Facebook ads

Today Facebook began displaying advertisements in the “news feed” you see on your home page. Here’s an example of one I saw today

When I clicked on the link in that ad, it took me to a page displaying this video

While a single ad in my news feed is not going to bother me much, I don’t know whether I’d feel the same if there are going to be many of them scattered through the feed. Also, it doesn’t look like this ad has been contextually targeted (unless Facebook knows something about me I don’t?) But I’m sure they have that idea lurking around somewhere.

What was really interesting though was that the ad was being served through DoubleClick which is in the process of being acquired by Google. So all those guys predicting the downfall of Google at the hands of Facebook might want to re-think their arguments a bit! ๐Ÿ™‚

Yes, yes I know that’s not precisely what Scoble was saying, but I still think he’s full of hot air. ๐Ÿ˜›

Updating…

I’ve added Google ads to my blog in the sidebar. Not like I expect to earn a lot of money (or any actually) but I just thought my almost non-existent readers should know! ๐Ÿ™‚

GMail ads

Just some funny stuff I see as ads when I use GMail.

This set of ads I get when I’m viewing the introductory email from Google. Talk about advertising yourself! ๐Ÿ˜‰ What’s also funny is the related pages section, one of the pages is returning a 404, but that doesn’t faze Google. hehehe..

And this was when I was viewing another mail which mentioned “GMail” in the text a couple of times. Google really believes in fair play, don’t they? ๐Ÿ˜‰

Isn’t it Hobvias?

So then, striatic has been going under the name of Hobvias Sudoneighm for quite a while and a week or so ago, yeรถz finally twigged onto it because of a Google search he did. If I recall correctly, in a moment of uncharacteristic eloquence, he said he was a moron.

Today, striatic was quite excited to discover that a Google search for Hobvias Sudoneighm presented yeรถz’ pic as the 5th and 6th search result. The hobvias thing to do was a Google bomb to help yeรถz climb the rankings. My fellow conspirators in this endeavour are Shambly Hermit, striatic and Emily. (With hopes of recruiting more Flickrites.)

edit: We’ve just been joined by Meer ๐Ÿ™‚ And I’ve learnt that co-ordinating a Google bomb is hard work. Out of the five of us doing this, three of us are linking to one page and two others linking to another page. Aaaarghhh!

Google’s Game, Set and Match

The fun folks at Google now present for your viewing pleasure… Google Sets.

Enter in a group of things you know belong to a set and then click a button and Google predicts other items that might belong to that set each linked to a Google search for that word.

I played around with it, and found it to work pretty effectively. Some funny stuff, try putting in “walrus manatee dolphin” and click on large set to see someone unusual amongst all the sea creatures. ๐Ÿ˜‰

Or you could try putting in “one two three four five” and see how Google counts!