Since Facebook has gone public and answers to the investors, I've seen a few annoying ad-related things creep in. First came targeted ads in feeds, styled to look like a post from a friend (except these would come from a brazilian clothing maker, or a psychology graduate school, or ... ). Then came elevation of a friend's post with a link to a business to the top spot in my feed for the better part of 24 hours (despite sorting my feed by 'most recent'). And most recently, I received a notification because a friend had checked in at a location near me. In the middle of the work day. 7 miles away. I imagine the new emotion verb in status updates is intended to help them parse reactions to places where I've checked in and so on.
Clearly they are trying to increase the level of interconnectivity between people and exploit that by pairing in businesses. This is how you become an ad firm. Unlike Google which does all the ad research and presenation somewhat on the sly, we give Facebook explicit information about us and see the ads only on facebook.com, thus we associate all of this with them, directly. How in-my-face can they get? Unless it's really useful, people will treat ads as malware and either leave or ad-block it, both of which are bad for Facebook. In either case it raises awareness that Facebook is mining me, trying to get as much out of me as possible. Should I feel creeped out? Should I worry they are hoarding too much info about me, even though I'm the one that placed it up there?
The common reaction of "you can just turn it off" or "just use ad-block" in an interesting reflection of "out of sight, out of mind". This works in Facebook's favor because it means at least some people don't really care that they are being used as long as they don't have to see the consequences right in front of them. They're not worried about the stockpile building in the background. I'm not sure if I am or not, and I feel like as long as it stays on facebook.com, I'm pretty fine with it. Once it starts spilling over and following me everywhere, fueling the giant ad machine, that's when it becomes a huge turnoff (and I suspect would have the same effect on others).
We've established people will not pay for a social network, so pay-per-use pricing models won't work. For advertisement to work, they need to get people to continue creating a rich influx of content. If they start turning away those who post the most (and therefore have the most obvious ad targeting), they run the risk of damaging their ecosystem. Everyone agrees they are sitting on a treasure trove of information, but to clearly exploit that to their gain loses our trust. It removes Facebook as our safe place, our friend, our site where we get to drive what's happening. It makes them into a stalker. By trying to do too much, they run a serious risk of damaging their brand, their user base and ultimately, their bottom line.
And in the meantime, the shareholders are knocking.
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