Facebook, privacy, and the uncanny valley of advertising

"What’s the difference between recommendations from a friend and recommendations from a perfectly targeted advertising network? If anything, the friend is likely to be less useful."

No. A friend is much more likely to have your best interests at heart, especially when choosing between you and the advertiser. A targeted advertisement will usually be designed to benefit the advertiser/product, and not for you.

Although, I'm interested in the potential in target advertising's version of the big religious/motivational billboards. Imagine a Google search history that seems to be leading to suicide, and then ads popping up to convince you otherwise...

You might want to re-save that article's image, it's half a meg. You can get it to 10th the size with just saving it as JPG, at ~65% quality.