Social Media Lessons of the Week

I decided to browse NPR and the NYTimes for "technology" this morning. Two interesting article came up. The first one is about Power.com.

Power.com is a program where you can log into multiple social networking sites at once. Sound's pretty awesome. I'll take it for a test drive this afternoon and see if I like it. I'm logged into facebook like 16-20 hours a day so if there is a way I can keep up with my other lesser used sites during the day, that would be cool. Sure I love my twitterfox, and I'm becoming more and more fond of tweetdeck, but I'm always looking to one better my tech connection. The NYTimes article is about how Power.com is suing Facebook for monopolizing social networking. They are likely to lose, but they are getting some attention from it, even if it is just from me and the NY Times.

Second lesson of the day is from NPR. One of the reasons I like Facebook and my Google mail is that the marketing towards me is getting smarter. I like most of the ads that I get on Facebook. They are set by profile information, not text written in messages, statuses, and posts. This is both too bad, but also makes it more affective then how Google does it.

Google will pull words from the text of e-mails. This is frustrating to me sometimes. I had to click on Jim Risch ads everyday because they would be generated by my e-mails during the Nov '08 election. I clicked on the ads, mostly just to cost him money through Google's pay-per-click. I also marked his ads as "offensive", like I often do on Facebook hoping they will get the picture that I am not interested in the Young Republicans' ads, or any ad for republican candidates or issues. I wish there were a preference of excluding ads instead of just adding data that will generate better ads. If Google base more of the ads on profiles and less on key words generated in e-mail conversations, I think the ads would be more relevant. I also wish I could request types of ads. I love all the ones for vintage clothing and would like more of them.

I guess in the end it doesn't matter. I'm of a generation that has been so advertised to since youth, I am pretty good at tuning them all out. Unless it is a picture of a girl in a vintage swimsuit. That always catches my eye.

clipped from www.npr.org Facebook Ads A Big, Fat Wrinkle For Some Users But, I recently found myself in a dilemma, and it all had to do with Facebook and my age. I noticed, as I thought about it, that all the Facebook ads on my page were about wrinkle creams and diets. Whoever was advertising had focused on my age and on nothing else revealed in my profile; for example, a love of science fiction or birding. [Then she removed her age from her profile, and] started looking again, and I noticed no ads for diets or wrinkle cream. It turns out that now you can vote ads on Facebook up or down, and even vote them out. I'm guessing a lot of people voted against those ads for wrinkle cream. And when she took her birth year out, "there was an obvious decrease in the number of those types of ads. Now the ads are geared more toward key words in my profile, and seem based on my interests."