Location, location, location
I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at local, mobile applications and how they fit into gaming and local commerce. Michael Arrington biopsied the social gaming economy and found it to be quite ill. Marginal advertisers (and I use even that term loosely) are filling these companies’ coffers with cash from shady lead-gen deals.
In other news Facebook announced an updated advertising policy which, amongst other things, will allow them to target users based on the geotags of content that they post.
Facebook also announced plans for their Open Graph API which would allow any web page to behave like a Facebook “Page.” This is a big deal. What if I could “friend,” “favorite,” or “fan” every page or story on the internet instead of “sharing” it. What would that mean? Would it have the same semantic meaning as “follow?” Would it be easier for consumers to grasp? People have great difficulty understanding the difference between saving a single item versus saving a stream of items. That’s why more users use bookmarks than RSS readers - or even twitter. If Facebook could somehow use the social graph to help users cross that bridge - or to make it irrelevant - then this could be huge.