Tuesday, December 18, 2007
What Could Facebook’s Beacon Have Been (and Still Be)?
Just because it is the holiday season and BoomTown is feeling all holly and jolly and merry, it doesn’t mean we’re going to back down on the fiasco that was, is and will always be Facebook’s Beacon.
In fact, we’re hopping mad all over again after a talk we had last week with a very smart exec at a company that Facebook does a lot of business with, who posited the right way the social-networking phenomenon could have rolled out the now radioactive ad system.
It did not have to be that way, as the exec I was talking to noted, if Facebook had first launched the Beacon service–which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed–as a noncommercial tool for users, focusing on things they had posted on a range of external Web sites that they actually might like being broadcast back to friends at Facebook.
