Around the Net
Facebook Beacon: What Should Have Been
- BoomTown/D: All Things Digital, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 11 AM
An unnamed source discusses the shame that was (is?) Facebook's Beacon and posits an interesting theory on the right way to roll out a peer-to-peer recommendation system. For starters, piling
such a system on its users without first making an attempt to warm them up to the idea was foolish. If Facebook had offered a non-commercial version of the program, which tracks your purchases and
then broadcasts that information to your friends via your profile news feed, focusing on what users published themselves--like video clips, for example--Beacon might not have been so bad.
Swisher points out that sites like YouTube, Flickr, Yelp, Craigslist and Twitter provide services specifically for sharing information, which make them perfect Beacon partners. The service would then provide value for all parties. Finding an easy way to let friends know what you are posting on the Web, as anyone knows, is still not very easy to do. Instead, Facebook decided to cater to advertisers first, which isn't all that surprising, given the company's massive, pressure-filled $15 billion valuation.
