After taking some time to review Facebook’s new advertising offering, I can’t even even bring myself to feign interest. Honestly, I expected a lot more out of Mr. Zuckerberg.

Business Pages. Sponsored groups that use consumers as marketers. If history serves me, didn’t MySpace try the “Brand Friend” angle with Paris Hilton about 8 months ago? Whatever happened to that?

Beacon and Social Ads. As vaguely Orwellian as ads targeted to your profile data are, it’s also just an exercise in data parsing. I am not certain whether marginally more targeted advertising will really provide the type of value necessary to justify Facebook’s magic number valuation.

Insight. Targeted metrics for advertisers. Probably the most useful of the new products.

In short,

Is this the new Adsense? Highly unlikely.

Is it a revenue model that Facebook seriously needed? You bet it is.

Will “brand friends” work better this time around? Probably enough to fool advertisers for about 6 months.

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