If you haven't heard about Facebook's Beacon advertising platform, it's a way for external sites to send news updates to your profile. So, for example, say I buy a camera online at Circuit City. I'm not sure why I would subject myself to that, but let's go along with it for the hypothetical. Circuit City then sends a little note to my profile which shows up on my feed so all my friends see, "Hey! Michael just bought a camera at Circuit City!" As you could expect, this has caused a PR shitstorm of epic proportions, culminating in Facebook's founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, issuing an apology for it and finally allowing users a chance to opt out of these types of ads entirely. Before, it was on a site-by-site basis. The default action, when Beacon was first launched, was for these sites to just be able to throw things on your profile without ever opting in. Naturally, big names like Coca-Cola backed the hell away from that as soon as they saw what it was.

Over at the Techland blog, Josh Quittner is declaring Facebook to be in the latter stages of a terminal illness. He claims that bad press and also blames a large part of it on the lack of anybody with maturity (oh wait, sorry Mark, experience) in the company. One example he sites is detailed in an amazing blog post about some gaffs Zuckerberg made announcing Beacon.

Personally, though, I think it's a combination of that and the extreme pressure Facebook has been under to make money and justify its massively inflated worth. Do you think Facebook has gotten any better in the past few months? I certainly don't. Beacon just confirmed to me that Facebook has lost its way. But that's really nothing new and it's not even the worst part of the problem. The worst thing about all this is that Beacon fits Facebook so well. It's something that we have come to expect from them. Mix four parts personal information with six parts greedy fucker and you get Facebook. It's a great idea... for Facebook. Then all these damn people start taking the Facebook out of the equation and go, "What the fuck is this?!"

There is, at the heart of all this, a significant problem. We want a social networking site that doesn't exploit our data and take advantage of us, yet our personal data is what drives any kind of social networking. Without knowing that I like zeppelins, python and pie, how is it ever going to hook me up with like-minded individuals? Or, how would it, if there were any others, I mean. The next logical step is to promote hypercontextual ads for each person, using that personal data. And what's more hypercontextual than stuff that you actually did. Beacon fits! And maybe that's why Facebook is getting panned so much - maybe we don't like to realize just what it is exactly that we're willing to give up in order to stay connected online.