In the office we enjoy comparing adverts: by this I mean the adverts Facebook chooses to show us. Sometimes it can be bang on and other times only just miss the mark. Of course it’s all driven by semantics but the profiling is so good that it’s scary and it also seems to hang on a few key pieces of personal information. I’m not certain but I think these are age, gender and relationship status.

Now it's definitely more complicated than the three terms I’ve identified above, semantics is built on countless connections between information all over the place but these three denominators seem to stand out. Take my colleagues for example, we share many similarities age, tastes etc but there are subtle differences and FB knows this.

Colleague 1: @Librarianlauren

The lovely Lauren’s spare time is taken up with reading and brewing her own triple strength beer. She is a mean swords woman and should the day come that the dead begin rising from their graves, her house would be the first one that I’d be knocking at (hopefully knocking, not scratching). Interesting fact: she once carried a sword through the London Underground.

Interestingly, today’s adverts for LG don’t resemble her interests in anyway. Ads include anything about the bloody Twilight saga, weight loss, and bean bags. Now Lauren is private person and doesn’t like putting too much information in the public domain. I think that because of this Facebook has a harder time profiling her and is therefore throwing random adverts her way. It’s almost saying ‘Every girl likes bean-bags, Robert Pattison and losing weight’.

Colleague 2: Paul C

Paul is the technical development officer here so he’s a bit of a whizz with coding and building sites. He’s currently single and a real catch ladies - though you will have to be pretty special to pull him out of his partying bachelor lifestyle! He has a massive red Ferrari in his dreams and two cats: Moss and Bobbins aka the midnight cupboard bangers.

Facebook knows Paul is single so he continually receives adverts for dating sites. Also because of his technical abilities he receives adverts for gadgets and web tech too. Finally, he receives a lot of fitness and sport ads; he regularly visits the Gym and watches the football. Pretty well targeted I would say but I’ve no idea how Facebook knows he’s a physically fit, football loving person.

Me

I just get gadgets and gaming ads. I’m in a relationship and have been for a few years now so I think Facebook knows this and will not throw me the dating adverts PC gets. I regularly receive adverts with tiny pictures of iPhones and the like in them. I do get music ones too so it must be because I have some of these activities/likes listed in my profile.

It’s pretty impressive really; I imagine most people don’t notice how they are profiled and shown specific adverts. I encourage people to look; it can be pretty funny sometimes. For example, I got this one today, 2/3 correct but I’m not a gay man and Facebook knows this so maybe there’s an anomaly in my theory somewhere.

Semantics is information about information about information, so much deeper than traditional meta-data; it’s so specific that it’s almost frightening. For any more information on Semantics there’s the Semantic Web page on W3schools, it helped me understand things better; there’s also a great Web 3.0 video a few posts back.