The service will initially be ‘opt-in’ and will use ‘friends-only’ as the default privacy setting so as to avoid users unwittingly broadcasting their location to the whole network due to unfamiliarity with the new feature. Obviously there are still serious security issues (when people know where you are they also know where you’re not) and unfortunately it’s a little too easy right now to imagine the Places feature to be, even if only in a very small number of cases, a potential aid to stalking, burglary and other such ugly crimes.

Regardless of this, it is not actually the security side of things that I wanted to discuss in relation to Facebook Places right now (that has already been covered in detail elsewhere), but instead I wanted to consider some of the implications for the increasing localisation of the mobile web.

The true significance of Facebook Places, I believe, is rather in providing us yet another important stepping stone in the increasingly prominent process that is the localisation of the mobile web. With the ever growing potency of mobile devices (whether smart-phones, tablet computers, sat-navs, netbooks etc), localised services are more and more becoming the norm – including everything from local area information, maps and nearby services, right through to the accompanying localised targeted advertising.

This latter aspect will I expect provide a significant surge in online ad spends once the mobile targeted ad delivery systems become widespread and developed enough to be accessible enough for smaller businesses also. Finally, even these local independent shops, bars and services will now also have an effective incentive to utilise web advertising (which was not really the case before – not many of my local barbers for example have a web presence, or an advertising budget). Now even a tiny newsagent or a tea room will be able to register its presence and pay for advertising on localised mobile devices – alerting nearby potential customers who are logging into Facebook (or anything else for that matter, given a bit more time) of the existence of whatever they seek: a sort of mobile fancy digital Yellow pages, with maps and sat-nav integrated if you will.

In this sense, I expect many will be grateful to Facebook for leading this localisation of the mobile web and once again proving that they can have a significant impact on web traffic and thereby ad spend (we’re all already aware of the power of the ‘like’ button to boost traffic for websites and blogs). That certainly is something worthy of recognising and applauding, without of course forgetting about the aforementioned attendant security issues. Hats off to Facebook on the concept – they just need to carefully and sensibly manage the implementation now.

Dejan Levi

All this represents a pretty cool little diversion for a lunch break at work and will no doubt prove popular as any original spin-offs for Twitter are these days. However, what the Hunch game illustrates more pertinently is just how effectively certain bits of online personal data can be cross-collated to produce a remarkably accurate profile of your online (and possibly ‘real world’) self.

Indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if Hunch’s principles and coding can be applied very lucratively not just to create this fun little game, but also to deliver highly specific targeted advertising to twitter users. This in essence is where the game’s real relevance comes in, and it will be interesting to see if Hunch.Inc (which delivers a range of personalised recommendation services) can extend their idea to other sites that utilise social networking principles in a similar way.

For users of social networking sites the conclusions are pretty clear – if you upload even seemingly inconsequential and trivial data, it nonetheless can prove very useful as a piece in the jigsaw construction of your online behaviour and personality. This in itself is not a problem for many web users and I’m not going to try to convince you here that it should be – what is important to emphasise however is that there is no irrelevant personal data in the online world any more for, as the tendency towards targeted advertising becomes the norm, such data is now becoming the single most essential component in the effective functioning of the online ad economy.

Dejan Levi

The issue is not a new one in relation to FB; we all remember the disasterous and intrusive compulsory Beacon app, which monitored user spending habits and harvested the info for corporate clients. Understandably the user backlash was so swift and severe that FB quickly pulled the app – but some of the principles behind it are evident still in other practices. I decide to log in to my Facebook account to assess the effects of the current level of advertising and commercialisation on my user experience…

The first thing that should be noted is that there is not an overwhelming quantity of advertising involved with using FB. When I look at my profile I have a couple of fairly small and unintrusive ads in the right hand margin, which are directly connected to the info I have entered into my profile. In terms of ad presence and prominence therefore, things feel ok – in short it is perfectly possible to use FB and largely ignore them, making the trade-off to use the free service seem quite worthwhile.

However the issue is that in order for the advertising to be as minimal as it is, the ads need to be highly specific and targeted, as FB can raise far more revenue per pixel by using such ads as opposed to non-targeted ones. The challenge in terms of user privacy thereby clearly involves a delicate balance between maintaining revenue on the one hand, and user trust on the other.

For me personally the specificity of the targeteing is a major factor in my feeling towards it. For example, I recently added a Sopranos themed app to my profile, after which I noticed a jump in the number of adverts I was seeing that were connected to buying a new television, digibox, or tv-channel package. Fair enough I thought, if this was to mean I could use the service for free then I felt quite happy to continue to do so.

Things changed however when I noticed I was getting ads directly connected to TV shows or bands that I had listed in my ‘likes’. Suddenly I was being exposed to a much more specific level of advertising – Sopranos coffee mugs, Arrested Development t-shirts (I had listed the show as one of my favourites) and other similar items.

Once this started happening I pretty much overnight became quite wary of listing too many details that I expected would be thus used (I only have one or two shows or bands listed now) since there was something in the overly direct correlation between my profile info and the advertising that was somehow creepy and offputting.

I didn’t want to enter personal info about myself once I felt I was basically providing a free and in a way unconsenting consumer survey. Though I had had targeted advertising on my profile for a while, it had up until this point felt general enough for me to regard it as uninstusive. Now I felt as though every detail of my profile was sooner or later to be turned into ad revenue – and that this was the whole point of the FB exercise.

Ultimately, as Zuckerberg emphasises, sharing is good. But it will only continue if we trust FB not to cross the line of commercialising this sharing entirely and blurring the guiding principles of the venture. If the advertising is just a way to maintain the service and keep it free then it must be retained – but if it starts to affect the levels to which people feel comfortable to share, then it must be re-assessed.

Perhaps one solution is to remove the most specific, and hence obvious, level of advertising (the ‘Heroes’ bed linen for the ‘Heroes’ fan for example) – and retain the others, though of course there would be revenue implications in this. Regardless of this FB and Zuckerberg must know that once the line between community and commerce is totally blurred, many users (myself included) will simply migrate to another network. I don’t doubt that a healthy balance is possible – but it can only be maintained by continuously listening to the feedback of the community.

Dejan Levi