Simon Dumenco Saves Beacon’s Bacon!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on December 12, 2007 at 12:02 AM PT
Don’t miss this very funny piece by AdAge columnist Simon Dumenco about suggestions for other new Facebook products in the wake of its Beacon fiasco.
For those not following this sordid tale, the hot social-networking site stumbled badly in its handling of a new ad product that broadcasts your purchases from external Web sites back to your Facebook news feed.
Facebook has had to backpedal a lot on Beacon, including issuing an apology last week for it from Founder Mark Zuckerberg.
In the wake of Beacon’s dimming (sort of), clever Simon thought up some more ideas for the feckless Facebookers, such as Facebook Questioning:
Writes Dumenco:
Are you a closeted homosexual in a small Southern town? Facebook Questioning will automatically suggest to those friends and colleagues who are able to ‘read between the lines’ that maybe you’re ‘questioning’ your sexuality. It does this by comparing Beacon data with thresholds of what’s considered ‘normal’ heterosexual behavior by marketers. ‘The purchase by an unmarried, middle-aged male of more than two movie-musical soundtracks or DVDs per quarter doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s gay,’ says a Facebook veep. ‘But it will raise a rainbow-colored flag within our algorithm and might even help certain in-denial Facebook users with their own voyage of self-discovery.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld says a lot below:
