Facebook ‘Sponsored Stories’ are a user experience fail
Will Brinson
Facebook is really swell because you get to point and laugh when people are forced to go from “In a Relationship” to “Single” and forget to hide it from their status. But Facebook is a real burn on privacy and daily intrusion from ads.
It’s going to get worse, too, because of “Sponsored Stories,” a new little twist that Facebook went live with on Tuesday. Facebook explains it all in a video (which is only likable and not embeddable, grrr) but an anonymous engineer named “Phil” puts it in perspective.
So my friend Joe goes and he checks into Starbucks. That’ll appear on my news feed and I may or may not see it. And what we’ve seen is that a lot of impressions do get lost because there is so much content coming through. Starbucks can come in and say, ‘I want to promote check-ins to our locations.’ So, when I come to the site I see the story that my friend checked into Starbucks. Now I can click through, I can like the starbucks page from that story and when I like that page it creates more organic content.
OH. Well everything’s just so much better when you end a sentence with a STRAT-filled buzzword isn’t it?
Actually, no, it isn’t. And the rest of the video is even worse, because these random engineers proceed to make excuses for this new “feature” by saying things like “it won’t go to other people’s feeds” (we care why?) and that “it’s not this message saying ‘you should buy this thing or come to this website’” (yes, yes it is).
It boils down to one thing: money.
This is going to be a cash freaking cow for Facebook, because if Starbucks wants to promote a ton of check-ins to their stores, Zuckerberg and Co are probably going to charge them an arm and a leg to get drilled-down demographics.
Now, these “organic non-ads” are certainly going to be better than any of the crap that the ‘Book normally tosses up on the side of the my page (seriously, Facebook: no one’s buying that anyone actually created a bucket list for Greensboro, North Carolina).
Look, Facebook is a generally awesome site — as long as you don’t mind having your privacy treated like a Ben Roethlisberger groupie or being force to stare through countless advertisements — that serves a multitude of fantastic purposes.
But forcing users to become walking advertisements against their will and without compensation probably isn’t the most open-ended way to crank up the user experience.
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