At Monday’s ad:tech Conference in New York, MySpace announced the launch of SelfServe, a self-service advertising platform for marketers. While the service is targeted toward small businesses, politicians, organizations and others who would like to tap the MySpace audience for advertising, anyone can create an ad.

According to a statement by Michael Barrett, Chief Revenue Officer at MySpace parent company, Fox Interactive Media, SelfServe will allow “anyone to create meaningful business and promotional campaigns through the vast friend networks they’ve built on the MySpace platform. Targeting is for everyone — from the smallest band to the biggest brand.”

According to MySpace, there are 23 million small and local businesses in the U.S., and about 10 million maintain a profile on the network. MySpace hopes to offer these businesses a way to tap into this business community – of which only about 1 million advertise online – and offer them a way to reach out to a targeted audience. Most of these businesses, they say, advertise only via search through outlets like Google and Yahoo.
Ad creators will have options to customize their ads and target them based on region, demographics and interest categories. MySpace will then offer analytics for tracking ad performance. Somewhat similar to Google AdSense, the ads will display across the social network. Advertisers will also be able to leverage their friend networks for promoting ads, similar to Facebook ad networks.

MySpace has used proprietary technology to compile extensive data on each user, including age, gender, geographic location and interests. This information is then used to fit users into approximately 1,000 categories – which will tell potential advertisers that not only are the users sports or film fans, but can share information about favorite teams or genres of film.

Minimum advertisement purchases start at $10 and pricing will be based on clicks to the advertiser’s profile. While initially, prices will be fixed CPC based on category, MySpace aims to later have auction based pricing.

This service had a soft launch in July, and currently has about 50 top advertisers testing the service, including Microsoft, Ford and Taco Bell.

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 .