The giant online publisher and aggregator Huffington Post began experimenting with a new content recommendation engine today, powered by Facebook and built by AdaptiveSemantics, the startup the company acquired last June. The feature uses the “Liked” Pages and shared articles of logged-in Facebook users who visit the Post to recommend recent content from across its wide swath of articles.
It looks like a good and relatively simple feature. Surprisingly, HuffPo readers responding in comments on the announcement absolutely hate it!
The feature sounds simple, but is a great example of the power of Facebook: the social network is not just a tool for publishers to push content onto, to increase distribution and pageviews, Facebook Connect is also a form of data portability that allows 3rd party websites to offer personalized content to their visitors. Many sites have exposed content that a Facebook user’s friends have shared, but this leveraging of the structured individual interest data is far less common.
Could objections to using this data be rooted in the ongoing lack of clarity around Facebook’s privacy settings? Or did the company just shoot itself in the foot so badly 12 months ago when it made drastic privacy policy changes that people still distrust it today?
The Down Side
Reader comments range from confusion about the feature to distrust of anything associated with Facebook (“I don’t have one of those,” several people have said) to distrust of recommendations to concern about self-reenforcing political perspectives.
“Great,” one frustrated comment read, “put your readers to work for you, is it not enough that we have to deal with your advertisements.” Unbelievable!
Another: “If it involves Facebook, you can count me out.
