Marginal Utility

• I got my introduction to Facebook's Beacon "feature" by surprise — I saw an update in my feed to the effect that I'd purchased [shoes for the boy] from [shoe-selling site]. "Oh, really?" I thought. The Beacon technology apparently lets Suzanne's online shopping feed to my Facebook profile.
• In one sense, that's not bad for [shoe-selling site] since Suzanne is a lot cooler than I am.
• However, online advertising that works on the principle of, "Hey, that cool Jimbo Jones smokes Laramie Jrs., maybe I should too!" jumps the online advertising shark. Suzanne just thinks it's freaky.
• Part of what makes it acceptable for the Googleborg to read my (home) email is that it isn't very intelligent and doesn't broadcast the results of its distillations to my entire contacts list.
• Meanwhile, Facebook's advertising seems otherwise to be badly under-targeted. Ads asking whether I'm sick of the dating scene are missing a key piece of information in my profile (i.e., "married"). Ditto the "Make $1000/day from home!!1!" ads.
  
• Fortunately, a bunch of my best blog pals are already on, since otherwise some combination of the Facebook-Fogey Taper and Peak Facebook are conspiring to keep the number of people on the site I actually know (or knew) very low. The rate of new registrations is detectable for groups as large as my college graduating class (~3,500) but not for my high school class (~120).
• Making up for the latter deficiency using Teh Google yielded some amusing news not in the alumni newsletter. One former friend sued his law school in part over the amount of text he was able to type in computer-based timed exams. Could the expected value of the remedy be worth the cost of sending the signal?!
  
• It also seems a little fogeyish that Scrabulous is coming across as the killer Facebook app.
• Adding friends who are pseudonymous in blog-world in an environment where use of real names is the norm (if an irregularly enforced norm) provides some new vistas of compromise of personally-identifying information. The question du jour is, what's the etiquette for adding pseudonymous bloggers who are, in some sense, blog-pals but who aren't "out" and whose identities you triangulate from other connections?

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, social networks

// posted by Tom Bozzo @ 7:48 AM