Saturday, July 28, 2012

Two words why Facebook's sponsored stories will fail

"You shill."

Any user involvement in pushing advertising is going to result in negative peer pressure. If this is connected to Likes, then it's going to kill Likes. No one wants to see advertising in their stream. No one likes a hack. All it takes is an adapted pattern of behavior to kill the adopted behavior Facebook wants to promote. Shame will kill this effort. Just watch.

 I've had some ideas of my own toward mobile advertising, but more recently I've soured pretty severely on the whole notion. Why? Business models that create and build tangible things that people want to buy directly are much more interesting, viable, and, well yes, moral. The idea of all those brains and all that money trying to figure out how to sell advertisements instead of useful products is such a depressing statement about American business.

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