Note: This is a Hypothesis.
Facebook Connect is if anything else extremely convenient. It provides the functionality of OpenID and allows you to comment on, interact with and engage on password protected sites by using your pre-existing Facebook profile.
Why would Facebook offer such a convenient service? What do they have to gain?
Facebook is the Wikipedia of people. It's become a veritable gold rush for advertisers, marketers and anyone else interested in collecting your data for business reasons. The access to a wealth of semantic data from user profiles allows for hyper targeting within the closed community and is a great vehicle for cheap leads, easy conversion and calls to engagement. If you want to find and target a 22 year old, college educated woman from Spokane, Washington that loves kickboxing? You can market to her via Facebook.
However, until Facebook Connect this data collection/marketing only occurred on Facebook. Facebook can expand their tentacles into each and every website that has Connect enabled by providing a free tool and increased functionality for the publisher.
Engagement ad outposts are already here and being positioned, they just aren't fully operational.
So...what does this actually mean?
Facebook is building the world’s largest contextual ad network that targets based off of profile information rather than site content. The social network has developed a potential game changer for web advertising in Facebook Connect.
It's mind numbingly simple when you stop and think about it: Serve ads based off of data collected on Facebook to users on different websites for maximum effectiveness. The ads served to you will follow your interests and adjust both according to the site viewed and your profile's data.
Why would a publisher choose to enable Facebook Connect knowing that all this data is going to be going right back to Facebook? It’s also going to catch on with publishers because the ads will be more relevant and thus they will be able to make more money.
Google and Twitter have launched similarly ambitious Connect options for their own platforms. Neither have the sheer amount and intricacy of data that Facebook has though.
The most interesting part of this whole scenario? This falls directly in line with Facebook's revenue model and previous launches. The lifestream, Playstation and Xbox launches and building out of brand pages? Calculated decisions. Facebook is forming the very fabric of our social lives and in the process creating a massive multi-tiered platform (capable of serving semantically targeted ads on each level).
Facebook is going to be an absolute revenue machine. Get on board now.
Photo Credit: prospere
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tagged as ad platforms, Facebook Advertisement Strategy, Facebook Connect, facebook connect strategy, mobile ad integration, multi-tiered semantic advertisement, OpenID, publisher ad platforms, semantically targeted social ads, social ad platform
