• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, August 23, 2007 11 AM

A new advertising system on Facebook gives marketers access to an unprecedented amount of information that its users reveal about themselves. The idea is to ultimately devise a system that predicts what products and services users might be interested in before they know it. Unnamed sources say the new behavior targeting plan, set to be unveiled this fall, is the company's top priority moving forward. Facebook declined to discuss specifics.

The same sources said the social networking giant is trying to achieve what Google did with AdWords, allowing advertisers to buy groups of people with similar interests using enhanced, targeted technology. Right now, advertisers can only target by age, gender and location; the new technology would add stated user interests, such as music, activities, sports, etc.

Instead of selling simple banner ads by category, marketing messages will appear in user, group and company news feeds. Facebook advertisers can already create their own pages and send out messages via news feeds in a separate, but vaguely described three-month marketing campaign. The new program is about pushing relevant marketing items onto users' pages. The company thinks the new initiative will be a less labor-intensive way to take advantage of the personal data people reveal on the site.

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