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 …

The Internet is advertising's most measurable medium, but despite available research, Web data isn't necessarily accurate, posing a massive problem for advertisers. You've seen it before: depending on whom you ask, comScore or Nielsen/NetRatings, Yahoo either had 133 million unique visitors in June or 108 million. That's not a small difference. So which do you believe? Both companies stand by their research methods. Understanding advertisers' woes, the IAB recently called for a public audit and accreditation of their research. "It's a really rough science," said company CEO Randall Rothenberg. But what will that do? How do you audit …

YouTube's make-or-break advertising system has finally been rolled out. Now it's time for the $1.65 billion video site to start repaying the massive fee Google paid for it last fall. So how much revenue will it generate? The answer, predictably, is not much -- not for several years anyway. However, over the long haul, the contribution could be very material, at least on the top line. Overlays along the bottom of videos can be ignored, which makes the ads a truly opt-in experience. According to data tests cited by the New York Times, 75% of viewers presented with …

The rich and fabulous has an exclusive haven where they can congregate online. Social networks like Facebook are filled with droves of people who "are not generally well-networked themselves," says 22-year-old Roger Allen Conner, Jr., who founded a North Carolina-based consulting firm called SiloIQ. Conner is looking for powerful friends--the kind who can waltz into exclusive nightclubs in New York and L.A., or sell 1-year-old Bentleys to their less-wealthy friends when they want the latest Maserati. People with real connections; people you can only find (ostensibly) on aSmallWorld. Yep, aSW is part of the growing sector of …

Google Earth is expanding its scope to include the stars in the sky, the company said Tuesday. The search giant, whose Earth program gives users anything from an astronaut's view of the earth to street level images, wants to turn the service into a playground for stargazers. It's hard to imagine how Google could make money from this, although you can imagine it will soon integrate Google Earth images into its results. "Never before has a roadmap of the entire sky been made so readily available," said Dr. Carol Christian, who was recruited to co-lead Google Earth's Sky …

Job site Monster.com suffered a massive attack yesterday, as hackers deployed a Trojan to access the employers' section of the site using stolen log-in information. Security firm Symantec said the program was used to gather names, email addresses, home addresses and phone numbers, and could be used to send phishing and spam emails. The security firm said: "This remote server held over 1.6 million entries with personal information belonging to several hundred thousands candidates, mainly based in the U.S., who had posted their resumes to the Monster.com Web site." Monster has since been alerted of the security …

In order to make a first-person shooter that could compete with "Call of Duty 2", video game publisher THQ hired a technology firm to measure game testers' response to its new title "Frontlines." THQ had tech firm EmSense measure their brain wave, heart rate and perspiration rate as they played the game. Is that data more reliable than what the testers said? Does "emotion sensing" know more about what you do or don't like? Well, one way of measuring the results is to see how well the game sells when it hits shelves in 1Q 2008. If it …

Apple's market-dominating iTunes Store may have just been handed a healthy dose of competition. MTV Networks may soon announce a digital music partnership with RealNetworks, the purveyor of online music subscription service (and iTunes competitor) Rhapsody. Telecom giant Verizon Wireless will sign on to supply mobile distribution for the joint venture's content. These partnerships are a response to Apple's meteoric rise as a consumer electronics and media-distributing giant. Rhapsody has always played second fiddle to iTunes, while MTV's previous online music ventures failed to get off the ground. Apple's fierce hardware/distribution combination has allowed it to enter successfully …

Adobe, the software maker behind Acrobat and the Flash video player, is set to announce the integration of a standard format for high-def video in its latest version of Flash. The H.264 video format is the same one deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD video players, as well as satellite and cable set-top boxes. The new version of Flash containing the high-def format is being released today, although the changes in video quality will only become detectable as video producers encode their videos with the new format. Flash isn't the first video player to integrate H.264, but it's the …

Facebook and MySpace are starting to make bank on online advertising, but a recent Forrester study shows that traditional online ad formats aren't really playing well for advertisers. The result is a growing concern that social networking isn't a marketing boon. There's a new movement in some marketing circles that says social networks should be used more like a customer-relationship management (CRM) tool. eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson called advertising on social networks "low-hanging fruit" for marketers that need to figure out "a model that expands the beauty of social networking." However, it's far easier for marketers to buy …