100,000 Facebook Ads and I can’t find one. Argh - they’re not live yet!

Well we all certainly know why Google moved up their OpenSocial announcement - from Nov. 5th (yesterday) to last week. They wanted to one-up SocialAds - Facebook’s new sector KILLER ad system!

It was actually kind of childish and vindictive of Google - but that’s OK - cause our goals were reached anyway. We’re figuring out what OpenSocial REALLY is - while appreciating Google flexing its muscles and forcing Chris DeWolfe et al - to use the “O” word.

The Google Bull came stampeding into the Facebook Widget/App space last week and got everyone BUT Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft to agree to an ‘open’ OpenSocial platform - for widgets. NetVibes has come back hard (and well timed I may add) with their own “bringing social to software” strategy - right after the HiveLive Social Networking platform was announced with a similar approach yesterday.

Now MySpace’s ‘hyper-advertising’ will get a run for its money. What does Google have to answer Facebook’s Ads and MySpaces ads? Don’t they look kind of pathetic?  Its a battle of open vs private (as Om Malik calls it.)

So now I gotta head over to my Facebook account, go join up and ‘friend’ some brand Facebook pages - OOOPS not live yet - 100,000 pages I can’t see yet! All I want to do is actually experience the future of advertising and monetization of people. I can’t wait!

With phrases like:

innovative way to cultivate relationships with millions of Facebook users

new ideas and fresh ways to engage with our customers

explored new ways to reach our target audience with a compelling brand experience

Its clear that the marketing folks are starting to pay attention and Facebook just went and pushed every hotspot button Madison Ave. has.

Google has never had a compelling story for targeted advertising. Facebook now does. That was enough for Google to go ahead and announce OpenSocial - a week early. Man oh man - I just love it when beheamouths battle for our loyaly with increasingly coolio and open platforms. KEEP GOING!

Those in the know are analyzing OpenSocial as we speak and now the same thing will happen with Facebook’s SocialAds as well. These are amazing times - my friends - and that’s why I’m excited about the panel we’ll do at LeWeb3 in December - when Patrick Chanezon of Google (and the OpenSocial project) will be on-stage with me and Tariq from NetVibes (and others.)

Others seem to agree that this whole ploy actually makes Google look kind of bad. But me - I’m just glad to get the very notion of moving user’s data around - as a conversation topic. Even if OpenSocial doesn’t do that!

My head is buzzing on how to connect all these technologies together OUTSIDE their Firewalls - and aggregate whatever you want - together. Is that what APML is for? Clearly OpenSocial ain’t done yet. I can’t wait to see what gets announced next! OpenYahoo?

OpenSocial shows how to open up a widget platform. MyBlogLog showed how to create Widget communities. Clearspring has a open platform for collecting Widget analytics. NetVibes is a Open Widgets dashboard. Niall Kennedy puts on Widget conferences.

Can’t we do the same thing with SocialAds?

Shouldn’t we be able to move our list of followers from Twitter to Seesmic?

And oh - BTW - did you see that Microsoft updated and launched a whole bunch of new stuff with Windows Live - that connects to Vista? No - you didn’t hear about that yet? Oh gee - I wonder why?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 10:22 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.