FriendRank - In Soviet Russia Google ranks YOU
July 10, 2008
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If Google can have its say, advertising inside Social Networks is about to change. Google has put off the social advertising realm for long enough. You have heard of PageRank, well now there is Google FriendRank.
Googles latest patent will attempt to put a “rank” on you. Yes, YOU. The patent explains that they will use this algorithm to identify the key influencers in a network. This will then serve as the basis to serve ads upon.
What kinds of data might the Google Friend Rank Algorithm use to determine that you are a key influencer?
- # of Friends
- # of comments
- # of articles published
- # of networks user is in
- amount of time you have been apart of a network
- Demographic Data - Age, Sex, Location etc.
- Which groups you are apart of
- Rate at which people befriend you
Google is the king of delivering targeted ads, so it really is no surprise to me that they are developing an algorithm to do such a thing. I honestly wondered what took them so long. I have a feeling, however, that this will not sit well with the community. The implementation of targeted ads on Facebook has received a lot of resistance and I am sure FriendRank will not be any different.
How do you feel about this? Is this too big brotherish? Should users be able to partake in ‘social networking’ without having to worry about someone targeting an Ad based on their user data?
Comments
4 Responses to “FriendRank - In Soviet Russia Google ranks YOU”
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We’re at a point where Social Networking is 9relatively) fresh territory for advertising - don’t really see why we shouldn’t be subjected to ads based on gathering demographics in this sphere - it’s what advertising and marketing people have always tried to do anyway.
As for judging peoples personal brand ranking based on how many “Friends”, etc, they have online - that’s flawed for a start. Whoever started using the term “friend’ on most SN sites got the wrong term - most people have a small % of their “friends’ that actually are friends in the true sense of the word, and then they have people that think they might say something they might like to hear - how many followers to the “Big guys” have on say twitter? - and they pay attention and respond to each and every one of them - right?
i reckon Google ranking us based on how “Kewl” we are on Social networking is mainly just going to be a good thing for peoples ego’s more than anything else. (For business purposes obviously i’d like to be #1 in google - but hey, when it comes to the social scene - being #5000 doesnt really bother me much -my ego ain’t that fragile
I’d rather have some quality ads served at me than half the spammy junk on facebook already
What I am really interested in here is how this friend rank is going to carry over to the sites that are bookmarked by these more powerful social users.
I have already seen that the more powerful the social profile that submits your blog post to say Digg, the better you do in the search engines and with the popularity of the post in the social bookmarking site.
I added this comment so I can be subscribed to more comments via email, (forgot to check the box) as this thread is extremely interesting to me.
@ Chris
Sorry on the delay to respond.
When a power account promotes your content, there is a much greater chance of it catching traction inside the network. This is typically the case across the board, no matter the social bookmarking network.
With regards to the effect of the post inside organic rankings. What happens is that when a post goes popular, or hits the homepage, its internal link weight rises significantly b/c it is linked too off of much more powerful pages.
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Only time will tell how Google will unleash this new algo, FriendRank. It is very interesting IMO; going forward I will continue to post any of my findings on the blog, so keep an eye out.