I enjoyed the sarcasm in Nick Carr’s post The social graft about facebook:

“Once every hundred years media changes,” boy-coder turned big-thinker Mark Zuckerberg declared today at the Facebook Social Advertising Event in New York City. And it’s true. Look back over the last millennium or two, and you’ll see that every century, like clockwork, there’s been a big change in media. Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely 100 years ago, and so forth and so on up to the present day - the day that Facebook picked up the 100-year torch and ran with it. Quoth the Zuckster: “The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today.”

It seems like there should be a lot of value in social advertising, but even after the facebook ads announcement, I don’t think anyone has figured it out yet. It’ll be good for things like music, movies and books (which people were already essentially endorsing), but I’m not convinced it’ll scale too far beyond that. I haven’t taken a look at the new marketing pages (I haven’t been on facebook since the announcement at the start of the week), but they didn’t seem to offer any value to me.

That’s another issue… there doesn’t seem to be much value in these for the user. Facebook Beacon seems a bit more interesting, allowing people to make news feed events for off-site actions, but it’s still constrained so that you can only see it inside facebook (i.e. you can’t really do anything interesting with it). Whatever. If I get a facebook CD in the mail, I’ll really know they’ve become AOL (and it’s 1996).