Forget about the top ten reasons you should quit Facebook. Heck, forget about all the other reasons too because this is the new definitive reason why you will quit Facebook: Zuckerberg now wants to put ads directly in your feed.


The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook wants to put advertising in your News Feed. The News Feed is the stream of information that you see when you get into Facebook. It's populated by status, images, posts and all the activities from your best friends.


If they go through with this plan, your new best friends would be car manufacturers, the latest stupid Hollywood movies and some underpants brand. Worst of all, you would not be able to hide those advertisers forever. It seems that Facebook is thinking about taking away the ability to filter those ads, just like when you hide the posts from friends who are not really your friends.

You know, I was going to write a long rant detailing why this potential feed ad clusterzuck is all shades of wrong, but I won't. This could be so damn annoying that the only thing I want to write is "Fuck you, Facebook." So:

Fuck you, Facebook.

There. [WSJ via The Atlantic Wire]

Update. Brandon McCormick from Facebook's communications team sent a comment clarifying the WSJ:

Seems like there may be some misunderstanding. The WSJ story talks about a separate real-time News Feed test that would show everything happening all the time in a separate section on the right hand of the page This would be true for things your friends are doing, updates from apps you are using and content from Pages you have liked (including any of the 250,000+ fans of Gizmodo). These aren't ads. Just like they are today, they are updates from the people and things you have chosen to connect to. While you may not want Gizmodo to be your best friend, and you may not want to get updates from Gizmodo every minute, you may be interested in a story posted on their Page. This separate News Feed would help display that content, in real-time, along with everything else that is happening.