Interesting article from the Guardian technology section. Is Facebook becoming more and more like MySpace? Only time, and user response, will tell.

Excerpt from Guardian post:

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook’s social advertising system in New York yesterday, and it has nothing to do with banner ads, or text ads. It is, rather, a clever way to capitalise on the rise of fansumers: the sort of people who buy products as a way of making statements about themselves and their aspirations: in other words, it’s the off-the-shelf lifestyle business. (Usually, the “statement” is that they have more money than sense.)

TechCrunch blogged the event, and says:

Facebook is announcing three things: Social Ads (ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally), Beacon (a way for Facebook members to declare themselves fans of a brand on other sites and send those endorsements to their feeds), and Insight (marketing data that goes deep into social demographics and pyschographics which Facebook will provide to advertisers in an aggregated, anonymous way). These three things together make up Facebook Ads. Here are the press releases for Facebook Ads, Project Beacon, and its launch partners.