Fresh, hot, emoticons here! Dane Cook Trailers! Salted Nuts!

Microsoft dropped some cash into the social networking app I affectionately call Faceplant to grab a 1.6% share in the company and will be selling online ads for Mark Zuckerberg’s little startup that could in the near future. This all comes on the heels of Google buying up webvertisier Double Click. Apparently, Facebook has developed it’s own brand of context-sensitive ads that will respond to users habits and interests and Microsoft wants a piece of that pie. Now, I’m no expert, online advertising is an unavoidable beast and one that I don’t fully understand but I will say this, the thing that annoyed the shit out of me more than anything was when MySpace started to be overrun with advertising. Want to log in? Here’s an ad. Watch this, then you can find out what your friends are doing. It’s a shitty system that I would imagine drives away more users than anything else. It creates more problems than it’s worth. Take a really slow site, add some flash banner ads and watch the users experience go from bad to worse in 55.46 seconds. Hellooooow. The thing here is that I don’t think my experience is singular. Annoyance, just based on my own observation and an understanding of who uses these sites (you know, my peer group), is likely the experience of most. I can’t imagine anyone ever clicking these ads in hopes of winning a free iPod or downloading some emoticons or even watching a movie trailer for the latest Dane Cook piece of shit that’s making it’s way down cinemas lower intestine. I can see that trailer on TV. That’s right. We still watch TV. Television, the place we expect to have advertisements ruin our experience and in turn, not ruin it. I can always use the washroom during a television ad. The only online advertising I have seen that works is Coudal’s The Deck. It’s limited to certain sites that I go to every day (A List Apart, Daring Fireball, Design Observer, Kottke, Zeldman, A Brief Message). All sites about design. I like design. I’m interested and so I’m not averse to finding out about any of the ads that might be posted on those sites. I click on the FontBook one every time I see it. I’ve learned about Harvest, LightCMS, Squarespace. All things that interest me so I click. The only benefit I see in social networking in a commercial sense is in data mining. Market research. And that doesn’t have to be done by way of advertisments. You could collect the information from any of the mini-apps in Facebook. Use the movie rating app to post a short poll about which movies a user wants to see. Direct more dollars into offline advertising to that specific group. Charge companies for access to your collected data (demographics not phone numbers, names, etc.) so that they are better informed about their own audience. The thing about it is, you have your target audience for a great deal of products and services right there in Facebook but the reason they’re there isn’t for advertising, it’s to interact with their friends and their friends ain’t selling them shit.