Facebook may have got its tune in play; the ads on the right side of my web page in order are:

1. how to build muscles
2. learning to read the Bible
3. saving water in Australia
4. ‘best FPS game on FB’
5. Australian real estate.

Now think about that; Facebook used to be quite crude in its advertising with want-a-girlfriend and grow-back-your-hair along with the usual furniture advertisments.  Nowdays it seems to have taken a page from Google’s playbook and has allocated advertisers into several categories which for me fall into male/christian/ex-pat aussie/video game player/ex-pat aussie!  Now while all these things are true, they are rather mixed up and unfortunately don’t represent me.  For a start there isn’t anyway possible that I can ‘save water in Australia’ since I’m a million miles away.  I don’t think there is anything which indicates that I’m a video game player so that is most likely just a promotion from the developer paying FB to carry the ad higher, and I’m a little beyond building muscles I fear and most 50yo males are more into whisky and wine than serious gym time.

I really think FB is squandering an opportunity here – they have massive data and don’t seem to know how to use it for insight themselves.  While response time is important there could be background anaytics of my data to suggest more important things including really looking at those infrequent posts and comments which I make.  For example, an important part of my family just had a wonderful little girl and I’d be more interested in baby items right now than ‘building muscles’!  Somehow, FB has choosen to make a land grab for running & ruining the internet through search, messaging, email, identity, photos and everything else they can create and is fast becoming a bloated rather than interesting competitor.  Beware the plague of creeping featureism.