Social Networking Watch

Hitwise Says Facebook Most Popular U.S. Site

TECH CRUNCH - Mar 15 - Hitwise names Facebook the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google is second at 7.03%. Yahoo Mail is third with 3.8% and Yahoo is fourth at 3.67%. This is the first time Hitwise has named Facebook the top site in the U.S. Comscore still ranks Google the top site by reach at 81% of the U.S. population. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Scamville Marches Onto The iPhone

TECH CRUNCH - Mar 14 - In our Scamville series of posts last October we exposed the massive user fraud occurring Facebook and MySpace social games. Fake quizzes tied to long term mobile subscriptions, malware-laden toolbar downloads and other scams were the center of the controversy. Now we’re seeing the same old scams hit the iPhone. And the same players, particularly OfferPal Media and SuperRewards and now Google, are powering those scams. New Offerpal CEO George Garrick promised to take a leadership position in cleaning up scammy ads. SMS subscription scams are among the most lucrative offers to game publishers because users get a recurring fee of $10 – $25 per month until they are able to terminate the subscription. Many users never notice them, and those that do usually have a lot of trouble getting them shut off. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Facebook Helps Social Start-Ups Gain Users

NY TIMES - Mar 12 - Facebook Connect has helped give rise to a new wave of social Web services that benefit from piggybacking on Facebook and its 400 million users. Blippy, for example, is a new service that allows members to give friends a glimpse into their spending habits by showing purchases made through iTunes and Netflix and on major credit cards. The approach seems to be working. Although Blippy opened its site to the public only in January, members have shared details of more than $15M in purchases with their friends. Another advantage to using the Facebook is that it makes it easy for people to send messages back to Facebook from the other sites that are linked to it. A service called LoKast, which lets users share media like songs and videos with others nearby using a mobile application, will rely heavily on Facebook and Twitter to increase its user numbers. Since Facebook Connect was introduced in December 2008, more than 80,000 sites have put the log-in feature to use. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES

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FarmVille Adds Facebook Credits Payment Option

MASHABLE - Mar 10 - The Facebook platform game FarmVille now supports the Facebook Credits virtual currency. The popular online game uses two units of in-game currency: Farm Cash and Farm Coins. Previously, you could buy them with a credit card or PayPal. Now the game offers Facebook Credits as an option. We recently learned that Facebook takes 30% of developers’ Facebook Credits revenue. Analysts have speculated that Facebook might surpass $1 billion in revenue this year, and the social network’s virtual currency could be a vital part of growth beyond that. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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How Big Is The Facebook Economy?

GUARDIAN.CO.UK - Mar 10 - Investors are pumping more and more money into web services that are heavily reliant on Facebook. Smartdate received $2.2m from investors to try and build its idea of using Facebook data as the basis of a matchmaking service. We know from a number of reports and internal estimates that Facebook itself is due to post somewhere upwards of $1bn in revenue for 2010. How many companies rely on Facebook to keep themselves going? The conservative estimate must stretch into several billions of dollars worth of business at least. Back in November, Electronic Arts bought social gaming site Playfish, in a deal worth ~$275m, meanwhile Zynga, another developer of popular games has already taken more than $200m of venture capital. Other companies making apps include Slide, Mindjolt and FriendFeed (bought by Facebook for ~$50m). FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK

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This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.

Google, Facebook Sued Over Patent For Phone Social-Networking

BUSINESS WEEK - Mar 10 - Google and Facebook were sued by a New York company over an invention related to software that lets people join social networks on their mobile phones. Wireless Ink Corp., which runs the Winksite service, claims that Facebook Mobile and Google Buzz are infringing a patent issued in October. The company is seeking cash compensation and a court order to prevent further use of its invention. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WEEK

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Facebook To Launch Location Features Next Month

MASHABLE - Mar 9 - It now appears that Facebook will officially reveal its plans to incorporate location features in two ways: 1. its own features for sharing location and 2. APIs to let other apps — like Foursquare and Gowalla –- offer location services to Facebook users. Presumably, Facebook will make sure to address privacy issues with its location features. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Twitter Sees 347% Growth In Mobile Browser Access

READ WRITE WEB - Mar 4 - Twitter has experienced a 347% jump since a year ago in people accessing the site via mobile browser. According to a comScore report, both Twitter and Facebook have experienced significant increases in mobile browser access over the past year. Over 30% of smartphone users access social networks using a mobile browser, comScore reports, up from 22% a year ago. Access to Facebook using a mobile browser grew 112% while Twitter grew 347%. Facebook saw 25.1M mobile users in January 2010, MySpace had 11.4M and Twitter 4.7M. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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Facebook CEO In No Rush To 'Friend' Wall Street

WSJ - Mar 4 - The eventual IPO of Facebook could make its founder the world's richest twenty-something. "We're going to go public eventually, because that's the contract that we have with our investors and our employees," Mr. Zuckerberg said during a recent interview. But, he added, "we are definitely in no rush." Mr. Zuckerberg has passed up several opportunities to sell and make a killing. These include a $1 billion offer from Yahoo in 2006 and an overture from Microsoft that was worth a possible $8 billion or more. In October 2007, Microsoft invested $240M for a 1.6% stake plus some exclusive ad rights. By early 2008, Mr. Zuckerberg began to take steps to help prepare the company to go public. He expanded his management team, hiring Google executive Sheryl Sandberg as his No. 2 in March of that year. Any IPO timing is squarely in Mr. Zuckerberg's hands. He owns more than a quarter of Facebook's stock and controls votes for three of five board seats. FULL ARTICLE @ WALL STREET JOURNAL

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This post also appears at the SNC Forums.

HI5 To Support Facebook Games

CNET NEWS - Mar 2 - Hi5, a social network that changed its focus to gaming relatively recently, that it has built some code so that Facebook app developers can transport their creations to Hi5's platform with minimal effort. It's specifically targeting game developers. Beb announced a similar plan to accept Facebook apps late in 2007, but it's unclear as to the extent it was actually executed. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Facebook's $1B Revenues

CNET - Mar 2 - Facebook may pull in an excess of $1 billion in revenues, according to estimates and poking around on behalf of industry blog Inside Facebook. That's an increase from the same publication's estimate of $700M last year. However accurate these new estimates from Inside Facebook are, Facebook is certainly making money--and it's making money because the Facebook "fan page" and complementary ad space to promote it are the hottest ticket in brand marketing right now. Plus, it's well-known that some of the biggest buyers of Facebook advertisements are social-gaming companies looking to pull in more players. Facebook has a potentially lucrative new revenue stream emerging when its virtual currency system, Facebook Credits, launches in full--Facebook takes a 30% cut of all proceeds. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Lights Go Out For Streamy

TECH CRUNCH - Mar 2 - Social network aggregator Streamy hasn’t been able to find a buyer willing to pay what the two founders were hoping to get for the assets, so the startup is shutting its Web app down – for now. Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Judge In Facebook Privacy Lawsuit Reserves Decision On $9.5M Settlement

ONLINE MEDIA DAILY - Feb 28 - A federal judge reserved decision about whether to approve $9.5M settlement of a class-action lawsuit against Facebook stemming from its Beacon program. If U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg in San Jose, approves the agreement, Facebook would be required to shutter Beacon permanently and to contribute ~$6M to a new privacy foundation. The 19 individual consumers named in the complaint would receive amounts ranging from $1,000 to $15,000, but no other Facebook members would receive a monetary award. And attorneys who represented consumers against Facebook would receive ~$3M. Overall, ~3.6 million Facebook members were affected by Beacon. FULL ARTICLE @ MEDIA POST

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Facebook to Take 30% Cut Of Developers’ Facebook Credits Revenues

MASHABLE - Feb 26 - Facebook will soon roll Facebook Credits out to even more application developers, so it has publicly announced that it will take 30% of the revenues earned for goods sold via Facebook Credits. Facebook Credits make up Facebook’s virtual currency; the currency became available to some users last Spring. Those users could buy gifts with it. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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Facebook Secures Patent For News Feed

MASHABLE - Feb 25 - Facebook now owns the patent for the news feed. Depending on what this patent actually covers, Facebook could use it to protect its intellectual property and force other companies with news feeds — e.g. MySpace, Google, and Twitter — to change or take down their technologies. Facebook pioneered news feed technology when it launched its News Feed feature back in 2006. While there was a lot of controversy about it back then, it is now a standard feature on multiple social networks. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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DST Has $1 Billion For Social Media

BUSINESS WEEK - Feb 19 - Digital Sky Technologies, investor in Facebook and Zynga, intends to make big investments in social Web startups over the next five years. Yuri Milner, the owner of the company said: "We monitor close to 50 companies globally that can be potential investment opportunities."  He expects to announce at least one deal by midyear. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WEEK

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Facebook Now Takes PayPal

TECH CRUNCH - Feb 18 - Facebook will make it easier to buy Facebook Credits: you’ll be able to buy them with PayPal. Along with Facebook Credits, you’ll be able to use PayPal to purchase Facebook Ads. Other payment options for Facebook include standard credit cards and mobile phones (using Zong). FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Facebook Overtakes Yahoo

MASHABLE - Feb 18 - New data released earlier today by Compete.com reveals that there has been a major shift at the top of the web charts: Facebook is now larger than Yahoo in the U.S. In December 2009, Yahoo garnered 133.45M visitors in the U.S. Facebook wasn’t far behind with 132.13M uniques. In the first month of 2010 Faebook’s traffic rose to 133.62M visitors, while Yahoo shrunk down to 132.0M. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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