Facebook: not taking over the world just yet

So, Facebook's 'Beacon' advertising system is supposed to be really evil, poised to give Mark Zuckerberg some James Bond villainesque ability to plant targetted ads in amongst the latest notifications of the stuff our vague acquaintances are doing that are too boring for them to bother to tell us directly.

But if this were the case, surely the ads on Facebook would actually be useful somehow? Instead, it seems that every ad I see is for utterly boring crap - the usual parade of phones, holidays and health insurance, with no sign whatsoever that these ads have been targeted at me at all. In fact, I doubt that they're even targeted at the average Facebook user. And if it's not boring corporate ads (you know, the kind that your brain just learns to ignore), it's abysmal stuff like this:

Seriously, who the hell wants a badly-drawn 3D avatar as their image on to the world? There can't be that many sexual predators who want to pass themselves off as 13-year-old girls, can there?

Rumours of Facebook's power have been greatly exaggerated on both sides. Facebook isn't the internet equivalent of the Dark Lord Sauron, forging the one ring that will bind us all into purchasing whatever crap they flash before our eyes; nor is Facebook a revolutionary force so great that it is worth $15bn.

It's a bubble, and what's worse is that it's an old bubble that has been reinflated. The internet advertising bubble burst back in 2001 when CPM rates collapsed after advertisers figured out that just showing the ad to people wasn't any guarantee that they would actually click on the thing, and an even weaker guarantee that they would buy any products at the end of it all. Companies whose business models depended on showing ads collapsed when this revenue stream abruptly dried up. The same will probably happen to Bubble 2.0, once people realise that contextual, social* advertising isn't all that much better than the stuff they had in 2001.

* I take particular pleasure in predicting the failure of 'social' marketing. I've long been a believer in the notion that the qualifier 'social' negates the meaning of the word it is applied to - 'social justice', 'social democracy', 'social cohesion' and my particular favourite, 'social worker'. 'Social web' and 'social marketing' threatened to undermine this notion; I'm happy to report that it seems that they do not.