Ad targeting company Media6Degrees mines online social connections to deliver advertising to customers as well as the people that are connected to them.

Media6Degrees’ concept of social ad targeting is different than common perceptions, President and CEO Tom Phillips told eMarketer’s senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson today. While not literally social media data, the Web data used to construct custom audiences for brands does come from the social Web.

Instead of constructing audiences based on demographics, Media6Degrees uses "data that comes from connections between prospects and customers." The brand loyalists are seeds that Phillips gets directly from the client. The company technology and algorithms identify an audience based on the connections between the sites that the seeds visit and the sites that other Web browsers visit.

While there is not an explicit connection between two specific people on Facebook, for example, person A may look at content (images, blog posts, etc) from person B, and we may assume there is a connection based on this. "But it could be someone I don’t know; we both end up at the same obscure food blog or political blog or sports blog—or whatever it may be," Phillip clarifies. The data is empirical, and the connections are measured so that the most productive are valued higher in a campaign.

The business functions as a performance ad network, taking advantage of these connections for major marketers’ campaigns. "The two metrics we measure our performance by are view-throughs to site visits and view-throughs to conversions." These metrics are what clients are looking at when they quantify performance.

Media6Connect does not believe they are making demographics obsolete, but that this approach is more important. "If all the trends are in our favor, then we’ll do a better job finding audiences for marketers than the conventional way," Phillips predicts. If Facebook moves beyond demographics to abstracted data, "it would be huge for us."

In technology as in culture, when the traditional players take a page from the innovators’ playbook, one of two things generally happens.

The traditional player’s adoption of innovation can be so successful that it co-opts or even bests the innovators (remember back when Google’s acquisition of Twitter was inevitable? Remember Google Buzz?).

Or the opposite can happen, and traditional actors become plot points on the way to the paradigm shift (see: AOL, MySpace).

We don’t know if either of these scenarios will play out with Visa’s entry into PayPal’s space with Rightcliq, but PayPal, debit cards, waning customer confidence, micropayments, new legislation and even Gen Y are certainly chipping away at the credit card industry.

Visa’s Rightcliq “is an online shopping tool targeted to consumers that assists online shoppers by offering the ability to browse multiple merchants and select items consumers are interested in looking at in one central location, making comparison shopping easier,” Joseph Saunders, Visa’s chairman and CEO, said in an October 2009 conference call.

Rightcliq is essentially a place to collect your payment and delivery information. It allows users to collate a “Wishspace” where they can bookmark their desired purchases, comparison shop and e-mail product images to friends. In essence, it’s an emulation of PayPal, which has 81 million active accounts and whose recent partnership with Facebook brings aboard more than 300 million potential customers.

Rightcliq is currently available in beta. Not many details are available right now from Visa, but analysts expect a more robust version to be available in Spring.

Analysts see the move as an attempt to take a share from PayPal, according to Internet Retailer.

“It’s too early to tell if Visa is going to be a challenger,” said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp . “They can get the consumer usage piece, but working with SMBs and the stored-balance piece remain to be seen.”

Surprising news yesterday from Facebook: the social network officially signed a strategic agreement with PayPal to become one of the alternative methods to pay for Facebook ads and Facebook credits. Neither the length of the contract nor the sharing ratio is specified but it’s a 180° shift in strategy on Facebook’s part.

The announcement was not expected as Facebook had its own payment system in beta for years (see here and here) which will still exist for virtual goods.  One simple fact can explain this decision: already 70% of Facebook users live outside the US, as do the advertisers.

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Image via CrunchBase

Barely two days after launching Buzz, the social networking feature for Gmail, Google bought the social search engine Aardvark for $50 million on February 11.

This acquisition is part of Google’s strategy of going social in order to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Aardvark is a social search engine founded in July 2007 by former Google employees. The San Francisco startup, which launched its service in private beta in 2008, allows web users to ask questions which are then distributed through their social network and sent to someone who can answer them.

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Spam and malware attacks on social networks have risen 70 percent in the last year, according to data protection firm Sophos.

Thirty-six percent of respondents to Sophos’ survey have been sent malware over social networks in the past year, an increase of 69.8 percent. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have been spammed via social networks.

“Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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It’s fair to say that Facebook is not the best place to go if you’re trying to avoid the temptation to spend.

From the sometimes-effective-oftentimes-hilarious targeted advertising to updates on what your friends are purchasing – whether it be a vacation, dinner and drinks or Avatar tickets – the fact is that a lot of Facebook activity is predicated upon money spent, or waiting to be spent.

Until now.

Stop Me from Spending! is a Facebook app developed by Youth Media International (Youth Radio) and Context Optional to help young people budget.

“‘Stop Me from Spending!’ grew out of the recognition that young people are hugely influenced by their friends, so this was a real opportunity to tap that peer orientation in a positive way,” said Lissa Soep, PhD, senior producer and research director, Youth Radio.

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Writes Adweek’s Noreen O’Leary:

In terms of politics and world events, this has been a wild decade, but on the marketing front, one thing has remained constant: Apple’s emotional connection to consumers, who reward it with an almost cult-like loyalty. Though the brand almost petered out in the ’90s, last year consumers told Interbrand that Apple was the thing they couldn’t live without and the one they found most inspiring. Why? Perhaps it’s Apple’s vaguely antiauthoritarian stance (epitomized in its iconic “1984″ ad). A true-in-practice focus on relentlessly improving its products also helps. But maybe it comes down to this: Most brands are run by committee, but this one is the embodiment of a living, breathing person. Steve Jobs is Apple in the way that Richard Branson is Virgin. Of course it helps when you’re a brilliant marketer who happens to be the CEO.

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“Privacy” has been in the headlines a lot this past week, from lingering uncertainties left by the Tiger Woods story, to Eric Schmidt’s widely derided anti-privacy statements and Facebook’s (also derided) security changes.

Which makes it strangely apropos that Techcrunch reported Friday on Blippy, a still-in-beta service that shares your credit-card transactions with your friends online.

That’s right, share your credit card purchases with friends. Online. Sure, you might think that that’s probably the last thing you’d want to do, but, in all fairness, some people would.

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Last week, the Webby Awards named the top ten Internet moments of the decade.

Each of the winners represents how the internet has triumphed over old technologies and practices.

“The Internet is the story of the decade because it was the catalyst for change in not just every aspect of our everyday lives, but in everything from commerce and communication to politics and pop culture,” said David-Michel Davies, the executive director of the Webby Awards.

“The recurring theme among all of the milestones on our list is the Internet’s capacity to circumvent old systems and put more power into the hands of ordinary people,” he said.

The Webby Award’s top ten are:

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