Now, I know what you might be thinking: “But Facebook is already a mess.”
Hold right on there, because here’s whats going on in with the social media/world-dominating platform.
According to a TechCrunch post on Feb 15:
“TV commercials that automatically play could soon hit Facebook’s news feed. This week Facebook CMO David Fischer admitted auto-play video ads might be distracting, but said ‘I believe there are ways we could do it.’ Fischer said during his Stanford Future Of Media Conference keynote that he admired YouTube’s video ads. But auto-play video spots could be flashy and annoying in the quiet news feed.”
I’m already inundated with app requests and event invites that I don’t particularly care for, usually because it’s a mass request from Facebook friends, but adding auto-playing ads? It’s like taking a trip in the wayback machine to 2002 when auto-playing MIDI files were the norm on Geocities.
I get the reasoning for this from a business perspective. All startups are in the market to make money somehow and ad space on a big social network is highly coveted. This is a sure fire way for Facebook to get a good revenue stream up, in addition to the revenue stream that they already created with selling credits for games and, for whatever reason, food such as chocolate and Starbucks now.
But for the average Facebook user, this could detract one from checking the website every five seconds. Unless extensions such as AdBlock can hide the video ads from showing, but that’s up in the air.
Bottom line, Facebook is a business and they’re going to keep acting like it is. Whether they lose users over this or not might not even affect them unless it’s a mass exodus.
There are other things that could affect the company, though, such as this information from a recent blog post on their website:
“Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. This attack occurred when a handful of employees visited a mobile developer website that was compromised. The compromised website hosted an exploit which then allowed malware to be installed on these employee laptops. The laptops were fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software. As soon as we discovered the presence of the malware, we remediated all infected machines, informed law enforcement, and began a significant investigation that continues to this day.”
I don’t know about you, but if I’m using a social network that may cause my computer to crash and burn, I’m either going to load up all the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-malware software I can or I could quit using the website. Sadly, the latter doesn’t feel like an option for me because it’s become a communication tool in my generation.
“We have found no evidence that Facebook user data was compromised,” Facebook also said in the blog post.
While it’s reassuring to hear that user data wasn’t compromised, it’s still frustrating for users to have to deal with these things.
Personally, I know that I’m using all my prospective security measures to keep myself — and my information and identity — safe on the Internet. But the increasing frustrations associated with using Facebook might not be worth it sooner than later.
