Facebook today announced that the company would discontinue the controversial Sponsored Stories from the site on April 9th. The Sponsored Stories were unveiled back in June last year to help companies promote their stories among the users.
The Sponsored Stories became quickly controversial, since Facebook literally sold the user actions to the advertisers without your permissions to your friends.
It is also known that the company was under fire for the Sponsored Stories. Its not that Facebook will discontinue the feature, but also the company will remove the stories from the feeds, forever. Talking about this shutdown, Facebook says:
As announced in June of last year, we’re bringing the best of Sponsored Stories — social context — to all ads. Since this update makes Sponsored Stories redundant, we will no longer offer them as a stand-alone ad unit for marketers. Social context will continue to appear with all ads where eligible. Our social advertising honors the audience that people choose, so nobody will see information in social context for an ad that they couldn’t already see.
While Facebook is taking this step to get some good name among the users’ community, Google+ is already coming up with features that would access and share your public information in Ads with your friends.