Comments on: Facebook’s Beacon and Boundary States

By: Philip Wilkinson

Philip Wilkinson — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:14:00 +0000

To be fair, I saw beacon in action last night and it popped up with a little jscript window saying that this “achievement” (from kongregate.com) would be posted to my facebook neswfeed – with an option to stop it if I chose to.

On logging in to facebook, at the top of my profile was another reminder that it had been added and a button to remove it if I wished.

So plenty of warning and options there. The only thing is if this becomes more mainstream and you are constantly having to say “no” to every event. Perhaps we also need a “don’t let facebook post anything from this SITE ever” option too…

By: Todd Sieling

Todd Sieling — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:11:00 +0000

Good commentary. Since the launch of f8 I’ve had a feeling that advertising and the social network in Facebook would collide in some interesting ways.

I do think that social networks matter to advertisers, as the propagation of a purchase or the use of a brand is an advertisement in itself, but in the heavily timelined experience that is Facebook, it can even create social pressure to buy something because your friends have already done so.

By: Brian Payst

Brian Payst — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:53:00 +0000

I think you are spot on with this. Facebook has thrived off of being something closed and useful to college students. What the students have failed to appreciate is that Facebook is a business, not a service. The ad platform drives clearly defines Facebook as a “company” and there will likely be ramifications from that in the minds of many of their core users.

I have been wondering if Facebook has made the strategic decision to not worry about losing their early adopter audience of college students (or at least a significant percentage of them). I certainly think that the identity that many of our students have created on Facebook isn’t one they are going to want to share with the world.