I'm not sure why I missed this thread; it's almost literally made for me ;-)
I'm not a hacker but I'm here today because.... I sell SaaS. I work in aviation, which on the commercial side of the organization is as enthusiast-driven and fly-by-the-seat of the pants hacky as tech companies (but with suits). I'm interested in alternative finance - more as a to get money to people that most need it than out of any delusional desire to get rich off it - and have a degree in economics. I built my first website in 2000 but my side projects exist more in my head than in source control. I like to write, but don't blog, not least because I've a sneaking suspicion the sum total of all the time spent by all the visitors to my blog would be less than the time I spent writing it. Nobody is reading this either :). I even read sometimes read articles on the joy of Clojure or Go or Haskell and try to understand why people get excited about monads. I have a latent* desire to start a startup, and went to a startup meet yesterday to deny being interested in starting a startup
In college we used to pour handles of McCormick vodka into left over Grey Goose bottles(same ones used over and over). I think you all can guess that no one ever knew the difference. :p
I made a point earlier that the advertiser chooses the target audience and I don't believe FB does what this article claims. I've seen retargeting creep into FB lately but again someone is making assertions rather than an algorithm IMO. Some 3rd party ad networks let you really drill down.
I think FB can do what this article claims but is not actually doing it.
I can't say what FB did here with much confidence - its an anecodte. But I'd like to point out that it isn't hard to reverse engineer the information out of FB. Buy a targeted ad and then watch the click-throughs. Cross reference the click-throughs from that ad with data from another tracker that knows identities and you've now been able to link whatever your FB ad criteria was to the identities of anyone who clicks through - even if they don't do anything else besides click through.
It's been about a year since I placed a FB ad but I was under the impression that whomever is placing the ad targets an audience not FB itself. If that is still correct then whoever was placing the "coming out" ad was acting more like an observant bartender mentioned in the article rather than an intelligent algorithm.
This is exactly right. I mean I think Facebook is as creepy as the next guy, but this article makes the unsubstantiated claim that Facebook guessed his orientation. Unless they have some secret new interface for their advertisers in this case it's unlikely. That said I'm sure they could predict this with a high level of accuracy if they wanted to.
You are not entirely right, the advertiser chooses what audience to target but only Facebook knows exactly who is in that audience, the advertiser probably was advertising to people who support gay rights, etc.
I'm a co-founder of Olympus Math, an adaptive platform that improves math proficiency for middle and high school students (currently deployed across 35 school districts nationwide)
Your above mentioned project is aligned to a new product we are gearing up to develop. I would love to chat with you further, you can email me at muj@olympusmath.com
My co founders and I had a discussion about this very issue. We all wanted the functionality initially but realized that we hated sliders as users of other sites. No one I know cares to re-read the slide that was missed.
