All Up In Your Face, Book

This graph shows the number of users logged in through Thursday evening on February 22. 150,000 Facebook users care more about [Grey's Anatomy] than their friends.

One of beauties (as well as detriments) of the innernet is that it provides marketers and product hawkers detailed information about their target demographics; and it does this better than any other medium (Nielsen ratings, my ass.) What's really interesting, however, is when you see (as in the graph above) how an internet audience is affected by television. Every Thursday the Facebook team watches the activity on their site take a dramatic dive at the start of Grey's Anatomy, and then return to normal levels thereafter (it even rises a bit during the commercial breaks.)

Services like Facebook and Myspace are in a unique position here. Besides monitoring their members actions, locations, colleges, and interests -- they're able to monitor activity because so many members keep the window open all the time. Case in point, this guy:

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.

500 hours on Facebook. That's a five with two zero's after it. As a trader for Goldman Sachs, he probably made 500 dollars for each of the hours he spent trolling Facebook looking at his friend's younger sister's pictures.

But however much of a time suck these spaces are, now we can verify that bankers and traders are filthy scumbags (or at least, the owners of these services, Mark Zuckerburg and Rubert Murdoch can.) And in as much as Myspace is a "place for friends," its really a place for advertisers to cater their products to your every click. They're providing the most in depth and reciprocal medium for both consumers and retailers to better understand one another.

Now these notions have already been floating around the ethosphere for some time. The advent of a ratings box and the tighter loop that it provided television executives years ago got the ball rolling in the first place. But its interesting to see the cross medium affect -- namely, how the internet effects television, effects advertising. Wowzers, this is a bit too heady for websides.

But generally it begs the question: Does the trader from Goldman really even need advertisements for dick cream and Viagra while he looks at young girls? Whats the point if he's already typing with one hand...

[via Scott Kidder and TechCrunch]