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.

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.

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.

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.

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