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

A lot of Londoners (me included) and more have been fuming that they have been unable to get tickets to the London Olympics this summer but today Facebook unveiled a way that people like us, and millions of others, will get to interact with the Olympics in a way that they may never have before. Facebook today launched Explore London 2012, a dedicated page for athletes to communicate with fans and provide their own personalized updates around the event. 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 say they started to work with Facebook on the effort some 18 months ago, although so far there are only 250 of more than 10,000 Olympic athletes on the site, 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.

“We will follow the athletes’ stories for the next 17 days,” said Joanna Shields, Facebook’s international head at an event in London this morning, pointing out the clear opportunity on a network to better curate and harness on a platform that already gets 1 billion comments and 300 million photos uploaded daily. “It’s that discovery through friends that makes things interesting and makes you want to click on media. We want to bring discovery to the Olympics.”

But that will not extend to discovery of brands. Because of “the notion of a ‘clean venue’” in the Olympics itself, with no branding or ads, “we will not be running ads against these pages,” says Christian Hernandez, head of platforms for Facebook.

More to come. Refresh for updates.