Today LinkedIn pulled a Facebook.

LinkedIn launched its own social ad network, which utilized users images and profile information in advertisements that would be served on the site, presumably to their contacts. LinkedIn really should have seen this coming — a few years back when Facebook did the same thing it experienced a user backlash.

What’s the fuss? Social network users expect the opportunity to select whether their likeness is used for profit. In both Facebook and LinkedIn’s case, users were initially opted in to the ad programs by default.

Now LinkedIn has stepped back just as Facebook did, claiming in an “I’m sorry but we told you so” blog post that the user trust was of utmost importance:

In early June, we announced changes to our privacy policy — including the new ad format’s opt-out policy — ahead of the first small test of these social ads. I also reiterated the same during the launch of social ads, explaining how members could opt-out of sharing their recommendations with their network.

The problem? Had LinkedIn taken a passive approach and introduced the social ad platform by spelling out an easy way for users to opt in to appearing in such ads — even perhaps offering incentive — it would have been fine. But automatically signing users up to appear in ads can be seen as exploitative and aggressive. Having corrected itself by pulling back on using user info and images, LinkedIn might wish to make amends by offering incentives to encourage users to participate in the social ads.

Facebook, by example of its incredible success, is not a normal company and likewise neither is LinkedIn. Both have found great success not without making relatively big mistakes. In March 2006, Mark Zuckerberg turned down a $750 million offer for Facebook insisting the upstart social network was worth $2 billion. In the first half of 2011 alone, Facebook’s valuation has been estimated at $50 billion to $100 billion.

But I digress. No matter what nonsense social networks put in their terms of service, the user will always prevail when it comes to a base level of privacy settings. These networks may be free but only at the price that the services take advantage of and in many cases sell its users. Once opted in to the network (by simply agreeing to the Terms of Service) the rules are always liable to change, most often in the interest of shareholders, and in the case of LinkedIn, with its stock still soaring at nearly 50 percent above its price when it hit the open market 3 months ago, keep an eye out for more creative maneuvers to capitalize on its 120 million user profiles.

There are consumer protections against such behavior, though not so much in America. But LinkedIn’s move this morning may have violated European law.

Photo by alancleaver_2000 used under Creative Commons license.

But now I’m hoping to hear the voice of freedom to select new songs to synch with car ads this football season. Let’s face it, the “Our Country” ad and its brutal stickiness has in many ways ruined the past couple seasons for us football fans who don’t have TiVo. This year, perhaps we can deal simply with the Brett Favre soap opera as the primary spoiler to the season (and just the story, not his potential to bury my Bears).

What songs would you like to be spoonfed into your many hours of redundant NFL ads this season? M.I.A.? Madonna? Gnarls Barkley? The inevitable Brad Paisley? Metallica? Is an ad gonna break a single this season and then butcher the release of an album (as was the case with “Our Country?”)

Here’s to those pitching new songs for placement in ads likely to air during football games. I sure hope you landed something fresh and not-so-annoying.

At left, you’ll see Tom Lewis aka TomDog purporting to endorse a Facebook App. Sure, he probably is a “fan” of the app but I doubt he realizes that his image is being used in this manner on his friends’ sidebar.

There IS a way to opt out of your likeness being used in this paid ads for Facebook Apps, although it is not entirely easy to find the opt-out page.

Log-in to Facebook, go to “privacy” at the top right, click “News Feed and Mini-Feed,” then select the “Social Ads” tab within the module and change “Appearance in Social Ads” to No One. Screenshot below. Anyone else have issues with this?

SearchEngineWatch points to a couple interviews in which Google Ad execs predict that both candidates Obama and McCain will depend heavily on Adwords bidding wars and that the Clinton campaign was inconsistent with it’s usage of Google’s Adsense and Adwords platforms.

According to Adsense’s cost-estimate tool, the keyword Obama costs an estimated $0.88 – $1.23 per click (CPC). So, essentially the party who wishes to advertise on a website contextually relevant to the keyword “Obama” would have to outbid other potential advertisers. “Barack Obama” scored similarly on estimated CPC, but the estimated CPC for “McCain” is $1.23 – $1.85 — signficantly higher, implying that someone is driving up the bidding to advertise on websites/blogs featuring the word “mccain.” It comes as little surprise to find Barack Obama ads at the bottom of my posts that feature McCain. Yet, in the instance of the Lara Logan post, I’m betting that the McCain ad was picking up the “Iraq” keyword and advertising on that (Obama-related posts appear to be plastered with pro-Obama Google ads).

Now it *should* be easy for me to block this particular McCain ad by simply taking the root URL that the ad links to and adding it to the Adsense content filter. That said, any intelligent campaign would be sure to barrage the ‘net with ads from a multitude of unique URLS and IP addresses.

Have you had any great success / embarrassments in attempting to maintain open contextual ads in the face of occasional ad content that surreptitiously hijacks relevant keywords for competitive gain?

Via MLB.

Let’s have some fun!

The photo was uploaded into my Flickr account and was well-tagged. I license all of my photos with a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license, meaning that anyone is free to use the image with attribution, except for commercial purposes (I since changed this particular photo to all-rights-reserved to make it even more clear that I wasn’t willing to give it away to Nuveen).

Although I suspect the photo has been on display since the beginning of the season (I’m told it is one of eight on display in the entry way of the skybox area near the ticket booth) I was finally notified today of its use and agreed to terms to license it for the rest of the season. I must say I’m very happy to report that the Creative Commons system works, I’ve made money from shooting a photo that was discovered on Flickr and never expected to, and even though the ad is pretty stupid, at least it’s not above the communal urinal in the men’s room.

An interesting aside, the original photo was in color and was taken during the Chicago Air & Water Show. The jet pictured in the original was rubbed out for the ad.

Is this unique to the “Friends for Sale” App being advertised here or is this a standard policy allowed by developers who build Facebook Apps? Seems a little much to me… What do you think?

Lee Rainie’s latest Online Activities & Pursuits survey (d/l .pdf) spotlights increased use of video-sharing sites. Interesting to see this data as it coincides with renewed interest in online video endeavors thanks to the writers strike. Another Pew Survey released six months ago had the percentage of adults (with Internet) who watch video online at 57%. In the end, it’s not about percentages but quality minutes spent viewing online video programming both original and otherwise.

I missed the report on Teen Content Creators (d/l .pdf), released before the holidays, until I caught mention of it on David Weinberger’s blog Friday morning. But a preliminary look at the report shows positive trends in the ways in which teens are engaging in social networks and online activities. Nearly twice as many girls blog than boys, however, that ratio is reversed when it comes to posting online video. 89% of teens who post photos online (47%) say their photos occasionally get commented on.

Previous posts about Pew Internet:
* Is MySpace the Teenage Parking Lot of Today?
* Future of the Internet: Liberty + Privacy
* Pew: Nearly 50 Million Create Own Web Content

Everyone wondered if they’d ever really pull the trigger on this, or stick to their adsense guns while DoubleClick ambled along — and the day has come. $3.1B later, Google is now the king of all Internet advertising (although Yahoo! remains no slouch, most recently expanding it’s one-stop online news ad shop to include McClatchy).

Sergey Brin once hinted at DoubleClick being the “life preserver” as John Battelle mentions in The Search (and as Biz2.0 reminds today), but the metaphor was baswed on Adwords going under. While Adsense is doing fine, Google apparently seized on this opportunity to box out Microsoft and go large.

Rafat at PaidContent reports that the $3.1 billion cash offer is “much more than the rumored $2 billion that Microsoft was intending to pay.” It’s also 10 times DCLK (private since 2005)’s revenue.

How will this work out? Here’s Google’s Presser. Battelle’s analysis forthcoming at his blog.