Charles Petersen, in the New York Review of Books, on the rise of facebook.
If anything, Zuckerberg looks, in some distant but discernible way, like the Robert Moses of the Internet, bringing severe order to a chaotic milieu. While several efforts have been made to create more open versions of social networks, none has found much success. We are still waiting for the Jane Jacobs of online “urban planning” to appear…
Urban-analogy bonus-points aside, what I found interesting about this article was the comparison between the types of targeted advertising Google is capable of, and what Facebook is [expected to be] capable of.
Because of its unparalleled demographic information, Facebook can sell ads that will appeal only to carpenters in one small town in Vermont, or to graduates of the Harvard Business School, or to residents of Manhattan who list “opera” as an interest. The site could also provide the most highly targeted political ads in history. Google can sell ads that will appear in a particular locality, as Scott Brown showed by buying up much of the online ad space for Massachusetts during the final days of his successful bid for the Senate. With Facebook Connect, it may be possible to show ads specifically targeted to Massachusetts residents who use words such as “Irish,” “Italian,” or “black” in their profiles, or who list their religion as Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish. So far, however, advertising has only provided enough revenue for the site to barely break even, and many believe the site can only claim to be profitable because of creative accounting.
But is Facebook’s demographic information ‘unparalleled’, as Petersen claims? I think this forgets the massive amounts of data on personal preference collected by Google each time we make a search (or use Google maps, or add a website to our Google reader account, or compose an essay on Google docs, or send an email, or…). And in a way, I would think this information is far more valuable to advertisers than the personal information on Facebook. The latter is data that 1) we choose to share and 2) isn’t necessarily about us, so much as it is about the personality we choose to craft online. The data Google has is much more personal – it concerns the actions we want to take, the places we want to go, the knowledge we want to have. The Google might know us better than we know ourselves.
[link via James Fallows]
