Facebook Turns the ‘Like’ Into Its Newest Ad
via AdAge >>

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — The ubiquitous “like” is currency for brands, and Facebook is giving them a new way to collect: an ad unit that shows up on the right-hand side of the screen it calls “sponsored stories.”

The unit will give brand-related action such as a “like” or a check-in a lot more visibility on Facebook by adding them to an ad unit in addition to users’ news feeds.

For example, if Starbucks buys a “sponsored story” ad, the status of a user’s friends who check into or “like” Starbucks will run twice: once in the user’s news feed, and again as a paid ad for Starbucks. Though clearly marked with the words “sponsored story,” the ad — which will includes a user’s name, just like the news feed — is not optional for Facebook users.

Great comments are below the article, too:

I see a lot of brute force in all of these advertising “experiments” from Facebook lately, and not much finesse. And I think the user experience is suffering. I find it harder and harder to know where anything is in FB, and that should be a cause for concern for them. Facebook WAS the clean, safe alternative to MySpace. The more convoluted and cluttered it gets, the more room opens up for someone to come in and supplant them with a better UI.

- Jeff Greenhouse

 and this:

Facebook – WAKE UP!!!

Monetizing the “Like” feature for Facebook enhances advertisers’ paid messages but it also pisses off Facebook users and diminishes the experience….

The more Facebook gets plastered with conventional ads, taking advantage of it’s users engagement, the more it will look like a NASCAR sponsored vehicle driving away active engagement and participation.

Rodney Mason, CMO www.moosylvania.com

 and this:

Facebook has brought upon the downfall of the advertising effectiveness of social media.

Bill Starr, CEO mylifelist.org

and also:

Let’s see how long it takes for one of these advertisers to get sued by someone who figures they should be paid a TALENT fee. If they publish an ad with your photo (not to mention your name and your words), seems like you should be paid — unless you signed a release form saying you work for free!

bbbbird

..to the thoughtful:

It’s very interesting to see that in a peer-to-peer medium where brands have no natural place, brands still very much pursue a brand approach. 

Call me crazy, but why not focus on value between peer-to-peer rather than interceding that relationship with in attempts for a brand-to-peer or peer-to-brand-to-peer relationship. After all, being human does seem to work.

Best regards,
@josippetrusa

and:

The time really is ripe for a Facebook alternative now isn’t it? 

FB has made risky moves before (news feeds for one) and proved it was the right thing to do, but I’d fear that this blatantly tells their members that they’re tracking their actions for demographic business needs. Not that people aren’t aware of this to some extent, but a company should be careful in how obvious they’re monitoring their members. No one likes to feel like they’re being spied on, or that every move and action is being recorded and watched.

- pancakes

I have to say yes, and today I stumbled across the perfect example of this principle.

http://kpanke.com/

I like the header on this web site. A detailed photograph with interactive elements that link to his portfolio, Twitter, music, etc. The mouseovers make it navigable. Overall, well done and a nice little showcase of his talent.

Unfortunately, when I first found it, I really thought that the header was the only thing on the page. There is no indication what anything lies below it, unless you happen to notice the scroll bar on the right. I was on my laptop, which is a 15.6″ widescreen. Here’s a screenshot of how it appeared in my browser window:

(click to enlarge)

So yes, the “fold” still matters.

Already worried? Scroll down to the steps you can take to protect your info.

How does this work?

Well, first of all, Facebook has already released “social plugins” for web sites that will add Facebook stuff to their pages. The Facebook info is actually loaded into a little frame on each page. The content in the frame shows comments, notes, etc., from your Facebook friends in connection with this web site (assuming your friends have been there).

Keep in mind that you have to be logged into Facebook for the personalization to work. This can happen one of two ways: you log in at the main Facebook site and then browse the rest of the internet, or you log in through one of these social plugins on someone else’s site.

So if you log in, how is your Facebook data used?

Liz Gannes explains it this way at gigaom.com:

Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar.

It also will allow your friends to share any information that you currently have given permission to share in your Facebook Privacy settings.

This is all very disturbing.

Why? There are two basic things wrong with their approach:

1. Facebook is sharing your information quietly, and the average user will not know enough to either a) opt out, or b) understand the difference between Facebook content and the actual content of the web site they are visiting.
2. Taken together, Facebook’s quiet approach and their decision to make all users opt-in to this service by default, they appear both sneaky and too big for their britches.

Let’s break this down.

The idea of a personalized web experience is not bad.

However, Facebook is a social destination, not a browsing mediator/experience.

A personalized browsing experience is what we might expect from a company like Google. They already provide a number of applications to make living on the Internet much easier. Want to read the Microsoft Word attachment in your email, but don’t have that ability on your phone? No problem: Google Docs will copy the document into your own little document area and show it to you as a web page.

But from Facebook? No. For me, at least, Facebook has not yet escaped its roots as a social application.

It’s true that people use Facebook very differently. You could simply use Facebook as the social tool it was originally developed to be, posting updates about yourself and uploading pictures. Other people like the social aspects of being able to post on someone else’s wall and using apps to send virtual cards, smiles, flowers, and other gifts to their friends. Yet another purpose is business and marketing: you can add a page for your business, invite people to become fans, and post announcements about your store. Still others create a profile to use only as a gaming account, connecting to Facebook game apps both large and small.

The point is, Facebook is still a destination. To be fair, I’m not against Facebook’s expansion, but they really need to handle it better. A service like “Instant Personalization” should have been introduced more carefully, with a lot more communication about the feature’s benefits and practical application, allowing users time to grasp the concept.

Most importantly, no matter how this new idea was communicated, Facebook should have respected their users enough to let us opt-in to it. By quietly flipping the switch on all users, Facebook now appears both sneaky. The reactions online have been saying “look what else Facebook is doing to trample all over our privacy” and not “look how innovative Facebook is.”

Facebook also appears way too convinced of their own superiority. Either they feel too big/too important to worry about offending a few users, or they assume that everyone will want to opt-in (so why not do it for them).

Unfortunately, Facebook is offending its users. That’s important because in a world of free and cheap services, the characteristics that set one product or service apart from another are the intangibles, like service and quality.

Facebook certainly isn’t the only social service available out there. If they continue acting this way, I will seriously consider distancing myself from Facebook as anything except a vehicle for reposting my tweets. I may only be one user, and a half geek at that, but there are many more out there who might gladly jump off the Facebook ship for a more user-friendly (in all aspects of the phrase) solution.

These steps will prevent Facebook from sharing your info:

1. After logging into Facebook, click on Account and go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites. Uncheck the Allow box at the bottom of the page.
2. Next, also on your Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites page, click the button to edit “What your friends can share about you.” Uncheck any item you do not want shared by someone else. (It’s quite a list. I unchecked them all.)
3. Finally, you need to block three applications. Yes, you apparently need to block them even if you have not used them or explicitly granted them access in the past. You need to block Facebook Docs, Yelp, and Pandora.
4. You may want to keep an eye on the Facebook Help Center page about the partner sites in this program. There are only three at the moment, but there is no guarantee Facebook will tell anybody when new ones are added.

Many thanks to PCWorld for sharing these steps.

None of the other suggestions online worked for me, but I did find a solution on my own today. I’m posting it here in the hopes that it will help someone else.

I logged into an old Google account using my PC while I was investigating this issue, and I discovered by accident that I could log in to YouTube with the alternate email address I had listed on that account.

But I didn’t have an alternate email address on my current Google account, so I took the following steps:

1. Logged into my current Google account and went to My Account (https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount?hl=en).
2. Under Email Addresses, clicked Edit.
3. Added an alternate email address (a Hotmail address).
4. Google sent a verification email, so I went to Hotmail, opened it, and clicked the link to verify.

Then I immediately went to the YouTube app on my iPhone and was able to login using the alternate email address I had just verified and my Google/Gmail password.

Let me know if this works for you. If it does, feel free to post this solution to any forums where you tried to get a solution and none worked. Spread the joy!