Facebook? Why should I sign into Mark Zuckerberg’s site to download a presentation written by someone else and made available from somewhere else? Although the invitation was optional, it still felt like a kind of category error. This was Facebook pushing its nose too far into someone else’s business.

Specifically, my business. I felt jostled, hustled and nudged. (It actually is much worse, as Wired.com’s Priya Ganapati discovered.)

Nudging is the name given by the authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein to describe the art of influencing user behavior by presenting options in specific ways. When they nudge us, businesses and government erect what Thaler and Sunstein call an architecture of choice around us.

Last month, TechCrunch spotted a good example. This was Facebook’s decision to allow users to respond to a would-be friend by pressing a button entitled “Not Now”.

Previously, Facebook forced users to choose between Confirm and Ignore. The change, Techcrunch suggested, was all about creating a de facto “follow” feature that doesn’t depend on the followed party giving permission. This, TechCrunch suggested, was an attempt by Facebook to “slyly beef up its social graph a bit more”.

So what? Surely, nudging (not to mention “choice architecture”) has been around forever. What’s wrong with using a series of barely noticeable prompts and temptations to maximize revenues in the short term?

Nothing. On the ad-funded web, it’s essential that users behave in a way that’s lucrative. Sometimes, they need encouragement. If you’re providing an expensive service for free, it’s surely not outrageous to treat users as sheep, funneling them toward the point at which they yield their maximum value.

Or is it? Perhaps the really important thing about nudging is the frequency with which it’s done, and the way in which the nudging is presented.

Some companies do it less than others. Although I suspect it adopts a tougher stance with business customers, Google has remained a reluctant nudger in consumer markets. If you’re a fan, you probably believe that this is because the company goes with the grain, striving to do no evil. If you’re a skeptic, you’ll argue that Google’s approach to its users is made possible by a cash-generative advertising business. Either way, the interpretation is largely positive.

Aggressive nudging causes problems. As corporate self-interest becomes more important than user satisfaction, the nudging company’s approach to consumers becomes fragmented and incoherent.

Something like this, I suspect, happened to Windows during the past decade as Microsoft struggled to cope with the emergence of the web. The company’s vast promotional campaigns for Windows tended to focus as much on the company’s achievements as the benefits conferred upon users. The self-regarding nature of these campaigns told us something about the company’s attenuated links with its customers.

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Authors: Peter Kirwan

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