The premise behind Facebook's Social Ads is the notion that users of the social network will declare their brand loyalty on the site, and thereby opt into targeted ads from some of their favorite corporations. Starbucks, despite a recent dip in store visits after a price hike, serves 44 million customers a week. So you'd think a few of those customers might have admitted to being fans of Facebook, right? Wrong. Facebook's Starbucks product page has all of 59 fans. I think there were that many people in my local Starbucks the last time I bought a latte.

Why does Facebook seem to have more momentum now than MySpace? Some might tell you it's Facebook's vastly superior user interface. Oh, and that the site actually works most of the time. While they might not say so in public, MySpace executives agree. The News Corp.-owned social network is hiring for a redesign and it's being very upfront with candidates as to what it wants: a feature by feature Facebook match. Innovation be damned, News Corp. wants to catch the perceived leader. The same source also tells me News Corp. already knows who it wants for the job.

Read/WriteWeb last night reported that Amazon.com will announce today, among other things, support of Google's OpenSocial Web widget platform in all of its applications going forward. Now Google can tout Amazon's support for its rival platform to extend social networks. Or can it? Amazon flacks, after sending Read/WriteWeb a press release about the move, are now retracting it and claiming the company is not adopting OpenSocial. Or if it is, they're pretending they don't know about it.

VC blogger Fred Wilson gives Google and Yahoo too much credit: He's taking their "Inbox 2.0" initiatives to turn Gmail and Yahoo Mail into social networks seriously. He 's put together a chart comparing the "social graphs" — we think he means "number of users" — of some popular social networks versus Microsoft's Hotmail and AIM.com. Wilson estimates that Yahoo and Google, which aren't actually on the chart, have about 250 million and 60 million users. Here's the chart.

Ready for details on what Facebook is doing to prevent its employees from abusing access to user information? Too bad. All that Facebook blogger Nick O'Neill got out of Chris Kelly, chief privacy mouthpiece for Facebook, was that, "Facebook takes privacy very seriously." O'Neill buys it, citing Kelly's conviction. We don't. We already know it's in Facebook's interest to tell press it takes privacy seriously. And we're still hearing too many sources tell us Facebook employees abuse their privileges. And there's one case in particular where Facebook's lack of action speaks louder than Kelly's words.

Microsoft paid $240 million for less than 2 percent of Facebook, but Google's getting a peak behind the curtain for free. According to reports, there's a vulnerability in the Facebook application Compare People, made by a company called Chainn. The app allows a search engine such as Google to rifle through the information of any users who have the app installed on their profile. That's about 10 million Facebook members, according to numbers from AllFacebook. What kind of user information is available?

You probably didn't watch the video. So you might have missed the part where Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief operating officer, told Kara Swisher that users will be able to opt out of the site's new Social Ads and Beacon ad network:

Dan Peguine, the developer behind the Honesty Box application for Facebook, just came up with another useless idea. Peguine decided to poll Facebook users to ask if they'd rather pay a $3.99 monthly subscription to or continue to use Facebook for free and put up with ads. The result was a predictable landslide in favor of ads. Somebody alert Google. Online ads just might have a chance!

Kara Swisher from AllThingsD managed to pull Facebook executive Owen Van Natta aside for a quick interview. In the video, Van Natta spouts the company line, defending Facebook's behavioral targeting as something less than creepy. Mostly, Swisher lets Van Natta get away with it.

The best things in life are free — including advertising on Facebook. VC blogger Fred Wilson is putting his money where his mouth is, helping dissolve the hype around some of Facebook's new ad products by doing some real-world testing. Wilson tried the new targeting capabilities of Facebook Flyers. He writes, "So far, not much success. In fact, none." So far, according to the pictured chart, Wilson's ad has seen 435 impressions and received zero clicks. Thanks to word of mouth, the Facebook page Wilson created for Union Square Ventures, however, is garnering almost 1,000 pageviews a day — free of charge.

You've seen the chart: Web email isn't necessarily going away, but social network messaging is on the rise. In the U.K., it's already as popular as email. So what's Yahoo's plan to compete with Facebook and other social networks? Email, of course. Seems that's Google's plan too, according to what both companies told Bits. The idea is that the connection between you and those in your address books and inboxes are just as much a part of your social graph as the people you "friend" on Facebook. But I'm skeptical. Who wants a friend request from Mr. George Annah of Senegal or opheliasbmv4 and other "chicks in your area" who "needu some luvin today" ?

The night after Facebook launched its new ad products, all we heard from Madison Avenue was the baying of sheep. Everybody loved what they saw. Google had better watch out and MySpace was done for, said the ad buyers in wool suits. But now, the unbelievers are finally starting to come out of the woodwork.

As a side note, a little known fact is that when I was at Friendster, I found a small company out of Harvard that we came very close to acquiring, a startup no one had heard of that time, a company named Thefacebook. I've been an admirer of Zuck and the facebook team for a long time now.

Bebo, the San Francisco-based social network that's more popular overseas, launched a platform called Open Media today. It allows content owners to publish videos on the site using their own formats and ads. Launch partners include CBS, MTV, ESPN and BBC. Content owner keep all the ad revenue. Users can become "fans" of these content owners, just like they can "fan" brands, bands and celebrities on Facebook. Impressive, but Bebo hasn't fully caught up to Zuckerberg & Co. until it's also illegally forcing users to endorse products.

Speaking at a conference over the weekend, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe reportedly asked Facebook to join Google's OpenSocial initiative. Facebook COO Owen Van Natta politely rejected the idea. He said Facebook's developer platform protects user privacy better than the open standard.

It's a scenario as disturbing as it is common: Your boss becomes your virtual pal on online social network Facebook. There are defensive tactics you can adopt as soon as you get the initial request. "It's like an unwritten rule that your boss shouldn't add you, or, if he does, than you have the right to slap privacy restrics on his ass," says a young magazine writer who's been "befriended" by several of his superiors. But some employees still wonder how to handle the finer niceties of such a fraught relationship—like, for instance, when your boss sends you a $1 imaginary gift to compensate for a real-world slight or oversight.

You think you have it rough, little cube farmer? Try working at Valleywag. We ragged on egoblogger Robert Scoble when he became a fan of himself so it's only fair that we do the same to the Valleywag — my boss, Owen Thomas. I hate Facebook spammers, and he's become one. Next thing you know he'll be buying some bulldogs and filming himself driving down the highway. *shudder* I quit. I'm going to go work for Boutin at Wired or WSJ or wherever he's slacking off today.

Webhost Joyent, partially funded by Facebook board member Peter Thiel, is going to offer free hosting to Facebook app developers. Apps will load faster and allow developers to write code without significant out-of-pocket expense. For apps with 10,000 or fewer users, this service will be more than enough. Once an app grows large enough, the thinking goes, the developer can fund their own hosting — ideally with Joyent. [GigaOm]

Another day, another story about how early employees at Google are richer than you'll ever be. Meet Bonnie Brown, Google's first masseuse, hired in 1999 for $450 a week and a "pile of Google stock options." Retired after five years of getting hands-on with engineers, she now spends her days with her private Pilates instructor, traveling for her charitable organization and watching her pile of money grow to absurd heights. And she looks so smug and happy in that picture, doesn't she?

Mainstream media pros — that's me — climbed over each other to cover last week's overhyped Facebook event. Founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social site's new ad models and proclaimed a stupefyingly conceited Zuckerberg's Law — "Once every hundred years, media changes." But if the server logs at Slate are an indicator, no one cares but us hacks. My edgily-headlined report, "Why Facebook's Dinky New Ads Won't Topple Google," got prominent placement as Slate's No. 2 story of the day last Wednesday. The traffic report for last week shows it as one of my least-read Slate articles ever. It's well below the one about the talking pen, and far behind a primer on night-vision goggles that drew 20 times as many clicks (400,000 vs 20,000). No matter how good or bad the article itself was, readers didn't click to find out. Facebook vs Google? Yawn. The logs show they were much more interested in my editor's essay on how to fix Sports Illustrated.