Facebook + Microsoft = Facesoft is watching you

So the blogosphere and news aggregators are buzzing with Microsoft’s $240million investment in Facebook in return for the rights to sell third party ads on the social operating system du jour and a 1.6% stake, valuing Facesoft at $15billion.

Well blow me down with a modified hacked hairdryer that’s enough money to buy Bulgaria.

Om Malik has a good breakdown of what this might mean, but I wanted to pick up on the whole ‘does Microsoft now have access to our personal data?’ issue. Seth Goldstein sees appvertising as targeted ad placement on Facebook. In order to achieve this we the user have to be content to give up our info to Microsoft who will use it to sell ad space on our pages relating to whatever it is we are talking about.

Google made a little dough providing the same targeted ad deployment for search results and it seems has lost out to Microsoft in the battle to secure a 1.6% stake in Facebook.

But targeted ads based on my News Feed? That’s just plain ole creepy. So one of my friends is talking about virtual poop when low and behold an ad pops up on my page for a vibrating toilet brush! It’s all starting to get a bit Minorty Report with ads based on my social stream.

Om reports that Kevin Johnson from Facebook said this in response to his query, ‘Does Microsoft have access to Facebook user data?’

‘User trust is core to what we focus on and we both are going to provide highly relevant advertising and focus on that. We don’t want to violate user trust…There are certain parts of the partnership we are not announcing.’

Er, ‘we don’t want to’, so that’s not an affirmative, that’s a we will try not to, but at the end of the day we probably will and you must be fools to think we won’t. Phew…. aaarrghhhh.

I’m sick of this ad sustained online economy, how many ads can the web sustain? Targeted advertising keeps me up a night, next stop my dreams will be interpreted by a virtual psychoanalyst and I’ll be bombarded with real world pop-ups for rock climbing equipment and lady shavers (I have vivid dreams).

Om’s a bright guy, he looks like a Bond villain and he knows his 2.0 from his beta blocker, so when he says:

‘I think they are dodging a very relevant question.’

You had better be scared. Facesoft wants to listen in on your life and then sell it back to you.

How about, rather than cluttering up my already virtual poop cluttered Facebook profile, you turn around and say:

‘Hey, we’re glad you like Facebook, you obviously have nice friends, though your wife is a lot more popular, how about you pay $1 a week to try and muster more friends than your wife and you can have unlimited food to throw, a nice video app and some other stuff we’ve not yet thought of.’

Sure a lot of people would protest, they can all go to hell or sit in the basement and scoop pumpkin pulp, because if I pay $4 per month for a service I find invaluable and that increasingly is becoming the social operating system it dreams of being when it grows up, so will 40 million other subscribers, so that’s $4 x 40 million per month = $160,000,000, enough for Zukerberg to purchase Moldova rather than Bulgaria, but if he saves for a few months he could probably buy Denmark.

$1 per week for an ad free experience. When did we all suddenly expect everything for free? $1 to not feel creeped out. We can leave that to the pumpkin scoopers. Invest the money in a secure micro payment service rather than mind reading technology that nobody except the people devising it want.

Posted in 2 Minute Critique, Appvertising, New Business Model | No Comments »