Facebook Is Trying to Be Less Creepy

For the second time in two weeks, Facebook has made a concerted effort to be less creepy.

Exhibit A: The company's decision last week to make the default for new users "friends" instead of public. Exhibit B: On Tuesday, Facebook began downplaying passive updates from third party apps. That means there will be fewer instances of updates such as, "Todd is listening to the Starland Vocal Band on Spotify" clogging up your News Feed.
As enhancements go, these are pretty minor — really minor, actually. In the first instance, Facebook could have made much bigger strides against creepiness if it made the friends setting the default for everyone and notified them of this. Changing the setting for new users is a tacit acknowledgment that such newbies (who are these people just signing up, anyway?) never noticed their default settings — so Facebook was, in effect, taking advantage of their naiveté.
The passive updates announcement was also a half-measure at best. Notice Facebook didn't say it was getting rid of such updates; it will merely show fewer of them in your News Feed. Facebook didn't say it was getting rid of such updates; it will merely show fewer of them in your News Feed.

Still, in the first example, money was at stake. Twitter may be a fly on Facebook's elephantine corpus these days, but insiders say Facebook is genuinely perplexed at Twitter's ability to shore up the market for real-time advertising in a year or so. Facebook has scrambled to catch up with hashtags and trending topics. While the company hasn't released any stats, it's safe to say that most aren't using Facebook to comment on live events the way they do on Twitter. Clearly, Facebook has calculated that it wasn't worth putting Mammon ahead of the user experience.

That's good, because the company hasn't always reached the same conclusion. Remember Beacon? Initiated in 2007, Beacon helpfully let your friends know when you bought something online ("Todd just bought the Twilight trilogy.") After a lawsuit, Facebook shut Beacon down and CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted it was a mistake.

Then, in 2011, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to force Facebook to get permission from users before it shared information with advertisers. Last year, the FTC revisited the agreement after Facebook initiated a new privacy policy without consulting the agency.

Since Facebook is a free service, it's a fair tradeoff that the company uses some of our information to run ads and pay bills. The problem is that we don't like being reminded of this. That's the problem with the new ads running in the News Feed; when people say they're creeped out by Facebook these days, they're often referring to those "interest-based" ads, which Facebook has run since last October. Such ads are based on your browsing history, so if you were checking out a Cannondale Synapse Carbon 6 bike, you would start seeing ads for that model in your News Feed.

If this creeps you out, though, don't blame Facebook. Twitter is doing the same thing, and Google has done it for years. Neither are evil nor creepy for taking this approach. They're just trying to figure out an ad model that works.
TV advertising followed a similar path. After broadcast TV was introduced nationally in the late 1940s, the industry took years to figure out a successful approach to advertising. Initially, the norm was a full-program sponsorship, which prompted shows like Texaco Star Theater, The Bell Telephone Hour and The Colgate Comedy Hour. It wasn't until later in the decade that Pat Weaver (Sigourney's father) got the idea to offer time slots during programming hours to multiple advertisers.

The result has been a contract with the viewer: We'll let you watch this for free, but you must sacrifice time to ingest some commercial messages. Viewers didn't necessarily like this deal, but their umbrage didn't eclipse the desire for free entertainment — at least until cable, DVRs and Netflix hit the scene.

Facebook is working out something similar, but the primary variable is privacy, not time. Either way, despite the high-flown rhetoric about the wonder of sharing, the nature of your relationship with Facebook is transactional. You may not love where Facebook ends up, but it will be the scientific point at which the company can maximize your value to advertisers without making you flee the site.