With each iteration the number of participants has increased by orders of magnitude making your coolness less valuable and harder to find. With each new communication channel(email, website, blog) companies and advertisers want you to buy their stuff. As the population has grown and the internet has supplanted print, radio, and television in delivering raw numbers of prospects, or suckers depending on your viewpoint, Advertisers have and are betting big on getting you to ‘Yes’ from email,banner ads,websites and now Facebook pages. Using other peoples money to make a living selling you shit is as old as the first print advertisement. This is not a new business model. The FB mission is to deliver eyeballs to advertisers in exchange for money.

Facebook membership is a suckers bet. Here is a piece of poker player wisdom; ”If you look around the table and can’t spot the sucker, than you are the sucker.” If you are under the illusion that Facebook is about sharing and caring about you, I would like the opportunity to offer you either a piece of the London Bridge or a square inch of the Moon.

Facebook is arguably the current darling of the internet with a ‘reported’ 900 million users, whose sole function is to encourage members to provide information by ‘sharing’ yourself with others for the marketing machine that is Facebook. This is not a new business model. However with web beacons, third party advertising companies and Facebook’s ‘like’ buttons infecting the web,(Imagine being an alcoholic and going to the local mall and every store is a bar or liquor store.) data mining, collection and data sales has gone into overdrive.

Facebook has become the internet’s Digital Plantation and its members are all sharecroppers slaving in the digital fields living in the company town, buying ‘cred’ from the Plantation owner, and in the big house there is a giant party as the ‘bosses’ buy and sell attention data, your data.

I mentioned before that this is not a new business model, but a 21st century feedlot(fattening the cattle before sale and slaughter) that has attracted the attention of advertisers and companies in a big way.

In October 2007 was this quote in a Wired Article
“The key thing is that Facebook has an audience,” says Forrester analyst Charlene Li. “Wherever audiences go and people spend time, that becomes an advertising medium.”

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/10/facebook_future

The buzz and revenue being earned by Facebook has led to the upcoming stock sale to the public. If you have a few bucks and want to double your money… fold your money in half and put it back into your pocket. Institutional traders and program traders will be snapping it up and bouncing it around for days.

As I mentioned earlier Facebook is generating revenue by selling advertising and data to companies who have been sucked into the Social Media Kool Aid. On the back of a matchbook, the ability to reach up to 900 million ‘customers’ would seem to be a great bet. Since you can sell almost anything on the web from abacuses to zebras. Almost.
If you consider 1/2 of 1% of ads actually get clicked, and you have a pool of fish even around 450 million would give you about 4.5 million leads to turn into sales, it might be a good deal if you are selling stuff folks need. But need is the last item on the list of advertising objectives.

GM’s Drive By Shooting
However GM, the largest auto manfacturer in the US is pulling out of Facebook. Holy Crap Batman! Somebody in ad land figured out that trying to sell cars used to drive to destinations to folks who are sitting down at a screen or even on a mobile phone is just about the dumbest way to spend money advertising a product that requires you to use your head as an active participant where your tablet, monitor, or mobile phone will get you seriously hurt if you try to multitask.

Once more folks figure this stuff out, ad revenue will plummet, people will demand more accountability from these networks, and the death spiral of irrelevance will suck Facebook into another What Happened to…. article on the back side of the web.

The introduction of GPS tech in phones let all those cute apps like where am i , and where do i get condoms RIGHT NOW work. The fact that most smart phone users use their phones for letting the world know they took a successful dump rather than actually calling and speaking to anyone doesn’t make a very convincing case for connecting the dots between ‘smart phones ‘ and any increase in intelligence in the gene pool. Quite the reverse if the popularity of Farmville and stupid bird games sucking up more minutes than folks talking is any indication.

Apple’s failure and by extension the Windows and Google phones which all do the same thing is not that they are collecting this information, or got caught doing so, but not immediately performing a PR Magic Trick. But I will get to that in a moment.

Behind the cute little screens of every mobile phone are ones and zeros which make up the digital universe. The one true thing in the electronic  universe is: If you make it with ones and zeros somebody will come along and break it.

From passwords to viruses, if it is binary it is breakable. Think about every data breach you have heard of since the first two web pages went live.  Hell, they even have a word for it.  Jailbreaking does not mean digging a tunnel out of the big house, but stands for hacking phone operating systems to do more and different things. Like making useful and free apps that do things that folks actually want, rather than being bombarded with commercial messages offering shit you don’t want, need, or could care less about.

The PR Magic Trick   or the Massive PR Failure

This was a watershed moment for PR/Social Media companies to continue to justify their existence and they fell down. The solution to the black eye and the creepy factor could have been dialed way down using the time honored gag of misdirection.

BLAME IT ON THE PHONE COMPANY!!!!

Holy Shit! If every there was an opportunity to toss somebody under the bus, this was a golden moment. Everybody hates the phone companies and this could have been a PR Coup sticking it to the telecoms and pleading that the phone company made them do it. Especially in the case of the iPhone being nose to ass with AT&T for years. Think NSA Black Rooms. Some of the data collected are the different cell towers used to make connections between you and whatever the fuck you are doing with your phone. This translates into location data which can give a pretty good indication of where you are when you are using your phone. And what you are doing with it.

The Anonymous  data collection excuse  is so much bullshit for a number of reasons. The phone company and Apple will never let go of user data for billing and selling apps on your phone. This means that the unique identifiers like your MAC address and phone number nails you to the data crucifix harder than superglue on your fingertips.

Three Card Monte

BLAME IT ON THE PHONE COMPANY!!!! Apple could have said the phone company made them do it. The phone company could have said that they were collecting this data to determine where and how the network needed upgrading,(not that they will spend any money on doing this, preferring data caps, usage plans, extra numbers you don’t need) or better yet, to keep the tinfoil hat crowd happy, blame it on the government! Yeah! AT&T and the NSA Black Rooms at the switching stations.

Apple’s response is so tepid as too be meaningless.

Apple Admits it Botched iPad, iPhone “Location” Code, Says Fix is Coming

Apple Q&A on Location Data

But Wait!! There’s More!!!
IN an effort to prove that they are the peoples representatives, the Congress is gonna grill Google, Apple and Microsoft. This of course after getting their tits slammed in the door of party posturing.
Google, Apple and Microsoft questioned on data tracking

Jesus, you just can’t make this shit up.

HP Purchase …$300 million

Arianna Huffington is now Mike Arrington’s Boss … PRICELESS