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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Over the past 24 hours, two of the largest Facebook application developers, RockYou and Zynga, have announced relatively large funding rounds. RockYou raised a whopping $50 million and Zynga raised $15.18 million. What are these rounds going toward? RockYou is apparently turning their attention toward the booming social gaming space and expanding their advertising efforts, while Zynga is most likely stocking up on cash to help build out their ever expanding portfolio of popular games.
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Facebook has been used to accomplish a lot of things including organizing global protests, running political campaigns, and even hunt down criminals. On Friday, the first “crowd-sourced” movie to be developed, “Live Music”, will be released. The movie, was developed by connecting artists from around the world on Facebook via the Mass Animation Facebook page.
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Communist regimes and dictators really do not like Facebook. We’ve written about China blocking Facebook on an ongoing basis, and now Vietnam is possibly blocking the site as well. According to Ben Stockton of AP, “Over the last week, access to Facebook has been intermittent in the country, whose government tightly controls the flow of information.” We’ve seen access to Facebook limited before but this is the first time we’ve heard of issues in Vietnam.
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This evening, Sony officially announced support for Facebook on the Playstation 3. While integration was first rumored last week, there is now an official video of the Facebook features which we’ve embedded below. Included in the integration is the ability to: share trophy information, share purchase information, and share game event information. Each of these features take place automatically once configured.
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Tonight millions of people around the world will stare up at the sky to watch meteors crash into our atmosphere resulting in beautiful explosions (as long as you aren’t in the city). So far over 900,000 people have registered for the Lenoid Meteor Shower 2009 event on Facebook which means there’s a decent chance you’ve seen it show up in your news feed.
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Just when I said that the Connect video promotions had become a trend, I noticed a comment on Facebook highlighting yet another video promotion, this time for the television show CSI. This promotion involves the user depicted as a criminal who’s being pursued by the CSI team. It’s a creative use of Facebook Connect however it’s fairly similar to many of the other promotion that we’ve written about in the past, including the Fight Club promotion which we covered on Friday.
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Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon as some of my Facebook friends become engaged: a photo of the couple is displayed along with the story about the couple’s new “engaged” relationship status. It’s a subtle change but it’s a nice touch by Facebook as a photo always helps a story resonate with readers. The new engaged story update has appeared to come with the updated homepage design.
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It could be worse. Girls are now “permanently connected” to Facebook, a girls’ school leader told the BBC. Rather than skipping class to go get high, girls are able to get their fix quicker via their mobile devices. One of the biggest issues according to some parents is the Honesty Box application, which lets users write anonymously on each other’s walls.
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Back in July we first wrote about the impending launch of the Facebook Ads API and today marks the launch of the first ad manager built on top of the Facebook Ads API. Alchemy, which has received just under $500,000 worth of initial funding from the TechLightnment team, is a proprietary tool for planning and buying social advertising. The initial campaigns have seen anywhere from 500 to 1,000 percent increases in click-through-rates according to the company.
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