Parking Tanks on Lawns 101

From the poke you in the eye for an eye Dept.

No sooner does Google announce that it is getting into Social Nets, than Facebook announces that its getting into targeted Ads.

Facebook Ads is comprised of three parts: Ads targeted at Facebook members using their profile data such as age, gender, relationship status, work history, and stated interests (Social Ads); ad widgets that advertisers can put on their own sites that allow Facebook members to become product endorsers, and spread that endorsement to all of their friends on Facebook through their personal feeds (Beacon); and aggregated profile information that is exposed to Facebook advertisers that tells them what kind of people are getting their ads and who is clicking on them

The idea is that the Ads will be targeted to your profile data, and that of your "friends". A few thoughts:

(i) I wonder if they will aggregate the data for all the individual Santa Clauses, Jesus's, Julius Caesars, Karl Marx's and Attila The Hunses or treat them all separately

(ii) I don't know about you, but a lot of my Facebook friends are new virtual friends rather than people I have actually spent a lot of time with, and a lot of my actual friends are not on Facebook - so I'm not sure how accurate my Facebook "Social Graph" is in terms of inferring stuff about me.

(iii) My behavioural data on Facebook is very circumscribed by the limited activities that I carry out on Facebook, which is a tiny subset of all I do.

Nonetheless, just as with Google prising Facebook's walled Garden to be a bit more open, its good to see more competition emerging in the Google Adopoly.

Now when, pray tell, will Yahoo start its engines?