ambient

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.

1. Schedulable named pipes callable with dynamic parameters from the URL. More string functions.

3. Plugin / extension system addressable by URLs

4. I need a sense of reliability / scalability. What if I want to use pipes to index 1 million pages and send the results to me via xml?

5. Other output formats, including xml. RSS output is very cool though, and it currently exists. I can create widgets based on pipes that I create.

6. APIs to programmatically create Pipes

The fact that I could even think about asking for these things in a generic service is mind-boggling because 2 days ago, I would have thought that these possibilities were years away. This is the another step in turning the internet into a real operating system. Openness would be nice.

Nice services to have around pipes:

1. A means to contact pipe authors in order to get my content added

2. Digg for Pipes.

I started to play with Pipes a little this morning.

My first pipe simply takes the output of this blog, pipes it through BabelFish to translate it into Japanese, and output the result. The character encoding seems screwed up when you view the result and, of course, the quality of the translation is subjected to the mercies of BabelFish’s translation algorithms. However, I’m very impressed with the potential that this sort of ad-hoc content merging / transformation holds.

Some of the more interesting pipes on the homepage are a list of TechCrunch citations, the very innovative New York Times Through Flickr pipe, and another one that merges all of the Yahoo Blogs. The last example demonstrates a different approach to creating RSS reader subscriptions and is more akin to the RSS-reader-as-News-River use case.

Perhaps an overarching trend here is a new breed of services / tools that allow a crossover from simple (or powerful) customizations on popular tools to publishing those customizations in order to make them useful to more people than just one. That would be yet another example of what makes the internet so powerful in a long history of innovation swapping.

Steve Yegge’s excellent essay last month on building software platforms touched on this as well. GreaseMonkey, for Firefox, is a better extension mechanism for Firefox in many ways that Firefox’s own plugin system. He’s not the first person to show me that many of the ideas from UNIX are alive and well on the internet, but he is the first that I know of to view Firefox as being as much Emacs as it is a web browser.

The inevitable question will be how to monetize this service, but the nice thing about it being developed by Yahoo is that they 1) have the resources to develop the features for awhile without worrying about how to make money from it and 2) have been very good with their acquisitions (including del.icio.us and flickr) by not overhauling what makes them work so well in order to fit into some convoluted business model.

Besides, the potential to monetize this service, both for Yahoo and, if Yahoo is smart, for users / publishers (notice the ongoing convergence there) is huge. As search and findability become increasingly mobilized, contextual, and regionalized (and tied directly to local and offline conversions), the ability to fund a network infrastructure that creates even more conversion opportunities between services, the opportunity is staggering. And if Yahoo is really smart, they will figure out a way to make even more money by empowering their users to first make money with the services they provide.

Exciting times ahead.

Yahoo released a new service callled Pipes.

Tim O’Reilly immediately got it because this development is, in many ways, he and the rest of us have been waiting for ever since Jon Udell captured our imaginations with his comparison of internet to the venerable UNIX operating system.

It’s nice to read about the excitement coming from the developers (e.g. Kevin) of this unique service because it demonstrates something that most people assumed Yahoo had lost long ago: the ability to have fun.

Yahoo’s stock price and their lower than industry average P/E. Might be a good buy.