Facebook Is Marketing Your Brand Preferences

This is an interesting article from the NYT: Facebook Is Marketing Your Brand Preferences (With Your Permission). It's a simple idea - the resource will ask for your permission to include details about things you have purchased or made an opinion on in adverts that they send to your friends, and your friends won't have much choice in what they can do about it. Of course, it's not just going to be on Facebook per se - if you go to another website they may well ask if they can refer back to Facebook.

Personally I think this is an insane idea. Librarians and information professionals are already finding it hard enough to get acceptance for Facebook in their organisation, and the message 'Facebook is about work, not about having fun with your mates' is hard enough to make as it is. This will just further intensify the assumption that Fb is Not A Good Thing.

Moreover, I don't actually think it's going to work that well - I have several groups of friends on Fb - some of them are work colleagues, some are friends from science fiction conventions and others are friends from different places. This is NOT a homogeneous grouping of people. Sure, some may be interested in some of the things I like to read or buy, but not all of them will.

It's also going to work the other way around as well - if friends start pumping adverts through to me, albeit without meaning to, I'm still going to get the spam (because that's what it is) and they're not going to stay my friend for long. Lord alone knows what kind of insanity will come about if you've got hundreds of friends (though in cases like that it's your own fault IMO). I just don't get the feeling this is going to end well.