook by logging in and then going to the Account menu (top right of the page), then Privacy Centre, then Applications and Websites. Once you are into that screen, select and switch off Instant Personalisation.

Robert Scoble, who took the picture above [thank you], is char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally bullish about these announce­ments, but recog­nises that the company is treading on thin-​​ice:

So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambi­tious, move and they are going to move care­fully and delib­er­ately from here. They better or else we’ll see reg­u­lators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that util­ities usually are heavily reg­u­lated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.

I think that current reg­u­la­tion is suf­fi­cient, if it’s actually acted upon. The trouble is that few people under­stand their rights or are in a fin­an­cial position to be able to fight for them. Furthermore, the exist­ence of people who either can’t be bothered with Facebook or who have actively revoked their accounts means that the rest of the Web would be unwise to march in line behind a single leader.

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• Facebook on Privacy: ‘We’re Finished’
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