Facebook Tests 'Want' Button To Hoard User Data, Save Its Stock Price 98
colinneagle writes with news that Facebook is beginning to roll out tests of "want" and "collect" buttons in an attempt to bring users and retailers closer together.
"The company is working with Victoria's Secret, Pottery Barn, Michael Kors, Wayfair, Neiman Marcus, Fab.com and Smith Optics. The difference between 'liking' and 'wanting' would be like discovering the holy grail of datamining. Inside Facebook said that although the 'Want' button is different than the Want plugin that developer Tom Waddington noticed in June, the company may eventually offer it as a plugin. Unsurprisingly, Facebook wants to keep people on the site as opposed to leaving to visit Pinterest. Collections will offer retailers a Pinterest-like option to engage buyers, offer users a way to collect images, while also collecting even more data about users. For example, Facebook asks, 'Why are you collecting this?' Regardless of a user's answer, the wants and collects will surely be used to deliver targeted ads. Eventually, the Collections feature could help Facebook generate more revenue."
FUCK YOU (Score:5, Funny)
Give me a fucking 'dislike' button already, you shitheads!
Re:FUCK YOU (Score:5, Funny)
So, you should "want" images of your "dislike" button!
2 birds, one stone!
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I have a "FarceBook sucks"-button right here. Never needed it, as I never started to waste time on that stupid thing.
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Good for you! Please, take a few moments and reward yourself with that feeling of smug self-satisfaction.
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I believe the button you are looking for is 'Hate.'
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Are you kidding?! The Free Market is just a theory, like evolution; get over it.
No, evolution is a theory. "Free market" is not even a hypothesis. It's pure fantasy.
Re:FUCK YOU (Score:4, Insightful)
They never will, it'd cause way to much embarrassment. Oh, that company page you put up has 2 million dislikes? Oops, looks like a Facebook page was a bad idea. Yeah no, Facebook wouldn't do that to their bottom line. Interesting as it would be to see if you could "Dislike" Facebook itself...
I don't understand why they wouldn't.. (Score:1)
If that was the case, they would put dislike buttons on everything and charge page owners $$$ to remove them.
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Re:FUCK YOU (Score:5, Funny)
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I should get some so I can put them on flyers for Indie bands who post their stuff on street lights or other places, causing clutter and litter.
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Yay! (Score:2, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new (?) datamining overlords.
Come on, this is making it too easy for dataming as a profession. This isn't even mining, this is being handed little golden chunks, the only thing left for facebook to do is to raise it up and gleefully say "Look what I have!"
I know a lot people are really concerned about corporations connecting your consumer/personal dots and figuring out some Deep Secrets, but go look at what google thinks you are interested in (without signing into your google accoun
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Insightful)
Clear your cookies and try from a different IP or browser. Google definitely appears to be doing "guilty by association" type functions where people sharing IP's get similar results.
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Honestly I feel a bit jilted by Google. Don't they want to get to know the real me? ; )
You can generally get a fair idea about where a person is by IP, but really, does it tell you very much that I'm in northern Illinois? That's a pretty big demographic. I'd have to ask their engineers "why bother?"
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awesome (Score:4, Funny)
When this hits I am totally going to log in to a fake account and click want on dilldo's and refried beans, nothing else
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Be sure to "want" penis enlargement *and* breast augmentation clinics as well.
Throw in some prophalactic medication manufacturers for good measure.
Re:awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Oh I think you are on to something. If I join you and a bunch of others in Operation Dildo Want, we can finally convince Nintendo to make a WarioWare ShoveItUpYourAssGame [youtube.com] for the WiiU (now that the old Wii's sun will soon set). Then, when Platinum Games gets wind of this, their horrified management will cancel their Bayonetta 2 exclusivity plan there [joystiq.com], and they'll move it and the original to, say, Steam where I can buy 'em for the PC!
...what!? I can dream! About the games...and her butt [flickr.com]...and they've been kinda talking about it too... [theverge.com]
Been using the fuck off button for a while now (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hehehe, nice!
What's in it for me? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mind trading some personal information for some services, but I don't see how helping FaceBook out on this by telling them what I want to buy helps me. If they can give me discounts, then perhaps, but I don't see that mentioned.
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I don't mind trading some personal information for some services
The "some services" you receive are the monitored interactions with your friends and family. The data from said interactions may be sold to marketing research people. This is all a benefit to you, though you may not yet understand just how much you will benefit from this wholesale usage of your data.
Re:What's in it for me? (Score:4, Insightful)
You didn't get paid to write that, and you did it anyway, just because you like to tell other people what you think.
While /. comments are for people who like to tell others their opinions about nerd stuff, facebook posts are for people who like to tell others what they like, or what they had for breakfast. It's not that different really.
I think the "want" buton might work well with fb's target demographic, but I'd still not buy any of their stock until it has dropped at least another 99.7 %.
Save its stock price? (Score:4, Insightful)
Save its stock price? Nah, I'm pretty sure that machinery served its purpose. Now Zuckerberg just needs to sell it off to Dewey Cheatam & Howe Capital LP, reap that private equity money from the middle- and lower-tier firings, and enjoy his *clears throat* well-earned retirement.
This Want stuff is just to wring out a few remaining Dumb Fucks(tm), that their data may fund the Not-Yet-Fired for a little while more.
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Indeed. How the Facebook IPO was different from a somewhat camouflaged and utterly immoral Ponzi-scheme escapes me.
I think impounding of all ill-gotten gains and life in prison would be the right appreciation for it.
the potential for hilarity is enormous (Score:4, Funny)
Imagine for a moment, the profoundly funny and silly trends that could run from clicking "want" on simple, stark statements, like:
Privacy
Responsibility in Industry and Politics
Or even just silly stuff, "celebrities eating hotdogs"
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You rule!
Lets assume they don't just blindly process wants somehow though. This is well beyond their abilities I'm sure, but you could try and figure out what is in a picture automatically. I would HOPE someone has some logic to weigh where the image came from, like a shopping site is a good clue it's useful whereas lolcats is not as useful.
So to solve for that, go to amazon, find a unicorn mask and want it. Now make a shopping site that ties into amazon.com and want all the lowest margin items, or all the
Want Humble Pay-what-you-want Prime Rib Buffets. (Score:2)
There is much potential for awesomeness here.
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Me? I like to dabble in cookery, and had a hypothetical conversation with my sister concerning weed.
What I would place as a series of fake products for people to "want"?
"Stoner Joe's Finger Lickin' Cickin!"
Featuring a an "herb roasted" rotissery chicken, slathered in premium pot resin, and speckled with crushed thyme, rosemary, and lemon pepper.
And "Mary Jane's olde fashioned honey", a 50-50 mix of cannabis resin and pure honey, from bees exclusively fed on marijuana flowers. (100% organic, pesticide free!)
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THIS! might just get me to finally sign up for a FB account - just to screw with them....... Let's make this happen Slashdotters!
And Then There's World Hunger (Score:5, Interesting)
From day one their modus operandi has been to push things to the point where even their most loyal users rebel, then back off just enough to quell the noise. And then to repeat, moving the bar even lower with each step.
Yeah I use Facebook, but I also am pretty picky about what information I leave on their servers. Judging by the utterly bizarre collection of ads that show up, I must be doing something right. Today they're promoting: Lord of the Rings Online; Fast and EZ Debt Reduction; Diamond Jewellery; Fitness Membership; Joint Pain Relief; and allegedly "luxury" Real estate, none of which are even remotely interesting to me. Google at least manages to place ads that I might click on.
Re:And Then There's World Hunger (Score:4, Funny)
i used to get similar results but that is because i marked all of the ads as "sexually explicit". for a while i didn't have any ads now i don't because of adblock and noscript
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Why anyone would care about the many ways that Facebook mistreats their data sources - ah, users - is beyond me. Unlike Google they never even bothered to pretend to be anything but money-grubbing capitalists with no problem whatsoever with Doing Evil. From day one their modus operandi has been to push things to the point where even their most loyal users rebel, then back off just enough to quell the noise. And then to repeat, moving the bar even lower with each step.
This should absolutely be NO surprise whatsoever based on what Mark Zuckerberg has said about Facebook's privacy on and off-record. Off-record, he said he didn't believe in privacy (according to an employee). On-record, he talked about "granular control", and said other things to the effect that he would erode privacy as much as he can get away with. In my mind, he's absolutely admitted that he is enthralled to the advertisers-- who should rightly be understood to be THE primary Facebook customers, NOT u
A strange game... (Score:4, Insightful)
The only winning move is not to play.
Is Facebook relevant anymore? It is starting to have that Myspace-like stink about it.
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FB always reminded me of geocities (for those who remember):
"Hello, my name is Jenny, I'm 13 and this is my cat, and I'm interested in dancing."
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Geoshities was useful for storing images, back when the net was young.
I used to use it in the same way I use photobucket today, up until they started acting like babies about hotlinked images.
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It never was relevant. Zuckerberg and accomplices inflated it with what was basically a modified Ponzi-scheme until they could cash in big.
It serves one purposes though: Separate the stupid and the gullible (with FarceBook account in actual use or, worse, stocks) and the smarter ones. Yes, not playing is the right move.
Re:A strange game... (Score:4)
Maybe not to you, but this is a blatantly stupid statement. It has a massive user base, of addicted people.
I personally no longer use it, but it is stupid to say it is "irrelevant"
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Maybe not to you, but this is a blatantly stupid statement. It has a massive user base, of addicted people.
So does heroin. Is that relevant to you?
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Maybe not to you, but this is a blatantly stupid statement. It has a massive user base, of addicted people.
So does heroin. Is that relevant to you?
My point exactly.
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The only winning move is not to play.
Is Facebook relevant anymore? It is starting to have that Myspace-like stink about it.
The funny thing is Myspace is getting a reboot to where it at least looks clean and far from the HTML-cut-n-paste abomination it was. I agree with a publisher friend that Justin Timberlake is shrewder than many give him credit for [jackyan.com]; Myspace might actually bounce back. Meanwhile (after I left, thankfully) Facebook started Timelines, which looks almost equally horrid from a web design perspective. I mean, really, I do recall when users touted Facebook over MySpace (yes, the capital S was intentional there)
No chance, FarceBook is doomed (Score:3)
Zuckerberg and accomplices have known this for some time. The IPO timing and modalities were no accident at all. Now that their Ponzi-scheme is collapsing, they have some motive to slow down the collapse to be not too obvious, but that is it. This thing has no future at all as it lacks a viable business model.
Facebook is building addictive habits (Score:5, Interesting)
This probably is not well-known to people except those working in neuroscience/behavioral psych research, but "wanting" and "liking" are part of a drug addiction theory called incentive salience [wikipedia.org]. The basic notion is that "liking" something is a momentary, pleasurable feeling of hedonism. It passes quickly, but it's powerful reinforcement that drives you to want that hedonic feeling. The "wanting" is where motivation and incentive comes into play to drive the craving for reward (be it drugs, food, whatever).
Think about it: what's the last time you ate a cheeseburger? Do you have a vivid memory of it? Probably not.
But do you want a cheeseburger? Especially one with cheese, bacon, medium rare, fries on the side... mmm...
Anyway, the theory explains why addiction persists and drug abusers fall back into old habits, even when they've been clean for years. Salient cues are too much to ignore (a needle, a bus stop they used to meet their dealer, etc). The theory works with rats getting drugs, food, sex... No reason it can't be applied to website visitors too.
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Very interesting point! Makes a lot of sense to me.
I suspect equally immoral techniques were used to make it as big as it is to allow the big cash-out. (Never had an FB account, I just cannot seem to care.) I hope this is just a last-ditch effort to delay the coming FB stock-price crash, but given how little people have rational control over their desires...
Side note: Cheeseburger??? Urgh!
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But do you want a cheeseburger? Especially one with cheese, bacon, medium rare, fries on the side... mmm...
I liked the part where the women could remember, "two all beef patties with lettuce, cheese and special sauce on a sesame seed bun" while standing in front of the White House, but not the Pledge of Allegiance.
Seems straightforward enough. (Score:1)
2. User collects likes.
3. User likes collections.
4. ???
5. Profit!
What I "want"... (Score:3)
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My best friend from high school is actually working at a little company right now that's trying to exactly that. I tried their beta a few weeks ago and it wasn't that great (their search got me a bunch of crap that wasn't what I searched for mixed in with what I was, and they clearly hadn't indexed the inventories of that many stores in my area), but that -is- basically their goal, and I hope they succeed, because it -would- be a pretty useful thing to have available. I'm blanking on the name of it, sadly.
Planted Likes? (Score:3)
So I think that Facebook is inserting these "likes" on the behest of advertisers.
My Facebook Friend list is the same as my real friend list (I dont add any Tom, Dick or Harry that I've met somewhere, at some point in my life) so I notice when things are out of character for them.
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(Oh, and you're a hater...)
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donotwant (Score:2)
My new antisocial network (Score:5, Funny)
Has no Like, +1, or Want button. It does have "-1", "Dislike" and "Do Not Want". If you were to post something, it would delete your post and insult you. However, it doesn't matter because it doesn't accept registrations (either gives server down errors or captchas with symbols not in unicode), so it's all academic anyway.
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FB stock is in a death spiral... (Score:2)
At what point... (Score:2)
Will targeted advertising become a feedback loop and lose all cost effectiveness? If youre only going to show me products im interested in in the first place, why waste money on advertising it to me?
Re:At what point... (Score:4, Insightful)
So if I 'Want' a Victoria Secret ad .. (Score:1)
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Browsers need a social link blocker (Score:2)
Spock's wisdom holds true.... (Score:3)
.
Doesn't seem to work for me (Score:2)
I've been clicking on the "Want" button on the Victorias Secret page all day, but I'm referring to the models.
What happens next? Cuz so far, ... nothing.
I think maybe it's broken.
A rose by any other name... (Score:2)
What if all or most just decided to treat the 'want' or 'collect' button as if it were named "dislike"?
FB cannot force us to treat the button according to the text that labels it.
But too bad the masses would never know.