Another recent online power grab involves Facebook’s changes in privacy SEO. Most of the information gathered in social networking is used to improve the relevancy of advertising presented to you (be it behavioral or retargeting).

Yet Facebook’s recent changes in layout and linking unveil an even more ambitious plan. They want to become a hub for all brands, products, and artists on the web.

It’s true that you can hide all of your fan pages in green that fit into Facebook’s pigeon holes of activities, interests, movies, books, or music. There’s a good chance that most listings here will have their own fan pages, except for books which should list authors instead.

(Mark’s profile information that is publicly available; the interests in green can be hidden but the section in yellow must be visible to everyone, even outside of Facebook, if your settings allow visibility in search engines)

However, when you log in, you can discover some interesting user experience decisions that determine the data displayed above.

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As I reported three years ago, one of Google’s chief competitors has been the beneficiary of its own algorithm. Only this time it is Facebook, and not Yahoo, to receive a vaunted PageRank of 10.

For those unfamiliar with the story, the PageRank concept was integral to the original thesis of Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford. Essentially it rates the billions of pages based on a 0-10 scale regarding the number of inbound citations (or links). So while it is supposedly a play on words for Larry’s last name, the acronym is also conveniently PR (i.e. public relations).

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Facebook is pushing me to the edge, but I have not quit the social networking site yet despite my last post. Thus I decided to set up the feature that posts my Tumblr updates to my wall. In other words, one of the main reasons I went with Tumblr. I was very happy to see a straightforward approval process.

It gave me the option to post my entries to my Facebook wall. Sharing something public with a private group of friends? Approved! Then it asked if I wanted to deliver my private wall posts to a public blog on Tumblr. Denied!

That is the way it should be. Ask for my permission upfront, and maybe you’ll get it 50% of the time — without making me angry or risking an account cancellation.

Facebook Beacon was one of the first major missteps for the massive social network that shared your personal data across partner websites. So they toned it down and allowed you to opt-out. Yet Facebook continued to collect data, and a class action lawsuit ensued forcing Facebook to terminate the service in late 2009. Now it appears that Beacon 3.0 is looming on the horizon due to pending changes to its privacy policy.

I am not surprised, especially in light of the PR disaster that was Google Buzz (contains profanity but in this case I believe it is well warranted).

When will companies learn that “pre-approving” these sorts of features equate to the type of behavior covered by CAN-SPAM? People do not want their data being shared without their explicit permission. What happened to double opt-in? This is something that should have been figured out 10 years ago. I guess companies get greedy after a while.