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

Did you know that an illegal immigrant can, after becoming a legal immigrant, claim work done in the U.S. while they were still “illegal?” I only became aware of this when I saw the following headline from The Washington Times, 5/18/2010:

Illegals granted Social Security

The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment — even if the job was obtained through forged or stolen documents.

The following is from Tim Chapman, Director of the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., before the vote (emphasis mine):

To qualify for full Social Security benefits, a worker must register 10 years of work. Under current law, illegal immigrants who obtain legal status can use their previous illegal work history to apply for Social Security benefits.

A compromise immigration bill pending right now in the U.S. Senate (sponsored by Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Mel Martinez (R-FL)) comes at a time when our nation is facing an enormous crisis on the entitlements front. A recent report moved the year in which Social Security will go broke from 2041 to 2040. Congress cannot afford to keep the promise of Social Security to its own citizens, let alone illegal workers.

To remedy the situation, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) has offered an amendment to the pending Senate immigration bill that would reverse this law to ensure that law-breakers are not rewarded for their past work at the expense of immigrants who have waited in line and American citizens.

Of all people, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) voted against the amendment, saying that it wouldn’t be fair to wipe out the “nest eggs” of currently legal immigrants who have already accumulated benefits from illegal work completed before they were authorized to work in the U.S.

Excuse me? Why should illegal work mean you’re entitled to anything? If you get a job with a stolen Social Security number, you should get jail time, not benefits.

Consider this scenario: a man who is a full U.S. citizen — born here and never a citizen of another country — wants to get a new identity (for whatever reason). He gets a job using a stolen Social Security number and forged and stolen documents. If he is caught, would he be prosecuted?

If the answer is yes, then any illegal alien who obtains work, loans, bank accounts, or any other benefit using the same stolen Social Security number and forged/stolen documents should be prosecuted.

Besides, the legal ramifications are spelled out when you sign forms for work, bank accounts, etc. — that by signing your name, you are attesting to the truth of the information you have provided. Usually, you are also agreeing to abide by the company’s right to fire you and close your accounts if they find that you provided false information, and not to hold the company liable for damages as a result of providing false information.

But back to the bill amendment…

I did some searching, and here’s a good summary of the amendment and vote (the original post is no longer online):

Just a few minutes ago, on the floor of the United States Senate, senators debated an amendment to the McCain immigration bill.

This is not, by itself, profanity-inducing.

But here’s the substance of the debate– Should ILLEGAL immigrants, once made legal by the McCain legislation, be entitled to receive the Social Security benefits they have paid into the system while ILLEGALLY using FRAUDULENT Social Security numbers STOLEN from actual, legal citizens of the United States of America.

The fact that this is even up for debate is just beyond insane. Everyone knows we will never have enough Social Security funds to serve, you know, actual citizens.

Every single one of those senators knows that, and they’re debating whether we should extend such non-existent, unsustainable, budget-busting, generation-saddling benefits to millions of people who fraudulently entered the system by stealing the identities (and sometimes ruining the credit) of legal Americans?!?

Sen. Ensign, God bless him, offered an amendment suggesting illegals should not be eligible for Social Security benefits accrued while illegal.

The U.S. Senate voted to kill that amendment, 50-49.

I can think of no better response to this than this quote written in 1919 by President Theodore Roosevelt:

We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here does in good faith become an American and assimilates himself to us he shall be treated on an exact equality with every one else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed or birth-place or origin.

But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American and nothing but an American. ….There can be no divided allegiance here. . . We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people.

In contrast, Massachusetts seems to be following the letter of the law by not allowing illegal immigrants (or the companies who support them) any more leniency than they would American citizens caught in the same felonies. (To compare again, think what would happen if a company was found to knowingly and regularly hire U.S. citizens with false identities and forged papers. Both the individuals and the company would likely face prosecution or penalties.)

From the Boston Globe, 5/27/2010:

With one lawmaker citing President Lincoln’s respect for the rule of law, the Massachusetts Senate passed a far-reaching crackdown this afternoon on illegal immigrants and those who would hire them, going further, senators said, than any immigration bill proposed over the past five years.

In a surprising turn of events, the legislation replaced a narrower bill that was passed Wednesday over the objections of Republicans.

The measure, which passed on a 28-10 vote as an amendment to the budget, would bar the state from doing business with any company found to break federal laws barring illegal immigrant hiring. It would also toughen penalties for creating or using fake identification documents, and explicitly deny in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants.

The amendment would also require the state’s public health insurance program to verify residency through the Department of Homeland Security, and would require the state to give legal residents priority for subsidized housing.

If there are “federal laws barring illegal immigrant hiring,” why is the U.S. Senate voting to reward illegal aliens who got away with it?

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.

I made a storage unit reservation online for a 10×10 unit at $119.95/mo. The location details said that 24-hour access was available for $10/mo. When I signed in, I signed a contract that said my monthly rent is $129.95. I thought that this included the $10 fee for 24-hour access. Make sense, right?

What really happened, though, is they put me in a “newer” unit that has an alarm on it, which is $129.95 instead of $119.95. THEY DID NOT TELL ME ABOUT THE PRICE DIFFERENCE when I signed in. They also did not in any way mention 24-hour access as an additional service — it was not offered as an add-on, and I was not reminded verbally about access hours. 

Nowhere on the contract does it list that 24-hour access IS or IS NOT included. It does not state specifically that my access is during business hours only.

I discovered that I didn’t have 24-hour access when I tried to enter after business hours with my swipe card.

When I complained, the girl at the counter told me that the 24-hour access would have been listed in the Services section. How am I supposed to know that?

The location told me to call corporate if I wanted to complain, so I did. The agent who called me back to resolve the issue basically said that since I signed the contract, there’s nothing he can do. He said that he understood how I could be confused, and that the location should have told me about the price difference. However, he also said that there was absolutely nothing he could do — not even letting me have 24-hour access free for a month or something like that. He also kept putting the burden back on me, saying I should have asked, even though the contract is ambiguous on the 24-hour access thing.

Other notes about the location:

- very limited parking by the front office
- the gate to the storage area is crowded by U-Haul trailers parked around it
- the access gate stays open a long time after opening to your card swipe (real secure, eh?)

I’m reviewing this bad experience as many places online as I can.