Facebook checkins turned into advertising, quit moaning…

Its intriguing to see ideas you’ve had previously, explored and implemented. I wrote a while ago about mydreamscape and how it was going to make money. One of my suggestions was product and locational placements.

Maybe a lot of people are dreaming about a certain location or a certain product. If you own that location or product you may want to own that page and make it more like yours? So for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/items/buzzlightyear/ – could be a page about buzzlight year in dreams and have images and links to the item its self. This would also be true of locations too for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/location/europe/london/thamesbarrier – would obviously link to the Thames barrier in London with information taken from Wikipedia.org and other open sources. The information architecture of exactly how this would this work needs to be sorted out.

Realizing this in my head, but decided not to include the option of having people who were spokespeople for a certain thing in there dreams. So realistically if I was to consistently have dreams about buzzlight year not only would I be featured on a item page but I’d be highly ranked. So if one of my friends was to have a dream about buzzlight year not only would they have a link to /buzzlightyear but my friends thoughts or dreams would be ranked much higher. Of course this would change once Pixar decided to own that space.

Sounds confusing…?

Well Facebook just included this feature in a slightly different way…

If someone checks you in to a certain place or likes a certain thing. Facebook can and will use your location/like to advertise to your friends that thing/location.

So back to mydreamscape, you would get. Ian Forrester had a dream about the Amazon Kindle automatically but the difference here is Amazon would be able to pick and choose which stories they would use in the advertising. So you don’t get that embarrassing problem, where a person has a negative dream and the advertising is based of it. Just because someone checks into Starbucks doesn’t mean they had a positive experience there, so to run it across a human eye makes sense to me.

Ok now thats out the way, I would agree that the whole process of mining users likes/checkins for data they can use for advertising purposes really sucks. But then again, to be fair to facebook. Its all in there in the EULA. If you don’t like it, for goodness sake switch to something else or stop using it.

Just quit moaning…