the tindog coffeehouse

I can accept a certain amount of advertising on any website. Fine. I accept your ads in return for free content or a free service. But everyone has their limits. Put popup ads on your site, and I’m simply going to block them. Put up blinking or animated banners or ads that make noise, and with the help of Adblock Plus I’ll block those too.

Those who have succumbed to the siren song of social networking sites like Facebook have to accept that while web advertising is sometimes annoying, it’s either that or pay for the right to “poke” your casual acquaintences. Again, fine. Put some relevant text-based ads in an outside column or at the top of the page, I may even glance at them once in a while. But use your friends as a medium to spam you? I’m not OK with that.

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy discusses Facebook’s new “Engagement Ads” initiative in which interactive (intrusive?) targeted ads are delivered to users’ profiles. Users are encouraged to comment on the ads, give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or become a fan of the product. Any of those actions, naturally, then show up in all their friends’ news feeds.

As Wired points out, what this really means is that marketers are using Facebook’s news feed algorithm to deliver advertising to you in your news feed presented as though it was coming from one of your friends, thereby blurring the line between a genuine personal endorsement from a trusted friend and a blatant paid ad.

What does that mean? If you get a newsfeed from someone you haven’t spoken to in years who “totally loved Dark Knight!” it’s probably because Warner Bros. paid to have it broadcast to you.

Normally, information that you put on Facebook is sent to the people in your network who would find it the most valuable. But the algorithm that Facebook has implemented to determine your closest friends can easily be translated into a marketing tool, with Facebook charging advertisers to get your positive messages about their products sent to as many people as they would like.

Of course it’s not just Facebook coming under fire. Twitter, the popular microblogging site, has become a magnet for legitimate advertisers and spammers alike, with spammers masquerading as legitimate users and companies data-mining Twitter posts to be able to deliver targeted ads to users.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that whether it’s technically spam or simply an overly-aggressive advertising technique, it completely undermines the entire social networking ecosystem. After all, once you can no longer differentiate between a real friend and a paid advertisement, you can no longer trust the system that delivers it to you.

Again, I can accept that advertising is part of the deal. Let’s just keep it within the limits.