Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled Facebook Ads, his company’s plans to take on the heavyweights of online advertising. Speaking before some of the company’s biggest sponsors in New York, Zuckerberg said:

“Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online. For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”

The company is launching Facebook Pages, a new feature for brands, local businesses, and musicians to promote themselves. This is pretty much in-line with some speculation we caught wind of on Friday. At launch, there are already more than 100,000 pages set to go live. Pages will feature standard features of Facebook profiles, allowing users to add comments, write on the brand’s wall, and post photos. Admins for Pages will also be able to add applications to them, potentially putting them in direct competition with existing third-party apps. These actions are of course shared throughout Facebook’s mini-feed and News Feed features to encourage viral marketing.

As for “Social Ads,” the must speculated on ad network that Facebook has been reportedly building? They are the second piece of the puzzle, and will import data into Facebook on actions you take outside the network, such as purchasing a product or viewing a video on an external site. eBay is one of the major partners for this part of the project (called "Beacon") and will allow users to import a list of their items and share it in their feeds. Another example is ExpoTV, who will notify your Facebook friends if you upload a video review to their site or add a product to your wish list. Privacy settings will allow users to determine what type of data is shared.

Finally, for advertisers Facebook will be providing them with detailed data on the users they are reaching. For example, demographics, user activity, and performance of the ads. This probably the most innovative part of the announcement, as it gives advertisers incredible insight into their customers and their interests.

What's missing from the announcement are how Microsoft might be involved in the ad network, and the much-rumored idea that Facebook would be using member data to display ads both within its site and on third-party publishers. The inclusion of bands in the "Pages" concept seems in-line with the rumors about Facebook Music that we've also heard recently.

My first take is that all of this is a little underwhelming when compared with the earlier speculation that Facebook was launching a major AdSense competitor. The "Pages" concept doesn't sound much different that the profiles bands, movies, and brands setup on MySpace, and while it will be a nice revenue generator for Facebook, it's certainly not revolutionary. More details and analysis certainly to follow soon.