Facebook gets by with a little help from its friends who need advertising.

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A Facebook analysis studying journalists’ use of the subscribe feature finds that the group have experienced a 320 percent average increase in subscribers since November, 2011.

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Zynga’s newest game has already set a record in its first week, growing faster than any other application has during its first week on Facebook.
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A short horror video has made it to the top of our list of the fastest growing applications nine days after Halloween, followed by Zynga’s newest and edgiest game.
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Drug companies continue to react to Facebook’s policy shift this week that enables the public to comment on the walls of certain pharma pages.

While product or drug-specific pages continue to be closed to comments, Facebook on Monday started allowing the public to weigh in on the corporate pages of drug companies, as well as pages for patient-specific groups.

And that’s resulting in a number of pharma companies closing Facebook pages, or at the very least monitoring them more closely.

The issue is how much time these companies want to devote to monitoring and deleting inappropriate comments, since open walls may lead to the reporting of bad side effects or unfactual statements — which could raise concern from government regulators.

The Washington Post reports today on the latest reactions from some of the largest drug companies on Facebook:

• Amgen, which had previously planned to maintain its Break Away From Cancer page, removed it Monday. A company spokeswoman told the Post that Amgen continues to work through the comment moderation issue and have yet to find a solution.
• Bayer, best known for its aspirin, is consolidating its Facebook presence by closing the Strong at Heart page, which had more than 26,000 likes, while continuing to manage the I Am ProHeart page, which has more 49,000 likes.
• Purdue Pharma, which makes pain relieving medications, closed its In the Face of Pain page until the Food and Drug Administration releases rules for online engagement.

On the other hand, a Sanofi spokesman told the Post that the company hasn’t experienced any issues with the more than 66,000 people who like their pages related to diabetes and whooping cough, in addition to a company page. Sanofi is keeping its Facebook pages on the site.

Readers, what do you think of the corporate reaction to the new Facebook policy regarding drug companies?

Today the Washington Post announced the launch of their Facebook Connect support. The integration is relatively basic but lets users more effectively share content, at least that’s what the Washington Post communications team says. While I was able to log in after they gave me instructions how to, I wasn’t able to figure out how to share the content. Regardless of the existing Connect functionality, this is a relatively big fish for Facebook who just last week announced integration with YouTube.
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