- Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Facebook is ready to admit mistakes in implementing Beacon, but it is undeterred by the criticism, a top executive said.
 
Owen Van Natta, chief revenue officer at the social-networking company, defended Beacon on a panel at Ogilvy & Mather's Verge Conference yesterday. While allowing Facebook erred by not notifying users more clearly their off-site actions would be piped back to their social circle, the idea behind Beacon was sound: link users' social actions to their circle of friends.
 
"It was just a matter of making sure they knew when it was happening," he said. "I think you'll see Beacon expand."
 
Facebook introduced Beacon as part of its Social Ads platform introduced last year. It let third-party sites place tags on their pages that would transmit purchases and other actions users took on the site into their News Feed on Facebook. The system soon came under criticism for not giving users notice their activities were being broadcast.
 
Beacon was not the first time Facebook ran into a privacy uproar over a new feature to the service. Initially, many users expressed unease over News Feed, the feature that automatically shows members what their friends are doing. Facebook executives point out that furor died down, and News Feed is now an indispensable part of Facebook. Van Natta said the ability for a user to publicize an eBay auction to his friends is a valuable feature.
 
What's more, Van Natta, who is leaving the company, said the uproar over Beacon was not really from users.
 
"It was really the press and people concerned about privacy," he said.
 
His remarks came during a panel the discussed the challenges of introducing marketing into social media. Gawker media publisher Nick Denton said he believes the "innovation" in social media ad models is mostly a result of their failure as media properties. Even MySpace gets higher click rates than Facebook display units, he noted.
 
"A site like Facebook is forced to innovate beyond what the users will accept," Denton said.
 
Not all ads on Facebook perform poorly, though. John Battelle, founder of Federated Media, said Facebook applications like Graffiti Wall are running ad campaigns for companies like Dell that are performing well by all metrics.
 
"There's no engagement in ad networks," he said. "We haven't yet figured that out yet, and I think social media will."