

Facebook Starts Turning Listen, Read, and Watch Stories Into Ads - bootload
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/09/open-graph-sponsored-stories/

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david_xia
I think these socially sponsored ads are going to be money-making and also
insidious if done right. It's a nuanced, strange mix of social content and
advertising. They're trying to make all ads social or all their open graph
actions into ads. If you play this out to its logical conclusion, that's kinda
scary.

Imagine a world where a large chunk of your online interactions are actually
being used as content/ads targeted at your friends.

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dspillett
I'm fine with this (if I'm going to be advertised at, I'd prefer ads that have
at least a small chance of being relevant to me) as long as information isn't
leaking out to the advertisers - for instance all the stuff my browser picks
up is from fb not images from the advertiser's server (they could then use
referrer tracking to find my public profile and infer something from the
keywords they've purchased hooks for their adverts on) and so forth.

One thing that irritates me about the "<somebody> has read <article>" posts is
that if you click on any of them you are forced to accept the news source's
app if you want to read it yourself which may leak my information. If I was
happy giving source basic details and letting the post to my contacts via my
stream I'd already have added their app thankyouverymuch. Of course there is
the option of opening a new window and copy+paste the headline into Google,
which is what I do if I care enough (and if the information is apparently
available at another source, I'll read it there instead).

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callumjones
With the new Open Graph verbs and their extend meta information I wonder if a
noun could sponsor a story?

Say, instead of Spotify trying to sponsor specific artists; the artist it self
could sponsor any popular Open graph story whether it be from Rdio, MOG or
Spotify.

So someone like Foster the People could pay for any Listen[artist='Foster The
People'] to be sponsored.

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orijing
Yup! That's the magic of open graph.

I am an engineer on facebook's ads team.

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gms
It's about time they did this but I don't know why they don't do it for all
regular status updates, given that they already do entity extraction.

I suspect this is forthcoming.

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ypcx
I suspect the forthcoming cancellation of my own account in that case. I
already strongly dislike FB's "ranking" of news feed stories. You never know
if you are writing your status update to yourself, or to a 50 friends, however
this seems to be inversely proportional to stupidity of that update.

