E-Tech

Chris Stubbs has a neat post on how Beacon threw some Epicurious pie recipes onto his Facebook Mini Feed. I had been waiting to see a good example of Beacon in action and this was it. I need some friends who are conspicuous consumers and see no problem with letting everyone know about it. If you do nothing but rent Blockbuster movies and buy shoes at Zappos, please friend me. (And if you're interested, here's a list of all of the current Beacon advertisers (as of 11/22)--although Epicurious is not listed in there..)

Of course, Stubbs conveniently took the pie recipe references out of his profile page, so I had to try it out for myself. (Hey, there's no shame in liking a good pie recipe!) Here's my encapsulation of Beacon in action:

Step One: Go to Epicurious and look up a Barefoot Contessa recipe. (Ina will always be my favorite.)

Step Two: Be somewhat miffed that there are only two Barefoot Contessa (aka Ina) recipes on there--ice cream bombe (nifty but daunting) and pork loin with fennel (the show with that one is coming up this week---I am way too consumed with Ina's recipes.)

Step Three: Add pork loin with fennel to my recipe box. Epicurious's server contacted Facebook.

Step Four: Pop-up comes up mentioning that I added notice of this recipe to my profile on Facebook. It does give an opt-out "no thanks" option, but the entire thing is a little confusing and pretty easy to miss.

Step Five: Go to Facebook and see this:

This is a nice step in the right direction as far as letting users know when third-party information will be listed in Facebook. The entire process, however, shows its colors. Never has so much guilt been displayed within an online transaction. Can you imagine if Gmail asked you several times, before you sent a message, "Are you sure you want to do this?" "Still sure?" "How about now?"

Whatever advertising utility Beacon might have had is gone because of this. Is there a way to seamlessly share a range of personal information online without crossing privacy boundaries? Is anyone on Facebook even on Epicurious besides me and Stubbs' girlfriend? Questions, questions.

And finally...

Step Six: Wonder what Epicurious is getting out of this other than some bad vibes from their users and perhaps a few more ad clicks.

P.S. in case you never want to go through any of this yourself, here's the easiest way to block Beacon.