Facebook unveils new ad-targeting features

Corrected at 9 p.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized Nick O'Neill's relationship with Facebook. O'Neill works for AllFacebook.com, which has no official relationship with the social network.

Facebook has announced new ad-targeting features that allow advertisers to expand their target location radius.

Facebook told advertisers Wednesday that they will be allowed to expand the radius of their target audience by a specific number of miles. Whereas advertisers could target Washington, D.C., now they will be able to expand their sphere by adding 10, 25, or 50 miles to their target radius.

"Previously if I targeted Washington, D.C., I would use ads that included Arlington, Virginia, Bethesda, Maryland, and other local cities," AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill wrote in a blog, adding that he hopes the social-networking site will soon add the ability to target based on ZIP code.

Facebook also added the ability to target audience members based on language instead of just by country, which comes in handy when dealing with countries that have more than one major spoken language.

Facebook's announcement comes as Google says it will show ads to people based on their habits. This behavioral targeting is designed to make ads more "interesting," according to Google.

O'Neill addressed that move in his posting:

This move clearly reduced the value gap provided by Facebook advertising and other social networks like MySpace who offer targeting by interest. Facebook still has advertising advantages in that you can target based on an individual's job position, age, location, and gender.

O'Neill also reported that social-networking site also it had reached 190 million active users, however, this is a stat a Facebook representative denied to CNET News.

[newfacebookstinks]

Personally, I HATE the new look of facebook. It is, excuse my french but a clusterflip of chaos and unwanted scrolling down the page to get to the information you're looking for.

There are definitely more ads when viewing your profile. But, that doesn't bother me as much as the new functionality and "look" they've updated.

First, I despise the new "HIghlights" on the right. There are a handful of unwanted friends whose "highlights" I don't care to see, but don't want to delete them as friends. It looks busy, it is not clean, and I am sick of seeing the same highlights every time I log in.

Second, there is no way to "collapse" any of the feeds or shrink any of the updates, so if you click on "photos", you see a large sized picture of the latest friend to add photos and you have to scroll down the entire page in order to see what other friends may have updated their photos. There is no option to collapse it into "one line" like the old facebook.

Plus, all the text is the same size and boldness, so it is difficult to distinguish whether or not something is a status update, new photo story, link, etc.

In addition, the "what's on your mind" doesn't show what your most recent "status" is, so if you don't remember you have to scroll all through the clusterflip of chaos on your page to figure out what you wrote last. Really annoying.

AND... I FINALLY convinced my mother and some other family members to join, taught them how to navigate the pages, why it's useful and fun to keep in touch with people, etc. NOW it's so confusing and will have to explain things like... why you can't get rid of the "highlights" and why there are so many ads on the right side of the page.

I'm incredibly disappointed at the roll out of the new facebook and am also disappointed in all of the "testing" and "observing of users" and "eye tracking" to find that what they rolled out is nothing but a clusterflip of a chaotic mess.

I like clean, simple, non-busy. This is the complete opposite of what I once liked about facebook and hope they'll at the very least give users the option of removing "highlights" or at least customizing them to include only those friends you choose (like you can in the feed portion to the left) and allow the "collapsing" of feeds to one line updates as they did before. Please allow for collapsing! Allow us to customize the look of our own page instead of having to deal with your chaotic mess you created.

Oh and also add your most recent status to "what's on your mind" so we don't have to scroll down to figure out what we wrote last.

Thanks.

[Harrison912]

I'm typically on FaceBook to socially market my safety and security web site as well as raise awareness for it's products. Since it's not a brick and morter store, geographic advertising doesn't really work for me but thanks for the information, Steve.