Facebook News - the follow up post

So much news yesterday on the social front, particularly on Facebook (though I didn't miss the Xauth pieces).

I posted a collection of links to a number of pieces that seemed worth reading yesterday. Here's is my analysis.

Facebook v. Twitter

Facebook Borrows Another Feature From Twitter: The Hovercard


Feature wise there is a lot of "borrowing" going on. But the primary reason for this is actual UI Richness and dealing with information density. Users are gaining sophistication and ease of use is critical for keeping users engaged. But how to accommodate lots of data without going for clutter? One answer is layering information via on screen pop ups and overlays, which apparently Facebook is going to be doing a lot more of.

Facebook to Twitter: Back Off, We Own People’s Interest


Facebook and Twitter are both trying to understand what their users are interested in and capitalizing on that information in the form of targeted advertising. Facebook is expanding capabilities and data richness around interests that people explicitly declare, taking advantage of existing profile data. Twitter is doing so via analysis of tweet and retweet activity. Twitter is a more technically advanced, algorithmic approach, while Facebook capitalizes on their size with more of a brute force method. In the end, advertisers win, more choices to advertise to highly specific audiences.

Community Pages:

In Big New Product Push, Facebook Set to Launch 6.5 Million New Community Pages


Facebook Launches Community Pages and Basis of Open Graph API


Facebook to Link Profiles and Pages


Community Pages lead to making facebook profiles more dynamic, and in someways is more Wikipedia like than anything else. Community pages pull in info from Wikipedia even! The additionally pull in status updates algorithmically matched to the page but don't feed into the news feed. This enriches experiences for users and gives Facebook great data, but opens up a lot more security considerations.

Security/Privacy

If You Link Your Facebook Profile Data to Pages, the You Make that Information Public by Default

Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt


Privacy just got even harder. "Liking" and therefore contributing to community pages is public by default.

“Like”

Facebook’s New Like Button Will Power A Behavioral Ad Network

Facebook’s “Become A Fan” Officially Switches to “Like”

Facebook’s New “Like” Button and The Anonymized “Like” Stream


A transition marketers are going to have to help manage: users now will "Like" brands instead of "Become a Fan". "Like" is not like the share functionality of "Like" on someone's status update. (Confusing)


The assumption is clearly that the new behavioral data being collected is going to lead new advertizing capabilities, but that isn't being announced at this time.

Ads

AdParlor Introduces Facebook Ads API Service for CPI Advertisers

New product offering from existing facebook advertising service provider. Using Facebook Ads API, AdParolor's product is an optimization engine that adjusts bids across ads to bring in higher quality results at lower rates that other options. Not a self serve product.