Business Insight Zone

It’s been more than a month since we talked about Facebook, which increasingly looks like not just the “It” company of the season, but of 2007. This morning’s Web haul brought me to these two interesting items about the social-networking phenomenon/company.

1. On VentureBeat, Kevin Barenblat writes about the challenges that face developers trying to capitalize on Facebook’s f8 applications platform. His summary: the application you develop for Facebook won’t be as viral as you think, and existing marketing tools like search engine optimization (SEO) don’t have their usual punch within the Facebook environment.*
2. On TechCrunch, Duncan Riley writes about how Facebook will / may / should use the vast personal data contained in users’ profiles. The short version: If they get sophisticated enough, they should be able to predict what users will like before the user ever expresses that particular preference. Somewhere, an advertising executive just passed out in ecstasy.

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Let me quote Barenblat on this point: “… because news feeds are one of the best ways to reach out to users, expect a News Feed Optimization (NFO) industry to develop just like Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” File that away until later — I’m working up a post about some of the new entrepreneurial niches opening up across the new media / technology / massive-interconnectivity spheres.