Techcrunch is reporting on the soon-to-be-released advertising additions to FaceBook: namely, their Project Beacon which will allow third-party stores such as Amazon.com or Orbitz to publish stories to your FaceBook Newsfeed whenever you purchase something (like a book or plane ticket). For example: Someone might purchase FixTunes and then a message would appear on the news feeds of all their friends: “Daniel just purchased FixTunes. Click here to see it”.
This is great news for advertisers and e-commerce sites. The news feed already serves as an excellent tool for virally spreading information (look at how fast the Stephen Colbert group formed), and knowing that your friend purchased a product is about as good an endorsement or review there is. We would definitely be excited to integrate this into FixTunes.
That said, from a user/consumer perspective, I’m not sure how this will play out. I am already starting to feel like my Facebook News Feed is starting to resemble my email inbox - full of spam. Not spam in the viagra-nigerian-dictator form, but spam in the form of somewhat useful information that I technically asked for but don’t have time to care about. I’m already overloaded by notes on all my friends changing relationships, adding pictures, getting hungry, joining groups and so on. What they bought may just be too much. Could this be the beginning of the end of Facebook?