#FF00AA

Facebook is going to start serving ads based on what your profile’s keywords — that’s what everybody expected. The interesting bit, however, is that Facebook is going to identify you when you go to eBay and other partners (so that they can tell your friends what you bought and what movies you’re going to see). Put two and two together: they’re much closer than you might have thought to offering an advertising network allowing any website or blog to insert ad iframes that are specifically targeted to each visitor, based on their Facebook profile.

No wonder Microsoft would afford Facebook such a valuation: they might actually be the first serious threat to AdSense, succeeding where Google failed in trying (supposedly) to put together Orkut and DoubleClick.

No wonder, either, that Google would try to make the web 2.0 landscape as fluid as possible with OpenSocial, facilitating profile transfers so that each next Friendster is more short-lived than the one before, and nobody ever gets to be Facebook again.

Now it all hinges in Facebook managing to keep the audience’s interest in the long run, and it actually looks like they may be clever enough to make it.

Concerned about your privacy? (News flash: there’s no such thing anymore in the twenty-first century. Deal with it.) At least a Facebook targeted ad network would have the advantage over Google that it would only (or at least, mostly) use data you voluntarily gave it. And you could totally opt out — if you don’t mind looking like the luddite sociopath that you are.