The Contiuned Expansion of Facebook

"Facebook will reveal a new ad unit in coming weeks that will appear within the social networking site's recently launched, and controversial, News Feed feature, a self-updating list of alerts indicating when a user's "friends" make changes to their pages."

"The new ad unit, called Sponsored Stories, will occupy the third position within a News Feed, either as a small banner-like placement or as a video clip, writes MediaWeek (via MediaBuyerPlanner). When users click on the ad, the user's entire network of friends is alerted, and they can then interact with the ad. According to Facebook, the ad will allow advertisers to harness the site's social-networking dynamic and leverage social-networking behavior."

via marketingvox


AV: Facebook is making some interesting moves as of late. Founder Mark Zuckerberg is trying to grow the business and expand beyond its college-only roots and open the site up to all users. That, combined with new even more stalker-friendly features led to furious protests from students, leading to the creation of half-million member facebook groups protesting the recent developments.


Understandably Zuckerberg is seeking to grow his business and potentially sell it off, but why risk turning a somewhat differentiated social networking site into just another myspace? What separates Facebook is its semi-exclusivity, and these new moves all but eliminate that. In fact, that was one of the reasons I liked Facebook and haven't gotten on any of the other sites, theres a certain feel of uniqueness to the site that myspace and the others just don't have. Now I'm not so sure...

Although, I suppose at the end of the day, $1 billion buyout would be really hard to pass up, regardless of what the result on your site is...