The social networking battle continues, with today’s major announcement coming from Facebook – which faced scrutiny after the launch of Google’s OpenSocial. Today at a press conference in New York City, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the details of Facebook Ads – which will allow businesses to create profiles (much like regular user profiles), posting multimedia content and spreading their marketing message to users. Today, more than 100,000 new Facebook Ads pages will be launched by various advertisers, including Coca Cola, Verizon and Microsoft to reach Facebook’s 50 million users.

Already, developers have created a number of applications to be used on the commercial profile pages for everything from booking restaurant reservations to providing company reviews.

As Zuckerberg explained, Facebook Ads will have three tiers:

• Businesses will be allowed to build pages on Facebook and connect with their target consumers through friend requests.
• A system has been created that supports the distribution of marketing messages virally through Facebook Social Ads.
• Facebook will also provide user data – including user activity, fan demographics, ad performance and trends – to marketers

In addition to major brands, Facebook pages will allow bands, local businesses, organizations and service companies (such as restaurants) to create profiles much in the same way as a regular Facebook user – inputting their profile information and expanding their profile through the use of a variety of commercial Facebook apps.

When a user accepts a particular commercial profile as a friend, they can elect to include messaging from that business in his feeds. For example, when reviews are posted about a particular restaurant, these reviews will appear in all friend feeds.

For in-depth analysis, check out a blog post by Jeremiah Owyang, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

Timing for the launch of Facebook Ads was not yet announced at the time of the press conference, but stand by for the live site and check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/ads .