Akkam’s Razor

Via Mashable (link):

You’d think with all the controversy over the Facebook news feed and the recent decision to open up the site, Facebook might hold off the new stuff for a while. Not so. A tipster tells me that the company will roll out a new type of advertising on the site in the next few weeks - even worse, these “sponsored stories” will appear in the much-hated news feed.

[…]

Update: the Facebook folks mailed to say that your friends won’t be notified when you click an ad. Nonetheless, ads are still coming to the Facebook news feed - something that’s unlikely to go down well with the community. 

Techcrunch weighs in with more (link):

LinkedIn has told me they are likely to do something much more tasteful around ad placement in social networking; focusing on friend recommendations, context and making receipt of ad pitches completely optional. There are certainly good ways to monetize social networking behavior but there are also many ways that could be bad.

Update: Melanie Deitch, Facebook’s Director of Marketing, emailed to tell us that the MediaWeek story we linked to below was incorrect and that in fact, no unsolicited notices will be sent. Only users who have elected to join a sponsored group will be notified when friends in that group click one of the group’s ads.

Update 2 Deitch wrote back to clarify that no one will ever be notified of your ad clicks and the ads will either be for sponsored groups or link directly to an advertiser’s page. Sounds like the MediaWeek story was almost entirely wrong.

Well, I guess we'll be seeing how aware FB's audience is, and what the likely effect that audience's ire will be - maybe Facebook picked up enough new members that they can afford to lose some "legacies"?

PS.  Be sure to check out "Drama 2.0"'s comments in the TechCrunch thread.