The "Face" of Web 3.0 Marketing
By Matthew Loop

It has 50 million active members and is adding two hundred thousand new ones a day. Over five thousand applications have been created for it just since May of 2007. After an epic battle with Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft won the right to pour two hundred and forty million into it, bringing its total value up to fifteen billion.

What is it? It's Facebook, the hugest potential opportunity for internet marketers who need to keep up to speed with Web 3.0 and the semantic web explosion.

Facebook's one-of-a-kind social network is seen as the vanguard of entirely new operating systems that, unlike Windows, exist only on the internet rather than on your computer. It's an online community that a fresh, new mass of internet users, just discovering this innovative virtual environment, is flocking to in droves just to find new friends to Poke - and, in the process, creating a whole new dynamic marketing base.

A big draw to the site is all the free Facebook tools and applications that users can use to either interact with their Facebook network or just use to display their own personal preferences. You can have a zombie fight, share your favorite music, challenge a friend to a virtual race with a virtual car, exchange quizzes, or just throw a sheep to get someone's attention.

Facebook's fun online community is rapidly becoming like a snowball rolling downhill, gathering more and more users, who in turn attract their friends, none of whom want to miss out on what everyone's talking to. And it's ending up, after three and a half years of a relatively quiet existence, as the New Big Thing in cool internet content, thanks to Facebook opening the site up to the creation of lots of fun new applications by outside developers.

So forget Friendster and keep watching MySpace deteriorate into MySpam. The millions of Facebook friends are a whole new attractive market ready to be marketing to in a whole new way. The future of the internet lies in Web 3.0 sites like Facebook.

- Matthew J. Loop, DC