unimanz

monetizing news, is very tricky. i can't thinnk of 1 social news site that makes a lot of money.

Is there not as much ego as wanting to have museums named after you as there is in having fancy cars and houses. This determination to leave a legacy can often be just as conceited. Its not enough to be rich, people want to have a stamp on history like the Rockefellers or Carnegies.

Donating to a museum may seem altruistic but don't be so foolish, you can never really know people's true motivations.

I agree with this somewhat. Traditionally businesses have been dependent on advertising or PR in order to promote their product, but increasingly there is value in inflitrating certain networks (e.g. early adopter crowd) so as to spread "virally". You could call this a new type of business promotion e.g. community adoption or maybe its just a new subset of PR, in which case, nothing much has changed.

> "You type Cancun into Facebook and it hits you with "tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance". Why couldn't Google just do the same when you Googled for Cancun?"

That's the thing...with Facebook you don't have to search in order to be presented with relevent advertising. FB could parse natural language from the communications you are having with friends to display ads relevent to what you want now. Using my example above if i posted on my friends wall saying I am going to cancun then I would see the ads described above. However, that doesn't mean I woulnd't search in Google.

I agree, natural language parsing is very difficult but if Facebook could do that they may be on to a winner.

> "But they’ll never know what you want right now, and Google always does."

Matt, this appears to be your killer point, that search allows advertisers to know what you want right now. The limitation with search however is that there are things I am very likely to want that I don't search for.

Let me use an example. Often when people are about to go on holiday they announce it in Facebook by writing on someone's wall or updating status etc. Now if I said I was going to Cancun for example would't it be great for advertisers of tshirts, shorts and holiday insurance to advertise to me? Only Facebook can do this, Google cannot (I would have to do three separate searches, with FB I do nothing).

I think this goes beyond a friend recommendation because it links exactly to my plans. Its not only targeted but it shows what I want tomorrow. I think overall this is more targeted than google thanks to the demographic targeting placed on top which Google does not have. In Facebook, I could use the persons place of employment and age to work out their salary and offer two different holiday insurance schemes to the wealthy and the less fortunate. If I type in Holiday insurance in Google, advertisers cannot filter like that. And would think this likely to return a better ROI than Google search (as long as people pay attention to the ads! - the assumption being when ads are relevant people actually do).

So what I am saying is that there is a whole lot of data for Facebook to play with, don't rule them out yet. It will be very hard for them to pull this off but someone has to challenge the google monopoly and who are better placed than them.