facebook application development

Zuckerberg Interviewed on ABC – Facebook CEO gave an extended interview to ABC’s Diane Sawyer this week in which he discussed “The Social Network,” the 500 million user mark, the current ownership dispute and a possible IPO.

Facebook Updates Events Emails – Facebook recently updated the email interface for Facebook events this week, going from a text-only view to a more graphical interface matching with its latest events page changes.

Power.Com, Facebook Suit Decided – After more than a year, the Power.Com v. Facebook lawsuit was settled this week. A federal judge gave a multi-part ruling. Power.Com did not commit a crime by allowing users to violate Facebook’s terms of service to access their personal information by “automated means.” But, when Power.Com changed its IP address to do so, it might be a crime. And the judge also dismissed summary judgement against both companies.

Facebook Relies on Users for Clean Content – As more people began to upload images to the Internet the business of screening these images for offensive content became a big business. The New York Times reported this week that, oftentimes, the low paid content reviewers suffer psychological trauma related to their jobs. As the article also describes, Facebook (like many other web companies) relies on users to flag objectionable content, which is later reviewed by employees in Palo Alto, Calif. or Dublin, Ireland. Some of Facebook’s content is outsourced, but not most of it, according to a company spokesman.

San Francisco’s Facebook Use – Facebook posted an interview with San Francisco City/County’s CIO Chris Vein discussing how social media might replace government web sites and the role sites like Facebook play in providing city services.

Sarah Palin, Facebook and a ‘Social Experiment’ – Former Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin wrote a controversial Facebook note this week that was automatically removed after blogger Brian Ries posted a screenshot on Tumblr urging others to flag the note as “hate speech.” Ultimately, Palin’s note was reinstated by Facebook and Ries said the result of the experiment was that freedom of speech on the Internet is still hazily defined.

Adobe Integrates Facebook Ads – Adobe Systems announced it was adding tools to its software this week that would allow online marketers to better integrate with Facebook ads. Specifically the changes will allow marketers bid for ads on Facebook through Omniture, a recent acquisition, and a company that has been an Ads API services provider for months.

Coca-Cola’s Facebook Faux Pas – Coca-Cola was forced to pull its Dr. Pepper Facebook promotion this week after the application published pornographic messages on underage users’ accounts. The app took over a users’ status updates and in the case of one 14 year-old user posted a reference to a hardcore pornographic movie.

People Hate and Love Facebook – A recent survey by ForeSeeResults led many to conclude that Facebook’s devoted user base hates the site. But as TechCrunch examines, the survey has issues. It struggles to explain, for example, why 57% of respondents visited Facebook every day, yet ranked the site worse than Wikipedia, even though only 20% visited that site every day.

Facebook in Patent Trial – Facebook was in court this week to defend itself in a patent-infringement trail. The suit revolves around a patent for managing electronically stored data issued in 2006 to Michael McKibben and Jeffrey R. Lamb, who work for Leader Technologies Inc.; they’re asking for royalties and for Facebook to stop infringing on their patent. Facebook said it didn’t misuse the technology and the patent doesn’t cover social networking anyway. Facebook has been habitually taken to court over extremely broad prior patents, and these cases have tended to not go anywhere.

BranchOut, Facebook’s LinkedIn? – Startup BranchOut launched a Facebook application this week that aims to provided LinkedIn-style business networking on Facebook. A very thorough review here.

Discovery Channel Connect Mimics Facebook - Campfire created a Facebook Connect integration for the Discovery Channel’s “The Colony” project. Essentially “The Colony” is a simulation of what a global pandemic would do to civilization via social media; electing to utilize Facebook Connect pulls up a users’ network in a simulated social network revolving around the pandemic. Users see (fake) posts from their Facebook friends encouraging them to survive the pandemic.

Zuckerberg on ‘The Simpsons’ – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to guest star on the popular television show “The Simpsons” in the upcoming season. He will play himself and tell characters on the show that even billionaires drop out of school.

Crowdflower, a labor-on-demand provider who routes tasks from companies with labor needs to crowdsource markets like Gambit and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, recently released an API and have begun working with online payment platform TrialPay. In hopes of being able to track reputation and quality scores for crowdsource workers across marketplaces, Crowdflower is also looking to employ a social login such as Facebook.

We spoke with Lukas Biewald on Monday at Crowdflower’s crowdsourcing work meetup, held in the company’s San Francisco office, about some of these new developments. First, the company has added Trialpay as a crowdsource labor pool. Since Trialpay is one of the first alternative payment options for Facebook Credits, this partnership could potentially allow crowdsource laborers to earn Credits for their work. It could be especially useful for younger social gamers who might not have a credit card or a source of income necessary to pay for offers like magazine subscriptions or to purchase Credits directly.

A new API from Crowdflower allows anyone to embed available crowdsource labor tasks into their site or application. The RESTful API allows for automated interaction with the Crowdflower platform, using URL-encoded key value pairs and JSON responses to perform functions such as notifying users when completed tasks have been judged.

Lastly, Biewald described his desire to get the crowdsource industry using a social login such as the Facebook Login plugin. If crowdsource laborers signed in through Facebook, Crowdflower could track their performance and create persistent reputation profiles. High-quality workers could then instantly tackle more difficult, high pay tasks if they started working through a new marketplace. Meanwhile, inaccurate, flaky workers would be unable to hide from their poor past performance by switching crowdsource employers. It would also facilitate another dream of Biewalds’: to see Crowdflower reputation ratings included in job applicant résumés.

Looking forward, Biewald said they are thinking about potential integrations with the Facebook Credits system. We’ll have more details on that as they become available. To learn more about Crowdflower’s features, pricing and clients, check out their Slideshare.

Last week, RockYou began telling users (and us) about its plans to make Credits the exclusive payment option in its Facebook applications. Today, the company has gone further, announcing a five-year deal to exclusively use Facebook’s in-house virtual currency on the platform.

RockYou is one of the largest developers on the platform, with around 34.6 million monthly active users and 2.70 million daily active users, according to AppData. By getting this commitment, Facebook is ensuring that the company’s user base will start using the currency, thereby furthering its reach across the platform.

Facebook intends for Credits to get more users buying more virtual goods on third party applications than they have through third party payment options. It is experimenting with a variety of promotions to help spur the currency along, including giveaways, and special advertising for third-party developers who adopt it — also signing up other developers to exclusive five-year deals, including CrowdStar and Lolapps.

Meanwhile, some developers have balked at Credits, because Facebook takes a 30% cut — whereas it has taken 0% up until now — and because the implementation of Credits can create additional costs for developers.

For more, see our coverage from last week about RockYou’s Credits integration.

Wildfire is launching a Groupon or LivingSocial Deals-style application on Facebook this week, called Group Deals. It’s designed to allow brand Page administrators to set up group promotions on a Facebook Page within a matter of minutes, then get their discount offers shared among friends.

Group Deals works for Facebook Pages and via Facebook Connect like the others — group discounts require a minimum number of participants in order to be profitable for the business, and Facebook provides distribution to make that happen.

Wildfire’s product costs at least 99 cents a day to run, and provides a variety of pricing and customization capabilities. Setting up a Group Deal on Facebook via the Wildfire social application wizard is designed to be fast and simple, requiring three parameters: the value of the deal, the critical mass of takers needed for the deal to activate and the time period during which the deal will be valid.

Brands may also link a Group Deal to an e-commerce service  on their web site.

PayPal will administer the transactions on Facebook. Part of this integration allows buyers to receive reminders to recruit friends to the deal, be notified if the deal activated and also provide buyers with instructions on how to redeem a deal.

Wildfire raised $4.04 million earlier this year, right after it had rolled out a sweepstakes service on Facebook after partnering with Publisher’s Clearing House. For more information about social promotions on Facebook check out the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible.

Canadian Firm, German Govt File Against Facebook - Toronto-based Merchant Law Group filed paperwork seeking class action status in a lawsuit against Facebook this week claiming Facebook mishandled user data during the most recent privacy changes, and seeking the sum of the money the company made as a result of making user data public in that change. It’s not clear how strong the firm’s particular arguments are; what is clear is that some law firms pursue such cases when they think they can get money or at least publicity out of their efforts.

Meanwhile, perhaps more seriously, Germany data protection official Johannes Caspar said in a statement this week that his office had initiated a legal process that could ultimately cost Facebook thousands of euros in fines. The action comes over privacy issues, specifically, April privacy setting changes that exposed the information of people who don’t use the site through Facebook’s email importing settings. Facebook has until August 11 to respond to the legal complaint.

Facebook’s Economic Geography - Visual Economics created a really interesting map of what Facebook’s economy would look like if it were a landmass, representing app companies and Pages by size, and other interesting representations.

Microsoft’s Docs Integrates Facebook - Microsoft’s new Docs.com site has made some changes to its program that allows for better Facebook integration. Currently you can post a document to your Facebook Page. Docs.com users now have the ability to:  post documents for a Page, author a document as a Facebook page, add a Docs tab to your Page and share/manage docs with other Page admins.

Buy a Drink, on Facebook - It’s now possible for Facebook users to buy their friends drinks — real drinks — even if they live in different cities. Web developer Webtab uses Facebook Connect and its Bartab app to coordinate the purchase.

Basically after paying a $1 fee (on the site or via the app) a user can send a drink to someone in the app network in the form of a digital coupon; the indicated drinker must then go to the indicated bar to redeem the coupon.

DC Team Focuses on Privacy - The Hill interviewed Facebook Spokesman Andrew Noyes this week noting that the company’s D.C. team is setting its sights primarily, 90% to be precise, on privacy.

Facebook’s Buchheit Gives Gov a Hand – Code for America, a group working to “import the efficiency of the Web into government infrastructures,” is the beneficiary of the services of Facebook’s Paul Buchheit. The organization is working on several projects with a variety of government groups.

Ladies Love Facebook – Oxygen Media and Lightspeed Research released a report about Facebook usage by women this week. Among the findings was that about one-third of women aged 18-34 check Facebook as soon as they wake up, even before heading to the bathroom. Other findings: 42% of women think posted photos of them “visibly intoxicated” are okay;  57% interact with people more online than face-to-face; 39% call themselves Facebook “addicts”; 21% check Facebook in the middle of the night; 63% network on Facebook; 79% think posted photos of them kissing are okay and 50% are friends with strangers.

Doctors Talk Health on Facebook - USA Today has a piece this week that explores how some health care professionals are using social media tools to help their patients.

Facebook Supports Rel-Me - Chris Messina posted a screenshot showing that Facebook now seems to be supporting the rel-me attribute on its site, used for identity consolidation. Links on one web site about someone connect to other Links about that person, establishing a bi-directional personal rel-me link.

Facebook Pushes Ad Quality, Privacy - The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook is promoting its social-context banner ads service as superior to competitors — including by impression volume, as the graph from the article shows, below. Incidentally, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote a company blog this week describing the way ads work, taking special care to spell out how user privacy is maintained.

Users Like Likes - A couple of different outlets reported on the number of Likes Facebook users are serving up. One promoted the figure of 3 billion Likes a day, with 350,000 sites using Facebook’s social plugins.