A glowing profile of Facebook’s business to date by Kurt Eichenwald:1
The Google concept of demand fulfillment—someone searches for a pink shirt and is shown an ad for a pink shirt—had an important place in Internet marketing, the pitch went. But Facebook was about generating demand by showing users content that they might not have otherwise considered.
It’s long, but worth a read; it presents the optimistic take on Facebook’s future by framing their targeting efforts as the natural next step in a century-wide evolution in advertising, from print to radio to TV to search.
I’m clearly skeptical2 of Facebook’s long-term prospects, especially on mobile, but cautiously so. The truth is that Facebook has never really been that interesting to me for the exact same reasons that Twitter is: I have a wide array of interests, am intensely curious, and have little desire to dwell anywhere for long – physically or intellectually. But then I remember that most people settle within miles of their place of birth, have the same friends for life, and I remember that I’m not Facebook’s target customer.