Can Facebook feed its ad brains?

(continued from previous page)

"We do a contest of algorithms in each context...and see which works best (to serve an ad) and that's a traditional machine learning technique. But this requires massive computing power," said Paul Martino, founder of Aggregate Knowledge. Martino said his company is in talks with various social networks, but does not yet have a deal with any of them.

One of the techniques in this field is known as collaborative filtering, which Amazon used when creating its product recommendation system. Amazon's system automatically analyzes your purchase history and looks for the same buying patterns among other shoppers. By sizing up the purchase histories of similar shoppers, the system can look for the products you haven't bought yet and that other similar shoppers have. Then it can suggest items you might also like.

Facebook plans to adopt similar techniques, for people who like the same music or films, according to people familiar with the company. That way, movie or music studios could "suggest" entertainment in the form of a product placement.

Behavioral targeting
Another approach is to tailor ads to a person's demonstrated behaviors, or what's called behavioral targeted advertising. That means that a site might keep track of a person over time and factor in his or her demographics and preferences. A high-income woman who has recently said she's looking for a car might receive a Lexus ad, for example.

Facebook has already come up with some machine learning tricks to allow people to search on a person's nickname, even if the person hasn't divulged that information. According to one source, the company developed an algorithm that could strip words from people's "wall" (where friends post messages) and then remove from the list all the words that weren't in the dictionary. With what remained it built a comprehensive dictionary of nicknames so that people can search on a friend's profile under alternative names.

"That's an interesting machine learning problem, and they have a million things like that," said the source.

Facebook is already clustering people into groups, such as tech geeks or music lovers, and following patterns of people's behaviors to predict other kinds of behaviors, according to people familiar with the company. For example, groups who like baseball could like sushi, in a hypothetical link within data patterns that you might not expect. The ad network could then target ads for local sushi restaurants to members of that group. But the company hasn't deployed this methodology on a wide scale.

Facebook is also a tremendous barometer for public opinion. So the site could eventually track chatter about a movie like Spider-Man, for example, and sell that information to the film company or watch how a message about the movie on a wall is received. If the chatter falls off quickly, it could be time for the studio to release the movie on DVD rather than keep it in theaters.

The big search sites have done some work in this area. Google, for example, in order to send the right ad, looks at search terms, a person's physical location (by IP address), and type of content on the site he or she visited. Yahoo targets ads similarly, but it also sells behaviorally targeted ads to marketers. For example, Yahoo might deliver an ad for baby formula to a person the company know has looked at pregnancy-health pages.

Microsoft serves ads based on audience segment, such as car shoppers, by anonymously tracking the behavior of users across its network. If an MSN user has browsed MSN Autos or searched for "Kelly Blue Book" on Live Search, the user will see relevant ads. The search and Web browsing history data is blended with data people offer to Microsoft during registration, such as age and gender, but not identifiable information.

For now, Microsoft will be serving Facebook's graphical ads, but it remains to be seen how the social network will tackle the ad issue on its own.

"The problem isn't that they can't make revenue, it's that the expectation is so high on the amount of revenue that they can make," Linden said. "Because people aren't in a purchasing frame of mind (at Facebook), it's going to be hard for them to get as much from the advertising as the hype right now."

CNET News.com's Elinor Mills contributed to this report.

[Ouch!]

Big Fat White Elephant

BaceFook will prove to be MicroGate's Big Fat Elephant in the room:

48 million clients? No @$%*^# way! Did they start April 1st?

And No doubt everyone is sitting at their keyboards waiting for the next ad to be flashed at them!

100 to 1 this will turn out to be a hoax! Watch out for the knock-on effect!

[Tomcat Adam]

...

Obviously you have never been to the site...

[Broward Horne]

Consolidation Phase

Facebook's current growth rate is unsustainable and will peak out around summer of 2008.

http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme?entry=social_networking_meme

My email to Facebook in 2006 suggested that social networking was entering a consolidation phase. With the introduction of their API and now Google's OpenSocial API, it's clear that the context is now about taking existing customers from other social networking sites.

My extrapolation of Facebook's growth rate is based on the concept that there are finite # of customers and most of those are already in play.

[Sea of Cortez]

Face book = being scammed by Nigerians

I posted a few things for sale on Facebook and I all have gotten is one message from Nigerian scam artists after another :(

You the messages that goes like we want to buy your car, but to buy it you need to ship to us, so send us $1250 for the shipping cost and
we will then send you $15K for your car.

Have Facebook display the IP location of the so called Facebook members and you will see more than half of them are mapping to locations in West Africa. I mean the girl says she is a beautiful blond from Charleston USA, but if you start talking with her you see that she wants you to wire money to Gahna for her to come and visit you
because her sick dad who is Ambassador Johnson is in Gahna. And Billions of other similar scams.

So join Facebook, if you want to be scammed to death.

[Rossjb]

Can-Facebook-feed-its-ad-brains? - Yes.

"For now, Microsoft will be serving Facebook's graphical ads, but it remains to be seen how the social network will tackle the ad issue on its own."

Looksmart's AdCenter + "Bid4Keywords" ='s Facebook...

"Looksmart's AdCenter allows publishers and advertisers to fully control their campaigns in all facets including their daily spend & the ability to fully target Looksmart's rich (& concentrated) content that does provide a wide range of topic appeal, particularly on a contextual basis."

And Network Solution's "Bid4Keywords" will suit Facebook, accordingly. That they have been found using Ads (a friend was served a "contextual") coming direct from an NAI member, would indicate this to us .... And they will probably be using Looksmart's AdCenter they have Licensed from Looksmart.

This will be "huge" news on Tuesday, if it is to be so. And it does appear to be. And the massive scale involved within the NAI (alone) should prove irresistible for them. There are at least a "half dozen" Networks forming, having compatibility with Looksmart's AdCenter. Learn of the NAI from within these posts here:

http://www1.investorvillage.com/beta/smbd.asp?pt=m&SearchBy=MessageText&SearchFor=Tacoda&clear=1&mb=3240&Search=Go

Last Thursday came the rumour of an AOL buy-out of Quigo for $300M. [And almost confirmed, just a few hours ago]

With AOL already heavily "involved" with the NAI (Network Advertising Initiative), it has "advertising.com" and "Tacoda" any such purchase would thereby introduce the Quigo customer base (those that are not there already via FAST's AdMomentum), and would include ABCNews.com, CNNMoney.com, Forbes.com, and USAToday.com.

http://www.quigo.com/

As said earlier .......Facebook will be "huge" for Looksmart as an Adcenter partner! And "huge" for all advertisers involved. IMHO.

:)

Rossjb

[ceoballmer]

With a little help from their friends!

They can do anything!
http://****************.blogspot.com
Why do ya think I "gave" them 256 million?