Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier.

When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservative Christians. She had a picture of the two of us as her profile picture, and it was set to private (that existed once). More importantly in the picture she wasn't wearing the hijab (the head scarf).

One day Facebook removed the ability to have private profile pictures - automatically converting every profile picture to public. Her sister saw the picture and long story short that was the last time she talked to her parents. That was 2+ years ago. Facebook can't be blamed for the cultural and relationship issues at play here, but they can be blamed for how they went about this. And we can be blamed for trusting them.

I still use facebook. I don't blame them for trying new things, pushing the boundaries, etc. I have however learned that no matter what that data isn't mine. It's facebooks. And whenever facebook decides to innovate they will do whatever they want with their data to try doing it.

The auction model for ads basically ruins internet searches in transactional categories. If you want to win at the "italian restaurant" search game, you have to bid the highest for the ad, which means you must have the highest margin. The best way to win is to open a restaurant with ridiculously high margins (over priced wine and cheap ingredients).

Want the "cheapest car insurance"? Google is zero help. It sends you to Geico or a bunch of lead-gen sites, and no matter what, you will end up at an insurance company that makes the biggest margins.

If you really want the cheapest car insurance, you need to find a company that doesn't advertise, and is non-profit, that way your premium is spent buying insurance, not TV ads and Berkshire Hathaway's stock appreciation.

Whenever I see a SERP full of ads, I search for something different. When there is nothing but ads, Google is sending you to high-margin crap.

Here's a very relevant blog post by Alex Limi of Mozilla: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/

Most sites these days that aren’t just displaying content will fail in interesting & mysterious ways if you don’t have JavaScript enabled. For the general population, Firefox will appear broken.

And yes, I know that some people have reasons (privacy, web development) to turn off JavaScript. There are many add-ons that can help with this — but it’s not something that we should ship to hundreds of millions of users.

(EDIT: this is the relevant quote, but worth reading the whole article)

They provided a boilerplate version of the ad and I gave them the 4chan-appropriate keywords to use with it. They've always been great to work with re: advertising.