TARGETING USERS BASED ON PERSONA DATA

1 . A method for advertisement distribution comprising:

at a server,

receiving an advertisement request from a third party environment for an unknown user, the third party environment having a different domain than a social network;

identifying a reference to the third party environment within a first content stream of the social network; and

serving an advertisement to the third party environment for the unknown user based on a user summary associated with the first content stream.

2 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising generating the user summary based on the content stream.

3 . The method of claim 2 , wherein the content stream comprises content generated by a user associated with the user summary.

4 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising determining a persona based on the user summary associated with the identified content stream, wherein serving the advertisement comprises serving the advertisement based on the persona.

5 . The method of claim 4 , wherein determining the person further comprises:

identifying a second reference to the third party environment within a second content stream of the social network; and

determining the persona based on the first and second user summaries.

6 . The method of claim 4 , wherein serving an advertisement comprises serving an advertisement comprising an advertisement summary having a similarity with the persona above a predetermined threshold.

7 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising:

receiving a second advertisement request from the third party environment for a social network entity; and

serving a second advertisement to the third party environment for the social network entity based on a content stream associated with the social network entity.

8 . The method of claim 7 , wherein serving a second advertisement to the third party environment for the social network entity based on a content stream associated with the social network entity comprises generating a second user summary based on the content stream associated with the social network entity and serving the advertisement based on the second user summary.

9 . The method of claim 8 , wherein serving a second advertisement comprises serving a second advertisement comprising an advertisement summary having a similarity with the second user summary above a predetermined threshold.

10 . A method for targeted advertisement distribution, comprising:

at a server:

receiving an advertisement request from a third party environment for an accessing entity, the third party environment having a different domain from a social network;

in response to the accessing entity being an unknown entity:

detecting a reference to the third party environment within a first content stream of the social network, the social network comprising a plurality of content streams, each associated with a user summary; and

serving an advertisement to the third party environment based on a first user summary associated with the first content stream.

11 . The method of claim 10 , wherein serving an advertisement to the third party environment based on a first user summary associated with the first content stream comprises determining a persona for the unknown entity based on the first user summary.

12 . The method of claim 11 , further comprising:

detecting a second reference to the third party environment within a second content stream of the social network, the second content stream associated with a second user summary;

wherein determining a persona further comprises determining the persona based on the second user summary.

13 . The method of claim 12 , wherein determining the persona based on the first and second user summary comprises:

abstracting attributes of the first and second user summaries; and

generating the persona based on similarities between the first and second user summaries.

14 . The method of claim 13 , wherein the advertisement comprises an advertisement summary, wherein serving the advertisement to the third party environment comprises serving an advertisement to the third party environment based on a similarity between the advertisement summary and the persona.

15 . The method of claim 10 , wherein detecting a reference to the third party environment within a first content stream of the social network comprises detecting the reference within content generated by a first user associated with the first user summary.

16 . The method of claim 10 , further comprising:

in response to the accessing entity being a social network entity of the social network:

identifying a second user summary associated with the social network entity; and

serving a second advertisement to the third party environment based on the second user summary.

17 . The method of claim 16 , wherein serving the second advertisement to the third party environment based on the second user summary comprises serving an advertisement to the third party environment having a similarity with the second user summary beyond a predetermined threshold.

18 . The method of claim 10 , wherein the reference to the third party environment comprises an explicit reference to the third party environment.

19 . The method of claim 18 , wherein the explicit reference comprises a universal resource identifier linking to the third party environment.