Facebook Beacon

Beacon was launched on November 6, 2007 with 44 partner websites. The Beacon was a part of Facebook's advertisement system that sent data from external websites to Facebook, for the purpose of allowing targeted advertisements. It also allowed users to share their activities with their friends. Certain activities on partner sites were published to a user's News Feed.

The controversial service, which became the target of a class action lawsuit, was shut down in September 2009.

In an official statement by Mark Zuckerber, creator of Facebook, he explained the failures of the Beacon, ‘Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information.’ ‘Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends. But we missed the right balance.’

I agree with Mark's analysis of the failure of Facebook Beacon, i believe he wanted to create a better Facebook, that would share more information between friends and also show how they use the web. However it shared a lot of information to advertisers, and users did not want this adaption to Facebook. Mark also apologised for taking to long to correct the problems users had. Eventually, this was a positive outcome that the Beacon closed down, although it can be argued that now this issue has been resolved Facebook can find a right balance in the system, and incorporate this back into Facebook.