• GigaOm, Monday, August 27, 2007 11:03 AM

Facebook's plan for a new ad targeting system received lots of attention, but News Corp.'s MySpace--social networking's former media darling--actually launched a beta version of a similar platform, and almost nobody noticed.

That's not to say that MySpace and Facebook aren't making money, but monetization is still the No. 1 concern for most social networks. To that end, MySpace is doing a far better job than Facebook; Google's search partnership is certainly one of the main reasons, but Pali Research's Richard Greenfield predicts that "the industry powerhouse" has "a huge advertising opportunity in front of it" with its new targeting program. Targeting "the most valuable advertising real estate across MySpace" will "meaningfully increasing the advertising opportunity," over the next several months, he predicted.

So why does everyone talk about Facebook? The social networking giant is getting a lot of mileage out of itsgroups and app development program, but the media's obsession with Facebook may have more to do with the fact that media people spend a lot of time there, rather than MySpace.

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