Facebook Ads suddenly got a lot more powerful

So when you click the new Like Facebook button, being very helpful and all, Facebook will update your permanent profile with your new like.

I'm still digesting all of the announcements from Facebook's F8 conference yesterday. Lots of brilliant stuff in there which has me excited. Interesting contrast to the catastrophe that was Google Buzz.

There is some work for us to switch from Facebook Connect by the looks of things but no biggie.

This post from Ed Dale is incredibly important and I have to admit I missed the key news too. The new Facebook "Like" buttons, that you can expect to see everywhere very soon, do something which increases the value of Facebook as an Ad platform by several orders of magnitude. They update your profile.

Like everyone else, I thought it was a Wall thing (and question whether people want their Wall to be a long list of product/site pimpages). But the buttonsd actually update your permanent profile that you filled out initially (interests/likes etc).

So when those of us who do Ads on Facebook want to demographically target people, we now have up-to-date detailed information based on your explicit recent "Like" activity, not the few interests ("Music", "Hummus") you thought of two years ago when you joined Facebook or when you clicked "Skip" during that part of the sign-up process.

This is a very very very powerful change and if I was the Google AdWords team, I would now be officially soiling myself.

Read the rest of Ed's post for more detail and thoughts.