Facebook planning targeted adverts

Facebook is planning to implement a Google AdWords-style advertising system that will target messages at a user's individual profile, according to media reports.

A report in The Wall Street Journal suggests that the advertising system is now the company's top priority.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed to the newspaper that the company is working on a new system of advertising, but refused to say whether it will be based on adverts targeted at personal data.

The plan is reportedly at a very early stage and the social networking site is expected to launch a trial service soon.

If the system works in the same way as Google's, marketers will be able to buy keywords that see their ads run next to matched user content.

According to The Times, the advertisements will appear differently from the website's banner ads and boxes and could be mixed up with a user's daily 'news feed'.

Facebook currently has 30.6 million visitors and is predicted to make a profit of $30m (£15m) on its $150m revenue in 2007.

Why Facebook Is the Future

On Aug. 14 a computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant.


WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet gotcha, but it's really about something more: a growing popular irritation with the Internet in general. The Net has anarchy in its DNA; it's always been about anonymity, playing with your own identity and messing with other people's heads. The idea, such as it was, seems to have been that the Internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online. Except it turns out--who could've seen this coming?--that our true, authentic selves aren't that fantastic. The great experiment proved that some of us are wonderful and interesting but that a lot of us are hackers and pranksters and hucksters. Which is one way of explaining the extraordinary appeal of Facebook.

Facebook is, in Silicon Vall--ese, a "social network": a website for keeping track of your friends and sending them messages and sharing photos and doing all those other things that a good little Web 2.0 company is supposed to help you do. It was started by Harvard students in 2004 as a tool for meeting-- or at least discreetly ogling--other Harvard students, and it still has a reputation as a hangout for teenagers and the teenaged-at-heart. Which is ironic because Facebook is really about making the Web grow up.

Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering. (It wouldn't be a bad idea for Google to acquire Facebook, the way it snaffled YouTube, but it's almost certainly too late in the day for that. Yahoo! offered a billion for Facebook last year and was rebuffed.) Facebook's appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It's a website, but in a sense, it's another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that's everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it--a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.

Maybe that's why Facebook's fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they're refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.

Facebook has taken steps this year to expand its functionality by allowing outside developers to create applications that integrate with its pages, which brings with it expanded opportunities for abuse. (No doubt Griffith is hard at work on FacebookScanner.) But it has also hung on doggedly to its core insight: that the most important function of a social network is connecting people and that its second most important function is keeping them apart.

Siphoning MySpace tunes using Safari

When it comes to protecting digital content holders from the hordes of naughty file grabbers, you'll be hard pressed to find a more zealous partner than Apple. So we were surprised to learn that Apple's Safari browser makes it easy to download MP3 files hosted on MySpace that are supposed to be limited to streaming only.

MySpace programmers have taken pains to obfuscate the location of the MP3 file music artists embed into their MySpace profiles. Until now, pirates had to use programs like Ethereal or Burp to divine where a tune was stored. But thanks to a Safari feature called the Activity Window, that cumbersome process is no longer necessary.

We read Dave Shanley's writeup of the technique and were able to replicate the process, although with a few minor modifications.

At the moment, we're huge fans of the Dexateens, a Tuscaloosa, Alabama, quintet that plays a gritty, southern-fried psychedelia infused with punk. (So moved are we with their song "Makers Mound" from their most recent album that the sectors of our hard drive where that song is stored have been damn near ground to dust.)

So we were eager to see if we could use the technique to acquire "Lost and Found," a demo that we're pretty sure can't be acquired anywhere else. It took us a little while, but we got it. Here's how:

Fire up Safari and point it to the Dexateens MySpace profile. "Lost and Found" should start playing.
Select Activity from the Window menu to show a list of every connection the browser is making. About halfway down the resulting list, you'll see a link that contains the string "musicplayerxml.ashx." In our case, the full string is http://mediaservices.myspace.com/services/media/musicplayerxml.ashx?b=16390798. Double click on it.
Safari will open that link, but it won't tell you very much without a little prompting. To do this, choose View Source from the view menu. You now have a window that contains lots and lots of links. Finding the link to the demo is as simple as searching for the string "mp3."
Doing that will reveal the link http://cache09-music02.myspacecdn.com/69/std_532891bc2226eddebd6420a3deee2c33.mp3. Cut it and paste it into your browser and you'll have the MP3 on your desktop in no time.
There are a few caveats. MySpace appears to behave differently depending on your IP address. For instance, if you're in California and put the last link into a browser, you're likely to get an error message indicating you are not authorized to access the file. We got around this by using the Unblock City web proxy.

We were also stymied by QuickTime, which popped up as soon as we were able to access the page. It presented us with a window pimping QuickTime Pro, which we were told is needed to actually download the file. Now, we know there's a way to change settings so QuickTime isn't invoked each time we click on an MP3 link, but we really, really wanted to download this demo. So we simply uninstalled QuickTime.

(We'd be indebted if someone would add a comment below reminding us how the hell to appoint some other player that doesn't try to punt pesky up-sell pop-ups.)

The lesson here is the same one we've heard over and over. Technology designed to limit what can be done with files distributed over the net to millions of people are at best a mere inconvenience. There's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Once you release something online, it's pretty much out there forever.

It's also worth noting that it's MySpace that has left the door open here. Safari is just an enabler that makes the hack easier than using a third-party app.

The insecurity doesn't seem to be lost on the Dexateens. The MP3 file containing their demo is encoded at a paltry 96 kbps. Any fan worth his salt is going to want a better sounding version of this song once it becomes available.

MTV, MySpace Join Forces For Voter-Candidate Talks

MySpace and MTV have teamed up to give presidential candidates and voters a platform for online discussions.
The plan announced Thursday will allow voters to send e-mail, text messages or instant messages to candidates during 11 live events from September through December of this year.

The events will be held mostly on college campuses in the mtvU network of more than 750 U.S. colleges and universities linked with its 24-hour college channel. They will stream live on the Internet through MySpaceTV and MTV.com.

College journalists from mtvU's College Media Network are scheduled to participate.

The two companies said voters can increase their chances of getting into the audience by adding the official event profile on MySpace.com to their Top 8 friends list and being one of the first to show up when a new campus location is revealed.

MTV.com users who submit the most compelling online videos on how they're addressing election issues that impact their community will be flown to the events.

A moderator will choose the questions, while political experts and an MTV newsperson will provide support. The events will also feature real-time polls.

Democratic Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Chris Dodd, and Barack Obama, as well as former Sen. John Edwards and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, have agreed to participate.

Republican participants include: Senators John McCain and Sam Brownback, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul.

Edwards will be the first to appear during the one-hour events. The debut will be streamed from New Hampshire on Sept. 27.

MySpace Ad Targeting Expected To Grow Over Next Year: Report

As Rafat noted earlier this week, the WSJ expressed some excitement over Facebook’s plans to place targeted ads inside users’ profile pages. Today, there is similar breathlessness from Pali Capital concerning MySpace’s (NYSE: NWS) marketing deal with Coca-Cola. In a research paper, Pali hails August 17, 2007 “as a monumental day for social networking and Myspace in particular,” as Coke paid $1 million to have its logo splashed across the entire home page of the Fox Interactive Media social net for the entire day.

MySpace has begun to leverage the data input by each MySpace user into their profile from a group of predefined menu choices (related to questions such as drinker, children, education, smoker, religion, college, employer, etc…). Within the next year, MySpace will be able to target ads based on what users write and place on their Myspace page itself, such as what TV shows members like to watch or music they listen to. Aside from focusing on members’ login pages, the ad targeting will be used across all of the MySpace programmed, “safe” advertising sections, such as the Music homepage and MySpaceTV. The company will avoid MySpace users’ personal pages, leaving those areas to be sold via ad networks. Therefore, Pali concludes, the most valuable advertising real estate across MySpace should become targeted over the course of the next six- to 12 months.

From the note: “Benefiting from continued growth in domestic unique users (now up to 70 mm vs. 54 mm in July ’06 and 21 mm in July ’05), and international unique users (now above 40 mm vs. 25 mm in July ’06 and 7 mm in July ’05), with user engagement continuing to climb (simply more and more to do on Myspace) and the first-full year benefits of the Google search deal, advertising revenues are expected to be around $40 million in August ’07 climbing to north of $80 million monthly over the next 12 months.”

MySpace.Com Death Threats

Athens, Alabama police arrested a man for allegedly posting a threat against the officers on a MySpace page. Police arrested 19-year-old Robert Bradley Tanksley Thursday afternoon, and they charged him with inciting to riot. Tanksley is a member of the Alabama National Guard. Police said a person who used to live in Athens contacted Athens police after seeing a message on a MySpace page that said --quote--
"Kill an Athens Cop today... There Bastards." That's how it was spelled.
Police investigated and found that Tanksley posted the message. They say Tanksley admitted during questioning to posting the item. He told police he was upset at the police department because officers impounded his vehicle last week when they cited him for
driving on a suspended license. Tanksley said he regrets posting the message and wants to
apologize to the Athens Police Department.

MySpace Pedolphile Turns Out to Be a Hoax

pedophile terrorizes the town of Erwin by using the popular MySpace website, but when police investigate they find the website and pedophile are fakes.

Investigators tell Eyewitness News the culprits were children.
Debby Potter says her children use MySpace, but is scared by who they may run across. "It's spooky and it's scary. I think my space is fantastic for the kids... cause both of my girls go on it and they enjoy talking to their friends," Potter said.

Erwin Police say a man named Mr. Henry Dibbs set up a webpage on MySpace and described himself as a single man, a reformed drug addict and someone who likes to meet children.

Erwin Police investigator, Lt. Hank Hairr explains, "He specifically named that he would like to find someone who could meet his needs both mentally and sexually and specifically described it possibly someone between the ages of 13 and 18-years old."

According the website Mr. Dibbs said he used to hang out at the Erwin Municipal playground and watch the children play. The problem is, there was never a Mr. Dibbs at all."

Debbie Potter reacted with shock. "Well... I really didn't find anything out about it until I read the paper. And it was like... oh my God! There's enough spookiness out already and this is not anything we needed. I mean... it's horrible."

Parents swamped the Dunn Daily Record with complaints about the site. The paper held off doing a story until Erwin Police and the SBI could find who was responsible. "The found that it was juveniles that actually created this site and responsible for making the post on this site," Hairr said.

Police told the parents about the prank by teens and the website has been shut down. So far the youngsters have not been charged with a crime, but the investigation continues.