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.



The new tool developed by 77Agency provides the following features:

• Ability to carry out multiple account management and reporting


• Conversion tracking (CPA and ROI)


• Range of reporting views (daily, weekly, monthly, multiple campaigns report, etc) with conversion data


• Bulk upload functionality which allows the creation of multiple campaigns and adgroups without the need to switch between different pages

As we mentioned on Monday, there will undoubtedly be a number of other companies to release their own tools on top of the Facebook Ads API, however we didn’t expect them to be rolled out this quickly. The team at 77Agency has been working with Facebook for the past few months on developing this tool and have been running tests with a number of clients. Over the coming months, 77Agency will be hosting a series of seminars throughout Europe (London, Milan, Rome, Amsterdam) and in New York, to highlight the opportunities available to brand and marketing managers.

We’ll continue to follow the companies building services on top of the Facebook Ads API over the coming weeks and months.

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.



While you would expect Happy Pets to be similar to Playfish’s largest game, Pet Society, it’s not. Instead, the goal is to adopt as many cats and dogs as you can and to take care of them. While you can purchase furniture for your house, just as you can in Pet Society, there are no activities to participate in outside of your house. The game is well developed though and has grown quickly in the past week. While none of the company’s new games have grown to be as large as Happy Aquarium, CrowdStar is investing significant development resources.

According to the company’s Executive Chairman, Peter Relan, the CrowdStar believes they have a unique business model. Relan says that CrowdStar recognizes “that the entire value chain, including the way you actually build, deliver and manage games has also changed, and traditional development models aren’t optimal for this new market. We believe we are building the most efficient, agile and profitable business model in the industry.”

While the company isn’t saying how much money they’re making, with one of the top games on Facebook based on both monthly and daily active users, it’s in the millions. We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on the CrowdStar team over the coming months as they establish themselves as a leading social gaming company.

There’s no doubt that Tyler Durden would have some issues with Facebook, but a new Connect integration is now out promoting the 10th anniversary of the film featuring Chuck Palahniuk’s unforgettable character.

The Fight Club film adaptation of Palahniuk’s novel is celebrating its 10th year the release of an anniversary edition on Blu-ray tomorrow. To get in the spirit of the film, you can tap into a specifically-themed Facebook Connect application to say “Welcome To The Mayhem.” Once you Connect, you’ll see and hear clips from the film with your photos and information injected into the theme of the film.

We’ve seen several applications that are very similar, most recently a promotion for Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. The Shark Week promotion had an almost identical interface, pulling pictures and information from Facebook profiles to make the user a part of the story.

While it’s been 10 years since the release of the Fight Club movie, the character of Tyler Durden still resonates with fans. There are quite a few Facebook pages devoted to Brad Pitt’s character, with some of the larger pages boasting 2,000+ fans. There are even successful spinoffs using the character’s name, like the “What Would Tyler Durden Do?” blog and Facebook page that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the movie, but can probably attribute a good deal of its nearly 2,900 fans to its use of Durden’s name and image.

While Tyler Durden would probably be appalled at the concept and magnitude of Facebook, Fight Club director David Fincher seems to be intrigued by the social network. The director is currently working on a film chronicling the founders of Facebook and how success changed their lives.

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.



Facebook is extremely confident in their existing system however, telling the BBC that:

We are confident that the Ceop button is an excellent solution for sites that have not invested in as robust a reporting infrastructure as Facebook has in place and one we continue to improve.

Investing time in a debate with Ceop may ultimately accomplish nothing yet that isn’t stopping Jim Gamble from offering Facebook with the opportunity to debate the issue a public forum. Apparently the company’s statement to the BBC wasn’t sufficient, and instead the BBC suggests that Facebook “come on the radio and defend itself against its critics”. In contrast to Jim Gamble, who’s job is to build awareness for the Ceop, Facebook doesn’t have much of a problem building awareness about their service.

With countless critics around the world, it doesn’t make much sense for Facebook to invest resources in public debates aside from having their communications department commenting on issues. When the issue becomes a legal one, Facebook has historically shown a willingness to cooperate. Just yesterday, Facebook adopted their latest privacy policy which was a result of a complaint filed by the Candian Privacy Commission.

For now the issue is nothing more than an extremely vocal leader of a child protection organization in the U.K. making what appears to be questionable claims that Facebook isn’t doing enough to protect their users.

Social network Bebo which has seen a rapid decline in popularity but is still one of the biggest such services around, has added a tiny but important new feature: a button that helps children report abuse or bullying.

The button is called the CEOP Report button, (CEOP stands for UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre), if you click on it, you’ll get advice and help about issues such as child abuse (but also viruses and hacking), as well as details on how to inform the police and CEOP.

While all that sounds nice and dandy, there’s always the problem of abusing the abuse button. If you make it easy for people to report a site or an individual as a child abuser, simply by clicking a button, some users could become trigger happy and do it even when it’s unwarranted.

In any case, Bebo isn’t the only social network where child abuse and bullying are common occurences; we can remember several examples on other major social networks such as MySpace and Facebook.

We’d like to hear your opinion: do you think that Bebo’s “panic button” can really be helpful? And if so, do you think that Facebook and MySpace should take similar action? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: bebo, facebook, myspace

We caught wind of some sort of Facebook integration coming to Sony’s flagship Playstation 3 console last week, and now the news is official. Facebook support will be introduced to the console in the next firmware update, version 3.10, and Sony provided some details on what that will entail in a short video preview (embedded below).

Once you link your PlayStation Network account to your Facebook account, you will be able to turn on options to automatically update your Facebook profile in 3 different areas: trophy information, purchasing information, and game event information. You’ll have to manually sync your Trophy Collection to send the information to Facebook, but when you do your PS3 will update your Facebook profile with any of the new trophies you’ve earned since your last sync.

Enabling the second option will update your Facebook profile when you make purchases from the PlayStation Network, while the latter option will vary by game. Sony left it up to game developers to enable support for Facebook updates and determine what game events qualify for a post, whether it be specific in-game accomplishments, stat milestones, or other event. In each case, you’ll always be presented with the option of declining any particular Facebook update if for whatever reason you don’t want to make it public to your contacts.

Sony also made some improvements to the built-in web browser to render Facebook profiles more accurately, and helpfully reminded users they can access their Twitter accounts from the browser as well. And yet, considering that today Microsoft launched a more thorough Facebook integration as well as significant Twitter and last.fm support, it’s hard not to read the PS3 social network integration news as weak by comparison. On the other hand, support for Facebook updates from within games is something the Xbox 360 doesn’t offer (yet — although Microsoft has indicated that will be coming in a future update). Not to mention that Microsoft’s console doesn’t even have a built-in web browser.

At the end of the day, it will still be a nice bonus for PlayStation 3 users on Facebook when it launches, on a date we only know will be “soon.” Check out the video below and let us know your thoughts: will you be excited to generate Facebook updates from your gameplay and PSN purchasing activities on the PS3?

[via NewTeeVee]

Tags: facebook, playstation 3, PS3, PSN, trophies

At the end of Octoboer, Facebook announced that it was revamping its privacy policy. The change, sparked by the intervention of the Canadian government, simplified the new policy, stripped the legal jargon, and put the document up for a comment period by the Facebook community.

That period ended two weeks ago. And because of the positive response (and the fact that there were less than 7000 comments), the new privacy policy is officially in effect. If there had been over 7000 comments, the company would have put the policy up to a vote by the entire Facebook user base.

The new policy is the same as the one proposed in late October. It discusses third party advertising, the right of users to delete profile information, the information it collects, and the rules on sharing information with third parties. Overall, it addresses the Canadian government’s concerns while making the policy easier to understand.

If you want to read the new document, you can find it here. If you take the time to read it, let us know what you think about the simplified document in the comments.

Tags: facebook

It’s been about three weeks since Facebook announced its Platform roadmap for the rest of 2009 through early  2010. It  series of 19 changes primarily affecting the mechanics of and rules around Facebook’s viral communication channels that applications use to spread and engage users. Last week, we took a look at what smaller developers are saying. The largest app developers are hard at work redesigning and re-optimizing their communication channel flows as a result of the new specs and policies. What are they saying about the changes?

1) Removal of app to user notifications

News of the removal of app to user notifications was pretty hard for many of the largest developers to initially stomach. However, while the removal of a channel that many have relied heavily upon will be rough in the short term, most understand that the channel has become clogged with spam and is losing value – both for users and developers. That hasn’t stopped some developers from stuffing it as much as possible – but not all have. Soon, app-to-user notifications will be going away, and developers will need to primarily rely on email for app-to-user messaging.

Some of the largest developers, anticipating the need to control user communication more, have been driving users to share their email addresses for a long time by requesting user email addresses in their apps. Facebook now wants this to all happen directly between apps and users, instead of needing to worry about creating the right kind of allocation limits on developer use of the Facebook notification channel. Notifications will still continue to be used by Facebook directly for things like likes, wall posts, comments, and photo tagging.

2) Removal of user to user notifications, UI deprioritization of requests

While most developers ultimately accept the removal of the current form of app to user notifications as positive for the Facebook Platform ecosystem, there is deeper concern about Facebook’s approach to user-to-user notifications and requests in the current roadmap. Developers argue that many user to user notifications are actually high-quality and engaging, so throwing the baby out with the bathwater (removing notifications and potentially burying invitations in the inbox) could actually be unhealthy for the Platform overall.

Preliminary screenshots released by Facebook show invitations being a third Inbox tab, behind Messages and Updates (from Pages). If this is the only place application invitations are surfaced, developers will see big decreases in conversion rates, and we agree that Facebook should provide a better access point for user-to-user application communication. Other proposed changes, like the user-to-user message composer, should drastically improve signal to noise in and of themselves.

3) Algorithmic News Feed, prohibition on auto-popup feed forms

Overall, while the largest Facebook developers are bracing for the pain of Facebook’s new policy prohibiting the auto-popup of feed forms — a pretty aggressive practice some have become very accustomed to – they agree that an engagement-based algorithm that brings the highest quality feed stories to the front is the right direction for Facebook to take the News Feed.

Giving good air time to high quality app feed stories will decrease the incentive to pump out as many stories as possible to populate the real-time stream, as happened over the last few months. The user broadcast channel will still remain important when all the changes have taken place, there will just be many less feed stories published overall.

Conclusion

Overall, most of the largest developers agree that Facebook is moving in a positive direction with the changes overall to preserve the fidelity of its communication channels, and developers are very glad that Facebook announced a roadmap before launching with the changes. Nevertheless, there is still some significant concern over how exactly some of the changes will be implemented.

In addition, a couple developers are starting to grumble that Facebook is starting to look a little Microsoft-esque when making changes like the recent News Feed update in which Facebook now shows only one image by default in developer feed items, while still showing three images by default in its own Photos feed items. (Microsoft has been criticized for reserving proprietary APIs for itself over the decades.)

However, none of the larger developers are planning on decreasing investment in the Facebook Platform any time soon – in perhaps the most telling sign, they’re all stepping development efforts up.

There are a couple dimensions to Zynga’s new $15.2 million funding. One is time. VentureBeat and peHUB reported the company’s latest regulatory filing earlier today. But, we heard rumors about “another round” of some sort that it was raising, back in April of this year.

One source, who previously said Zynga had raised more money in late June, has reiterated that point to us now. Meanwhile, Zynga has denied a new round of funding or not commented, at least up until today.

The filing shows that it was an extension of an existing round. That’s one of the ways that the company could have credibly denied a “new round” up to this point.

In terms of investors, the money apparently came from existing ones, as the filing — a legal document that the company has to submit to the government about any fundraising activity — doesn’t list any others. Zynga’s investors include: Kleiner Perkins, Foundry Group, Avalon Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures, who together have put in $4o million to date; we have more recently heard that Zynga’s banker has been Allen & Co., and earlier this year the company was intending to raise a round worth between $500 million and $600 million.

Getting the Full Picture

The other dimension is space — between how much the company is rumored to be making and what its valuation is. We hear the valuation is around $625 million, although the company isn’t telling us anything beyond confirming the filing…

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games

We’ve been covering the impending social integrations with Facebook, Twitter, and last.fm on Xbox Live since Microsoft first announced social networking support would be coming to the console back at E3 this June.

If you’ve been waiting to check out social networking on your Xbox 360, today’s the day it’s rolling out to everyone (well, everyone except teens under 18, at least temporarily).



After installing the new Xbox 360 system update, you’ll find Facebook and Twitter in a new My Community channel on your dashboard. You can check out the last.fm integration under the Music Channel. If you don’t see the new options right away, sit tight for a few hours as various regions will be receiving the update in a staggered rollout.

Everything works smoothly in all fronts, much like we saw during the preview and early access rollout of the services. Although the Twitter client is fairly simple, it gets the job done and gives you access to post status updates, see updates from your followers, and also perform searches and see trending topics.

The Facebook integration features a notably excellent photo browsing interface, as well as a uniquely useful feature that lets you find out which of your Facebook friends are on Xbox Live that you might not already know about. Facebook has some more details about specific functionality on their blog.

Do you have the new social networking integrations live on your Xbox 360 yet? When you have a chance to check out the new features, let us know your impressions in the comments.

Tags: facebook, Last.FM, twitter, Xbox 360, XBox live