The inefficiency of evil

Umair links today to some quotes from the senior management at FB, pointing out that the difference between revolutionaries and evil overlords is that the one wants to change the world for the better, the other merely to subdue and rule it.

CFO Gideon Yu: "There are these small bands of people who are trying to take over the world," Yu said. "This is so much more fun than working at a hedge fund or an investment bank."

Mark Zuckerberg: "If those interests include not seeing advertising, that is too bad. "There is no opting out of advertising."

Umair calls evil. I call just plain dumb. Sure, there's still a lot of people out there using old versions of IE instead of Firefox and there's probably even a few Firefox users who don't know about, or don't know how to use, Greasemonkey and basic expansion functionality for their browser that lets them...er, opt out of advertising. (Rather deliciously, Adverlab reminds us that people have been opting out of advertising via ad-skipping technologies since 1934). But by now the even slightly tech-savvy have heard about AdBlock Plus and its various equivalents. Mark Z's claim that "there's no opting out of advertising" is as good as declaring an all-out tech war against the hackers who will be building browser tools to block Facebook ads that no-one wants to see. Perhaps you'll all join me in wishing Facebook's boy billionaire good luck with that - better-resourced systems have already been there and failed.

Comments

[Paul Sweeney]

Doesn't anyone find it ironic that firefox is the best positioned to block advertising, and its funded by advertising, i.e. by google?

[rrc]

Thanks, this was the comment I was about to write on the bubblegeneration blog. All it will take is one smart person to write the Greasemonkey script and it will be passed around, dare I say, virally, especially at the college level.

What Google gets right with their ads is that they're unobtrusive enough that people don't bother to block them. If the new Facebook ads are even a little bit obnoxious it will set off a visceral reaction in users that the corporation is changing "their" Facebook.