Archives: May 2009

AdNectar is one of the most interesting advertising companies that currently service the Facebook platform as well as other social platforms. What makes them unique is their laser focus on virtual gifts. When I first met them in person earlier this year, they were one of the presenting companies at a conference in New York and I had a chance to learn more about what their company offers. AdNectar is in an interesting position in that they are competing directly with companies like Facebook who currently offer branded gift campaigns outside of the platform.
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This afternoon Mike Arrington posted about a new search engine called Topsy. The new service is built on the back of Twitter’s API and combines information like retweets, and general user influence to produce relatively accurate search results. It uses a similar algorithm to the one I suggested Facebook should use back in January. Since then, Facebook has made little progress in regards to search, at least that’s publicly known.
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While LivingSocial may hold the title for largest application on the Facebook platform, Zynga, the leading social gaming company on Facebook, continues to expand their lead daily. As of today the company is just shy of 43 million monthly active users and 100,000 short of 8 million daily active users, making it the biggest platform developer by all metrics. It appears that for a few days Facebook stopped updating their metrics last week. Once they began updating again Zynga’s metrics jumped through the roof.
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Facebook announced today that they had accepted an investment from Digital Sky Technologies in exchange for a 1.96 percent equity stake, valuing the company at $10 billion. The company also plans on purchasing an additional $100 million in common stock that will help Facebook employees cash out some of their vested shares. While Alley Insider speculated last week that this was a move by Facebook to try to attract other investors, the deal is now final.
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The company behind Lollapalooza, c3 Presents, has decided to make Lollapalooza a bit more social before the event by implementing Facebook Connect. While I typically don’t cover every new implementation of Facebook Connect, this most recent one was interesting because of the impressive statistics provided by the company. According to c3 Presents, pageviews are up 99 percent, page views per visit are up 34 percent, and the average time on the site is up 20 percent.
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The Facebook phishing scams have continued over the Memorial Day weekend, although it appears Facebook is slowly winning the battle. The latest versions of the scams have used Tinyurls and improperly placed spaces to defeat Facebook’s spam filters. One message I received in the past few minutes simply stated “n u d z . r u”.

While it’s unknown if recipients are following the improperly formed URLs, the spammers are clearly turning to alternative tactics. While the volume has appeared to increase, the new spam messages are not great phishing bait. Rather than luring more victims, the spammers are simply helping Facebook to improve their anti-spam measures.
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This morning I’ve been receiving numerous reports that Iran has blocked Facebook. After doing a little searching around I found an article stating that it was blocked “to prevent supporters of the leading opposition candidate from using the site for his campaign.” Mir Hossein Mousavi has attracted over 5,200 supporters on the site. While it’s far from a majority of voters, it was clearly the beginning of a movement that the Ahmadinejad regime was not a fan of.
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I first heard of Aaron Greenspan back in December 2007 when he emailed me asking for clarification a few statements related to an 02138 Magazine article that I had covered at the end of November of that same year. Little did I know that Greenspan was in the midst of preparing to launch his own book, Authoritas, which was later sent to me in April. At that point in time Greenspan attempted to begin promoting his book on Google, only to be prevented from doing so.
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Facebook is the process of testing out a new feedback feature with feed stories. The new feature, which is practically identical to comments, let’s you provide feedback to various users. Why would you want to differentiate between comments and feedback? You probably wouldn’t but as Eric Eldon pointed out back in April, Facebook is testing out credits integrated with feed items. One story after the other is pointing toward a soon to be released credits system within Facebook.
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A few minutes ago Seesmic rolled out the latest version of their desktop application which now includes Facebook comments, spell check, and Twitter spam reporting. I’ve downloaded it and tested it out and while it’s a bit more useful, it is definitely not perfect. In order to comment on stories you need to click on an arrow icon and view a status update in another tab, at which point you can follow the thread of comments.
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