Facebook Beacon, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 12Ben Gilbert 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Facebook Beacon comes up
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- ▶ 2:50:28 David Rosenthal It was just Beacon.
- ▶ 2:50:32 Ben Gilbert Beacon is one of the most epic failures in Facebook's whole history.
- ▶ 2:50:37 David Rosenthal Ok, so Beacon.
- ▶ 2:50:51 David Rosenthal Before Cheryl, do you know which Facebook executive led Beacon?
- ▶ 2:51:05 Ben Gilbert I never knew he was in charge of Beacon first.
- ▶ 2:51:11 David Rosenthal And actually, the epic failure here of Beacon leads directly to growth, as we shall see in a sec.
- ▶ 2:51:16 David Rosenthal Now, what was Beacon?
- ▶ 2:53:25 Ben Gilbert There was Beacon, which was JavaScript that an advertiser could embed on their website, on an e-commerce provider's website, that would do exactly what you're talking about, publish,
- ▶ 2:55:46 David Rosenthal Yeah, for Beacon.
- ▶ 2:55:47 David Rosenthal Ultimately, after a few weeks, they do acquiesce, and they say like, okay, we will turn Beacon off, we'll make it opt-in, as opposed to opt-out, and
- ▶ 2:55:58 David Rosenthal You can have a way to, like, completely turn off all beacon tracking permanently from your profile.
- ▶ 2:56:06 David Rosenthal Beacon activity basically drops to zero, and then, yeah, two years later it's, like, completely killed off.
- ▶ 2:58:12 David Rosenthal Beacon was such a disaster.
- ▶ 2:58:58 David Rosenthal One, after the Beacon fiasco when Cheryl joined, Chamath kind of needs a new job at the company.
- ▶ 2:59:10 David Rosenthal I think at most places, like, Chamath would have been fired immediately for what happened with Beacon.
- ▶ 6:04:24 Ben Gilbert Beacon.