Facebook’s Take on Beacon: Mistakes = Innovation

Facebook has said very little about Beacon lately. Surely the company is putting some, um, tweaks on the program, which angered users whose purchases on sites outside of Facebook were beamed back to their Facebook friends without their permission.

I guess if you’re leaving the company, you have more leeway to talk. According to a PaidContent.org interview with Owen Van Natta, the chief revenue officer who will be departing the company shortly:

“The ability to learn from [mistakes], will unlock the benefits of this kind of media. I was at Amazon.com when it started and the book publishers were nervous about letting consumers put reviews up. They only wanted the good review, not the bad ones. But the thing is, the good reviews only have credibility when you have the courage to put negative opinion alongside them. So Amazon changed that view in the retail industry and social media’s doing the same for every other brand on the planet.”

Personally I think Facebook needs to do a big sitdown with one of the leading business pubs and get it all out in the open. You innovate, mess up, clean it up and then move on. And then tell the world how you did it.

Update: WSJ published a story on March 5 that touched on these issues (and recapped a lot of what has already been reported about Facebook). If you’re a registered user you can find the article here.