Social Networks are Rewriting Advertising Book of Rules

Source: massimobarbieri

Social Networks are rewriting the rules of online advertising.  These changes are being caused by the overwhelming number of users that these sites are receiving and the portability of content over the web with the creation of technologies such as Facebook Connect and and MySpaceID.

From the article:

The change is taking place on social networking sites, where new applications and cross-site partnerships are turning the likes of Facebook and MySpace into one-stop shops for hundreds of millions of users–platforms from which all the Web’s offerings can be reached.

More important, in the next wave of development for such sites, new tools will allow members to take their social-media identities with them when they go to other Web sites. Once wedded to a single networking platform, a member’s “social graph”–password, profile, list of friends–is becoming portable. In other words, as they surf the Web, users increasingly will be able to define themselves by their social network of origin.

That’s big. It signals that Web companies are no longer in a race to build “destination sites” that attract vast numbers of users. Instead, social networking players are racing to extend their influence over the entire Web by exporting their social features to all sites.

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Advertisers, meanwhile, may eventually stop buying specific ad space on the Web and go after users, wherever they pop up, based on their social profiles and networks.

Read the full article at BusinessWeek