By now, there has been plenty written about facebook’s “project beacon“. After several discussions with coworkers, I decided to document my thoughts…

Some of the fallout with regards to beacon is the concern over privacy. People are concerned about their online activities being shared on facebook. However, the toast only shows to users who are logged into facebook. When I was first looking into beacon (and showing examples to others), we had difficulty testing, as none of us were currently logged in. We work for a digital marketing agency, we all have facebook accounts. But we’re not always logged in. I would assume that those who are, are aficionados, and would be eager to update their mini-feed.

One concern with incorporating beacon was that it would bother users. We didn’t mean in terms of invading privacy, but rather the toast popping up and requesting user action. It appears kongregate has already introduced a user preference that will suppress the toast.

When we were looking at the integration details, we did think it would be interesting to see how many of our users were logged into facebook compared to those who were not. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t necessarily give us a good sense of how many of our users had facebook accounts at all, but at least we would have some information about them..

I will admit, I operate under the assumption that our activities online aren’t anonymous, so I don’t think it’s so heinous that we are prompted to share some of our activities on our mini-feed. We already blog and twitter and update status - the notion that our activities can manage their own push to our loyal following actually seems convenient. Unless, of course, we don’t want our friends to know we just purchased Britney Spears’ Greatest Hit…

Despite the fallout, I still think there are benefits to incorporating beacon into a site that is looking to generate hype. Rather than spamming friends with a “check out this cool site” link, posting an action to a mini-feed offers additional information in a non-obtrusive way.

There is a limited number of approved actions thus far, and yes, several of them are relevant to commercial transactions (buy, wish_list, queue, sign_up, bid, review, add, book, comment, create, join, subscribe and order, among others). I don’t find this particularly shocking; it makes sense that those are behaviours that would be of interest to surface. I guess the difference is that I think the bigger draw is the “where” not the “what”. That is, John Smith bought XYZ at the Has-Everything Store. If you are a smaller site, you’d be excited for the link to your store.. what the individual actually purchases may be of less relevance.

I recall the fervor when gmail came out and served up targeted ads. People were so afraid that “someone” was reading their mail. Personally, I’ve had positive experiences with the targeted ads: in an email exchange with some running friends preparing to visit NYC, I was served an ad about a running tour of the Big Apple, which they took and enjoyed. (I just tried to find the link via a regular google search and was unsuccessful ) Perhaps I just feel that the notion of the web or the net is that there are those connections.. if it manifests itself in my being served ads of something I may actually *gasp* be interested in, where is the harm? I would just as soon avoid any and all ads that invite me to enhance my manhood….