While Facebook has let Facebook Page administrators target Page updates to fans for a while now, the company just extended targeting to stream updates. The service mimics the functionality provided by the new status update privacy settings first demoed by Facebook back in July. While the new privacy settings have yet to go live almost 5 months later, it appears that Facebook wants to enable granular stream publishing filters for page administrators as well.
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While Facebook is the largest photo platform on the web, the company only recently became a dominant force in the video streaming space. In the past month, the company doubled the number of video streams from 110.418 million streams to 216.765 million streams according to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers. That’s a dramatic increase, making the site the third largest video site on the web, behind YouTube and Hulu.
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This evening Chris Putnam of Facebook announced that the company is launching an upgraded version of their photo uploader, immediately available for testing as on of Facebook’s Prototype applications. Over time Facebook has had issues with their automated uploading tool, and as such they’ve been working on developing an improved version. If you want to test it out yourself, you can go install the “New Photo Uploader” immediately.
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On Monday we wrote about the first third-party Facebook Ads manager to leverage the Facebook Ads API. Today, 77Agency is the second company to announced their own Facebook Ads campaign management software. Additionally, the company is already involved in licensing discussions with a number of third-parties. Just like the Alchemy service which we covered on Monday, the 77Agency Facebook ad manager, enables advertisers to optimize bids in real-time.
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After trying to stay under the radar for the past few months, CrowdStar, the company behind the fourth largest game on the Facebook platform, Happy Aquarium, is launching their fourth game: Happy Pets. The application first debuted last Thursday and already has over one million monthly active users, approximately the size of the company’s other two games: Know-It-All Trivia and Restaurant Life. The company has great ambitions, with a goal of taking on Zynga.
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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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