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20 Part 1 Introduction

the balance right between advertising revenue and user the web, but also clear enough so people would be
experience. They said first of all, what’s not changing: able to easily control what they shared. We were
excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of
‘Facebook will always stay clutter-free and clean.
information people want to share isn’t on Facebook,
Facebook will never sell any of your information.
and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give
You will always have control over your information
people an easy and controlled way to share more of
and your Facebook experience.
that information with their friends.
You will not see any more ads than you did
before this.’ But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to
make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to
And what is changing:
touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial
‘You now have a way to connect with products, busi- approach of making it an opt-out system instead of
nesses, bands, celebrities and more on Facebook. opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share
Ads should be getting more relevant and more mean- something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with
ingful to you. their friends. It took us too long after people started
You now have the option to share actions you take on contacting us to change the product so that users had
other sites with your friends on Facebook’ (these to explicitly approve what they wanted to share.
were originally implemented as ‘social ads’ and were Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide
based on a piece of technology known as ‘Beacon’ on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve
that tracks purchases or reviews made by Facebook handled this situation and I know we can do better.
users on outside sites, then reports these purchases
to those users’ friends).
New friends list functionality launched –
Commercial companies or more commonly not-for-profit December 2007
organizations (e.g. www.facebook.com/joinred) can also
A criticism leveled at Facebook has been the difficulty
create their own Facebook pages (currently free).
in separating out personal friends and business
Facebook users can then express their support by
acquaintances.
adding themselves as a fan, writing on the company Wall,
In December 2007, Facebook launched a significant
uploading photos, and joining other fans in discussion
new functionality called Friend Lists to enhance the user
groups. When users become fans, they can optionally
experience. Friend Lists enables users to create named
agree to be kept up-to-date about developments which
groups of friends in particular categories, e.g. business
then appear in their news feeds.
or personal and these private lists can be used to
message people, send group or event invitations, and to
Privacy concerns sparked by ‘Beacon filter updates from certain groups of friends.
technology’ – November 2007
Facebook received a lot of negative publicity on its new December 2007/January 2008 – First drop

advertising format related to the ‘Beacon’ tracking in numbers using Facebook and new data
system which Mark Zuckerberg was forced to respond centres to manage growth in users
to on the Facebook blog (5 December 2007). He said: Application spam has been considered one of the
About a month ago, we released a new feature called possible causes to the drop in visitors to Facebook at the
Beacon to try to help people share information with beginning of 2008. The fall in visitors between December
their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve 2007 to January 2008 was its first drop since the website
made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve first launched.
To put this in context, the Facebook blog reported at
made even more with how we’ve handled them. We
the end of 2007, that nearly two million new users from
simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize
around the world sign up for Facebook each week. This
for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we
creates technical challenges – the blog reported that at
appreciate all the feedback we have received from
end of 2007 full capacity was reached in their California
our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned
data centres. They explained that in the past they had
and how we have improved Beacon.
handled this problem by purchasing a few dozen
When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to servers, but this time they had run out of physical space
build a simple product to let people share information in our data centres for new machines. But now
across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight Facebook assigns a user logging on to a relevant data
so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed centre – users in Europe and the eastern half of the US