Facebook Wins Foot In Mouth Award

Recently I wrote a post entitled Facebook's Beacon Tells All Your Secrets. Apparently I am not the only person who thinks that Beacon was a big mistake.

Wired.com wrote an article "2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards". Once every year, Wired News compiles a list of the most entertaining tech-centric misstatements and verbal foibles from government officials, CEOs and tech luminaries.

"Once every hundred years, an upstart Web 2.0 CEO says something so ridiculous it rockets to the top of the list faster than a story about Digg gets to the top of Digg.

This century's momentous proclamation came in November when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg trumpeted his social network's new ad technology, Beacon, saying:
"Once every hundred years, media changes."

Zuckerberg went on to describe how his company's mining and selling of Facebook users profiles would revolutionize ad sales, and thus media. Within weeks, Facebook did an about-face and apologized for not letting users opt-out of Beacon -- a system that announced to your Facebook friends what books, gadgets and movies you'd bought."