Facebook just figured out a new way to make money off of your status updates and likes, and it’s a doozy: they’re now using your likes and postings about products and services to display to friends in advertisement form.
Showing up quietly on Wednesday morning without any mention from Facebook, you can see the new ads at worked in the right-hand ad column. If you friends check in at business or like other websites or products, and if Facebook has an advertisement deal with that company, you’ll start seeing their status updates as a “Sponsored Story.”
“Currently, marketers don’t have the ability to know or plan word-of-mouth endorsements as part of their campaigns,” Facebook’s product marketing lead Jim Squires told the Wall Street Journal. “This gives a way for marketers to increase the visibility of stories about their organization… this is word-of-mouth marketing at scale.”
Sound familiar? It should: back in 2007, Facebook tried more or less the same thing with Facebook Beacon, which turned into a huge class-action privacy lawsuit last time around because of the way it allowed marketers to publish off-Facebook purchases directly to users’ walls.
The current system isn’t likely to spark any class-action lawsuits, but it’s still got some privacy concerns associated with it: although Facebook will respect your privacy settings when it comes to sharing your content with strangers, there’s no way to stop Facebook from turning your wall status updates into a billboard to annoy your friend list.
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