VentureBeat speculates on whether or not Facebook could see astronomical growth in its valuation after it deploys its SocialAds advertising platform next month.

When Facebook launches its "SocialAds" advertising product on November
6th, the technology will reportedly rely on cookies -- unique
identifiers sent to each user's computer from Facebook, and returned to
Facebook when they visit web pages -- to identify users and serve them
contextually relevant ads on sites across the web...

Advertisers would be able to clearly see interests in beer and other
such personal information for 50 million Facebook users, for the first
time. Right now, the ad networks record actions like surfing or
clicking, but lack specific data about what you're actually trying to
accomplish through your actions. There aren't many places besides a
Facebook profile where the average young man will write "I like to
drink beer" next to their name.

While I don't expect we'll see Facebook rapidly grow to that large of a valuation in the short term, this is an interesting frontier of online advertising to watch as social media begins to converge with performance marketing.

Cookies are no where near perfect as a foundation for metrics (as seen in the latest dust-up over cookie stuffing on ABestWeb, etc).  However, the online marketing and advertising industries have continued to improve upon their reporting efficiency as we work towards better metrics.  Combine that more efficient cookie with Facebook's wealth of information about a user (likes/dislikes/political views/etc) and you start to see a much more targeted adscape.

But here's where it gets interesting in my opinion.  Facebook won't be the long term winner as these social networks converge with performance marketing... Google will be.

Let me explain my point of view.  Jeff Molander recently quoted me from an email conversation in his post about Google missing the social media train.  Jeff makes the point that "Google doesn't get social media" and will thereby fall behind the likes of Microsoft / Facebook in the coming years as social media grows to over $10 billion in channel revenues by 2012 (according to Forrester).  My point in his piece is that we haven't seen Google's social media play yet.  (Interestingly enough, it will be announced the same week as Facebook's SocialAds announcement in November):

Sam Harrelson suggests we're about to see something huge from Google.

"Google will win the social game by being more open than
anyone. The social network of the coming years will not be a walled
garden or specific app like StumbleUpon.  Instead, it will be the
leveraging of all of our content and data with open API so that we (or
others we trust) can use those to build very niche and very
user-centric applications that push-pull data all over the place."

He continues,

"Facebook isn't compelling
because all of your friends are there. It's compelling because it
aggregates all of their data and yours. Google sees that and is going
to out aggregate Facebook while opening it up to the outside (something Facebook can't do). And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook
has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook
itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open--allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications."

If Mr. Harrelson is right (and he usually is) Google passed up Facebook with good reason and we all need to cool jets.

I don't know if I'm right, but I do know that Google is planning on something very interesting for the convergence of social media and performance marketing.