Beware: The socialbots are coming. These fake profiles mimic real people on Facebook but are actually computer programs that try to harvest private data from users, and expose them to other security risks.

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While Facebook provides a highly effective advertising platform, commerce on the social network might not take off, according to a report by Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research.
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The average like on a Facebook event posting drives $1.34 in ticket sales, compared to 80 cents per Tweet.
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Facebook can increase self-esteem among college students, according to a study by Cornell University.
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Research suggests people with the biggest lists of contacts on Facebook are likeliest to feel stressed out by the website.
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Fitness gurus often recommend finding a workout partner to stay motivated, and now we’ve unearthed a study showing how Facebook can supply that same type of positive peer pressure.
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Why are you friends with your friends? Is it because they share the same racial background as you? Or because they are of the same ethnicity as you? Or is it for an entirely different reason? Previous research on this topic focused on the these obvious aspects of people’s background to learn how we choose who we’re friends with. However, with the help of Facebook, researchers have found a new way of looking at frienships, and their findings may surprise you.
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A new report from eMarketer yesterday suggests that over $1.2 billion will be spent on advertising on Facebook. That spending accounts for the vast majority of the $1.68 billion that will be spent on advertising across all social networks. The rapid growth illustrates a number of things however the most obvious is that Facebook is completely dominating social advertising expenditures as well as that 2010 may just be the year that social media advertising becomes more mainstream. eMarketers projections also suggests that at the current rate, social network advertising will not generate the breakthrough revenues that Facebook is in search of.
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A few months ago the AllFacebook statistics tools that I originally built myself stopped working. The reason was that I had effectively crashed a bunch of servers and resulting from database tables that were storing too much data. While there were technical issues that I could go into detail about, I’ll save you the detail and let you know that we now have a dramatically upgraded set of statistics tools which are tracking over 1.4 million Facebook applications and approximately 8 million Facebook Pages. You can view them here.
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Want to know how the Facebook Platform is currently performing? One of the best indicators is the application distribution based on the number of daily active users (DAUs). While the historical shift of this is also important, we thought we’d take a moment to provide an approximate snapshot of the current Facebook Platform. While DAUs change from day to day, this chart should provide a greater understanding of the current distribution of applications.
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