Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

More info sharing for Facebook users

Facebook wants to adapt its site to incorporate updates from non-Facebook sites, which would lead to a lot of potential for targeted ads. This also means more info for advertisers on your browsing habits. Jennifer Collins reports.

Download

TEXT OF STORY

Bill Radke: The big guns behind social networking site Facebook are meeting this week with Web developers from other websites. This is happening at the company’s annual conference in San Francisco. Facebook is expected to unveil some new tools for its roughly 400 million users. As Marketplace’s Jennifer Collins tells us, the goal is to make the social network even more a part of daily life.


Jennifer Collins: OK, say you’re on a site like Marketplace.org. You hear a story you like by say, me. Before you can share it with your friends, you have to sign back on to Facebook.com.

Market researcher Justin Smith says Facebook might make that process more automatic. And there’s more:

Justin Smith: The rumor is that they’re going to expand this to the rest of the Web. So that you could say I like this website or I like this publisher and I’d like to continue to get updates from them inside Facebook, even though this website doesn’t live inside Facebook.

That’s a lot of information sharing, and it could bring with it profitable targeted ads.

Augie Ray is with Forrester Research:

Augie Ray: Because the more relevant you are, the more welcome the advertising is by consumers and the more valuable it is to advertisers, who will pay more for that.

Only problem now is Facebook has to get users to agree to share their browsing habits with advertisers.

I’m Jennifer Collins for Marketplace.

Related Topics

Collections:

Tagged as: