Sam Harrelson

GigaOm has an important scoop…

Now I have some skinny on a recent development that could have long-term ramifications, among them Google sending more traffic to Facebook.com.

The company will soon announce that some application canvas pages (ones that don’t require a special login) will become publicly indexable by search engines like Google. So for instance, our GigaOM Question Of The Day app can be indexed and made available in some limited form to people not logged onto Facebook. Apps get a public-facing web presence of their own.

If this is the case, imagine the SEO’ers scratching their head as they try to optimize their FB pages. At any rate, this is as good a reason as any for your company to start taking social media seriously.

Facebook really is boring me with their marketing attempts. I’ve basically begun to snub my nose at it because, quite simply, what they’ve rolled out so far will never work or sustain any sort of revenue for advertisers (or marketers). There are already too many concerns over privacy, data ownership and FB’s long term sustainability as a platform to cause much skirt hiking.

Beacon is a horrible idea and has been sloppily executed. It reminds me of the toolbar apps from 2002.

I like (love?) Facebook as a social network, but as a marketing paradigm, it’s just not a good fit… at least for marketing in its current stage of evolution. Perhaps one day marketing will be able to find employment in social networks, but at this point we’re still too closely linked to offline models and metrics that break down when you try to translate them to the social networking world (or the web in general in my opinion).

Google owns advertising and will continue to do so (especially after they move into mobile and/or release their GDrive application and start paying users to host their data in exchange for ads to compete with Amazon who will do the same… yeah, you heard me).

Tony Hung has a good run down of possible futures for Facebook if Beacon crumbles.