This week has been one of controversy surrounding the ongoing reverse mobile billing offers across Facebook applications. It also has been a week of positive updates for developers who were on edge about the impending removal of application notifications. While Facebook didn’t have any big product announcements this week, there was enough controversy to make up for the lack of any major rollouts.

Facebook Surpasses 325 Million Users

Last week Facebook’s advertising platform began reporting that the site had surpassed 325 million users. Just a month and a half ago Facebook reported that they had surpassed 300 million. It appears that the company continues to add around 5 million users a week and if the growth continues, Facebook should come close to hitting 375 million users by the end of the year.

Facebook Turns Up Heat On Aggressive Advertisers

Last weekend Mike Arrington began his fight against aggressive Facebook advertising which resulted in a week with many changes. Offerpal (one of our sponsors) got a new CEO, Mark Pincus apologized for spam ads on Zynga, and Facebook said that they would be continuing their pursuit of aggressive advertisers, even shutting down two ad networks.

Zynga Launches FishVille

On Friday Zynga launched FishVille, their newest game which essentially duplicates the functionality of “Happy Aquarium”, one of the most popular games on Facebook currently. Unfortunately for Zynga, FishVille has since been shut down temporarily by Facebook due to aggressive advertisements which supposedly violate Facebook’s terms. The result was that Zynga is now removing all in game offers until they can monitor all advertisements.

Facebook Launches New Bookmark Features For Devs

For those developers concerned about the impending removal of notifications, Facebook is providing new features to help developers retain new visitors. The first of these offerings is a new “Add Bookmark” button as well as FBJS methods to get users to bookmark applications. Facebook has said that they are working on other features including counters for “non-bookmarked” applications.

John ONeal - November 9th, 2009 at 11:48 am

acai berry adverts and dazzlewhite tooth whitener will continue to bill you after you “try” to cancel their product trial. They do it themselves or they turn your credit info over to another billing company and that company bills you a smaller random amount that they hope will slip through the cracks. Don’t let them post ads on programmer sites.

WHP - November 11th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

Very good article mate, been loving a lot of your stuff recently.

Something that I came across recently that you may be intersted in is this website (www.theisbook.com) that generates your Facebook Status for you when you’re not feeling very creative:

http://www.theisbook.com/status-generator/

Check it out and thank me later

Keep up the good work, I look forward to reading more of your stuff.