As it turns out, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally realized what everybody else understood from the start: the Beacon ad system was a huge mistake. Coming back to his senses, Facebook's boss has posted an apology on his company's blog:

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users," his posting reads.

Facebook announced early this month that it will alter the Beacon feature of its newly launched ad-platform after more then 50,000 users haves signed a petition initiated by the advocacy group Moveon.com.

Beacon is an advertising platform that tracks Facebook’s member transactions on third-party partner sites and transforms them into product/service endorsements. The endorsements are then inserted to their friends’ “news feeds.”

Unfortunately, Facebook members were automatically opted-in to the program and they are able to opt out but only on case-by-case basis. That means that for example you must opt-out for each of the 44 participants, but take a minute to imagine how much time you’ll spend opting-out for, let’s say, 200 sites.

MoveOn.com and other users said that Facebook’s Beacon is “a huge invasion of privacy”. Also, some of the Facebook’s members were outraged after their surprise gifts were unveiled to their loved ones.

"The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. [...] Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution," Zuckerberg writes.

Also, Facebook’s Beacon offers now to the users clear options in ongoing notifications to either delete or publish. If they delay in making this decision, the notification will hide and they can make a decision at a later time. According to various reports, some of the companies that were involved as advertising partners in the new Facebook ad-platform have decided to abandon the service.

Just a few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg sued an online magazine, 02138, to force it to remove incriminatory documents related to a 2004 lawsuit by three of Mark Zuckerberg’s former Harvard colleagues who claim that it was them who had the idea of creating a Facebook-like social networking web site and that Zuckerberg stole the idea while working for them.