NYT & Coke Disappointed With Facebook’s Beacon

You know when the press-announcements were made, it all started like a fairy tale. Everything looked so set be it the Social Ads or be it Facebook Beacon. Barely, a month later problems have started creeping in. Zuckerberg is facing allegations and Beacon is being heavily criticized for its opt-in feature. 

NYT’s Louise Story has accused Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for lying about Beacon’s "opt-in."

Via New York Times Blog -:

I asked why he thought lots of users would want to have information about their purchases sent to their Facebook friends through the company’s new system called Beacon.

I was surprised then when I saw the first version of Beacon, because it automatically sent your friends information on your purchases on participating sites, unless you acted to prevent it. It was an opt-out program. (Yesterday, Facebook reversed that policy.)

I’m hardly the only one who found a gap between what Facebook said and what it did. And this may be costing it some of the blue-chip support that it had amassed. Coca-Cola, for example, has decided not to use Beacon for now…This morning [the Coke source] said: “I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”

Time for Facebook to look in the mirror and realize that it’s not a quirky little start-up anymore.

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