Rank your best friends

Yes, it looks strange but thanks FriendRank you can rank your friends. The company scans data about your activities on Facebook and other social networks, infers who your best friends are, and ranks them. Then the company exploits that ranking to serve you relevant ads.

Social banner would ask which of your close Facebook friends, among a short list, you’d like to invite to see the movie. Or a social banner might inform you that a friend Jim just ranked Iron Man with three stars, and it might ask to “click here to buy tickets at Fandango.”

See image below, which shows the example of an ad, with friends on the top right.

SocialMedia finds out information about your friendships by watching who you play games with on Facebook or MySpace, or who you otherwise communicate with using other applications on those networks. SocialMedia is in a good position to get this data because it serves ads on hundreds of applications, which in turn can access certain profile data of the people viewing the pages.

Till now, Facebook has used its own news feed to display advertising to users and is said to be working internally on using your friendship network to serve ads, but it hasn’t offered any feature with an explicit friend ranking like this. Myspace, in turn, offers what it calls hypertargeted ads, but it doesn’t go as far as tracking your friendships.

Extract from Matt Marshall's Blog