Facebook Is About To Start Dumping Ads In Your Feed

Hey, remember when Facebook didn’t suck?

… OK, yeah, I can’t either. It’s never really been that great. But it’s about to get exponentially worse. Those annoying and sometimes insane ads that sit on the side of your Wall are now just going to get all up in your social networking business, jumping right into the middle of things.

And Facebook has just given up any pretense that this is about things you “Like”, if you were wondering. Now they’re just straight up cramming ads into your Feed. It’s all part of Zuckerberg’s plan to somehow keep Wall Street wolves from ripping Facebook’s tender belly open and eating its vital organs. And it’s not going to work.

But first the line of crap about how this is a test and it may not happen:

Facebook tells me the new ad unit is currently part of a very small test, presumably only available to handful of businesses and shown to just a small percentage of the service’s users.

“We want to be thoughtful about how we introduce ads in news feed, so we have limits in place to ensure that people’s news feeds are not filled with advertising, but we don’t have specific numbers to share.” It’ll be watching reactions to assess whether to roll out the ad unit

Oh please. We know what’s going to happen: users will hate it, and Facebook will roll it out anyway, because that’s what Facebook does. If this sounds desperate, that’s because it is. Common stockholders have very little control over Facebook directly, but they can do one thing to make Zuckerberg listen: Sell.

Facebook stock has been on a steady and painful slide ever since it went public. Currently it’s sitting at around half its IPO value, at $20 a share — and it can get worse. This is Wall Street: It can always get worse. Zuckerberg is discovering what was obvious to anybody not caught up in the hype, that Facebook was overvalued when it was private and that it had no real plan to generate revenue.

Meanwhile, the wolves are circling. If you want some advice, well, I’m not a stockbroker. But I do recommend this: If there’s something, anything, on your Wall that you don’t want a soulless corporate raider to know, you’d better get scrubbin’.

image courtesy Charis Tsevis on Flickr