USocial, a company which sells Facebook friends and fans, has received a cease and desist from Facebook for violating the company’s terms of service. The BBC claims that the issue at hand is that the company is “letting people profit from their profile”, which is strictly forbidden within Facebook’s terms. We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on the issue, to see if there were any issues with the company selling fans. In early October we highlighted the growth in the pay per fan business model, and since then we’ve heard an increasing amount of buzz about the space.
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On any given day we receive 5 to 50 stories to post on AllFacebook, however there’s no way for us to currently cover everything that goes on. Determining which stories to publish is part art and part science, however that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of all the things going on related to Facebook. That’s why we’ve decided to post occasional updates on the stories that we couldn’t get to the day before. Today we have 3 stories from yesterday that you should be aware of.
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Want to get your questions answered by Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Rhianna, or Taylor Swift? I don’t, but if you are one of the millions of people who follow celebrities, you can watch the American Music Awards pre-show live on Facebook this Sunday. The “Official AMA Pre-Show” will feature hosts Julie Moran, Jenni Pulos, Jai Rodriguez, Taryn Southern. Don’t forget Facebook’s own Randi Zuckerberg and Communications Director Brandee Barker, who will also be featured hosts of the event.
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Just one month ago at Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told the audience that the company had surpassed 150 monthly active users. One month later, the company’s user base has grown by a third, rocketing it past 200 million users. Monthly active users are a relatively broad metric when analyzing a company though, as daily active users are a more effective metric for measuring a company’s ability to monetize.
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While Facebook has let Facebook Page administrators target Page updates to fans for a while now, the company just extended targeting to stream updates. The service mimics the functionality provided by the new status update privacy settings first demoed by Facebook back in July. While the new privacy settings have yet to go live almost 5 months later, it appears that Facebook wants to enable granular stream publishing filters for page administrators as well.
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While Facebook is the largest photo platform on the web, the company only recently became a dominant force in the video streaming space. In the past month, the company doubled the number of video streams from 110.418 million streams to 216.765 million streams according to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers. That’s a dramatic increase, making the site the third largest video site on the web, behind YouTube and Hulu.
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This evening Chris Putnam of Facebook announced that the company is launching an upgraded version of their photo uploader, immediately available for testing as on of Facebook’s Prototype applications. Over time Facebook has had issues with their automated uploading tool, and as such they’ve been working on developing an improved version. If you want to test it out yourself, you can go install the “New Photo Uploader” immediately.
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On Monday we wrote about the first third-party Facebook Ads manager to leverage the Facebook Ads API. Today, 77Agency is the second company to announced their own Facebook Ads campaign management software. Additionally, the company is already involved in licensing discussions with a number of third-parties. Just like the Alchemy service which we covered on Monday, the 77Agency Facebook ad manager, enables advertisers to optimize bids in real-time.
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After trying to stay under the radar for the past few months, CrowdStar, the company behind the fourth largest game on the Facebook platform, Happy Aquarium, is launching their fourth game: Happy Pets. The application first debuted last Thursday and already has over one million monthly active users, approximately the size of the company’s other two games: Know-It-All Trivia and Restaurant Life. The company has great ambitions, with a goal of taking on Zynga.
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Days after Facebook announced their support for the Bullyproof campaign, the head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in the U.K., Jim Gamble, is challenging Facebook on their existing child protection policies. While Facebook already has effective reporting mechanisms that have worked in the past, Gamble would (not surprisingly) like for Facebook to implement the Ceop button for protecting children.
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