The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I'll first admit that I am probably the only person in North America who has never seen more than a single episode of Survivor. All these years, I have watched one episode when I was staying with a friend not long after the show first came out. I thought it was dull and I never went back. Along this same line, I'll also admit that I don't have an account on Facebook. I do a lot of stuff online. I have several blogs, a flickr account for photos, a twitter account that keeps me tied up, and a constant string of e-mail and chat sessions on the go. I probably spend far too much time online. But I have never had the interest or the time to set up an account at Facebook. It feels too much like high school. I know. A lot of people have tried to coax me in and have sent me invites. A lot of people have told me about the vast numbers of old friends I am missing out on by not having an account set up. I always figure that if people want to find me, all they need to do is stick my name into Google; they'll find me soon enough. But these days, Facebook is worrying me for several more reasons. The first is their agreement with Microsoft. The folks in Redmond who know all about monopolies recently paid $240 million for a 1.6 per cent share in this company. That puts the net worth of Facebook at over $15 billion. This has got to worry a lot of people. A company that started only a few years ago in a Harvard dorm room is suddenly worth that much money? Especially when the people who built the company, those valuable first customers, the early adopters, are beginning to move elsewhere onto other services. Certainly Facebook has changed the web in some important ways. It has changed people's ideas about social networking and the potential the web has to bring people together. But for $15 billion? The reason many people are moving along is because of Facebook's new advertising strategy. Called Beacon, the strategy is simple. Just as you can add other people to your account as friends, you can now add companies and become their fans. The trouble is that the original strategy involved Facebook e-mailing your friends and telling them that you are a fan of company X. As well, advertisements could appear both on your own site and on your friends' sites with both your name and the company's. For example, if you become a "fan" of Pepsi, when Pepsi ads appear on your friends' Facebook, they may state that you are a fan of it and tell your friends to become fans as well. Another part of this strategy was for Facebook to track every place that you surfed while you were online, even when you where not on Facebook's site, and then personalize the ads that are presented to you based on where you spend your time online. Understandably, privacy advocates were in a complete tizzy over these two new ideas. Basically Facebook wants to track every place you go online and then use that information to tailor advertising to you when you are on their site, as well as using you to sell stuff to your friends. There are now signs that they may be backing off. For Facebook to go from no advertising strategy to one of the web's most aggressive platforms stunned many users and made them nervous - something no company wants for their customers. While there is nothing official yet and while the company is certainly not sinking by any stretch of the imagination, these concerns might be early warning signs. People showed up and signed up for Facebook in droves. They can leave the same way. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
