What You Should Know About Facebook’s Brilliant Trojan Horse

The folks who work at Facebook are a smart bunch. They realize that in order for their ads to be effective and their ad platform to be more value-driving, they need to allow corporations to more intelligently target their userbase.

What better way than to get someone else to do it for them?

What better way, than to coax other corporations to spend their marketing and development dollars to build a system for users to “like” their products and hence populate each Facebook user’s profile with more information about the kinds of products and news items that they like?

The IMDB.com Example

Right now, if you do a “Facebook Like” on IMDB for the movie, “300” (disclaimer: I love that movie), you will have indicated that on IMDB’s page for “300”.

You are also then sharing that information with your friends in your newsfeed activity. What IMDB can also do now is enter that information into your Facebook information tab, adding “300” into your “favourite movies”.

Facebook says that IMDB will be able to deploy “hooks” to leverage upon this database in future, to target updates to everyone who likes the movie. Say, let you know when 300’s prequel comes out…

What a great story to sell to companies like IMDB.

So What’s The Trojan Horse?

The simple definition of Trojan Horse is the mechanism with which a third party can now “enter your premises” based on a “pretext”.