new look facebook

today at around 3pm, mark zuckerberg finished unveiling his plans for the next phase in facebook's life, and in his words, the next phase in communication. to much anticipation, the ceo of facebook made three key announcements that will change how people and companies will interact and communicate on the site with themselves and each other.

the three big changes are: social ads, project beacon, and insight marketing. i won't go into detail on what each entails, but in essence, it is the maturation of facebook and their big foray into leveraging the vast amounts of incredibly powerful data inherent to the site and intimate relationship users have with it.

there will be a lot of people crying foul on this as it really pushes the boundaries of privacy. but i for one welcome it, both as a consumer, and a marketer. as a consumer, i have longed to eliminate unnecessary messages and information from my life because there are just too many that are not relevant to me in the least. so, naturally, ignore them. now there is a way that i might only see something that i'm interested in (because i've put it on my profile), well i just might be more likely to pay attention because you're catering to me. and as a marketer, well this is surely xanadu. to only have to pay for the people i actually want to speak to and not be paying for all the other people i don't care about, it's a no-brainer.

there's probably also the concern that facebook has sold out with these moves. that they're becoming myspace. i'll disagree with that too. mark z is smarter than that. he knows what he's got and isn't going to ruin that. he's seen what happened with myspace and if he couldn't learn that simple lesson, then he deserves to fail. i do believe him in his belief that he wants to keep the site very pure and consumer focused. he's calculated in what he brings to life on the site and these moves i think are for the betterment of the site and the people who use it. oh and let's not forget the companies who now have an exciting, new playground with which to play where they can be very smart and effective with their efforts.