I was tirading on this subject in emails to a coworker today, and thought it could suitably be aired here, as well.

Web 2.0 was SUPPOSED to be the era of pull marketing. It was supposed to be a wonderful and stupendous array of glittering choices from which you could pick and choose the things that interested you and be left alone by everything else.

Internet advertising has, of course, been present since the dawn of frames, but it went from innocuous and ignorable banners to obnoxious series of pop-ups, and “rich media” which half the time is audible. Pull turns to push. Here, in your face. Have an ad.

Now Facebook… Facebook used to be fun. You actually know most of your “friends” on Facebook. You don’t get random pornographer friend-add requests or berated by bands and get-rich-quick schemes. Then… then the developers came in. So as opposed to the 20 stupid emails from bands you get a day on MySpace, you now get 20 requests a day to add some application on Facebook. And what makes these truly obnoxious? They’re from your friends, so they’re hard to turn down. And they all require some level of interaction. They want your favorite movies. They want you to spend $1 to send someone a .gif of a flower. Push marketing. Tell some third party site ten things about you because uh, your “friend” wants to know. Really.

It was announced recently that Google has promised to make data even more open to developers. iGoogle, GMail, GoogleChat, and other services will, in November, open the floodgates to parsing-and-serving little applications. It sounds nice, it really does. But somehow I think it’s gonna end up with me just having crap pushed on me, because I guess pull marketing isn’t consistent with a profit model.

Wah. And here I was thinking I’d get to order every course of my free lunch…