monkey!

November 7, 2007

Facebook knows what you’re eating, buying, and wearing

Over the past few weeks there’s been big talks about Facebook’s new advertising network. Finally, it arrived yesterday. It’s a pretty neat idea and comes with a variety of options, the big one being Social Ads

The concept of these social ads is pretty cool. You write a review on that Thai restaurant you went to last night and, if the restaurant has some ads floating around in the Facebook network, it will display a sponsored ad about the restaurant with your review. Pretty cool! It’s a neat way for merchants and advertisers to directly connect and show specific ads based no what you are interested in.

However, I can’t help but think of scary this is. Facebook assigned dozens of partners to play a primary role in their ad network. How these partners would work is say for example, when you rent a dvd from Blockbuster online (Who uses that anyways?), it will allow you to display the DVD you rented on your Facebook profile news-feed style. Add some more partners, and soon enough Facebook and all your friends will know exactly what you’re renting, what clothes you’re wearing, where you’re driving to, etc..

Of course, I am not going to play the conspirator here. What I see this as is a brilliant move no Facebooks part to sell more specific ads that people may actually click on. Additionally, Facebook will now know more about us, and their net worth will continue to rise, because in this day and age, information is king and if you are able to specify ads directly towards my taste, down to knowing what food I bought today, then you’re golden.