Oooh, now that's the way to get real names + addresses out of people. Neat. It also involves social pressure -- now not giving away your address will mean rejecting a gift.
Doing anything with addresses is risky from a legal and privacy perspective - I doubt facebook can get away with snailmail spam without permission, for example. Nor do I think they want to do that.
For geographic targeting IPs and user-entered information are usually good enough. Also, as gsharma mentions, facebook has tons of geographic information on users from mobile, which is better because it reflects where you actually spend your time and doesn't go stale.
I doubt facebook will extract much value from physical addresses. Rather, I think this is purely part of their monetization strategy. They can double the average user's contribution to their revenue from a single five dollar purchase. Also, I'm wondering if this is facebook's attempt at building a payments platform. I think this industry will be worth tons of money in the short and long term future.
FB doesn't want real names and addresses so they can start sending out snailmail spam, they want them so that they can start user matching with advertising partners' CRM databases.
I've believed that building a payments platform is the road to riches for Facebook for a long time. They have such a headstart on the fraud and identity issue, and they have both the merchants via FB connect, and the customers (obviously).
That's an interesting insight! I'm curious, does anyone know how much more valuable a user is (in $$$) if they have a confirmed real name + address vs. unconfirmed?
I thought about the address part too. However, don't they already have locations from smart phones to determine where you live, where you work and where you hang out.
