I was updating my Facebook status this morning at noticed that I am no longer required to use the “is” in my status!! I have a screen shot. It looks like it auto defaults the “is” in the status, but it lets you edit it out! Its not a huge thing by any means, but nice that they finally have taken it out! Here is a screen shot of it when I click on it:

I was on Facebook today, just checking things out when I noticed this ad on the left side bar.

Since Facebook has been in the news lately for their advertising platform, I have been watching for any changes that I see. This ad had the picture and name for a friend of mine, kind of like a “referral” type ad or “your friend did it, you should too!” type of thing. It wasn’t for a product, rather an application. Either way, I’m sure they were paying for the space. I also had another one of these ads show up in my news feeds but it was for Blockbuster. I should have gotten the screen shot, but I didn’t.

It would be interesting to see if people like these ads more, or if they are getting better “clicks”. Depending on the application, I guess I would be more tempted to go along with it and at least check the application out. The one that was in my news feeds looked like it was using Facebook’s Beacon ad platform.

Anyone find any good examples of these?

I’m kind of offended by Facebook’s “Ad Targeting”. Here is the picture I got from my profile. First, my religion is Mormon, political views are Conservative…so, how on earth is this suppose to target me?! Also, I don’t have anything in my profile that would make them think that this is an appropriate ad for me.

Is Facebook actually targeting these ads, because I hope for their sake they aren’t! The Facebook Flyers seem to be closer on target but they seem to still be just targeting by demographic information.

I think behavioral ad targeting and other ad targeting is going to be really huge. By this picture though, it’s going to be some time before they accurately target the ads.

Apparently Yahoo is about to launch their social network called “Mash”. Personally, I like to watch people take shots for the stars. Yahoo and MSN are chomping at the bit to catch Google…There are a TON of social networks like Myspace and soon to be Mash that are chasing after Facebook. Everyday I see more and more social networks launching.

What is Mash’s selling point? It’s a Yahoo product? Thats going to help get some initial subscribers but long term its not going to be a Facebook unless there is something Yahoo has WAY up its sleeve. From the early reviews/reports, it looks like Mash is going to be a wiki-social network where you can allow users to edit your profile if you want. I just see that as a big pain. I have one friend who will change things just because and I would ultimately just turn the feature off.