• Bloomberg/Businessweek, Thursday, September 23, 2010 11:36 AM

Unlike AOL, Yahoo, or even Google, Facebook is positioned to turn the Web into "the perfect advertising medium," Bloomberg/Businessweek suggests. "The company has developed a potentially powerful kind of advertising that's more personal -- more 'social,' in Facebook's parlance -- than anything that's come before," reads the magazine feature.

So, those ads that sit on the far right hand of site are what Madison Avenue's been waiting for? Not exactly. "These ads can evolve, though, from useless little billboards into content, migrating into casual conversations between friends, colleagues, and family members -- exactly where advertisers have always sought to be," writes Bloomberg/Businessweek. "The whole premise of the site is that everything is more valuable when you have context about what your friends are doing," says Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg. "That's true for ads as well." Meanwhile, what the social network presently lacks in targeting sophistication, it more that makes up for in sheer size. At last count, Facebook had about 550 million members worldwide -- about 165 million of whom reside in the United States.

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