You’re doing it wrong.

Image: kiske.

Yep. It really happened. An ad appeared on the Google homepage.

When Facebook Lite launched just under two weeks ago, my immediate reaction was a sigh of relief, followed by the question “how long will it take them to trash up this one, too?” When I asked that question, I fully expected to find out by Christmas. I thought wrong.

It took them eleven days.

That’s right, it took them less than two weeks to begin trashing up Facebook Lite just as its unholy predecessor had been before it. I took note that on the day of release, that they had already placed the ominous “Create an Ad” sidebar, and it looked suspiciously devoid of content.

Now that column appears to have been invaded by what has become the bane of Facebook users everywhere — trashy ad placements. So now that one single, misleading, trashy ad has shown up all by its lonesome, how long will it take for Facebook to populate the sidebar with two of them?

I find your lack of thumbs disturbing…

Allowing the trashy ads into Facebook Lite is one thing, but not bringing the larger Facebook’s only countermeasures along with them is another. Without the seemingly worthless thumbs up and thumbs down voting feature attached to these ads, users are left without recourse and entirely at the mercy of the ad-providers. What began as a refuge from the relentless onslaught of Facebook is almost surely doomed to its namesake’s destiny.

You can say that I’m just making hasty generalizations, but we are talking about Facebook here, after all.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to clear up some confusion created over the past couple of days surrounding the DiggBar, specifically how Digg short URLs work. As we’ve stated in the past, the DiggBar is meant to streamline the Digg experience and provide our registered users with the opportunity to catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content. Our strategy with Digg short URLs is to facilitate sharing of Digg content, not to be a conventional redirection service.

Last week, we made a change that began directing non-logged in traffic generated from Digg short URLs to Digg story pages where they can view the comments and related content. In response to feedback, all short URLs that were generated *before* today will now behave as they did prior to last week’s change by taking the user directly to the source content. Logged-in Digg users will continue to be directed to the source content with the DiggBar (if they have it turned on). Of course, if the content has never been submitted to Digg, viewers will continue to be sent directly to the source.

As always, keep the feedback coming as we continue to think about ways to enhance the user experience and evolve the product.

Thanks,

Jay

While it’s unfortunate that Digg is sticking with the decision made last week, they’ve at least reversed the effect on the countless links that were floated before the change.

Earlier Updates:

[UPDATE]: Mashable reports that Digg has in fact responded to our collective accusations of “bait and switch” tactics. JD Rucker, who posted this morning about this, contacted Digg. This is the conversation that transpired:

JD: Not sure if this is a mistake or something that was planned, but it appears that when people who aren’t logged into Digg click on Diggbar links, they are now taken to the Digg page and not the source. Are you aware of this? Is it going to be fixed? Thanks!

Digg: Hi from Digg,

Thank you for writing us about this matter. This is working as intended. Please let us know if you have any feedback or have additional questions we can assist you with.

Digg Support

No Longer a URL Shortener:

Nick Halstead, CEO of TweetMeme, commented on the above Mashable post that:

From TweetMeme’s point of view if this stays the same way we will be forced to remove it from our whitelist of shorteners, as by definition this no longer makes Digg a shortening service. We included Digg.com because we felt the addition allowed users the ability to gain extra traction along with the shortening support.

That’s serious. If other sites follow TweetMeme’s lead and remove Digg’s URL from their whitelists, the diggbar will have become illegitimate and Digg will have suffered a much more considerable black eye to its reputation than some angry blogging twitterers can inflict. Digg should realize it’s not the only kid on the block. There are many other heavy-hitters in social-media and the social-bookmarking competition is already fierce; if they start making enemies out of friends they’ll find themselves out of a market very quickly.

[UPDATE]: Social News Watch reports that Kevin Rose has just confirmed Digg’s intentions regarding the diggbar and its recent changes. In an interview on TWiT Live, Leo Laporte asked Rose what he had to say about the issue, (the good stuff starts at about 11.26 in the video):

(Laporte gives Rose the background from an article on Techcrunch)

Laporte: Is that true?

Rose: That’s a good question.

Laporte: You don’t know?

Rose: I’ve been gone for 2 weeks so I don’t know what got pushed, what code got pushed and how it functions but my last understanding is that what we wanted to do is have it so that if you click on a Digg URL it takes you to the Digg stories so you can Digg it. Rather than providing a short URL service that just forwards and does redirection we would just do a URL service just for Digg articles. Just like the same way that Techcrunch does “techcrunch slash 85374″ – if you go to that you’re not going to go to some other site you’re going to go to techcrunch. That’s the story.

Laporte: So you’re backing off on the original idea which is a general URL shortening service…

Rose: Correct.

A flimsy answer at best from Digg’s frontman. Regardless of his convictions on the subject, it sounds like Digg’s sticking to their guns and not about to show any remorse, either.

Orignal Post: Digg Changes the “DiggBar” Short-URL Service

Digg has seen fit to change the way their short-url “diggbar” operates. This change was in the last couple of days sometime, though when exactly that is, I cannot be sure. People haven’t been notifying twitterers until recently.

Non-Digg users who click a digg.com/****** style link will now no longer be taken to a site housing content, but will instead be taken directly to Digg’s own page containing a link to that site.

I will no longer be using digg.com urls for sharing links over twitter or any other service.

[UPDATE] You can see my comment at Social News Watch that has been posted in their article on the story, which goes into great detail about the discovery of the change.

This is disturbing in two major ways:

The purpose of this shift is clear, Digg wants more direct traffic, to generate more ad-revenue. When the diggbar was first released there was open revolt over the way Digg implemented it, causing them to update the tool in deference to the vast majority of people on the Internet who not only want nothing to do with Digg, but also prefer that their visit count as traffic for the site they actually visited and not for Digg itself.

Now Digg’s effectively reversed their position, and instead of simply being plagued by a badly coded, forced-frame toolbar, people wishing to visit sites via digg links will now be going straight to Digg.com instead. This is nothing more than dirty, back-alley behavior.

The more disturbing part is that they’re expecting us to use their diggbar urls to deceptively push their site to our followers. If I broadcast a link to the New York Times, people expect to see the New York Times when they click that link. They do not expect to land on Digg.

David Swain, of the Product and Platform Communications dept. at Facebook, left this comment yesterday on the initial post. I left the comment as publicly viewable:

Matthew, I work with Facebook and wanted to clarify a few things. Most importantly, these ads are not from Facebook. Similar to your post, several weeks ago, we received some reports of deceptive content in ads placed within apps by developers working with third party ad networks. While these ads are from external providers, we are concerned about any potential threat to our users’ experience. We recently had deceptive ads removed from a number of apps and prohibited two entire advertising networks from providing services to applications on Facebook Platform because they were not compliant with our policies and failed to correct their advertising practices.

We are continuing to investigate to make sure ads that violate our policies stay off Facebook and may take further action against developers who host the ads.

It’s an important issue, and one we take seriously.

David

My response was as follows:

David,

That’s extremely good to hear, and yet I can’t help but ask why this sort of information doesn’t get pushed to your users. I know I’m not the only person (as evidenced by the twitter-traffic) that feels the way I do about your company’s advertising practices. Ads are expected, and only a fool would think to complain about reasonable advertisements on a site that provides services free of charge. That doesn’t make the ads any less gaudy, or even flat-out offensive.

User-data is expected to be used for marketing, but not the users themselves. I very seriously doubt that Facebook thought this practice honorable to begin with, or they wouldn’t have done it so stealthily. In fact several people have mentioned to me that they would have opted in had they been given the option, if only for the entertainment value in having their faces displayed on ads that would otherwise be completely non sequitur. Since this was not the case, the overall opinion I’m getting is that your users think less of your company now than they did before.

I would think that after the recent debacle over the ownership of user-data that Facebook would tread more lightly. Using someone’s visage without their informed consent, with the goal of making a profit (whether it be for Facebook or an affiliate), is nothing short of dirty. People usually get paid for that sort of thing, and at the very least they’re told about it first.

I sincerely hope that what you’ve said about your company is true, and I mean that. I think it’s great that you came here to respond the way you did. Thank you.

-Matthew

Up for a read? Try Facebook’s TOS

It’s important to note that while David does mention an ongoing battle with “deceptive” ad-content providers, he unfortunately neglects to address the issue of Facebook handing users’ profile pictures over to these people to begin with. Nor does he attempt to elucidate as to why the company felt it best to opt its users in by default, never directly inform them, and proceed to bury the opt-out setting so far into preferences that it would rarely be found.

As if this behavior wasn’t suspect enough, Facebook then felt it necessary to leave this ominously guilt-ridden disclaimer perched on top of that opt-out:

“Facebook occasionally pairs advertisements with relevant social actions from a user’s friends to create Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads make advertisements more interesting and more tailored to you and your friends. These respect all privacy rules. You may opt out of appearing in your friends’ Facebook Ads below.”

First of all, why would they bother including such a statement if it weren’t to preempt the same backlash they’re experiencing now? The clause “these respect all privacy rules” especially stands out as being defensive of their actions. Clearly they were aware that what they were doing would upset users.

Firefox 3 Unable to Render Opt-Out?

This is something that began as a simple footnote at the end of my initial post. I assumed that this must simply be a bug, some code that just doesn’t sit well with the browser. I myself was unaffected as I’m using Safari 4, so I didn’t pay it much mind when friends told me they had issues. Then I spent some time going through the analytics of the traffic that post got as the story matured. Contrary to global averages showing Internet Explorer as the dominant market share, over 50% of the visitors on this site are using Firefox 3. Now, I know that it would be extremely sloppy to turn around and say that there’s a likelihood that Facebook also sees higher than average numbers for this browser, but it’s certainly tempting.

As more and more people reported throughout the comments sections of other blog-posts that they were unable to see the opt-out due to using Firefox 3, so too did the numbers rise of people who scathingly implied that Facebook had intended it that way. I’m not prone to jumping on conspiracy theory bandwagons, but you’ve got to admit, it’s certainly tempting.