facebook application development

16 Jul

Facebook Roundup: Lawsuit, Publisher, ‘White Flight’, Involver and Vaseline

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Advertising, Applications, Asia, Business, Development, Facebook, Government, International, Legal, Marketing, MySpace, Pages, Policy, Twitter, Video

Facebook Faces Another Ownership Lawsuit – Facebook came under a temporary asset restraining order this week after yet another person claimed to have had a stake in the company. Paul D. Ceglia filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Allegany County in New York alleging that he owns 84% of Facebook per a 2003 contract he signed with Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has requested the case be moved to federal court.

Ceglia claims he and Zuckerberg signed a contract stipulating that Zuckerberg would design a web site for a $1,000 fee and Ceglia would retain a 50% stake, with an additional 1% stake every business day until Jan. 1, 2004 until the site was completed. The site was to offer Harvard University students access to a live functioning yearbook called The Face Book.

New Facebook Publisher Revealed – A screen shot of the new Facebook publisher was seen on Twitpic this week. It looks like the new publisher is more simplified, including status updates, links and photos, but not videos.

Facebook Set to Announce 500M Users – TechCrunch reported this week that Facebook is set to announce the 500 million user mark with an interesting gimmick. Apparently, Facebook employees have been asked to upload photos of themselves thanking users; these photos were being hosted on a Drop.io account.

Facebook and White Flight – Danah Boyd has released another piece of scholarship on the racial composition of Facebook this week. The book chapter, “White Flight in Networked Publics — How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” details this topic and comes from her yet-to-be-published book “Digital Race Anthology.”

Previously Boyd noted that teenagers’ preference for MySpace or Facebook seemed to fall along racial lines, with more affluent white and Asian teens preferring Facebook and working class blacks and Latinos preferring MySpace. This latest chapter notes that MySpace has become a “digital ghetto” to many teens causing “white [and asian] flight” to Facebook.

One caveat is that the two companies don’t normally release racial demographic data about their user bases, although in late 2009 Facebook released some states showing that its US user base reflects the general population. Boyd’s statistical support for her thesis is derived from third parties.

For more see the story or the book chapter.

SocialSenseFB Filters Facebook for Brands – Networked Insights introduced its new Facebook Page application this week, SocialSenseFB. The app analyzes a brand’s Facebook fans, what their conversations consist of, how those conversations are impacting the brand and any issues to be addressed.

Involver Launches Tracking Tool – Involver launched a new program this week, AMP (audience management platform), aimed at helping brands track the ways their fan base grows, partially with frequently updated analytics. AMP consists of a dashboard where brand managers can see Twitter and Facebook followers, schedule content and track interaction. Pricing is tied to the number of Pages or fans to be managed.

DeHood Launches Facebook Integration – Location-based service focusing on hyper-local communities DeHood launched a Facebook integration this week at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference. The company also has an iPhone service and iPad app. On Facebook DeHood allows users to invite friends to their DeHood community, find friends already in those communities and post their DeHood-related activities on their Walls.

Govts Get Creative with Facebook – A few foreign governments did some interesting things with Facebook recently. In Ireland, input from Facebook users was taken into account over budget cuts, according to the Department of Finance there. And in the Philippines the government is using Facebook and Twitter to boost revenue by searching from tax evaders online.

Controversial Indian App ‘Whitens’ Skin – Vaseline has introduced a curious Facebook application in India that has caused quite a stir. The App is for a skin lightening cream for men and on Facebook takes a users’ photo divides the face into darker and fairer halves on Facebook to illustrate product effectiveness. Skin lightening products are popular in India and Vaseline’s parent company, Unilever, responded by saying the app was “created for the Indian market as a culturally relevant and engaging way for Indian men to interact with this product.” According to Inside Facebook Gold, India currently has 10.5 million users.

13 Jul

Microsoft Integrates Facebook into Outlook

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Business, Development, Facebook, Metrics, MySpace, Policy

On the heels of a recent Facebook Pages integration with Docs.com, Microsoft has again Facebook-ized its products by allowing Outlook users to access the social network from their email inboxes with the new Outlook Social Connector.

Mashable reported that Microsoft has integrated both Facebook and Windows Live Messenger into Outlook’s 2003 and 2007 versions via a new plugin, which will also allow integrations for MySpace and LinkedIn.

Facebook and Microsoft reportedly worked in tandem to ensure the plugin worked well. One privacy-related feature is that the plugin will only pull information from email contacts connected to a Facebook account. In other words, if you and most of your friends use Outlook primarily at work but have a personal email attached to your Facebook account, you may not see as much Facebook-related information with the Outlook Social Connector.

The new integration gets information live from Facebook, allowing users to see profile photos and news feeds of contacts in their Outlook inbox as they are published on Facebook. So, for example, when you’re reading a friend’s email in Outlook you will also be able to see their status updates, photo uploads, posts, and other activities.

Users may not, however, Like posts or update statuses, for example because the plugin only pulls information from Facebook. That’s in the plans eventually, according to Mashable, but for now the only thing Outlook users can publish to Facebook from their inboxes are friend requests.

[Images via]

08 Jul

Buddy Media’s Brand Platform Grows with Facebook, Goes Global

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Advertising, Applications, Apps For Sale, Business, Development, E-commerce, Facebook, International, Marketing, Metrics, MySpace, Open Graph, OpenSocial, Pages, Policy, Twitter, Venture Capital, iPhone, location

Buddy Media is a New York-based company that’s been helping brands take advantage of their social media presence since Facebook opened the platform in 2007.

The idea was to assist companies with establishing themselves on Facebook. “We didn’t know how we were going to do it, but we wanted to participate,” founder and chief executive Mike Lazerow tells us. “You basically could build on top of Facebook and reach consumers directly, rather than dealing with the traditional gatekeepers of the web.”

At the time, Facebook had about 30 million monthly active users — 470 million or so later, Buddy Media has a solid and growing business. Check out our interview with Lazerow, below, for lots of key details on its experiences to date, and its plans for the future.

Note that the company also does work on Twitter, MySpace and iPhone platforms, but has focused its energies on Facebook by offering primarily larger companies, brands and agencies a content management system that includes an application library, as well as publishing and analytics tools. Some notable clients include Anheuser Busch, Southwest Airlines, the NHL, L’Oreal and TJ Maxx.

It has raised $10 million from a variety of investors, including Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Mark Pincus, Softbank Capital and the European Founders Fund, among several others.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Mike Lazerow: The business is a software as a service platform, any company can subscribe or license it to help them manage their Facebook presence. Buddy Media is more of an enterprise player, versus custom app shops or the small business players. Our strongest categories are CPG (consumer packaged goods), travel (Four Seasons, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines), tech (Samsung) and fashion (L’Oreal, Diane Von Furstenberg, TJ Maxx, Marshall’s).

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

ML: Summit Entertainment (“Twilight”) is a company that we started with that had very few fans. Through Wall posts and managing of very creative ad promotions on our platform they’ve gone from 4.5 milllion to about 7 million Likes since January — which has been one of our biggest fan growths. On the retail side, Redbox, we started working with them in January and they had about 400,000 Likes, or fans. They are now one of the largest in their space with 1.1 million Likes without a lot of marketing, mostly just content management. +Global (more here) lets companies scale their Facebook presence by geo-targeting by language or country, whether it’s one Page in one country or 1,000 Pages in 100 countries. According to our clients we’ve cut over 80% of the cost out of the equation.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

ML: Across the platform we have 80-90 million total connections, fans, Likers. It’s not unusual for our clients to have 10% of all their Facebook fans engage them on a monthly basis. We now have 75 agencies, primarily advertising agencies and public relations firms, that actually use a white label version of our platform; we let (them) do most of the creative work. Buddy Media is growing by over 50% quarter-by-quarter in terms of revenue. We’re on track to do probably over $20 million this year. We have 85 employees in New York, New York.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

ML: Typically we look at client success through APIs that we can set up on our platform, which lets you track fan growth, user engagement and activation. It’s very hard ROI metrics tied to their campaign: How many people signed up for a sweepstakes, we got 300,000 people to redeem the coupons, how many people bought from a retailer, how many people signed up for a test drive? So, if you set up the dashboard correctly, everyone can be on the same page in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

ML: I think the biggest challenge for everyone working on the platform is keeping up with the changes Facebook is making. Every week there are minor changes — things open up, things close down, how you handle notifications, how you handle publishing, how you handle user data. Facebook is basically building the airplane as they’re flying it. You realize that you can’t have projects that last three months and then launch, because the platform changed. The mistakes that we’ve made have been in building things that we’ve had to rebuild because Facebook has changed. So, now the way we build our products is very open, very modular because, now we don’t need to change our entire platform — we just have to change a part of it. The changes also pose the biggest opportunities.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

ML: The number one change was the opening up of Facebook Pages. That was an important change that sent our company into orbit because every company, all of a sudden, needed to manage those Pages and they didn’t have people sitting around, necessarily, who knew FBML and Javascript. The change that has recently really helped our clients and our business is the introduction of the Open Graph. The idea that a company’s web site can also be social is enormous. It’s what I call a branded viral loop, it’s basically free traffic. The other major change I think that Facebook has made is they’ve recommitted to the user experience by cleaning up the ecosystem a lot, and ultimately, that helps everyone but it also helps brand that want to be in a clean environment.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

ML: We’ve been in the business long enough with Facebook that changes aren’t good or bad, they just are changes and we basically evolve and make changes.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

ML: I think the ability to geo-target your Wall posts through third-party platforms would be amazing. The ability to target content on a more granular level through Facebook Pages would be great, whether it’s by interest or by profile data so if someone comes into a Facebook Page it would be great to show local offers on the tab. The one thing they shouldn’t change is the commitment to the user experience.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

ML: There’s no other property other than Facebook that has the scale, the reach, the stickiness globally that Facebook has (so it) ties into a lot of different stuff that you’re doing digitally. We integrate with Twitter so if you’re doing stuff on Twitter, you could very easily link to your Facebook Pages. If you’re on YouTube, you can use that content on your Facebook Wall and Facebook tabs. Most importantly, Buddy Media has been very active in linking your web site to Facebook, and Facebook to your web site. And then the last kind of area which I think it’s really important for our clients is, how does their email system and their current CRM (customer relationship management) system interface with Facebook. So, having it all work together in a way that works for the company is much more important than, “What’s your Twitter strategy?”

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

ML: One of the areas we are most excited about right now is social commerce. We’re going to continue to roll out our +Global offering, which includes more granular targeting of content. Starwood hotels is a great example, (the company) doesn’t care about China as just one country, they care about China as a series of cities they do business in. +Global is a Facebook management system right now at its core, but as Facebook goes to 1 billion users, it’s really a web-wide content management system. There’s no reason why it just stays within Facebook. As Facebook infuses itself to other websites, we will also be able to control third-party web sites and other microsites. We’re going to broaden our reach significantly there.

23 Jun

Fan Appz Building White-Label App Business for Marketers on Facebook

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Advertising, Applications, Apps For Sale, Business, Development, Facebook, Marketing, Metrics, MySpace, Open Graph, Pages, Policy, Twitter

Since its founding in 2008, Santa Monica, Calif-based Fan Appz has built its Page management business around an enterprise and free version of its self-serve Page management software. It has most recently created a professional version for small- and medium-sized businesses that includes tools to enable users to create top 5 lists, quizzes, polls and other features on their Facebook Pages and other social media profiles.

As part of our ongoing series on companies that provide services to Page owners on Facebook, we recently spoke with founder Jon Siegal for more information.

“When I founded the company the business idea was, ‘Let’s build a suite of applications to help businesses and brands attract and retain customers, but do it using social media,’” he tells us. “We decided that we were going to build an application that businesses and brands could use to build and engage and grow their fan base, a suite that people can use to be productive right out of the gate.” Of the company’s many competitors, some have taken a similar approach, while others have opted to provide more customized services, focused on larger brands that want the special attention.

When Fan Appz hit the Page management scene in 2008, MySpace was still the number one social network in the US, but it was clear to Siegal that it would be Facebook that would transform how people interacted with businesses. Along the lines of what many other marketing-focused companies have thought, he tells us that Fan Appz wanted to offer companies a way to manage their social media marketing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — something that’s hard to do if every campaign is custom built.

“If you’re into building custom software for people, it’s going to cost more and it’s going to slow you down,” he explains, noting that the company’s larger clients had three core goals: acquire an audience, grow that audience and make money from that audience.

Although the company didn’t share a lot of specific data, here are some key stats:

Its larger clients include the NBA, NASCAR, comedian George Lopez and the Tonight Show
It reaches more than 40 million Facebook users among tens of thousands of clients around the world
The company claims it has seen increases of 7 to 10 times in the number of video plays on a Facebook Page, a 55% click rate to web site increase and a quadrupling of customer sign ups on web sites
The products are built in English, but clients cab input their own content — so Fan Appz products are used in just about any languages you can think of — anything from Turkish to Hebrew.

When we asked what that expansion might include — integration with mobile or geo-location — his reply was unsurprising. “We want to build the integrated suite to where (customers) can reach out to fans wherever the fans are. If there’s something new down the road, we’re going to be there.”

For more information about page management companies and the tools they offer, see our Facebook Marketing Bible.

19 Jun

Facebook Roundup: Localeze, Videos, Virtual Goods, Privacy, Amazon, TiVo and More

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Advertising, Applications, Apps For Sale, Business, Development, E-commerce, Facebook, Games, Government, International, Legal, Marketing, Metrics, MySpace, Open Graph, Pages, Payments, Policy, Politics, Privacy, Search, Security, Twitter, VirtualGoods, location

Like Button Boosts Blog Traffic - Six Apart’s blog platform, TypePad, reported this week that the installation of Facebook’s new Like Button boosted bloggers’ referral traffic by up to 50%. Adding the Like button for the post footer, which gave users the chance to Like and share on Facebook, boosted traffic for some up to 200%.

Facebook, Localeze, Localization - Facebook may have struck a deal with Localeze, right after the company premiered Twitter Places with Twitter to add venues to geolocation updates. Localize, a business listing service, counts 14 million businesses and Facebook, fresh off its recent location partnership with McDonald’s, wants to use the data for “some new kind of fan pages for places, that businesses will be able to then claim on the network.”

Facebook Users Like Videos - Facebook has the fifth largest video site audience, counting 41 million people, which is more than Hulu, CBS or Microsoft. Facebook video viewers watch longer than other sites and more video ads (40%) are watched in their entirety than on other sites (25% on the web).

Amazon Patents ‘Social Network’ - Amazon has been awarded a patent for a “social networking system” to do things similar to what Facebook and other social networks are already doing, such as “locating, and establishing contacts with, other users.”

More Facebook Privacy, Instant Personalization Worries - Privacy advocates are still on Facebook about its instant personalization and privacy issues; this week the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, among others, sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter urging him to make the instant personalization program opt-in by default. Facebook’s Andrew Noyes responded that the company is testing SSL access, has been praised for privacy sensitivity and also that the instant personalization program is misunderstood.

TiVo Users Can Update Facebook - Users of TiVo may now access Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, RSS and other updates through a new widget that Framechannel has created. Synching the DVR device with a users’ social network accounts allows for the updates.

New York Goes After Facebook Child Porn - Facebook and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced an initiative to fight child pornography this week; although Facebook already blocks child porn, a new database is set to increase protection against the offensive content by using a strategy similar to music piracy efforts. Facebook, MySpace and other social networks will identify offensive images by their hash values, or “digital fingerprints,” and block them from being uploaded.

[Cuomo photo via NY Attorney General's Office]

25% of People Dumped on Facebook - SNAP Interactive released some interesting, if distressing, news this week: 25% of people who date online have been dumped via Facebook. That is to say, they, they found out about the end of a relationship via Facebook; part of online dating’s appeal, apparently, is avoiding the face-to-face confrontation involve with breakups. More stats: 21% said they’d break up with someone by changing their relationship status to single; 40% updated their status so others see they have plans; 35% changed a status to allude to plans, even if they didn’t have any and respondents broke down 70% male to 30% female.

North Social Does Facebook For Brands - North Social is a Facebook platform that aims to help small, medium and large businesses better manage their Facebook presence by allowing users to creating photo showcases, landing pages, e-commerce sites, coupons and sweepstakes for a starting subscription of $29 a month.

Pakistani Law Goes After Zuckerberg - Pakistan’s Deputy Attorney General has begun a criminal investigation into Mark Zuckerberg in response to the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook fiasco in May. The legal proceedings began when attorney Muhammad Azhar Siddique filed an application for a First Information Report (FIR) against Facebook for use of derogatory remarks against Islam’s prophet Muhammad (some Muslims believe depicting Muhammad is blasphemous), the FIR has purportedly gone through and the penal code allows for punishment by death.

16 Jun

Buzzeo Acquisition is Latest Move in Context Optional’s Facebook Business Expansion

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Advertising, Applications, Apps For Sale, Business, Development, Facebook, Games, Legal, Marketing, Metrics, MySpace, Open Graph, Pages, Payments, Twitter, VirtualGoods, iPhone

Context Optional acquired unwrap inc., maker of Facebook application platform Buzzeo, today in an effort to continue the development of its Page management offerings.

The Palo Alto-based Buzzeo created a service for creating, managing and launching a variety of Facebook applications, primarily for e-commerce but also polls, product listings and others. The two companies noted in separate press releases that Buzzeo and Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite are a “natural compliment” to each other.

Unwrap inc. cofounders Waynn Lue and Joshua Reeves will join Context Optional as leaders in product development, marketing and engineering and Reeves tells us the two have already begun several projects. Previously, Buzzeo has been used by Ben & Jerry’s and Gold’s Gym on Facebook. Apps built by the company have generated more than 41 million installations by Facebook users to date. Buzzeo’s web site noted that new “features and frameworks” are set to be introduced in the coming weeks.

Reeves says negotiations with Context Optional had been taking place since February, but finalized this deal recently after entertaining various offers. Unwrap inc.’s primary focus has providing been small businesses easy social media management capability, Reeves tells us; he and his partner felt Context Optional was the best place to apply what Buzzeo had created to serve its customers.

This acquisition is one more step on a path that Context Optional has been traveling since 2006. We also recently spoke to Context Optional chief executive Kevin Barenblat about his plans for the company — this article is the first in a series we’ll be running on Facebook Page management companies.

Context Optional was one of the first Page management companies to develop around Facebook, consequently he tells us the company has been better able to turn lessons into innovations.

“Big change was driven by the launch of Facebook’s platform,” Barenblat says. “It was a huge shift in how easy it was to share, and so compared to the work we were doing on other platforms like MySpace, Facebook was just much more compelling.”

Most recently, Facebook’s Open Graph social plugins opened up new ways for Context Optional to help brands better interact with their customers by adding social context to its web site.

“It’s no longer enough to consider messaging to ‘fans’ of a brand; you now need tools to tune your message for specific objects that are liked,” Barenblat explains.

Highlights about Context Optional:

Its first application for a Facebook brand Page, Open Table, launched in 2007; the company has since launched more than 50 and the unwrap inc.’s acquisition is sure to add greatly to this figure.
Its first Facebook game, Electronic Arts’ Smarty Pants, was released in 2007.
The company manages applications for tens of millions of Facebook users, 12 million alone for its Travel Channel Kidnap app, 3 million of which are monthly users.
Clients include numerous Fortune 500 companies, from Bank of America to Ford to McDonald’s to Microsoft and Target, across multiple platforms, not only Facebook but also on MySpace and the iPhone.
Chase Community Giving was another milestone, as it was one of the biggest crowd-sourced philanthropy efforts ever.
Context Optional launched its Social Marketing Suite in February, allowing brands to mange, build and moderate their own Pages. The suite gives brands more control to target certain geographic groups, do-it-yourself quizzes/polls/contests or tracking fan comments.
The addition of Buzzeo to Context Optional allows the company to continue to focus on innovating Page management and adds an element of app expertise to the mix.

Facebook’s plugins are creating more ways for marketers to reach the service’s users. Barenblat says the Like button holds the most promise because it’s set to become the most widely adopted plugin. Furthermore he tells us that the current set of three plugins are “the tip of the iceberg” as far as Facebook’s reach into the wider web and “their true potential will be revealed when developers can author customizable plugins.”

Looking to the future Barenblat tells us Context Optional has “a pretty aggressive product roadmap that will offer more and more functionality to brands who are looking to leverage Facebook for marketing and engagement.”

You can read more about Context Optional’s past marketing efforts in our Best & Worst Facebook Marketing report.

[Context Optional logo, Barenblat photo and suite images via Context Optional]

13 Jun

This Week’s Headlines on Inside Social Games

Posted by Christopher Mack, under Applications, Blogroll, Facebook, Games, Google, International, Mobile, Monetization, MySpace, Payments, Venture Capital, ViralCulture, VirtualGoods

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Wedenesday, June 9th, 2010

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Friday, June 11th, 2010

11 Jun

Facebook Roundup: Flickr, China, Foursquare, Bangladesh, U.S. Facebook Stats and More

Posted by Sara Inés Calderón, under Advertising, Applications, Apps For Sale, Business, Development, E-commerce, Facebook, Games, Google, Government, International, Legal, Marketing, Metrics, Mobile, MySpace, Pages, Payments, Policy, Politics, Search, Security, Twitter, Venture Capital, location

Flickr Turns On Facebook Sync - Flickr users may now sync their Facebook and Flickr accounts so every time they upload a public photo to Flickr it appears in their Facebook news stream. The integration is powered by the Yahoo! Updates platform, coming on the heels of other recent Yahoo! Facebook integrations.

Widgets, Including Facebook’s, Slow Down Web Sites – Google employee Steve Souders ran a test on his web site to compare nine common widgets, finding that Facebook came in second only to Digg in how much widgets slowed page load times. Souders wanted to see how much widgets slowed down a web site and tested: Digg, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google AdSEnse, BuySellAds, ValueClick, Quantcast, Collective Media and Glam Media. Facebook came in second to Digg, which added two-thirds a second to page load times, while Facebook Sharer added one-sixth of a second.

Facebook May be Looking at China Office - The company could be opening up a China office, despite being banned in the country, according to TechCrunch.

Foursquare Sale Rumors - Facebook, among others, is in talks with location-based gaming company Foursquare about a potential investment or partnership, Kara Swisher reported this week. TechCrunch previously reported recently that Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft have all been talking to FourSquare about some sort of acquisition or other possibilities.

Facebook More Popular Than Google in UK - Hitwise reported this week that social networks are more often visited in the United Kingdom than search engines, most of this is attributable to Facebook. About 55% of social network traffic goes to Facebook and 90% of search traffic goes to Google, Hitwise reported.

Bangladesh Restores Facebook - The government of Bangladesh has restored Facebook after about a week in which the social network was banned. Bangladesh followed Pakistan after Facebook was banned over the “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” Page that many Muslims considered to be blasphemous. Pakistan restored Facebook on May 31 after officials said Facebook apologized and blocked the offensive content; Bangladesh restored Facebook after the offensive Page was no longer available there.

Facebook, PTA Partner for Internet Safety - This week Facebook and the PTA (Parent Teacher Association) announced a partnership to help educate children, parents and teachers about safe Internet use. Specifically the initiative is meant to address cyberbylling, but will also focus on shrinking the digital divide for children; Facebook will devote the equivalent to $1 million in resources to the effort. Previously Facebook launched the Safety Center Page to address similar issues.

Kelly Loses Attorney General Bid – Former Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly lost his bid for the Democratic nomination for attorney general in California this week. Kelly announced his intention to seek the office last year; the race against San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris prompted one of the first political attack ads centered around Facebook privacy. Kelly spent more than $12 million on the campaign and distanced himself from Facebook’s recent privacy woes.

More Research: Facebook Fans are Valuable – A few different reports this week found that Facebook fans are valuable to brands, monetarily speaking. eMarketer used comScore numbers to report that Facebook users spent more money than other Internet users. Syncapse Corp., which works with other companies on their social media strategies, also released a study this week that found Facebook fans spend an average of $71.84 more than non-fans over a period of two years. Additionally: Fans are 28% likelier to keep using a brand than non-fans; 68% of fans are “very likely” to recommend a product in contrast to 28% of non-fans; 81% of fans versus 39% of non-fans feel connected to a brand; and the average value of a fan is $136.38.

Americans Aged 50-Plus Prefer Facebook – The AARP, a non-profit organization concerned with quality of life issues for people aged 50 and over, reported that its members prefer Facebook over other social networks. A survey found that about 27% of U.S. residents aged 50 and above use social networks. About 23% of these reported a preference for Facebook, while MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter came in with about 4% each.

Most U.S. Teens Give Parents Profile Access - Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions recently published results from a survey of U.S. high school students that found most allow their parents full access to their Facebook profiles. The report noted that teens seem to have an all-or-nothing approach whereby 56% gave parents full access and 34% gave none at all; only 9% provided limited access for their parents.

LiveWorld Launches Facebook Crowdsource App - Social network marketing company LiveWorld launched Facebook Idea Power 2.0 this week, a conversation application meant to allow brands to crowdsource ideas on Facebook. With the app, customers on Facebook can submit, tag and vote via text, photo, audio and video; the app is available in multiple languages.

Seven Students in Trouble Over Anti-Semitic Facebook Game - Seven high school seniors in Southern California may be barred from graduation or suspended after they played an anti-semitic Facebook game, Beat the Jew. Apparently 40 students at the school joined the Page but only the seven involved actually played it. The game involves “Jews” who are kidnapped, blindfolded and driven away from campus and have to make their way back while being pursued by “Nazis.”

‘The Facebook Effect’ in Stores - David Kirkpatrick’s insider book about Facebook, “The Facebook Effect,” hit stores this week.

Read-Only Facebook for Workplaces - Facebook has been made available in “read-only” mode by Palo Alto Networks. Changes are made within the networks of Palo Alto Networks’ customers, blocking all Facebook apps, mail, chats and posting.

Print Facebook Photos at Target, CVS - Kodak’s self-help photo kiosks at retailers like Target and DVS will soon allow you to access your Facebook photos for printing. One will be able to log into your Facebook account on the kiosks, as well as Picasa or Kodak Online Galleries, select photos, edit and make prints, photo albums or other photo products.

06 Jun

This Week’s Headlines on Inside Social Games

Posted by Christopher Mack, under Advertising, Applications, Business, Connect, E-commerce, Facebook, Games, International, Mobile, Monetization, MySpace, Payments, Venture Capital, ViralCulture, VirtualGoods, iPhone

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Friday, June 4th, 2010

30 May

This Week’s Headlines on Inside Social Games

Posted by Christopher Mack, under Advertising, Applications, Business, Connect, E-commerce, Facebook, Games, International, Marketing, Mobile, Monetization, MySpace, Venture Capital, VirtualGoods, iPhone

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Need a Facebook App Development Company