Facebook discusses their new advertising system in a posting on their blog. They say that some things will change and some things will not:

First of all, what’s not changing:

• • Facebook will always stay clutter-free and clean.
  • Facebook will never sell any of your information.
  • You will always have control over your information and your Facebook experience.
  • You will not see any more ads than you did before this.

Here’s what is changing:

• • You now have a way to connect with products, businesses, bands, celebrities and more on Facebook.
  • Ads should be getting more relevant and more meaningful to you.
  • You now have the option to share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook.

But the post goes on and I’m not quite sure I understand what they mean by the following statement they make:

Engaging with businesses and buying things are part of your everyday life. Advertising doesn’t have to be about interrupting what you’re doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it.

Maybe it’s just poorly written, but I assume people want to get information about purchases before they make them? Anyway, more to the point social ads don’t really appear to add a lot of value. In the piece as an example, they mention you’ll see that one of your friends have just added a movie from Blockbuster to their queue and you’ll want to set up a time to go over and watch it at their house. Okay. No incremental dollars there. And this example is a complex one since if it’s Blockbusters Netflix-copy service, they actually incur further costs by increasing rental turnover though if you hold onto your videos for a longer period of time, they make more money on their fixed fee service.

There is definitely value in grabbing context from other applications and putting them into a socially-visible network, it’s just not immediately clear to me how this translates into higher sales for advertisers. It will take some time before companies and agencies can test, overcome the inevitable backlash, and figure out how to make this work for a consumer, not to mention for advertisers themselves. As Jerry points out, consumers may want to be “friends” with brands, but do they really want to be spammed by their friend’s brand friends?