[aspiringsensei]

I hadn't considered this angle: are you able to flesh out the degree to which they will be able to do this?

I'm non-technical, so it's not immediately clear to me:

* the potential increase in cashflow yields from improving ad targeting (what change will it make? isn't google pretty good at this already?) * How the data from Zynga & Slide will flow out of the facebook ecosystem and into the broader web (is your slide identity linked to your google search identity somehow?)

I'd appreciate any thoughts that occur to you. Still puzzling over the point of a back-door into facebook user data and what that might bring. Could they export that into a google profile? Would an understanding of what individuals "like" and "dislike" in concert with knowledge of their social graph's likes and dislikes lead to more targeted advertising?

I guess those are the questions that google bought the company to answer: 182m is not that much in terms of earnings for them, and they might have been able to pay in stock.

Thanks for getting my mind whirring.

[jgilliam]

You can get some small amount of information about a person via Facebook publicly, but to really get at all the info, the user needs to authorize their Facebook account to the app. Zynga and Slide have tens of millions of people who've done this for their apps, if not more.

All Google has to do is put an ad on all the Zynga and Slide pages that passes them the Facebook UID of the current user, and it could become part of their ad targeting. Then they can get the actual Facebook data from Zynga and Slide.

Google wants everyone to give this info to them directly, that's what Google.Me, Google Buzz, and all their different social experiments have been about. But that hasn't been working out so well, so these deals are a cheap way to make sure they can still get at the Facebook profile data.