Facebook’s Prospects May Rest on Trove of Data
From the article: "As Facebook turns to Wall Street in the biggest public
offering ever by an Internet company, it faces a new, unenviable test: how to
keep growing and enriching its hungry new shareholders. The answer lies in what
Facebook will be able to do — and how quickly — with its crown jewel: its
status as an online directory for a good chunk of the human race, with the
names, photos, tastes and desires of nearly a billion people. … What Facebook
already has — more than any other digital company — is a spectacularly rich
vault of information about its users, who cannot seem to stay away from the
site. Americans, on average, now spend 20 percent of their online time on
Facebook alone, thanks to the ever-growing menu of activities the company has
introduced, from playing games to sampling music to posting pictures of baby
showers and drunken escapades. Some 300 million photos are uploaded to the site
daily.
How Facebook exploits its users’ information — and how those users react —
is the next reckoning. David Eastman, worldwide digital director for the
advertising agency JWT, said Facebook would need to give marketers more data
about what kinds of users click on what kinds of advertising, and about their
travels on the Internet before and after they click on an ad. Most brands want
to have a presence on Facebook, he said, but they do not quite understand who
sees their pitches and whether they lead to greater sales." Read more
