Maybe I don’t want an RSS feed for the main “News Feed” from Facebook after all, since these spam links are starting to show up in my feed every day:
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17 Comments
spam != advertisements
But when they’re inserted into my “news feed” (intermixed with legitimate items), which is supposed to tell me about what’s happening with my friends, etc., then I classify that as spam.
you mean like when i’m watching a television program and they intermix commercials into legitimate programming? or when i’m driving down the road and they have adopt-a-highway ads intermix with legitimate road signs? or when i’m buying a pair of jeans and they have a levi’s label intermixed with legitimate fabric?
No, it would actually be more like if GMail, instead of placing their advertising on the side (or elsewhere) made the ads look just like a normal e-mail, and randomly intermixed those “e-mails” with all your regular (”legitimate”) e-mail messages.
Hopefully you can see the difference there. It’s clearly spam, and different from regular advertising, in my opinion.
It’s not spam, it’s advertising. It’s clearly marked as “Sponsered” and looks completely different. Spam is point-point and against your will to “subscribe” or not to subscribe.
And you’re also assuming that if facebook were to release RSS for individual “News Feed” advertising would be injected in-between items.
If we do see an RSS feed, I would rather have one ad item in the feed list then have ads directly below each item, which is what’s happening now through many major sites who do RSS advertising.
i see a difference between your two examples, however i don’t think there’s a difference between ads placed in the middle of legitimate content and the advertising that happens in my examples above.
I guess it’s a difference of opinion on what constitutes “spam” in regards to how and where the advertising is placed, but in my opinion this is an example of spam.
I say this because of the fact that it’s designed to blend into normal content, in this case the “News Feed” on the main page. This feed is supposed to notify you about events that occur related to your Facebook friends. The “sponsored” indicator is nice, but it’s not enough, in my opinion.
I go back to the GMail example, and ask if either of you would be OK with Google inserting advertising e-mails in with all your other e-mail, even if they included the text “sponsored” in the subject line? I think you’d find it a bit annoying; I know I would. Whether you’d call it spam or not is a matter of preference.
Dan, to your point, I do believe it’s completely unsolicited and not optional. If you know of a way to “unsubscribe” from getting those ads intermixed with actual news feed items, I’d be happy to hear about it.
I’m not sure where you’re going with the RSS thing, since I wasn’t talking about that here in this post. If they were to offer an RSS feed for this “news feed” (which they still don’t, frustratingly), I would expect it to contain whatever content that the “feed” displayed on that page contains, I’d just rather it not contain advertising messages that are made to look similar to regular messages.
As a side note (on the RSS topic), I’d much prefer advertising that’s at the bottom of a normal feed item than as separate bogus ad-only items.
GMail does offer spam in your definition, if you activate the RSS at the top you’ll see it.
When the non-existant RSS feed comes out I’ll tell you how to unsubscribe to it in Google Reader if it comes to that point. If you didn’t understand what I said about unsubscribing because this whole topic [I had thought] was around a hypothetical RSS feed then you can always stop using the News Feed.
I guess I didn’t understand because I read your post like this,
“Maybe I don’t want an RSS feed for the main “News Feed” from Facebook after all, since these spam links are starting to show up in my feed every day”
Oh wait…I’m confused.
But you must get a lot of spam around the web with that definition.
Either way it’s advertising through a service. It’s not forced advertising, without the option to opt in or out. The opt-in for the “News Feed” is actually using facebook.
So yes, your opinion for what constitutes spam is just different then what’s been already defined. You should edit the definition on electronic spam to not include unsolicited advertising,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_%28electronic%29
The RSS entries in GMail are not the same as messages inserted within the list of your regular e-mail, which is the eqivalent of what FB is doing with the News Feed. I’m not sure how I can explain that better.
Gmail has advertising, which I am completely aware of and do not consider spam. I draw the line when the ads are made to look like other messages and mixed into the list of other “legit” messages. The distinction here is crystal clear, and I can only assume you’re not acknowledging it for the sake of argument. (I noticed you still didn’t answer my question regarding the hypothetical GMail example which more closely resembles what FB is doing here).
As for the subscribing thing, the reference to the RSS feed was just a link to tie this post to my previous one regarding the “News Feed”, but my complaint here is about the “News Feed” content, independent of the fact that it’s not available via RSS. I do understand how that’s confusing, though, and it doesn’t make it any easier that FB calls that thing on the home page a news “feed”.
My question about unsubscribing was specifically about opting out of the unsolicited advertising inserted / blended into what’s supposed to be a list of news from your friends (in other words, spam). Since you mentioned “subscribing and unsubscribing”, I thought that’s what you were referring to, but in actuality there is no way (that I know of) you can opt out of this FB spam other than simply not using Facebook (as you point out) which is ridiculous.
The wikipedia definition seems to fit my concept of spam perfectly, so I’m not sure what would need to be edited.
Perhaps a visual representation is in order…
Here you can clearly see that the advertisement is formatted to appear similar to the other news items, and mixed in with the actual news items in a way that (IMHO) crosses the line between regular advertising and spam.
Call it advertising in poor taste, if you (for some reason) prefer to cling to a stricter definition of the word “spam”; either way, it sucks.
UPDATE: Luckily, it only took a couple seconds just now to whip up a greasemonkey script to strip the ads out of the page, so now I don’t have to be bothered by them.
I understand the difference between the RSS feeds and email in Gmail, I was just noting that Google implementation for placing ads in a “feed” is very similar and noticeably worse.
And good thing those ads were different enough for that greasemonkey script to work,
FYI, there are already definitions to these terms spam v. ads. and the key difference is solicited vs. unsolicited.
You should get with this guy to integrate the two together.
BTW: My comment is still in moderation.
i agree there’s a difference between what your saying and gmail’s ads… although google’s standard sponsored links are pretty close, i’m sure my grandma doesn’t know the difference between them and actual search results. however, i don’t think the facebook ads are any different at all than tv commercials and adopt a highway signs. i think you’re setting a different standard for advertising on the internet than exists in real world “free” content and services.
Dan, the Google ones that you referred to are totally different (and better) in my opinion, because they aren’t mixed into your regular messages. That is a huge difference. Although I’m tired of repeating it, I continue to go back to my hypothetical example of GMail inserting spam e-mails in with your regular e-mails, which is much closer to what Facebook is doing. Can’t get much clearer than that.
Also, I’m well aware of the difference between spam and regular ads, so no need to keep linking to various definitions of them. In my opinion, what Facebook is doing falls into the spam category for the reasons I’ve already covered above. Among other things, they cross the line between ads and unsolicited messages, since they are made to appear in the context of and similar to all my real messages.
Nathan, Google’s sponsored search result links are closer, but even those are completely separated from the normal content. Mixing it in with the regular results is what I disagree with. Again, I go back to my GMail example above, or another would be if those sponsored search results were intermixed with the regular search results - I think there is a big difference there.
I do understand your analogy to real world “free” content, but I don’t think that’s as valid (or at least not as close) a comparison / analogy as one to other “free” internet services (such as those offered by Google), and that’s why I continue to compare it to those.
Anything’s possible…