Burcu Arikan

I can’t imagine my blog without an Austin tag.

South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) takes place in Austin every spring. It’s a set of film, music and interactive festival and one of the famous ones in the U.S. I couldn’t attend in 2008 because, the tickets of interactive section range from 250$ to 450$, which is unbelievable.

In 2008, some of the key speakers were Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Frank Warren (PostSecret Project), Henry Jenkins (MIT Comperative Media Studies) and Steven Johnson, author of a bestseller “Everything Bad is Good For You”.

Zuckerberg talked about Beacon, a part of Facebook’s advertisement system that sends data from external websites to Facebook. It enables customers to share the actions they take on the other websites with their Facebook friends. Facebook Beacon works through the use of a 1×1 GIF web bug on the third-party site and Facebook cookies. Clearing Facebook cookies from your browser after explicitly logging-off from Facebook will prevent the third-party site from knowing your Facebook identity. I think mentioning the Facebook Beacon partners such as Ebay, Blockbuster, NY Times, Travelocity helps us understand the power of this application.  An internet cliche works here as Zuckerberg said “someone you care about is doing something, that’s much more effective.”