The Other Drummer

According to Read Write Web (say that five times fast) and AdAge, Facebook will begin to use your status updates, Places checkins, Page Likes, etc. in related ads.

So if you check into a Starbucks and say, “I love my Starbucks coffee”, Facebook can take that and put it in an ad next to your friends’ Walls:

Facebook is calling these “Sponsored Stories” instead of ads. Tomato, tomahto. They’re using your content directly in advertisements. Without your permission and without any way to opt-out.

As dire as that sounds, the upside is that said ads will only be shown to your Facebook friends, not strangers. The downside? No, you don’t get a kickback.

Upside #2: Facebook is still free. And until there’s a paid version (there won’t be) Zuckerberg and company will continue to use our late night rants, birthday wishes and favorite restaurants to make a lot of money.

What do you think? Are they crossing the line into Creepy Town? Are you outraged they’d take your likeness, content and location and turn it into an ad? Or are you happy to have what will hopefully be more relevant advertising? Sound off in the comments.

See the official Facebook video explanation of Sponsored Stories here.

Image courtesy of InsideFacebook.com.

Originally posted here.

I know. Infographics are so 2010. But there are some interesting Facebook statistics over at Mashable. The one above caught my attention.

If I’m interpreting that correctly, the most popular things searched for in the United States in 2010 weren’t Obama, oil spill or Justin Bieber. They were “Facebook” and “Facebook login”.

This indicates some generalities about folks online:

1. Even though people use Facebook all the time (+70% of US Internet users), many can’t remember “facebook.com” is where you login to Facebook.
2. People don’t know how to use their browser to get to “facebook.com”.
3. People don’t know how to bookmark pages in their browser.
4. People don’t know how to use basic browser functionality.
5. To many people, Facebook is the Internet.
6. Google should be scared to death right now.

I realize I’m a nerd outlier when it comes to technology. But when the main reason people are going to google.com is to search for facebook.com it has me a little worried. Mainly because I think people are starting to think of Facebook as the Internet.

You know…like AOL was back in 1999.

A threat to the real Internet

If people don’t know how to use their browser to get to the site they spend hours on each day how could we expect them to navigate to other places on the web? If the walled garden of Facebook is truly being perceived as the Internet, it means innovation will be stifled and people will be essentially crippled as far as their understanding of what it is to be online. If these things aren’t understood, it’s also a huge threat to Net Neutrality.

That’s not a good thing. The web is wonderful and great and innovative and amazing because it’s open and fluid and information flows freely. In Facebook, information flows in but doesn’t flow out, ala roach motels. And it’s all controlled by a privately held company which isn’t accountable to anyone.

Google

And why should Google be wetting its proverbial pants? Because Google relies on people linking to things to generate its search results. When people link to things inside Facebook, Google can’t see (most of) those links. So the more people share links, pictures, comments and videos behind Facebook’s walled-off “Internet”, the less relevant Google becomes.

Google is already feeling the heat because they haven’t found a way to crack the social aspect of search: people are searching for things from their friends via Facebook instead of Google’s algorithms. A closed, proprietary and walled-off Internet is their worst nightmare and it’s becoming a reality.

Conclusion

What do you think? Am I getting all worked up over nothing? Or is this something to be worried about? Set me straight in the comments.

This post originally appeared on the ThomasArts blog.

Just one day after I blogged about how annoying and non-applicable Groupon had become I received the above image in an email from them.

Eerie.

Clearly they read The Other Drummer.

The only questions they asked were my gender, zip code and birthdate. Then they immediately kicked me out to the Salt Lake Groupon for today which had something to do with a gym (it involved “Obsidian” and “Mind Body Barre” classes. I don’t know what those are.)

OK Groupon. You’ve bought yourself some more time before I unsubscribe. You also earned some brownie points for reading my blog. Now bring it.

Mark makes a great point here.

FYI – The map to which he is referring shows a Risk-style world broken and divided into different “digital countries” like Facebook, Google, Foursquare, Online Ads, etc.

For your enjoyment and pleasure, I’ve rigged the video to start about 51 minutes in. Watch until (at least) 53:04.

Courtesy of elena's pantry

The Internet created cheap abundance and as a result we craved more and more followers, friends and information. I see the trend swinging back the other way to exclusivity and artificial scarcity. (I think I blogged about this idea – or at least thought about it real hard –  a while back but I’m too lazy to try and find the post.)

Evidence for this can be seen in Path, a new social network (I know, I know) that caps the number of friends you can have to 50. Also, if you really squint, you can see the same idea applied to the new Facebook Groups.

I also had the random thought this morning (which was the real reason I wrote this) – what if there was a to-do list that limited the number of items you had on it? Maybe you can only have, say, five things on your list at any given time. For those of us who add things to our lists faster than we remove them, resulting in an overwhelming surge of to-do-ness, it would force us to do something if only for the reason that we could make space on our list for something else.

It would also make us really consider if something is important enough to do to add to the list or if we should just say “no” to begin with.

See? Artificial scarcity. It’s the new ranch which, in case you missed it, was the new ketchup.