A couple of days back, Louise Story wrote in Bits/NYTimes that, “More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages–despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads.” A Canadian company called Weblo is providing the ad network and compensates the owners. Clearly there is a tendency to disintermediate Facebook and generate ad revenue. Yesterday, I came across a Facebook application called Bonfire which spoofs, the much maligned Beacon. I think we can use Bonfire to take the disintermediation to its limit – users deriving direct benefit by placing recommendations in their profile pages.
As with Beacon, using Bonfire users can place web claims similar to what Beacon partners do. Instead, these sites can prompt the users about placing such a note in the user’s profile page. It will be easy to include a URL that friends of this user can click and visit the commerce’s site, which can issue a credit if the friends take a specified action. This way, Facebook is kept out of the loop with the users directly benefiting. Of course somebody should maintain the credits earned by the users, across the entire ad serving sites. Since the rewards will be of low value, what we are looking for is a micro-payment system. Amazon already has such a system called Amazon Flexible Payment System. Of course Google Checkout and Paypal can easily setup such a system as well.
Posted by aswath at December 10, 2007 02:56 AM