Ding dong, the witch known as Beacon is dead.

According to CNET, Facebook has finally killed off one of the most controversial online advertising platforms ever launched.  To be honest, I was more surprised it was even still active.

Nearly two years ago, Facebook launched Beacon which was to be a way for activities you did on sites outside of Facebook to automatically be shared in your Facebook news feed.  The problem with it was that it was quite often done without the Facebook users knowing it would happen, so potentially embarrassing and private information could quickly be known to all of your friends on the popular social network.

It was an ill-fated idea from day one, and was such a horrendous failure that a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook, and there is still a $9.5 million judgement awaiting final approval by a judge.

As someone who was very heavy into tech news blogging when this project launched, all I can say is good riddance.  It was a horrible idea, and it still amazes me no one at Facebook ever said, “You know, this might be a bad idea…”.  Sharing information from third-party sites without explicitly warning the user it was going to happen?  Brilliant!