Overstock: Playing wait-and-see with Facebook's Beacon
Thoughts about Zuckerburg's thoughts abound (See Techmeme and ZDNet's coverage).
But there are plenty of moving parts to sort out. The user angle will play out shortly--I'd reckon most folks will opt out. The advertisers are a different story.
We're making the rounds with advertisers and I'll post the reaction as they come in. First up is Overstock.com, which was an early Beacon participant. The company was still evaluating Zuckerburg's post and the new Beacon process, but was in no rush to participate in the Beacon program.
Jonathan Johnson, senior vice president of corporate affairs at Overstock, says the company is taking a wait-and-see approach to Beacon and won't turn it back on until the process and privacy issues are clear to all.
"We're going to leave it off until we're sure it's crystal clear to us and the community," says Johnson. He noted that Overstock will deploy a double opt-in with Beacon. You'll have to ok sharing of information on Overstock and on Facebook. "We want to be sure that the double opt-in is crystal clear."
Johnson adds:
"We need to be sure that the Facebook community understands how it works. Mark's blog may have gone all the way there, but we don't know until we see the reaction to it."
It's highly likely that other Facebook Beacon partners have the same reaction. For Beacon to ever work again there will be a few issues to monitor.
- Will enough people opt-in to Beacon to make it matter?
- Will a critical mass matter to advertisers? Is 500,000 users enough? How about 1 million? What's critical mass for Beacon?
- Will advertisers remain gun-shy after this initial hubbub?
Stay tuned.