Facebook has been great at cutting down on spam profiles- it easily beats out the fakes on MySpace.
However, now it has to be equally vigilant with advertisements. Facebook Flyers- Facebook’s do it yourself mini-ad network- is overwhelmed by shady survey deals and soft core pornography. It’s already started controversy.
But the real challenge is down the [...]

Facebook has told developers that its Marketplace Application is adding more API features. Of course, few developers use Marketplace for their own applications. Why does Facebook make the effort there, and not for Video?
The answer undoubtedly lies, to some degree, in technical difficulties. Storing, managing and distributing video is a daunting task.
However, there’s also a [...]

Reports say Facebook wants to include iTunes and music widgets on upcoming “artist pages.”
What’s the long game for this strategy? Not iTunes.
Facebook wants to become the label and distributor in an era without labels and distribution.
Who needs marketing when you have the social graph? And who needs stores when you have downloads?

You can bet one thing- FBFund’s grants will probably have a few restrictions.
Most likely rule?
Facebook Exclusivity.

This week, it’s Businessweek that gets the facts wrong.
In an article about Google opening up Orkut to developers,  Olga Kharif places heavy emphasis on the fact that Google will allow developers to host applications on their own sites, which is an “easier restriction” (let’s not try to parse that mangled phrase, at the moment). Kharif’s [...]

If Facebook developers are looking for Deep Throat, they’ve got him. His name is Adam Stamper and he came forward with some fascinating information:
You might want to look closely at the ads delivered by ‘Flyers Exchange’. When I checked the source of their flyers I noticed some unusual code which seemed to be placing 10 [...]

Facebook may be creating Artist pages on its site, as MySpace has done since the beginning.
Who knows what’s next for Facebook. Maybe users will get a new friend.

What do you do when your site’s visitors are literate in, and willing to use, piracy for all their content?
Start a music store?
Both the logic and veracity of the latest report are doubtful. Apple makes little to no money on iTunes- it’s used mainly to drive iPod sales. And competitors like Amazon are tough to [...]

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch does his time on the latest story- Steve Ballmer called Facebook a fad. It’s the CEO equivalent of a food fight (and no, not this food fight). Except it might be more serious, if Microsoft doesn’t invest.
Every possible point has been made about Facebook’s community features being more important than its [...]

The always fascinating Silicon Alley Insider offers up the recent results of a Razorfish survey of web consumers. There’s a lot of interesting facts (and some that seem a little too web-savvy- do 47% of Web users really use RSS?).  Online shopping was a standout feature for regular web users. I noticed the following:
55% rely [...]