There will always be a place for mass marketing, but in the next three- to five-years, a website that isn’t tailored to a specific user’s interest will be an anachronism

—Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking to Arianna Huffington at an Advertising Week event earlier this week (Full report at PaidContent).

I totally agree with Sandberg’s premise. I also think her timing is probably about right. While the technology to deliver a site that is tailored to a user’s interests already exists (whether through Facebook’s Instant Personalization or DailyMe’s Newstogram solution), publishers seem to be taking a ‘slowly, slowly’ approach to letting personalization power a significant part of their sites.

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1 year ago 5 notes
I wonder how many people’s Facebook profiles look like mine. I admittedly don’t use Facebook much at all, but I can’t imagine anyone filling in a form like that. Perhaps back in web 1.0…. but not now. Even if users get over the “cold start”, you’re left with a static, binary, decaying set of interests.  This is why the “Like” button is so important to Facebook’s plans to build up a comprehensive ‘interest graph’ for all of its users.

I wonder how many people’s Facebook profiles look like mine.

I admittedly don’t use Facebook much at all, but I can’t imagine anyone filling in a form like that. Perhaps back in web 1.0…. but not now. Even if users get over the “cold start”, you’re left with a static, binary, decaying set of interests. 

This is why the “Like” button is so important to Facebook’s plans to build up a comprehensive ‘interest graph’ for all of its users.

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1 year ago 2 notes

Thoughts on Facebook’s content recommendations

My colleague, Neil Budde just wrote an interesting article on the Newstogram blog about Facebook’s Open Graph and their Network Activity or Recommendations modules.

Neil identifies one of the challenges of using the Facebook Open Graph for making high-quality (i.e. relevant) content recommendations:

The biggest drawback to Facebook seems to be that it’s dependent on users clicking the “Like” or “Recommend” button on stories. We’ve been looking at Facebook widgets on a few of the large news sites, such as ABCNews.com, Time.com, CNN.com, and WashingtonPost.com. Even with up to 700 Facebook “friends” spanning all ages among our different accounts, we have few (or none) who are active recommenders of news stories. On a few of the sites, the only friends recommending stories are employees of the site, and even they aren’t that active. The result is a module not unlike a Digg or Most Popular list.
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2 years ago 3 notes

Chris Dixon: Facebook Is About To Try To Dominate Display Ads The Way Google Dominates Text Ads

Good analysis by Chris Dixon of difference between intent harvesting ads (think Google text ads) and intent generating ads (think majority of display ads), and how Facebook’s Like button (and the associated interest data that can be inferred from people ‘liking’ things) position Facebook to dominate the display advertising space.

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2 years ago 3 notes

Facebook’s plans to take over the web

Big news today from Facebook about its plans to infiltrate the web with its ‘Like’ buttons to further capture user’s “Interest Graph”.

Read more at Business Insider, PaidContent and Techcrunch.

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2 years ago 3 notes
Whoever knows what your interests are right now and can package them up for advertisers has the chance to make a lot of money.
…via Techcrunch article on Twitter and Facebook’s plans to capture user’s interests.
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advertising
2 years ago 3 notes