Published: Monday February 2, 2009
150 million users are an appealing lure.In a move likely to stir privacy advocates' ire, the company's 24-year-old founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the platform's ability to poll specific groups of users and be used as a marketing tool at the Davos World Economic Forum.
Later this year, Facebook intends to introduces "corporate polls" targeted at certain portions of the user base as a new means of making money.
Zuckerberg's demonstration didn't use corporate sponsors as examples -- instead, he used a more moderated approach, tempting the audience with polls on Obama, Palestine and Israel, "relaying the results back to the audience within minutes."
"Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups," the Guardian wrote Sunday. "the company has been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online. Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands, which are always seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors' products."
"Zuckerberg said 2009 will be Facebook's 'intense' year as it tries to justify some of the mammoth valuations that have been placed upon it by making some serious revenues through advertising. He was even seen sporting a tie, a sartorial extra which the Harvard drop-out has so far eschewed," the paper added.
Massive social networking and social news services -- such as Digg, Twitter and Facebook -- are increasingly attempting to capitalize on their large user bases and prove profitability. A deal to sell Digg in the purported neighborhood of $200 million fell through last year after vetting by Google.
Facebook's technology already allows advertisers to target specific categories of users, in much the same way that Google allows companies to target users based on keywords. The site is said to be logging an additional 450,000 users a day.
Polls are expected to launch broadly in the spring, and have been tested by companies like AT&T and Careerbuilder.com.
AT&T is already the target of privacy advocates; a company whistleblower alleges that the company hosted an National Security Agency spy room and allowed the agency to tap into its network to track phone calls.
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