Facebook Helps Paid Posts Float To Top Of Feeds

From Information Week:

New 'featured' stories let marketers cut through the noise in your already cluttered news feed. Cringe-worthy, or smart?

Facebook users often are left wondering at the robotic reasoning behind the choice of highlighted stories at the top of their news feed, but at least most of them get there because they are attracting a lot of interest, or comments, or shares. Now, Facebook users also will have to watch out for posts that float to the top because an advertiser paid to place them there.

So far, most of the grumbling about these new sponsored stories focuses on Facebook's decision to ambiguously label them "featured", rather than "sponsored," which is how Facebook originally said the feature would be rolled out. The new feature also attempts to make promoted items hopscotch across networks of friends, echoing Facebook's previous efforts to create distinctively social advertising models such as Beacon, a feature Facebook introduced in 2007 and ultimately withdrew with apologies. Beacon automatically notified users' friends of their purchases on other sites, in a way many found invasive and inappropriate.