It seems like it was just yesterday, that I was preening my first Facebook page to reflect my best qualities. Six years and 750 million user later, Facebook is a global force raking in billions and set to eclipse 1 billion users, a landmark achievement for any company, never mind one that offers most of its services for free.
Many like me have been on Facebook so long, and for some important formative years that it’s highly possible the site knows more us than we do. This epic backlog of information is the real price of entry. Whereas in the 2001 Internet, the only real digital information most companies had to operate off of was e-mail, which built a solid industry around email marketing that endured today. Facebook’s ad targeting works similarly, capturing users in a place they always are – checking e-mail and checking Facebook are how millions of people start their Internet days – and hitting them with highly targeted ads based on user activity within the site and also around the internet.
Spotify
Spotify may have just reached US shores, but is wasting no time fitting in. Integration of their application with Facebook through Open Graph has allowed for a more tightly woven web of social activity. Sharing has gone further than a cursory adding of Facebook friends within Spotify to encompass the minutiae of Spotify listening habits. When you begin listening to a song, it appears in the Ticker for friends to see, and it does this automatically. If those friends have Spotify, they can listen to the same song simply by clicking on the notification. The more users enable this connection between Facebook and Spotify, the more demographic information will be provided to both services, opening the door for marketers to target customers with relevant advertising. This is just the beginning. Soon Facebook users will be able to tie nearly any web music service into their Facebook dashboard, pulling all their activity into one place for sharing.
Video Streaming
Not to be left out in the cold, popular web video services like Hulu, Netflix, and Vimeo are boarding the bandwagon. Hulu’s Facebook app allows users to share TV shows in new ways, showing others what they’ve watched, and allowing them to stream from within Facebook. Users will be able to tag specific times within the video, and of coruse post comments on videos. Netflix aspires to similar levels of grandeur, but they are currently crippled by the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act which does not allow for public sharing of viewing histories. Watching a video through the Netflix and Hulu applications provides both Facebook and the video services with habitual viewing data, giving advertisers a massive, localized pool of data they can use to target customers.
During the F8 conference last week, Facebook unveiled Open Graph protocol which enables tighter integration with services like Spotify, Turntable.fm, Netflix, Hulu, and manifold other social applications. pool of data on its users is only going to increase. The recent rollout of the ticker in the top right of each Facebook user’s home screen shares with them the activities of their friends and is, on some levels an attempt to influence users’ browsing habits and collect even more information on user interests that can give advertisers more options for ad targeting.
yeah those were the days… when I just kept revamping my profile and all I cared about on Facebook was if I had some girls on my friends list. I like the social activity part of Spotify, sharing tunes. till I read your blog, I didn’t know about how my video viewing history couldn’t be shared, by law, I wouldn’t mind if someone saw my Netflix viewing habits.