I've mentioned FriendFeed before and we all know about Facebook so it's intriguing to see that Facebook has made a play to buy FriendFeed. Why bother buying a site that can just re-publish status updates and material that's already published elsewhere?

The answer is, of course, that the fight for your eyeballs and advertising dollars is now escalating. After a few years of the market simply rolling over and conceding all to the Google juggernaut the world has discovered that Google's search (which is being updated with a new beta version released this week) doesn't cope so well with the "real time Internet". Now that we're tweeting and updating our status constantly, there's a new opportunity as companies can advertise to you based on what you're thinking (or telling the world that you're thinking).

FriendFeed offers a value proposition that, until now, has been unexploited. By aggregating all of our social media presneces, FriendFeed provides both convenience for us and for advertisers looking to target us. In other words, I don't think Facebook has pruchased a new social networking platform - they've bought an advertising platform.

So, what's that going to mean for all of us? Well, it probably means that we're going to see some more direct. personalised marketing. In much the same way as customer loyalty programs are really exercises in customer data collection, we'll see our online, social habits collated and repackaged. This, I suspect, will in time result in more targeted marketing campaigns. I'm loathe to say it'll be more spam as spam really isn;t targeted at all - it's just a scatter-gun. The closest thing I see that's similar today is when I use some buzzword in a tweet (yesterday I mentioned "autism") and it's automatically retweeted.

What I hope is that I don't suddently get more direct message spam or requests to follow marketing types.