With every major update of Facebook’s experience they reveal little by little how creepy they are, because instead of looking at the things users need, each release just shows (no matter how pretty they make it) that they’re after nothing but the things that can be told to their advertisers about you, plain and simple. It’s not a social network, it’s a living marketing survey.
All along they were parsing whatever it is that we talk about, but it seems they need to get more efficient at it, their solution? Make the user click on drop downs that describe those things advertisers have to bid the highest Cost Per Click for.
This image explains better what I mean
Go Zuckerberg! Nice try, not buying the timeline crap over here. Google+ gets better and better.
Follow the geek.
Dunno what makes you think Google does not does G+ for advertising?
Do you think, G+ among other Google services are just, free services, cause they’re nice?
Note that I dislike FB just as much, and I use G+, but don’t blind yourself.
of course G+ wants know more about who we are so they can advertise to us. The thing is G+ is not that creepy about it and Facebook has a track record of forcing users to share, disregarding the value of privacy.
You can do all the creepy parsing you want in many ways, just don’t force me to share every little thing I do even if I don’t want to.
That is an awesome chart that really shows what is going on: but I don’t see it as all that nefarious. I actually welcome it. As long as Facebook is a free service, it is going to have ads to make money. As long as I have to see ads all day long, I’d rather see relevant ads that might introduce me to products I want or better deals to save me money.
Facebook is rapidly becoming a big business and besides gathering information about people they are designing features to get people to spend more time every day on Facebook. These extra page views lead up to more ads and this is what businesses are after. You can see this just by looking at how many companies listed at http://buyfacebookfansreviews.com do nothing other than promote Facebook pages. Businesses are desperate to get better and better results and Facebook is building a growing system to do just this by trying to entertain people all day long.
As long as Facebook does not display uniquely identifiable information about people to advertisers, there are no privacy issues that I can see. That being said, I think a number of people would welcome more fine-grained control over what is displayed on peoples profiles and how things interact with all of these new buttons. It’s a bit upsetting that some developers abuse the permissions settings to post stuff on peoples walls without it being really necessary for the app to run.
Google just wants to catch up to Facebook with Google+ and does not have users privacy or best intentions at heart. They are a calculating business entity same as any other. They have many kind and great employees, but their managers are in charge, not the engineers, on the really big policies that shape their privacy and other policies.