FriendSense; Adsense for FriendConnect thickens the plot.
Just a quick one here folks… being the holidays and all, but it is worth noting. You see, the folks over at TechCrunch were reporting about the upcoming AdSense for Friend Connect gadgets. Now this is certainly a sensible move and on it’s own not worth disturbing my joyous hiatis from the search geek grind unless of course there was more to it…. And there is.
Back in early October we looked at a set of patents relating to targeting social network users (from Google). At that time I was musing that there simply had to be some connection here with open social and monetizing social spaces in general. This apparent news of AdSense for FC gadgets certainly does fit in with what we looked at in those patents.
Targeting social influencers
As always, when the first patent came out, more than a few search geeks got excited and inferred that this so-called ‘FriendRank’ was going to somehow be related to organic search – but that’s to be expected as SEOs have been drinking waaay to much social kool-aid of late (every new signal is social related to many of them….sigh).
Funny thing, if you actually read ALL 5 patents… not merely the first one (a mere component) then it becomes obvious that the system is primarily looking at delivering ad related content to targeted users (and user groups). It’s secondary purposes seem related to traditional content delivery as well as recommendation engines for ‘new friends’ and ‘groups’.
It does bare noting that such a system (for AdSense) can be used for any of the OpenSocial partners which means the total aggregated data comes into play. How this plays out for AdWords publishers (as far as targeting locations) goes, we’ll have to wait and see.
Have a great weekend… a few round up posts next week and on to the new year!! (some goodies already planned for Jan. 05)
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