Facebook experiment

Evening/morning all

I thought I'd share the details of an experiment I'm currently running on Bookface.

It started a few days ago, when I replied to a friend with the first thing that came to mind in response to his post. The first thing that came to mind happened to be a German phrase (purely because my mind works in ways that may not always seem logical).

Then tonight, I noticed for the first time, that one of the sponsored ads that appeared on my page was a German ad. Obviously Bookface had lookd at my postings and decided that maybe I was German. So the experiment begun.

For the past few hours on Bookface, I have mostly been Spanish, but also a hint of German, Greek, and Japanese.

Over the next few days, I intend to spam my bookface account with random ramblings in foreign languages, and see what adverts come my way as a result. Watch this space

 

I had the same on here, i looked at some thing on another site that sells things, then log on here and one advert came up from that site i was looking at and the thing i was looking at to buy

 

I thought that was more to do with the cookies that are loaded every time you go to any website.

 

Google certainly pays attention to location and keywords when displaying

results.

 

Can I play too Dave?

Facebook thinks I live in West Bay in the Caymen Islands, so I get all sorts of ads about Rum & Boats n stuff.

 

ah ah

 

Best keep off the porn sites then.

 

Bookfac is considerably more clever than the primitive cookie spying technique (which is now virtually impossible anyway unless your machine has been compromised).

Bookface looks for key words in your posts, and also looks at who you interact with and what sort of things they write. From this and many, many other pieces of data, it builds up a profile of you, and then that profile is used in their advert engine to work out which ads to show you.

As far as bookface is concerned, I am probably still not Spanish or German, because most of my posts to date have been written in English as have those of the people I interact with the most. However the fact that Facebook showed me a German ad a few days after a brief exchange in German, suggests that the profiling engine has already adjusted the stats for the probability that I might be German.

If I stick with my experiment, what I expect to find over the coming weeks is that Bookface will start showing me increasing numbers of ads for Spanish products relevant in the UK. Probably starting with cheap flights back to Spain or similar products that a Spaniard living in the UK might be interested in.

 

So i've messed it up by talking about badgers in several different languages then

 

Probably not. That would just chip away at Bookface's steadfast belief that its profiles us right.

 

I've just evened it up by adding something that Kaz has probably had to deal with at some stage,

Mae fy hofrenfad yn llawn llyswennod.

 

Shouldn't it be full of Hot Air?

 

Which, Kaz or the Hovercraft?

 

I might have blown it

I've posted a reply to my mate, in English.