Facebook Application Trickery

I had been very careful to avoid adding some of the many applications available on Facebook, until recently when I decided to add as many as possible in 15 minutes. The result was not only chaos on my profile, but the discovery of Faceook's trickery. On a few of the applications, in order to use them, you have to send the application to 10 or more friends. In addition, your profile is queried higher in search results with the more people you disseminate it to. Ridiculous. I just wanted to find out who had a crush on me, but I guess it wasn't meant to be.

The one good thing about adding content to your Facebook profile that has been an improvement to MySpace's format has been the ability to hide applications on your profile. So why am I analyzing this so much? I think it will be interesting to see how Google will handle applications, and how the clutter and cleanliness will affect each network.

Scrabulous not so fabulous

While we're on the subject, a little note of interest for all half-a-million daily users of the Scrabulous app. Facebook has been asked to scrap the popular game (is that a pun? intended none the less) as Hasbro/Mattel believe it violates their copyright of the board game Scrabble.

Rory Cellan-Jones a BBC technology correspondent put it best by saying, "Early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing"

About 15,000 people signed a petition in the 2 days following the request to delete the Scrabulous app. We'll see where this goes. It's not like you can't play a scrabble game somewhere else on the internet. jeez.

Google's One-Two Punch to Facebook's... Face

Yup, it had to happen and is happening. Google will soon launch it's own social network to rival MySpace and Facebook. The new network is called "Maka-Maka," which means "a big hit" or something. Word on the street is that this is an internal codename for the project and the name will most likely be changed at launch. News.com noted, "'maka' means knock or blow in Hebrew. Maybe they are hoping to do a one-two punch to Facebook." Which, is funny considering that just a couple weeks ago, Google was on the losing end of a bid war with Microsoft to acquire 1.5% of Facebook.

Google recently released new APIs for application developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. This will help drive traffic, and the data will be available to other social sites that want to participate. It's a great way for Google to gain targeting data for their advertising efforts.

Currently, Google has a social network (if you want to call it that) called Orkut. TechCrunch wrote:

The bigger challenge for Google in the U.S. is Orkut itself. While there may be 24.6 million monthly visitors to Orkut worldwide, only 500,000 of those are here in the U.S., according to comScore. Cool social apps aren’t much good if none of your friends use them.

We'll see how many people want to switch over to Maka-Maka when it's released, and if they will offer some sort of incentive for the switch. God knows I don't want to hvae to enter all my "favorites" and pictures again on a new site. And, it appears that Maka-Maka wil be just as cluttered as Facebook is becoming. I hate looking at someone's page and witnessing a page fold length epic battle between pirates, ninjas and zombies. Dammit people! CLEAN UP YOUR GODDAMN MINI-FEEDS!

Microsoft Buys 1.6% of Facebook... for $240 Million

The Seattle Times reported that Microsoft just made a deal with Facebook to become the exclusive, global provider of banner advertising sales until 2011. Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share of the company for $240 million, which makes Facebook worth $15 billion. Seattle Times also notes that even though it's a $15 billion dollar dot-com, it has yet to turn a profit. The deal appears to be another step in Microsoft's recent takeover of online advertising, which includes their recent acquisition of AQuantive (Ave.A-Razorfish). Well, let the games begin cause who did Microsoft beat out for the share? Good ol' Google.

I guess since Google got beat, they'll probably just make their own networking site that will rule them all! Since MySpace is held by Murdoch, and now Facebook is teaming up with Microsoft, the only place Google can really go is on their own. I know there are a lot of other social-networking sites, but they suck, which is why I can't name any of them here. But, I think this might work to Google's advantage, cause MySpace is on it's way out, so Facebook will be top-dog, but it's already getting crowded over there, so... Google can sweep up on people jumping the Facebook ship. We'll see I guess.

I also have to note that Microsoft has it's own social-networking site called Windows Live Spaces, which is about 1/6th the size of Facebook. I guess they don't have much faith in their own site, or they're too lazy to make it better. Here's the approximated breakdown of size by users:

Win Live - 6 million
Facebook - 30 million
MySpace - 60 million

Google Advertising in YouTube Videos

So, Google has begun its advertising in videos on YouTube. This guy made a little video about it. I don't like it, but I haven't seen any videos yet that actually have it, so I'm wondering if it's only new videos that get advertising now, or if the videos have to be featured, or what. I did a quick search on YouTube to try and find some vids with ads, but I didn't find anything. The featuyred videos didn't even have ads. After being unable to find a video with a google ad, I started to wonder why this guy was watching a Kelly Piclker video. Mmmm... Check it out though - A little prevy of things to come from Google and YouTube.