News of Google’s newest adver­tis­ing ven­ture:

In its just-published patent appli­ca­tion for Net­work Node Ad Tar­get­ing, Google hatches plans for iden­ti­fy­ing the most influ­en­tial of a cir­cle of friends and pro­vid­ing this ‘influ­encer’ with ‘finan­cial incen­tives from adver­tis­ers in exchange for per­mis­sion to dis­play adver­tise­ments on the member’s [social net­work] pro­file’. Doing so will ‘pro­vide adver­tis­ers with the option of tar­get­ing either all mem­bers in the com­mu­nity or adver­tis­ing only on the pro­file of the influ­encer, thereby tar­get­ing the entire com­mu­nity,’ explains Google.

As some Slash­dot­ters have com­mented; if your best friend goes for this, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate that rela­tion­ship: friend­ship isn’t sup­posed to be a com­mer­cial trans­ac­tion. As for the tar­geted ‘influ­encer’: it’s a per­fect exam­ple of one of Mal­colm Gladwell’s so-called Mavens; the influ­en­tial early adopters.

via Mind Hacks