I decided to finally pursue some other advertising mediums for some of my websites and Facebook immediately came to mind. Facebook just recently allowed anyone to place ads on their site, and target them heavily. You can literally target any interest, demographic, network, anything. I figured I may as well give it a shot, and the nice targeting features should help with the conversions.

FB Works Fast

I created a simple ad in about 2 minutes, and it started running. Within no more than 3 minutes, (I'm not exadurating), I saw the following:

10,000 impressions! I was amazed, this was 3 minutes of advertising and I already had 5 clicks. Within about 10 minutes I had 20 clicks and over 30,000 impressions. Sure, it's not the best CTR, but this was just a quick little test ad. I'm sure with some ad optimization that will get better.

Another thing that makes this even crazier - this was a targeted ad. If I just unleashed it upon all of Facebook, who knows how many impressions/clicks I would get in the first 5 minutes. Crazy.

Apparently the Canadian courts think so as well. The unofficial apple weblog reports that the levy proposed against iPods - the so called "iPod tax," has been defeated. It's a good thing too, with a $5 to $75 tax on iPods depending on their size, wow, no wonder retailers were pissed.

It wouldn't have worked

If iPods are suddenly $75 more expensive people are just going to turn to one of the many easier and lazier places than a physical store. You've heard of it - the internet. I'm sure Amazon, eBay, and any other online store that sells iPods would be pretty pleases if this tax went though. This is also the reason that the Retail Council of Canada was the biggest opponent of this levy. Retail stores would have lost major revenue.

Even the grandparents who are scared to buy off the internet when buying iPods for their grandkids would be affected. The elderly know when they're not getting a deal - they have a lot of time on their hands. Why buy in Canada when you could take a trip down to the U.S. and get the same thing for much cheaper, without even considering the weak U.S. dollar giving up extra savings.

Bottom line - iPods aren't chock full o' pirated music, and it's a good thing the courts recognize that.

With the 2008 Macworld only 2 days away here are my predictions:

• 13" sub-notebook
• iPhone/iTouch SDK
• Faster processors on all apple computers

That's about all I can think about for now. The sub-notebook will be, obviously, the talk of the conference. There have been many rumors about it and I think it's pretty obvious it will launch at Macworld. Contrary to the rumors, I think that it will have a DVD drive. Apple's crazy like that - they'll squeeze it into a < 1" thick notebook somehow.

DVD drive or not, it will surely have better battery life than current laptops and I really hope that the laptop is Macbook Pro style aluminum, rather than the cheap Macbook plastic.

It should be a good conference.

The domain name registrar network solutions has been pulling some pretty sketchy moves lately. There were some reports that they were registering all domain names that were searched for and registering the name themselves. This, of course, will only allow people to buy the domain from them exclusively. This is a pretty big no-no in the domain name industry.

To prove that they actually were registering every domain searched I decided to do a little test. I searched for the domain davidjeffries-registeredbynetworksolutions.com. A little while later network solutions had plastered the domain location with their logo and a nice little button to buy the domain for "as low as $19.99."

This might seem ok, except now when going to another registrar, in this case GoDaddy, I got the nice "domain already taken" message. How can network solutions get away with this? Why aren't other registrars freaking out? Something needs to be done - network solutions shouldn't get away with this for much longer.

GoDaddy Domain Search

Facebook has been working with ABC for a while now working on their U.S. presidential election advertising/application. The idea is pretty good and hopefully it gets more people educated about the candidates and out voting.

Why are Canadians seeing this stuff?

Here's the deal: I'm Canadian. I really do not understand why Facebook is pushing this stuff to Non-Americans. Personally, I'm quite interested in U.S. politics, but I'm sure the majority of Canadians aren't.

So with Facebook developing all their awesome advertisement targeting software and utilizing the vast amount of information they have about me, why don't they just target it properly? page views? I guess ABC paid a pretty hefty price for so much attention.