A short update note on You-Know-Who.....

Yesterday furious debate was joined on that Ad platform, in essence we think that Facebook are currently trying to be too supply sided on their interpretation of social net advertising (missing the cluetrain), and that - in our view anyway - social networks based on trust just don't work this way over more than a very small number of repeat transactions with any one person.

We do think there has to be a new contract between advertisers and users for a new media, but ramming home user-hostile approaches to captive communities is probably not a viable long term strategy in a networked world. Just ask the music industry.......

Anyway, there have been three fairly interesting follow-on threads today on all this:

Firstly, Doc Searls commented on my post, essentially arguing that Facebook will iterate itself to a more happy medium in the way it treats its users and advertisers

Secondly, Umair Haque took the opposite view, ie that their corporate DNA has already set them down the path of trust plundering.

Thirdly, a number of people commented that the sort of users that Facebook is trying to reach don't fully grasp / don't care about trust in social nets anyway. The hope is that there are legions of FanSumers (sic) out there who want to be amateur Amway reps

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Last one first - we think this is wistful thinking by Adfans, simply because human social networks have spent millenia designing ways to expose cheats, defective behaviour etc etc - and early evidence of electronic media (TiVo, Friendster, blog flacking) is that we avoid Ads if we can, run from network plunderers, and expose fake reality quite fast - and the result for the perpetrator is usually messy.

Ads are content too, so if people need to want to watch Ads to get access to other subsidised content, Ads have a responsibility - targeted or not - to educate, inform and entertain us, not attempt to mug us, irritate us or bore us. As Seth Godin (who knows a thing ot two about permission marketing) noted re the Hotmail problem,

Any platform that makes ads a distraction or a cost is always going to fail compared to a site where the ads are a welcome part of the deal.

The more interesting question is whether Umair or Doc Searls are on the right track re Facebook's evolution. I have sympathy with Umair's views - anyone who starts out with T&C like Facebook's is probably storing up some bad (and in reality unnecessary) karma up for itself.

However, ultimately I think Doc is correct, and for a very simple reason - I don't think Facebook's current approach will work, and in not working they will lose mindshare, marketshare and money to competitors, and that will force changes. And it may even be, like Friendster, that Facebook 1.0 has to collapse to change - but 50 million people is a big constituency, and at some point they will find - as digg did - that 50 million tails wagging equals a darn big tiger.