Terrence Russell published an excellent and candid article in the Wired Blog Network called “Facebook Rolls Out Highly Targeted Viral Ad System”. Here’s an excerpt:

I sent him the below response recently as I’m interested in hearing his views on if the Social Networking public will accept this continued evolution of private blog-like network pages to public advertising platforms. I have conversations with designer and IA/Strategy friends quite frequently and, on the reverse side, discuss viral and non-traditional marketing opportunities with clients on almost a weekly basis (where much of emphasis is placed on blogs, Facebook, Linked In, Google Groups and other social networking ventures).
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Todd posted this on his Facebook group (Wannabe Entrepreneurs) so I thought I’d include it here. There’s some interesting points to this, a lot of what I’ve already learned the hard way.

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So we were playing a game of euchre on Friday at Alt.Coffee (in the E’Vill) and I mentioned an invention I was thinking about where I would affix the top portion of a filtered water pitcher into (or on) my automatic-drip coffee maker and create a sorta hybrid between the two. Hoboken’s water isn’t, shall we say, fantastic, so I figured this little genius idea of mine would make my mornings a modicum more pleasant. Considering the fact that I’m certainly not a morning person, I need all the help I can get. I took both appliances and sat them on my table and walked around them a few times scratching my chin and realized that it would be fairly easy to make a Frankenstein contraption out of the two. Read more

I knew about this happening a while back but pretended that if I just ignored it for a while, it would go away. Needless to say, it didn’t. With the release of Outlook 2007, Microsoft has decided to change the rules on html-formatted emails again and while it wouldn’t affect most people, it has become a thorn in the side of designers everywhere. The reason for this issue is that Microsoft decided to use the Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine where previous versions relied on Internet Explorer’s. And while I don’t think anyone could say that IE is a superior browser with a straight face, it was worlds better than Word’s.

With my company, ERA404, our quarterly newsletter fell to pieces as it relied quite heavily on <div> background images. Our original design, found in the ERA404 Newsletter archive (link below), is entirely illegible in Outlook 2007. The new version removed some of the limitations of the new rendering engine. Sadly, most people wouldn’t have noticed because Outlook 2007 isn’t heavily adopted yet. However, with the hope of staying ahead of the curve, we decided to redesign the newsletter for the small percent of readers who have made the unfortunate leap.

If you’re subscribed and are unable to read the newsletter, try the online version, which uses Internet Explorer‘s rendering engine or request this newsletter resent as Text-Only. Incidentally, here’s a handy widget for testing how the new rendering engine destroys code in Adobe Dreamweaver. Previous newsletters can be found at: http://www.era404.com/lists/.