The new Facebook killed my fluff friend. What once used to be sandwiched nicely between my info and my wall is now squished into the sidebar. And my little wallabee, Hallo, was one of the lucky ones. Most of our fluff friends’s friend (the human) are not aware that they can move their fluff friend from the “Boxes” tab to their front page. What does “Boxes” even mean, and whose idea was it to hide all the applications back there?
I guess facebook felt like they were becoming too much like myspace. It’s very important for them to have this distinction. When it comes down to it, data from facebook is by far more honest than data from myspace. This is really the value of facebook. Data. Sure, they have tons of traffic, but in the end, they want to be able to sell well targeted ads. Traffic helps, but if that was all they cared about, your facebook profile would be multi-colored, playing music automatically, and be raining snowflakes.
They trust their data so much because of the reputation facebook has created and maintains. By starting out with colleges, they seeded the playground with well-behaved kids. They so greatly outnumber the bullies that the bullies would get outed without policing. How much do they trust your data? My friend showed me a pretty compelling example. He changed his birth year to 1925. The ads he gets? There’s no “catch the bull to win a prize!” Instead, they’ve been replaced by hot, young attractive singles and hot, old attractive singles. Why does the 21 year old male get the bull and the 90 year old male get the girl? I guess it looks at my relationship status… Anyhow, I’m sure myspace does that too but I wouldn’t be surprised if ad companies are paying more for facebook ads than ads on other sites.
I wonder what facebook is going to do in the end and if they’re doing something more than just creating binoculars for advertisers. Either way, I’d sell them all the data in the world, just to give my fluff friend some more screen real estate on my profile..
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