Facebook Starts Turning Listen, Read, and Watch Stories Into Ads

I think these socially sponsored ads are going to be money-making and also insidious if done right. It's a nuanced, strange mix of social content and advertising. They're trying to make all ads social or all their open graph actions into ads. If you play this out to its logical conclusion, that's kinda scary.

Imagine a world where a large chunk of your online interactions are actually being used as content/ads targeted at your friends.

I'm fine with this (if I'm going to be advertised at, I'd prefer ads that have at least a small chance of being relevant to me) as long as information isn't leaking out to the advertisers - for instance all the stuff my browser picks up is from fb not images from the advertiser's server (they could then use referrer tracking to find my public profile and infer something from the keywords they've purchased hooks for their adverts on) and so forth.

One thing that irritates me about the "<somebody> has read <article>" posts is that if you click on any of them you are forced to accept the news source's app if you want to read it yourself which may leak my information. If I was happy giving source basic details and letting the post to my contacts via my stream I'd already have added their app thankyouverymuch. Of course there is the option of opening a new window and copy+paste the headline into Google, which is what I do if I care enough (and if the information is apparently available at another source, I'll read it there instead).

With the new Open Graph verbs and their extend meta information I wonder if a noun could sponsor a story?

Say, instead of Spotify trying to sponsor specific artists; the artist it self could sponsor any popular Open graph story whether it be from Rdio, MOG or Spotify.

So someone like Foster the People could pay for any Listen[artist='Foster The People'] to be sponsored.

It's about time they did this but I don't know why they don't do it for all regular status updates, given that they already do entity extraction.

I suspect this is forthcoming.