Facebook?s Social Olympic Ambition, Explore London 2012: A Dedicated Athlete Portal, But No Ads

A lot of Londoners (me included) haven't been able to get tickets to the London Olympics this summer. But we'll all get something else, Facebook announced today. The company is launching?Explore London 2012, a dedicated page for athletes to communicate with fans and provide their own personalized updates around the event, including metal wins and their own photographs as well as status updates. Alongside that, Facebook is adding other data to pad out the story: historical photographs and other information about notable events -- part of an effort to be able to claim that 2012 will mark the first "Social Olympics." Officials from the International Olympics Committee tell me they started to work with Facebook on the effort some 18 months ago. So far there are only 250 of more than 10,000 Olympic athletes on the site, including UK athletes?Tom Daly, Jessica Ennis, and the cycling team, although Facebook expects that to ramp up significantly in the weeks ahead. Significantly, although the pages may expect to get a huge amount of traffic from the millions of people who tune in to watch the sporting event, Facebook will not run any advertising alongside any of it.

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