It seems that facebook may be trying to diversify its advertising model a bit from typical display and flyer ads by including video now as well. Also, it looks like you can now comment on them (what can’t you comment on in facebook these days?). Will people actually want to interact with ads? They had better start rolling out some incredibly engaging (i.e. hilarious) content if they want people to get in on the action.

UPDATE: I just logged into facebook again and it appears to have been replaced by the standard Gift module. Maybe this is rolling out on a trial basis?

.

If Microsoft buys in, it will be a major milestone for facebook and will allow it to build on existing Microsoft ad platforms to improve its advertising revenues (which would couple nicely with facebook’s recent deployment of pay-per-click and user-targeted advertising options). And such a buy-in would make life much easier for Microsoft because it will keep them from having to reinvent the wheel and attract new users to yet another social site, which is very important as many users are getting tired of signing up for new sites and reentering the same information over and over. (This is why the future of social networking online is in the OpenID project, if they could ever make it more consumer-friendly.) In fact, I would say that the online user infrastructure is about to hit a ceiling for the number of social-based sites it can support, but that is a topic for another time.

A possible complication to this Microsoft/facebook tango is that it is also rumored that Google has been circling the waters looking to buy a stake of facebook, as well. I have doubts about this, given the most recent rumors coming out of Mountain View (via TechCrunch) about a ‘facebook killer’ that Google is planning. Essentially, they are planning a rollout of 100% open APIs that can both push and pull data from a social network (aka Orkut). So, I’d take any Google/facebook rumors with a grain of salt…since it seems that everyday there is a new story about Google’s plans for world domination.

All-in-all, it is shaping up to be a very interesting couple for weeks for facebook and the social networking world as a whole…updates to follow.

This is a big move that will certainly give facebook an edge on revenue viability in the social networking world, but the only thing I am left wondering is why it took so long.  Google revolutionized online ads a few years ago by making its advertisements non-intrusive and relevant to the user’s search query.  With a treasure trove of user data, facebook is a bit slow to get this new advertising platform to the market, but better late than never.  If you think about it, the data users provide on thier facebook profiles are truly a marketer’s dream…the more data you can compile on any group of people, the more accurately you can predict their behavior and cater to their specific needs.

The ability to user-target is already available on facebook for its user-created polls, which were launched on June 1, 2007.  Basically, any user can create a one question poll such as “What is your favorite kind of ice cream?” and then select what criteria the response sample needs to meet based on their listed interests, activities, gender, or school.  This results in amazingly relevant data because of its relatively high level of sophistication in targeting a sample population.  This idea expanded to advertising (currently only to be housed in the News Feed, but I see future expansion as a possibility) will greatly expand facebook;s ability to offer advertisers a relevant population to market their product to, which in turn means that facebook can generate more income per click and expand its client-base over time.

As long as Zuckerberg’s crew makes sure that they have a heavy-duty padlock on all user data and do not actually allow any outside access to it, I see this new platform as begin a huge success.  However, there is definitely the possibility that if this is handled incorrectly, there will be a user-revolt similar to the events following the launch of the News Feed…but I think facebook learned its lesson and will make sure it takes care of its own people first and focus on advertisers second.

Wired takes a look at 3 potential problems with the new platform.

ZDNet and the possible privacy implications.