""Any of my "friends" who post too many status updates that look like spam are going to get unfriended in a hurry.""

Business Week

http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2007/11/facebook_declar.html

Facebook’s ad system serves Social Ads that combine social actions from your friends – such as a purchase of a product or review of a restaurant – with an advertiser’s message. This enables advertisers to deliver more tailored and relevant ads to Facebook users that now include information from their friends so they can make more informed decisions. No personally identifiable information is shared with an advertiser in creating a Social Ad.

Social Ads can appear either within a user’s News Feed as sponsored content or in the ad space along the left side of the site.

Insights about Brand Presence and Promotion
Facebook gives marketers valuable metrics about their presence and promotion on Facebook. Facebook Insights gives access to data on activity, fan demographics, ad performance and trends that better equip marketers to improve custom content on Facebook and adjust ad targeting. Facebook Insights is a free service for all Facebook Pages and Social Ads.

Protecting User’s Privacy
Facebook has always empowered users to make choices about sharing their data, and with Facebook Ads we are extending that to marketing messages that appear on the site. Facebook users will only see Social Ads to the extent their friends are sharing information with them.

For more information about Facebook Ads, please visit www.facebook.com/ads.

I can certainly see the appeal of moving advertising to a more social realm in which people who genuinely like a product can, almost passively, serve as brand ambassadors. I mean, look at the millions upon millions of branded T-shirts people wear, turning themselves into human billboards.

I'm not yet convinced that such social ads are the entire future of advertising (though perhaps it's unfair to ascribe such views to Facebook strictly from an event that, after all, is intended to whip up enthusiasm over the new system). I wonder if there will be diminishing returns if Facebook members' news feeds end up resembling movies full of paid placements. Any of my "friends" who post too many status updates that look like spam are going to get unfriended in a hurry. Or if they all end up doing it too much, I might go to the trouble of using another social Web service.

Still, assuming Facebook provides adequate controls on exposure to marketing messages, "conversational" or "social" or otherwise--and I won't know that until I try it out myself--this could be a step in the right direction for advertising, both for marketers and for the rest of us