Hey St. John’s Dairy Queen workers, you forgot to make your Facebook group private. Now your hilarious little videos of each other mooning the drive-thru and waging indoor snowball fights are all over Canadian television. They just don’t understand your jokes about “using meat the next day that wasn’t kept overnight in the cooler.” Neither do the health inspectors.
Someone From Arkansas Is Selling Wiis For Only $99!!!
By 1.17.08
Quick, type in all of your credit card information before he runs out of inventory! Omgwtf $99 Wiis! The website, http://www.wiifor99.com—which is being advertised on Facebook, according to a reader—consists of the two screens shown above and that’s it. What a lazy con.
Do You Care About Privacy Or Just Unpleasant Surprises?
By 12.12.07
Seth Godin thinks that for all the talk about privacy, what people really object to is being “surprised.”
If your credit card company called you up and said, “we’ve been looking over your records and we see that you’ve been having an extramarital affair. We’d like to offer you a free coupon for VD testing…” you’d freak out, and for good reason.
By 12.5.07
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Buckling under a blistering poopy pile of criticism, Facebook will now let users turn off Beacon completely. [Facebook]
How To Block Facebook's Beacon
By 12.5.07
Don’t like Facebook secretly tracking your online purchases and telling your friends what you bought? Users of the Firefox we browser can use an easy add-on that jams the beacon’s signal. Just install the BlockSite add-on, and then add http://*facebook.com/beacon/* as one of the blocked sites. Make sure to keep those asterisks in. If that sounds a little complicated, this step-by-step walk-through at Wikihow shows you how it’s done. Alternatively, you could also add the same url to AdBlockPlus, another Firefox extension.
Facebook Tries To Keep Founder's Private Papers Off Internet, Fails
By 12.4.07
In a funny twist of fate, last week Facebook failed in its attempt to force a site to remove incriminating and/or embarrassing personal information about Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. We think Facebook missed a real opportunity here—they should have distributed the documents personally and attached ads to them.
List Of Companies That Participate In Facebook's Beacon Spy Program
By 12.4.07
One of our readers yesterday left a couple of interesting links in the comments section of our Beacon post. They provide the names of the companies that Facebook says are participating in its poorly conceived spy program Beacon. Here they are:
Facebook Alters Shopping Stalker
By 11.30.07
The New York Times says that Facebook will be making a slight change to “Beacon” the feature that tracks users purchases throughout the web and broadcasts them to their friends.
Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.
Facebook Might Revamp Shopping Stalking Feature
By 11.29.07
BusinessWeek says they have a source close to Facebook that says executives are discussing changes to the controversial marketing tool.
Facebook Ruins Christmas?
By 11.21.07
MoveOn.org is annoyed with Facebook over privacy issues. Apparently, people on Facebook can see what you’ve been buying on sites unrelated to Facebook and share this information with your friends. According to MoveOn.org, this is not only a violation of privacy (the feature is opt-out rather than opt-in), it’s been ruining Christmas/Holidays/Birthdays/Whatever for Facebook users.
Free Facebook Gift: Walmart Ghost Cookie
By 10.15.07
Today’s free gift that social network site Facebook users can electronically give to each other appears to be a frosting-coated ghost cookie in a plastic bag. Oh, and the cookie says Walmart on it. Spooky. Now is time for a fun Halloween game. Make this simple marketing ploy into a metaphor, and then read a lot into it.
Facebook Users Hijack Walmart's Dorm Decoration Page
By 8.28.07
According to Wired, Facebook users have hijacked Walmart’s dorm decoration discussion page, choosing instead to discuss the way Walmart “destroys communities and prevents unionization.” Oh, my!
Facebook's New Ad System Will Target Users Based On Personal Information From Profiles
By 8.24.07
Like to tell the world your business on Facebook? Get ready for some heavily targeted ads. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is working on a system that will use all of your personal information to target its ads. Currently, Facebooks advertisers are only allowed to target ads based on age, gender and location. The new system will consider things like favorite activities and preferred music, without exposing the data to advertisers.
