Facebook’s “Flyers” program has been in place for a while. What started out as a cute way to give someone a shout-out or announce a campus event, is now starting to evolve into what may become a legitimate AdWords competitor (of course depending on who gets the stake in Facebook, Microsoft or Google) – and maybe even more.

A few hours ago they announced in most people’s News Feed: “New and improved Facebook Flyers”. Clicking on this link takes you to the flyer creation page where you’ll noticed that you can now target things such as gender, age range, political views, relationship status, level of education, and individual keywords among other things. If you thought Google was scary with their contextual advertising, wait until you see Facebook’s version which features ads that actually do know things about you – because you tell them!

This thing is slick – it even calculates the number of people you are targeting on the fly based on the parameters you put in. Say you want to target men in the United States between 18 and 24 who are single, in college, and majoring in finance. You’ve just bought yourself some extremely targeted marketing towards the 26,080 people who exactly match that profile. The real value behind Facebook may have just unmasked itself – the network paired with this is potentially the damn Trojan horse for advertisers!

Valleywag has more on the implications of such a service. And, they rightly note again that this would seem to be another sign that Facebook is going to go with a Microsoft deal over a Google one so they can weasel out of their current deal with Microsoft and be in charge of more of their own advertisements.

This low-key push by Facebook seems to be a lot bigger than their letting on (there is no Press Release, not even an blog entry). Perhaps this is a soft-launch before a major announcement at some point this week.

[UPDATE 10/23]: Looks like this was pretty much dead-on. Allfacebook is now reporting that Facebook is going to launch a new ad network dubbed ‘SocialAds’ on November 6th. Interestingly the ads are said to be able to use the data to target users both on and off the site.