Facebook, which I started using the summer going into my senior year of high school, is continuously bettering itself. Since joining the site in 2006 it has grown substantially. Facebook went from reaching strictly college students to integrating young professionals, adults and even the elderly. Google on the other hand has been around for as long as I can remember and has always had a large and diverse following. The simplistic system that Google offers allows users to easily search for information and be geared toward websites that best match what they typed into the search bar. At its core Facebook is a social networking site, and Goolge a search engine. However, what if Facebook took the copious amounts of personal information it has and applied it to a search engine or a different website. Ian Schafer of AdAge discusses this topic in a recent article. The article notes that Facebook has the power of becoming more powerful than Google. He gives the example of going to Pandora and having it already know the songs you enjoy listening to. If you don’t frequent Pandora, what about CNN or other news sights, imagine visiting one of these sites and having articles that you are interested in pop-up automatically.
Upon first ponder the idea seems genius. From my advertising side, this would greatly increase click rates and overall reception of ads. Advertisers would have the ability to extremely target consumers. They would be able to place an ad in front of people who actually want to see it and would be likely to respond to it. From my consumer side, however, I am split. Part of me agrees that this is a great idea. Why bother searching for interesting articles when they can simply be presented to me, yet, the other side is a little scared. As a human I like choose. I like going to CNN and being able to decide what ads I think are relevant to me. When someone or something (in this case) tells me what I like part of me wants to rebel. In addition, there are numerous privacy concerns that I have. The first of which is that my profile is no longer just my profile. It has turned into a public moneymaker for the site and taken on a life of its own.
As a side note, Schafer makes an analogue between Facebook and Terminator the movie. He comments that if Facebook becomes too powerful it will turn into the movie Terminator and try to, ‘remove the possibility of human error and slowness of reaction time to guarantee fast, efficient response to enemy attack.” At the end of the article he comes back to the analogue and says, “Please don't annihilate humanity, Facebook. We wouldn't "like" that.” In addition, he adds a pretty funny conspiracy theory, “Former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly is running for California attorney general. California's governor is Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ahnold was The Terminator. Circle. Complete.”
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