Facebook: Hubris Leads to Egg on Face

Last week we posted a note sent to Facebook's head of advertising encouraging her to embrace a program that allows its community to share in the ad revenue that their eyeyballs are otherwise responsible for. The simple application would include a small box on the students' (or now everyone else allowed to be a member) home page with a "my favorite stuff"--and display links to advertisers that they want to endorse. It could work in a similar manner as the Commission Junction platform.

As a Dad with a college senior in house, I posed the idea to my offspring and her peeps, and they all thought it was a good idea--after all, it could be a source of income, however small it might amount to.

Lo and behold, I was unaware of a company called Weblo--which is apparently one of the hundreds of software companies that are taking up Facebook's "open architecture" invitation to introduce their applications to the Facebook community.

Per today's NY TImes- "Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer has said Facebook does not allow users to sell ads because Facebook does not want user's profile pages to become cluttered"

That's the wrong response, just like it was the wrong approach to allow Beacon to publicize users activity without getting their permission.

Weblo's CEO has it right : Rocky Mirza says that people should be able to sell space on their pages on Facebook (and a variety of other sites like MySpace and YouTube) because they are the content creators on those sites. Facebook would have no content if not for its users, he said, which makes it different from media organizations, for example, that have content because they pay reporters.