Facebook Business Solutions: Facebook Pages, Social Ads, & Beacon. hmm.

  Facebook Business Solutions 
  Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

This isn't an in-depth analysis just yet, but my initial impression is that Facebook Business Solutions seems pretty cool.   Whether or not it changes the game for FB on monetization remains to be seen...

Facebook Pages seems to be a retooled version of Sponsored Groups (aka Profiles for Things not People), with the added twist that you can now add Apps to these pages... altholooks like the apps need to be tweaked a bit to work with FB pages.   but i like the concept... i created 2 sample pages for organizations i'm involved with, for the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network i help run, and for the Stanford Facebook Application Network related to the class i help teach.

Facebook Social Ads look like a combination of Flyers + Sponsored Stories -- the stuff that shows up in the News Feed -- aka "AdWords for Facebook".   not sure how well these work just yet; testing now.  I'll try to write about this more once i get a handle on how it performs.  since appearance-wise this seems pretty similar to previous stuff, doesn't seem likely this will make a huge difference in monetization, except now it's self-serve instead of administered via direct sales group. 

Facebook Beacon seems to be a more proactive version of DoubleClick (i think?), in other words it enables advertisers & facebook to understand cross-site user behavior -- with obvious closely-associated privacy concerns, altho technically it's no different than what any other tracking or measurement service (Google Analytics, Wordpress's recently-acquired Gravatar, Typepad's TypeKeys, etc etc) is doing with javascript-enabled tracking.  However, it's what they do with that info that might be unusual -- Beacon enables external sites (who have to pay for this? i think) to publish transactional events into the "News Feed" on behalf of users who are doing something off-Facebook on a website.  This may cause some controversy, i think... i don't have a strong opinion one way or the other just yet, but since they implemented it as "opt-out" rather than "opt-in", it's going to cause a stir as users realize what info is being published to Facebook, just like the News Feed caused a similar stir last year with publishing on-Facebook info.  Worth watching this one further... mark my words: this one is definitely going to heat up the blogosphere, once people realize what's going on.

haven't checked out Facebook Insights yet, and Platform (APIs & Apps) & Polls have been around... will try to do more followup on these in a few days.