WalMart is advertising on Facebook

[diablose]

I look at Facebook right now and the left side banner ad is from WalMart. I'm not sure which I see as more significant, WalMart advertising on the Internet or Facebook landing such a big name as an advertiser. Not that I'm surprised. And I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it has been going on for a while. It's just that I just noticed it.

Comments

[kovarik_dude]

Just wait - rumor has it Microsoft is buying a significant (albeit minority) stake in the parent company.

Facebook = evil :)

[diablose]

ah, if you talk to most religions, they'll say that most fun things are evil with a :), so I don't see how Facebook is any worse than anything else I enjoy.

[kovarik_dude]

Oh, indeed, but I rarely consider social networking sites on the same level as a religious creed (or something I enjoy like beer, for that matter).

And in this case "evil" isn't really referring to the "traditional" moral values you'd find in various religions, but rather the geek pop-culture ideal that implies that going from a "let's generate lots of users in order to grow our site" model to "Let's make lots of profit, and marginally concern ourselves with the users" model is hated on, for various reasons.

It was intended as more of a joke than anything ;) I just happen to like poking at facebook (and/or myspace) as people tend to be attached to it in a rather....well...religious way.

Well, that and I dislike it.

Then again, my dislike for Microsoft is a bit myopic in that fashion as well.

[diablose]

It's always fun to poke you back when you're poking at something. :)

[diablose]

On a related note, there is now a group on Facebook called "The Papal Facebook Initiative" with part of its description saying "When this group reaches one million, we will petition the Pope to get a Facebook."

So far it only has 12,000+ members, but I know about it because one of my friends recently joined said group. The rest of the description is bad jokes about things you can do to the pope or have the pope do to you on Facebook.

Does this make Facebook more or less evil in your eyes?

[kovarik_dude]

Ignoring the context of what I said above, I wouldn't consider "facebook" to be good -or- evil. Possibly the people using it, or the people writing it, but as an application, there's no inherent "badness" to using the software.

Perhaps that's dodging the question - in the case of the people, if it's because it's the Pope, you'd really have to assume that the Pope is inherently better than other humans and/or protected by holy law from humor of that sort, or that humor about the pope is somehow inherently mocking the Church (and that -that- is wrong), and I think that's subject to debate by most humans on the planet.