Shorter: You're more likely to buy something if your friend buys one. Oh, and Facebook's money comes from ad sales.
The willingness of Facebook's users to share and overshare — from descriptions of our bouts of food poisoning (gross) to our uncensored feelings about our bosses (not advisable) — is critical to its success. Thus far, the company's m.o. has been to press users to share more, then let up if too many of them complain. Because of this, Facebook keeps finding itself in the crosshairs of intense debates about privacy. It happened in 2007, when the default settings in an initiative called Facebook Beacon sent all your Facebook friends updates about purchases you made on certain third-party sites. Beacon caused an uproar among users — who were automatically enrolled — and occasioned a public apology from Zuckerberg.
And it is happening again. [...]
...
Facebook is readjusting its privacy policy at a time when its stake in mining our personal preferences has never been greater. [...]
"I'm CEO ... Bitch"
Oh yeah? Find somebody else to work for you ... Bitch.
Facebook has developed a formula for the precise number of aha! moments a user must have before he or she is hooked. Company officials won't say exactly what that magic number is, but everything about the site is geared to reach it as quickly as possible. And if you ever try to leave Facebook, you get what I like to call the aha! moment's nasty sibling, the oh-no! moment, when Facebook tries to guilt-trip you with pictures of your friends who, the site warns, will "miss you" if you deactivate your account.
Facebook wants you to get into the habit of clicking the Like button anytime you see it next to a piece of content you enjoy. Less than a month after launching Open Graph — which made its debut with some 30 content partners, including TIME.com — Facebook is quickly approaching the point where it will process 100 million unique clicks of a Like button each day.
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. [...]
But corralling 500 million people is a lot harder than corralling 10 million. And some users are ready to pull the plug entirely. Searches for "how to delete Facebook" on Google have nearly doubled in volume since the start of this year.
I came very close to 'pulling the plug' on Facebook. I'm bored to tears with it. I couldn't care less about how many goats you fucked in FarmVille, or how badly you burnt dinner in some imaginary kitchen, and on and on. I'm tired of being asked to join things I couldn't care less about and wondering if I'm going to hurt somebody's feelings if I don't.
I'm leaving my Facebook account alone because there are things on there that I like. It's nice to be able to see how your friends are doing, even if what they're doing isn't much. I leave the game progress reports in because that's the only thing some of my friends and relatives are up to. Sad. There are occasionally updates and articles on things I'm interested in.
That said, I don't like Facebook. I put up a mildly off-color joke on my page and Facebook took it down. Hey, all my Facebook friends are adults and if they're censoring me because they're letting just anybody see my page, or if it offends their dainty sensibilities, well fuck 'em.
I used to go there several times a day so I wouldn't miss anything but I haven't visited the site in days, with the exception of yesterday when I got an email saying a friend had written on my wall. Some of the stuff people share is interesting and fun but too much of the content is drivel and mental diarrhea. Worse than here, even!
If you don't go every day, whatever's there is pretty much gone forever as far as accessing it unless you go to each individual friend page. I could do it, I suppose, I don't have that many friends, but I've got better things to do. I'm doing one of them now.
I guess I'm not properly 'hooked'. I've been hooked on shit before and it's no goddam good. Perhaps that's why I'm a little bit more resistant to it.
After reading the Time article, I did go in and change my privacy settings to 'friends only'. I'm not trying to meet people, I've gotten friend requests from total strangers, which is creepy, and there's plenty of other places that sell my info that I get enough solicitations and advertising via email, snail mail, TV, billboards, etc. etc. already.
Note to Facebook: Get your shovel outta my ass and go mine somewhere else ... Bitch.
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