Considering that Facebook has multi-billion dollar valuation, makes money selling users advertising, and makes money selling analyses of user information, my view is that the users are kindly donating Facebook their information, not that Facebook is kindly donating their service.
While users may benefit personally from the service being available, Facebook are the ones benefiting financially.
Users do not give Facebook money directly, but they contribute something valuable to the company just by using the site. I see it as a business relationship the same as if I was paying money for the service.
Neither side is 'kindly donating' their portion. Both are getting back more than they give, in a voluntary mutually-beneficial transaction. Or they'd each do something else instead.
I agree, I mainly state it like that as a foil to the commonly heard idea that these sites are giving us something for free. They're not; they're giving us a service in exchange for what we give to them.
Now and then I see someone complain about a free service, Google for instance, and receive a response such as "Well you're entitled to all your money back". This is stated as if the customer has no right to complain, because the service is 'free'. As you noted, that it is not the case. It's more of a symbiotic relationship.
Thought Facebook is clearly free to do as they wish, I personally feel that using my messages to friends to promote products for Facebook's profit is something other than what I expected when I signed up.
also called "bid to increase your rank in the newsfeed"
I am not against this as long as the stories are marked as sponsored, and not part of the main results. After all that's what Google's adwords are, in a sense.
"sponsored stories" will appear in the right hand column along with ads and other things like "people you may know". your newsfeed will be the same as always and the ranking there is unaffected by which stories can be sponsored.
Somehow I knew this was coming and had a similar idea for a startup, except I'd make these ads more transactional oriented and give users who triggered the ad a cut, since after all they are promoting a product/service. And I'd limit it to n ads per user per week, otherwise you can get spammy behavior out of "friends" trying to maximize their credits--sound familiar?
Anyway, we'll see how that works out. I would honestly demand money if a brand tried to associate myself with them even if it makes sense. It's time to track and rewad word-of-mouth ads--consider them this now. It's clear Facebook and others are in a position to do this. You know that $50 billion+ valuation? Doesn't sound as crazy now, does it?
update: Reading some comments on mashable, I see a good counter to my point: why should FB pay you if they don't charge you to use their site? Fair enough, but at some point users deserve to be rewarded by brands/companies (not facebook) for their loyalty and for attracting them new customers.
I don't understand what's to stop the system accidentally generating sponsored ads following negative interaction with a brand: you'd get John Smith says - Starbuck's sucks! - sponsored story!
What's nifty about the mechanism is that it doesn't, at least for now and according to the article, require the ever so difficult sentiment analysis. You have to explicitly "like" something or check in. Some users will have fun abusing this, but not so much more than some researchers abuse machine learning/nlp who complicate their living by putting too many constraints on a machine intelligence task. (Don't get me wrong, I love machine learning/nlp; it just doesn't have to be more complicated than it already is.)
What's interesting is that companies were already creating incentives for people to like a page, check-in to a place, post to a wall ...
Now, not only do they have to create incentives for these actions to take place, they have to pay Facebook for the right for these actions to be displayed prominently.
Facebook bans you from doing this: "You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser)."
I seem to recall when Facebook (or was it Gmail?) was started, something like this was one of the proposals for producing revenue. There was quite an uproar over it because it meant that whoever it was would be going through all of your personal information and parsing it for different keywords. It was deemed 'too creepy' and toned down.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 74.9 ms ] threadUsers do not give Facebook money directly, but they contribute something valuable to the company just by using the site. I see it as a business relationship the same as if I was paying money for the service.
Now and then I see someone complain about a free service, Google for instance, and receive a response such as "Well you're entitled to all your money back". This is stated as if the customer has no right to complain, because the service is 'free'. As you noted, that it is not the case. It's more of a symbiotic relationship.
Thought Facebook is clearly free to do as they wish, I personally feel that using my messages to friends to promote products for Facebook's profit is something other than what I expected when I signed up.
I am not against this as long as the stories are marked as sponsored, and not part of the main results. After all that's what Google's adwords are, in a sense.
Anyway, we'll see how that works out. I would honestly demand money if a brand tried to associate myself with them even if it makes sense. It's time to track and rewad word-of-mouth ads--consider them this now. It's clear Facebook and others are in a position to do this. You know that $50 billion+ valuation? Doesn't sound as crazy now, does it?
update: Reading some comments on mashable, I see a good counter to my point: why should FB pay you if they don't charge you to use their site? Fair enough, but at some point users deserve to be rewarded by brands/companies (not facebook) for their loyalty and for attracting them new customers.
This only works if the "like" actions are filtered to company-approved material only. Otherwise you can "like" a post trashing the company.
Now, not only do they have to create incentives for these actions to take place, they have to pay Facebook for the right for these actions to be displayed prominently.
It is like double taxation.
"Puking after drinking bad coffee - at Starbucks with my friend.
STARBUCKS!"
Must be nice to make the rules.
The times they are a changin'.