[drharris]

I love it, particularly the statement "Facebook should stop treating ads like they are dirty things that must be manipulated and integrated unwittingly into the Facebook experience." Totally agree. Pinterest succeeds because it is a form of content discovery. Aggregators work toward the same purpose. If I knew that FB could truly target ads to my specific situation, you bet I would be curious to look at them. Who doesn't want to find new, compelling content all the time?

I believe whoever wins the content discovery game wins the next decade. Google+ is the only one I see trying to make strides in this area, but they simply don't have the active user base to back it up. FB has the userbase, it just needs to capitalize on it. Doing so would mean a very big win for the small business sector too; for once, ads would actually engage the user and probably convert to a sale more readily.

More than ads, FB needs to provide tools to content producers, businesses, pages that enable them to capitalize on such opportunities. How difficult would it be to say, "We found that 17-23 year olds whose parents like Tom Petty are 67% more likely to like your brand. Would you like to create a targeted ad for this group?" They already have the data. Businesses would easily pay for that kind of functionality.