While Facebook didn’t have any significant announcements this week, it was another difficult week for publishers and advertisers who had participated in aggressive mobile offers for generating revenue. A law firm published that they are investigating a potential class action suit against a number of industry participants, currently looking for victims of reverse mobile billing scams from Facebook and other social platforms.
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Over five months after we first started covering some of the aggressive advertisements on Facebook, a class action suit is being filed on behalf of the users who were victims of reverse mobile billing scams. This was an inevitable suit although this really appears to simply be a law firm looking to profit from all of the scams. Named in the class action suit are the following companies, including some companies that have sponsored this blog:
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For the upcoming 10th anniversary of Fight Club, Fox has launched a Facebook Connect integration similar to a number of implementations that we’ve previously written about. One coincidental trivia item first noted on Techcrunch is that the director behind Fight Club, David Fincher, is also the director of the upcoming movie about Facebook, “The Social Network“.
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Last month we wrote about the impending launch of Facebook on XBox LIVE and now it’s official. According to Microsoft, Facebook will launch on Xbox LIVE on November 17th, the same day we mentioned last month. Facebook integration is relatively robust (see here) including the ability to update your status, view your Facebook stream, photos, and profile, and the ability to share scores with your Facebook friends. News of the launch comes just as rumors about PS3 launch a similar service was leaked.
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Only two weeks ago I wrote that Facebook was dominating the internet (and Twitter) based on the latest Hitwise statistics. Two weeks later Compete is showing a similar trend with Facebook growing 3 percent domestically over the past month while Twitter drops by around 2 percent. As I mentioned last month though, direct traffic to the Twitter.com site may not be a good indicator of activity on the site.
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wooga, the company behind the popular Brain Buddies application, announced today that they have secured $7.5 million from Balderton Capital as a follow-up to the first round of funding from Holtzbrink Ventures we covered earlier this year. Since August, Brain Buddies has surpassed Playfish’s popular “Who Has The Biggest Brain?” application. With Playfish’s $400 million sale to Electronic Arts earlier this week, it’s not surprising to see additional signs of investor confidence in the social gaming space.
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Back in July we were the first to post about an impeding Facebook Ads API for agencies and large advertisers. Today, Justin Smith posted the latest documentation of the Facebook Ads API as provided by an unknown source. The service is just as we’d expect given that Facebook’s existing advertising platform uses JSON-encoded methods to generate CPM, CPC, and demographic data. The API methods enabled advertisers to create and modify the following: ad groups, campaigns, and individual ads.
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This afternoon Facebook announced a new targeting feature for advertisers: friends of connections targeting. The feature enables advertisers to target those “users whose friends are connected to” specific Pages, Events, Groups, and Applications that you currently manage. It’s an improvement upon the “connections” targeting feature that we previously wrote about. It’s an interesting feature which enables advertisers to take advantage of Facebook’s social graph.
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In September, Tweetdeck updated their desktop application to allow users to view their entire Facebook feed next to their Twitter feed. Given that it’s probably the most popular Twitter desktop application, Facebook support became extremely useful. As of today Tweetdeck’s iPhone application now provides support for Facebook as well, letting you view and update your Facebook stream while on the go.
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A couple weeks ago we wrote about Facebook’s improved profile suggestions however at the time we didn’t notice one thing: Facebook’s recommendation to poke each other. Many people still debate what the purpose of poking is however Facebook appears to be using it as a tool to get users to be more active. What was strange about the recommendations we’ve been sent was that the user who saw them didn’t know the person they were advised to poke.
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