Facebook and a newer, kinder Beacon.

Interesting article on Facebook's futurenomics in the ToryGraph:

Market research company eMarketer recently cut its estimate of advertising spending on the social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, this year by £351m to £912m. It said US advertising spending on Facebook
will fall by 20pc to £147m.

Rival research company IDC said advertisers are turning their backs on social networking sites because they have a lower "click-through rate" than traditional online ads. Only 57pc of social network site users clicked on an advertisement and made a purchase last year, compared to 79pc on the internet at large.

Experts at Deloitte said Facebook is suffering from the double-whammy of collapsing advertising revenue and the soaring cost of electronic data storage. Deloitte estimates that the cost of storing photos and videos on sites like Facebook has increased by more than £70m a year.

Another nail in the coffin for the FreeConomic miracle then, and but a year after Forrester proclaimed social networks recession proof. Looks like they will now hope to make money by selling marketing data based on user data:

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world's largest market research databases.

In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site, once valued at $15bn (£10.4bn), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products.

As if they've not tried before, in that moment that would change media for the next 100 years........ scraping the user base's data for marketing data has always been their game, it just seems that every 6 months or so they come up with a new scheme of trying to make money from it.

Update - Oh no they're not, according to ALL Facebook - the Torygraph is apparently "factually incorrect" and apparently "misinterpreted" Randi Zuckerberg, sister of said Mark Zuckerberg.