For those who don't remember, Facebook's Beacon was an advertisement service created by Facebook that kept track of user's online activities and then used them to sell products (violating all kinds of privacy along the way).  Facebook users understandably objected and the idea was shelved.

Or so we thought...

Tom Kincaid, a top Facebook developer and blogger mentioned in the Facebook Developer Forums last night that Beacon seems to be rearing its ugly head once again.

According to Kincaid, he signed up for CBS Sportsline and got a Beacon-like pop-up, which he thinks may have used a Facebook cookie.

“I signed up on CBS Sportsline and joined fantasy football,” he wrote on the forum. “I got a pop-up on the bottom right. It looks like the old beacon stuff. I thought that didn’t work anymore, but it published a story to the homepage. I didn’t go through any kind of connect log in, it must have used the Facebook cookie somehow.”

I have to admit a bias here.  I've never been a fan of "free" applications like Facebook.  I like paying money for stuff.  I know it sounds antithetical, but I do. 

Here's why...

When something is free people tend to go with the attitude of "why question a good thing?"  Which would be great if anything was actually free.  But...

Nothing is really for free.

You have to pay for everything in life...Somehow.  Sometimes that's with Ads, sometimes it's with fees, and sometimes it's by more nefarious means.  But in the end nothing comes for free. 

That's why I appreciate paying for stuff.  There's no ambiguity.  You ask for some money, I give you some money, we're done. 

The exact opposite of that situation is what's going on with Facebook.  Facebook doesn't know how to make money.  They can't survive an attempt to charge a fee and they can't seem to make traditional ads work.  So now they need to make money but can't seem to do it in a traditional way. 

Enter the aforementioned "more nefarious means"

We don't know to what extent Facebook is bringing the original Beacon concepts back but I can almost guarantee you things will get worse as time goes along.  The longer Facebook can't find a way to make money the more it gets into the "wounded animal trying to survive by any means necessary" mentality.  That means looking for value in everything they have, including data collected from their users.

Facebook will not close it's doors just to protect their user's privacy.

What they will do is push every boundary of privacy until they find a way to save themselves.  The question of how much they violate your privacy will be decided by how far they have to go to make a profit.  That means every Facebook user is left with a big question mark as to what they'll eventually end up paying for the service. 

I don't know about you, but had I known the cost of Facebook might be playing Russian Roulette with my privacy, I probably would have just given them a little money instead. 

Here's a tip.  If you really want to annoy me.  I mean REALLY get under my skin.  Leave a comment or send an e-mail that says something like this...

"You totally missed the point"

Now, I've been known to miss a point or two in my day, I won't deny that.  But nothing is more obnoxious than someone leaving a message saying "you missed the point" and then not explaining what the point was that I missed.

It's just rude.

I've gotten a few such messages in regards to my post on Facebook connect so I thought I should address what I think the issue is.  Though I want to point out that any ignorance in the following text is not my fault but the fault of those who didn't see fit to explain exactly what they meant in their e-mails.

(OK, maybe a little my fault for not wanting to dignify their rude e-mails with a reply, but mostly their fault)

That said, I think the point they refer to is that Facebook Connect is more than an authentication system in that it's also what some would call a "revolutionary ad platform."  To quote Om Malick...

In addition to offering a simple authentication method, FC allows granular social interactions to be embedded in non-Facebook services. If Facebook can work with its partners to build interesting use-case scenarios that go beyond simple sign-on, it is quite feasible that Facebook can out-execute Google, MySpace and everyone else with its ID ambitions.

Why? Because this is their one chance of building a monetization engine. The company makes no bones about trying to build a platform that allows it to offer branded advertising in a manner akin to Google’s Adsense. A simpler person (like yours truly) would call this a platform that serves ads for all occasions, reasons and seasons.

In response to that I have a couple points...

1.  Read My Original Post.  The point I made there is that no one is going to use the authentication features of Facebook Connect.  If no one uses the authentication than the ad platform is useless because it can only collect info from users it can identify.  As for "granular social interactions" I said it before and I'll say it again, I don't think there's that much valuable information contained in a Facebook profile and I think the company's failures in the ad space so far verify that skepticism.  

2.  This isn't revolutionary, Amazon's been doing it for years and it really doesn't seem to work.  This is one of those ideas that seems really smart in theory but anyone who has watched their Amazon home page knows it isn't because information without context is useless. 

In other words, Amazon doesn't know that I bought lingerie for my girlfriend last month and not myself.  So now I'm getting solicited for Women's magazines and cosmetic products on my Amazon page that I have no interest in. 

Anyway, those two reasons are why I didn't address the issue earlier.  I wasn't missing the point I just didn't think this particular point was relevant given my feelings toward the authentication scheme and the system's potential in general.

I just couldn't pass up making a quick comment on Dick Hardt's provocatively titled post "Facebook Connect - fatal blow for OpenID?"  In it he suggests that Facebook Connect, which is the company's new distributed identity system, could win out over OpenID in the end.  Here is the quote...

Facebook Connect is a powerful identity system. Using Facebook Connect, a site gets access to the user’s profile data and the users friends. For sites such as Digg and Movable Type that want to make users accountable for their activity, there is an implicit reputation of the user based on the depth of the profile.

...

The promise of OpenID was to make login simple and move profile data. A number of us have been looking at using OpenID to make an accountable web. Given the momentum and immediate value of a Facebook identity system and the lack of OpenID RP deployment, one wonders if the identity opportunities of OpenID have passed.

Two points here, the first of which is stated very well by David Recordon who says...

Just as no one would let Microsoft own the protocol, no one is going to let Facebook either.

There's a lot of truth to that.  I'm not sure this is a situation where no company could ever control an identity platform but if a company did succeed they would need a lot of trust from the consumer.  That's why Microsoft has tried several times and failed, people simply don't trust them anymore.  Now that PR nightmares such as Beacon have had their way with Facebook I'd put them in the same boat as Microsoft in regards to trust.

Which brings me to point #2, despite what "community advocates" might have you believe most of the web traffic on the Internet is from about 10 big companies.  Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace, etc...  Unless a company wanting to control identity can gather the support of those companies they simply are not going to succeed.  Given Facebook is a direct competitor with several of those companies their chances of becoming the defacto identity provider are next to nothing.

Bonus Point Addendum: This is a topic for a much longer post but I did want to make one more point.  Many are saying Facebook Connect will win out because it provides access to the "Treasure Trove" that is a Facebook User's profile information.  I'm sorry, but I've never seen where the great value is in this.  Knowing what someone says their favorite movie is or what their favorite quote is doesn't strike me as ground breaking info that's going to revolutionize the web ad business.  That skepticism, by the way, is borne out by the seemingly awful return rate on Facebook ads. 

A couple weeks ago I posted on the oddness of Facebook being honored for its business acumen.  At the time I made the point that Facebook had made some impressive technical achievements but had not yet proven itself as a viable business and certainly didn't deserve to be honored as such. 

After thinking on it for a couple weeks I came to the conclusion that the business community just gets enamored with tech companies.  Something about the creation of new business models makes them abandon any rational analysis of a company's actual performance or future chances of success.

That theory is what's on my mind after reading the news that Marc Andreessen has joined the board of Facebook (as reported by Techcrunch)...

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Opsware and Ning and the former CTO of AOL, is adding a new notch in his belt: he has joined the board of directors of Facebook, two sources close to the company confirmed to us (speculation about Andreessen possibly joining the Facebook board started last month on the Boomtown blog). The company should be announcing it shortly, perhaps this week.

I have a lot of respect for Marc Andreessen from the technology perspective and the guy is a master at selling companies for more than their probably worth.  But a business man who builds for the long term he is not. 

In fact, Netscape's downfall was largely due to the fact that he and Jim Clark squandered their resources at the same time they were taunting the biggest, most aggressive company in the IT industry.  The end result of which was to take a company that was already profitable and on its way to long term success and effectively bury it.

That makes Mr. Andreessen seem like an odd fit given Facebook's insistence that it's in this for the long term. 

Even more bizarre is the fact that he's founder, chairman, and a full time employee of Ning which is a direct competitor to Facebook.  This isn't like Eric Schmidt of Google joining the board of Apple even though both companies make Cell. phone technology.  Facebook does one thing, Ning does one thing and they're both the same thing.  Its ridiculous.

I bring all this up to again point out the bizarre nature of Silicon Valley funding.  No company in any other industry would dream of pulling a move like this particularly when they had no profits and no viable plan to eventually turn a profit. 

Addendum: I stick by what I said in the post above but in thinking it over I wanted to add a couple things. First, Andreessen was 22 when Netscape was founded and only 28 when it was acquired by AOL so it’s a little unfair to hold a lot of what happened at Netscape against him. Second, though he’s famous for turning huge profits on companies that aren’t that successful it should also be mentioned that he makes more of an effort than most to stay involved in those companies. He stayed on after Netscape was acquired by AOL and he remained chairman while Loudcloud/Opsware was changing hands.  That should all count for something.

When did academia completely lose their integrity?  I wonder this while reading Kara Swisher's account of the ceremony in which Harvard Business School awarded Facebook its "30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award".  Here's a quote...

While it is not yet clear exactly what kind of business case study Facebook will turn out to be in the end–a raging success or a raging something else entirely–that has not stopped Harvard from feting the hot and hyped social-networking site.

That would be the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California, which will bestow upon Facebook its 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award on June 17 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.

This, to me, is an embarrassment to the Harvard Business School.  From a business perspective what exactly does Facebook have to brag about?  What business school skills does Facebook epitomize precisely?

Thus far they are a company that burns through investor money while failing to come up with any way to sustain themselves.  How exactly does a company that still has no idea how to make a profit after over 4 years of existence get an award for being a well run business?

This isn't to take away from certain impressive technical innovations Facebook has made but even those are few and far between (other than the Facebook platform what technically have they really accomplished?)

This might seem like a mindless rant of annoyance and, to a certain extent, it is.  But the bigger issue here is that business organization does matter.  At some point consultants spouting words like "empowerment" and "employee self motivation" made us forget that business management is a requirement of a truly successful company (you know, the ones that actually turn profits) 

Apple engineers created technical wonders years ahead of their time between the years of 1985 and 1998 (The Jobs-less years) including not one, not two, but three different Operating Systems that were better than Windows in every conceivable way.  But the place was a chaotic mess where no one could get a project out the door.  So a company with the finest engineers in the industry stagnated despite the fact that they were creating world class products. 

That is the importance of business management.  Good process insures a business against that type of thing and you need people who have studied creating good process to make that happen. 

The same is true with making a profit.  Someone with some business sense might have said "Hey, maybe we should do some market research on this Beacon thing to see if people will consider it a horrible invasion of their privacy."  Again, the reason market research exists is to avoid just such disasters and not knowing that gets you into trouble. 

But when even the Harvard Business School seems to have abandoned the principles of good business management one has to wonder how the next generation is going to get anything done. 

There was a book published in the late 90s entitled "Barbarians Led By Bill Gates" which was a fairly bitter tale of how backwards one employee (co-author Marlin Eller) felt Microsoft was in the early days.  Unfortunately, the book suffers from all the negativity. 

But one chapter really shines and that is the Chapter on Pen Windows.  Pen Windows was a project attempting to add a Pen interface to Windows 3.1 and it was a project that Mr. Eller worked on directly.  At the time a company named GO was making a lot of noise in tech circles by convincing people that Pen based interfaces were the next big thing.  So Pen Windows was Microsoft's response to that. 

I should mention that, by "Pen interface", we're not talking about drawing on the screen like a tablet but instead about drawing on a Desk pad as a mouse replacement. 

In the end, Pen Windows was a failure and GO went completely out of business.  As a final assessment of the situation Mr. Eller quotes himself as saying this to his partner on the project...

Greg, Look.  This wasn't a thing about making money.  This was all about 'Block that Kick.'  We were on the special team.  We were preventing GO from running away with the market.  That was our job.

Look, your background is in applications, you have to ship the application.  My job is in systems.  Systems, for much longer on, has been completely 'Don't let anybody else steal DOS from us.'  That's all we're doing.  We weren't trying to sell software, we were trying to prevent other people from selling software. 

From my view, Pen Windows was a winner.  We shut down GO.  They spent $75 million pumping up this market, we spent $4 million shooting them down.  They're toast!

I bring this up because news broke yesterday that Facebook will be Open Sourcing their platform in the next week and I think the above quote does a lot to illuminate why. 

The best way for Facebook to eat away at their competition is to keep their competition from innovating.  The easiest way to do that is to hand out the Facebook platform.  That way your competition thinks they're getting the holy grail when in fact they are stunting their own growth.

If a Social Network works exactly like Facebook than there is absolutely no reason for users, developers, et al to leave Facebook.   So while Facebook's competitors probably see the ability to integrate the Facebook platform into their service as a huge opening its actually just Facebook "preventing other people from selling software" 

Plus Facebook gets to kill off Google's OpenSocial in the process.  Not bad for a day's work. 

I think its important to remember that the old rules still apply in the software business.  People might pay for software with their eyes rather than their wallets but they are still paying for software and companies still need to compete for that currency.  I might not like tactics like this one but they show Facebook is paying attention to the past and in my book that puts them ahead of the competition. 

For the record, I certainly didn't miss the Facebook news but I can't seem to find any decent coverage on what exactly Facebook will be offering so I'm withholding judgement.

I also want to see how other people in the blogosphere react which is often the most interesting part of any Facebook news.

In particular I'm curious to hear Dare Obasanjo's take on the whole thing because it almost seems like Facebook is copying what Microsoft (and Dare in his day job) has been working on for the last year or more.  It wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft has had a feature before everyone else and not gotten credit for it but if I'm right it would be one of the more frustrating examples. 

Addendum: Dare's thoughts can be found here.  He doesn't mention Live or how Microsoft has been trying to extend presence beyond the social network since day one but perhaps that isn't the point of this on Facebook's part.  Like I said earlier in this post the blogosphere tends to distort Facebook news and having not had time to actually look at the API documentation I'm having trouble matching the reality to the hype.  In the end, all Facebook has to offer is a repository of personal information and a list of contacts.  So technology wise I don't see how what Facebook is doing now is anything other than an inferior version of Microsoft and others have done before (I realize Facebook's userbase makes their participation more valuable but I'm just speaking from a capabilities standpoint).  It just seems to me like everyone is holding up the ability to create information aware widgets as if Facebook had invented it.

I also have to admit to not completely seeing how the fact that this "doesn't require any server side code" is at all relevant.  The attitude among pundits seems to be that this now empowers people with no programming skills to start whipping up Facebook apps like it was nothing.  I don't think that's going to happen. 

Anyway, I'm going to look into this more.  I've long intended to jump into Facebook APIs and really get educated about it so maybe this can serve as the motivation for that.  I'll be the first to admit to a certain amount of ignorance on the subject but right now this just seems  to be a lot to do about nothing.

Rarely will I quote text in one of these posts but rarely will you run across a blog that has its own mission statement.  Since this is one of those rare occasions I thought I'd share it before going any further.

It is the mission of AjaxNinja to provide quality instruction on how to start a website or blog, develop it using common web development techniques, and then subsequently direct traffic to the website or blog using SEO and Social Media..

I'm really not sure Aaron Stannard's AjaxNinja site fits into the narrow mold of what I would consider a blog but (as in the case of Techmeme earlier in the list) it doesn't really matter to me because of how entertaining it is.

What Aaron does that no one else on the web is doing is to analyze the actual creation of a web site and to treat that creation as an art in itself which is worthy of studying.  He's sort of like the Anti-Scoble in that watching Scoble can be instructive but Scoble isn't really instructing you as much as he's simply doing something instinctively well and allowing you to watch.  Aaron on the other hand tries to codify what someone like Scoble does and then state it outright which is a much better way for new people to learn. 

Aaron concerns himself with actually figuring out and teaching what it takes to make a real successful site from scratch and that is something I haven't seen anywhere else. 

Beyond that he does mix the normal blog type posts in.  I learned quite a bit about Facebook development just by watching his ups and downs as a developer beginning his first Facebook app.  That type of stuff is what makes the blogosphere invaluable and again Aaron is good at instructing about things that he himself has just learned. 

Finally, and I debated whether to throw this out there or not but I think its an important point.  Aaron is pretty young having not even graduated College yet.  Some might consider that a reason to ignore him but I see it as just the opposite.  Here is a guy who has shown he has the energy, know-how and leadership skills to create something at a young age and take that thing seriously.

Whenever someone great comes along people always lament the fact that they didn't have the opportunity to watch that person from the start of their career.  I suspect that one day Aaron could be someone great in this industry and that alone is reason to subscribe to his feed and that (along with everything else) is why I put Aaron Stannard at #7 on my Blogroll list.

A post by Dare Obasanjo just brought the "This has got to stop" Facebook group to my attention.  The group seems to be dedicated to stopping all the useless vampire/pirate/zombie/etc... Facebook apps that really serve no purpose other than to allow users to send themed messages to each other.

In his post Dare says...

I've seen a bunch of tech folks blog about being overwhelmed by Facebook app spam like Tim Bray in his post Facebook Rules and Doc Searls in Too much face(book) time. However I assumed that the average college or high school student who used the site didn't feel that way. Looks like I was wrong.

The folks at Facebook could fix this problem easily but it would eliminate a lot of the "viralness" that has been hyped about the platform. Personally, I think applications on the site have gotten to the point where the costs have begun to outweigh the benefits. The only way to tip the balance back is to rein them in otherwise it won't be long until the clean and minimal vs. cluttered and messy aesthetics stop working in their favor in comparisons with MySpace. When that happens there will be an opportunity for someone else to do the same thing to them.

As much as I don't personally like the applications that this group wants to be rid of I don't think I'll be joining anytime soon.  To be blunt, it isn't the application's fault that one of your friends signed you up for something you had no interest in.  These applications are some of the most popular on Facebook so obviously somebody is enjoying them.  Further, since they rely on interaction to be worthwhile its equally obvious that some of those people's friends enjoy them as well. 

To say that they should be banned because some people don't like them or because they make a home page cluttered (a thoroughly ambiguous term) is silly.  By the same logic people should be banned from sending jokes via e-mail because some people over do it. 

Any platform that chooses to limit the type of applications that can be written for it based on the disapproval of people who would never use that type of application might as well just get out of the platform business altogether.

**Special Note** For the record this post was in my drafts and I'm using it to test posting with Windows Live Writer.  I don't know why you'd need to know that but I thought I'd tell you anyway.

Jeff Zuckerberg is an interesting character. From his scandalous “under 30 comments” (I was offended and I’m under 30) to the newsfeed controversy he’s managed to rub people the wrong way at an astounding rate (for a nice summary of most of these scandals see here). This is still my favorite Zuckerberg quote…

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."

At the same time, his company has managed to add enough innovation to largely negate much of the negative influence that the various scandals have had.

So I’m interested to see where this whole Beacon mess goes. For those who have been under a rock, Facebook created a new service called Beacon in which each user’s purchases (from other sites) would be published on their newsfeed (Dare Obasanjo has a nice summary post about it). People were automatically opted in to this and there was no global opt out which caused a huge stir.

The issue here is that anyone with even a little experience with people should have seen this coming from a mile away. Had they even polled their own employees I have to believe that a good percentage of them would have balked at the idea of springing this on people without even a warning.

Which brings me to my point which is that I don’t think a 23 year old should be running a company with such a public profile. There are certainly exceptions to that rule (Bill Gates for example) but Mr. Zuckerberg has proven time and again that he isn’t one of those exceptions. If it were me, I’d hunt down a CEO with some experience in dealing with the public and resign myself to the role of Chief Technologist as soon as is humanly possible.