How to make Web 2.0 into a spamfest?

AVC / Fred Wilson, a normally fairly sensible chap, has come up with an - er - "interesting" idea - fill the various Web 2.0 feeds with marketing messages - he starts with the thought that:

FeedBurner did that with this blog's feed and many other feeds with ok results a few years back. But honestly, the ads were not targeted enough or relevant enough to work really well. Facebook has probably done the most of anyone to allow marketers entry into the feed.

Feedburner's play limps on, and Facebook's play was not exactly a success, as I recall.....anyway:

So what we need to happen is the web services that render these feeds for us; google reader, netvibes, friendfeed, twitter, outside.in, facebook, etc, etc need to provide api accesss to these feeds to services that will serve marketers who want to get their messages targeted into them.

The targeting is the key and I am not entirely clear how this should work. In the case of search driven feeds, it should clearly be keyword based. In the case of geo feeds like outside.in, it should be zip code or neighborhood based. In the case of things like facebook or google reader, I think the targeting is more likely to be behavioral.

Two things immediately hit me.

- I can see why a VC may want some of his companies to have access to users' pub/sub feeds to make a better business plan and model, and I can see why some supplier companies would wish to do this, but I don't see whats in it for the users - its an economic tax on their attention and bandwidth.

- Users (generally) don't like this as an experience either! From junk mail to unwanted telesales, from email spam to Popups in your web browsing, this has not gone down well. Beacon flopped publicly (though I see it reared its head again, I see). We invented all sorts of online devices to cull the noise, and we don't like people that do it

Also, targeting is very hard in this case - I suspect that any form of attempt to get sufficient behavioural data for any one feed would be seen as extremely invasive. Apart from Google or maybe a Social Net or an ISP (and see the worries its causing when they do), its hard to imagine who would even begin to have enough data to do useful targeting .

I can see why a company may want to do this short term, not sure what its longer term benefit may - especially be if competitors don't.