Facebook developers, eggs, and other people's baskets.

We've said it before, and no doubt we will say it again - its risky to put all one's eggs in one basket, especially if its someone else's basket. Aaron Choi of Rock You's letter below is reported in All Facebook:

As you know, Facebook has gone through another round of aggressive compliance checks, and have flagged a number of ads that they deem offending. We’ve included some ads that Facebook is flagging as part of this email - most of which RY does not serve but are served by other networks.

We are as surprised as you about this latest round from Facebook, and have been consistently sending creative to them in an effort to get much clearer guidance. Much of the time, we don’t hear anything back or we get vague answers. In some cases, we have had ad creative flagged through our network when very similar creative is running on Facebook itself, served through Facebook’s ad system.

The result - all those application developers who have been depending on the "get millions of users and throw up irrelevant display ads" model are at risk.

What is interesting to me is why, in theory, this model even needs to exist on Facebook. I mean, this is supposed to be the place which understands its users best given the vast amount of personal data they have online there - and its been through the wringer on Beacon and still has pretty sleazoid privacy policies and T&C to ensure your data is theirs to mine. This, in theory is The Great Differentiator between Facebook and placing random Ads on websites. This is the ACME of Personalisation.

So, one of two options present themselves as explanations:

- The ACME of Personalisation is still not possible, so why p*ss off your users (and alert investors/competitors to the weak spot) just to let some poxy developers live a bit

- It works, and by golly Facebook wants all the loot - so start to clear out the developers by an Ad squeeze (A corollary - it works, but it needs access to Facebook's datamine that they don't want to hand over to 3rd parties).

I think if I were Facebook I'd do a similar thing - the invasive random Ad model is p*ssing off users, and its a feature they can get all over the 'Net - and Facebook as yet doesn't need the money - but it does need happy users.

As for the developers, return to top of post. Do not pass first sentence.