Let’s take a use-case example:
Ashley is an average looking 16 year-old high school girl. She hangs out with the nerdy crowd. Her interests include reading. Her favorite music is the Jonas Brothers. She’s having trouble getting over that nerd hump–and the fact that she still likes the Jonas Brothers.
Ashley has 246 friends. Not much for a teen her age. Her average time spent on Facebook outweighs others’ at 2 hours/day.
Ashley clicks on Stacy’s profile an average of ten times a day. Ashley knows Stacy through friends.
Stacy is a popular girl and hangs with the popular crowd. Stacy has 1,200 friends and her wall is always flooded with funny recollections of the previous day and photos–photo’s in which Ashley constantly browses. In Stacy’s profile, it shows that Stacy loves the band Greenday, and Stacy likes “rocking out.”
Guess what types of ads Ashley (the geeky girl that loves Jonas Brothers) will see?
Greenday ads (the band that Stacy, the popular girl, absolutely loves)
Facebook has the potential to carry this out.
The opportunity for pure evil to be done with the information Facebook aggregates is enormous, and the fact that they don’t protect their users from Facebook application developers shows they really don’t have their user’s interests at heart.
Facebook may well be the big corporate overlord we should be fearing, but we just haven’t seen it yet, and it may already be too late.
Have a nice day!
Please note: I've moved my active blogging over to a new site, called Jason Clarke - Infinite Bass Line. I will leave this site up indefinitely, but if you're interested in my latest posts please consider visiting the new site.
by Tanya
09 Feb 2010 at 08:36
OK I’m one of THE biggest Green Day(AND a FB user) fans and as I read this you article pretty much says Facebook is evil and Green Day is a evil/bad band(which they are clearly NOT).FB uses data like how many times do you visit and page or how many times you use an app,it is mostly visiting apps thought because if somebody uses Farmville they will get ads for Petville or Lil’ Farmlife.I visit the Green Day fan page everyday without and ads,but after i use a Green Day app then it might show 1 small add. PS Why do you have Green Day attacking undertones in this?
by Tanya
09 Feb 2010 at 08:37
and without* no without and
by Facebook lacks
22 Feb 2010 at 02:45
It is true that Facebook lacks in terms of protecting the interests of its users. Once you have friends list there, you can not be sure that same shall not be shared with the outer world.
by dave
16 Jan 2011 at 09:20
well, i saw this similar and better solution called kpimatrix (http://www.suzerein.com) at techcrunch lately. they can be viewed from iphone as they dont use flash