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Mondo Times editors
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 11:17am on Friday, November 13th, 2009 | Facebook, Other Social Networking Sites Face "ScamVille" Lawsuit
Gawker reported on November 12, 2009:
A Sacramento-based law firm is looking for people who faced "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars.'" The firm, which said it has launched an investigation into such scams, specializes in class action suits, among other areas.
Mike Arrington's TechCrunch has posted a series of articles on the issue of sleazy revenue models for online games, exposing the practice of sneaking mobile data subscriptions and pricey "learning CD" packages past players trying to earn online "points." Mafia Wars and Farmville creator Zynga gets a third of its revenue from such "commercial offers," while Facebook in turn gets 10-20 percent of its money from Zynga, according to Arrington.
The full story:
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5403487/class-action-suit-in-the-works-for-victims-of-social-gaming-scams
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 10:45pm on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 | 5 steps to stay safe and private on Facebook, written by Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb on September 16, 2009:
"People everywhere are mindlessly over-sharing on the world's largest social network, without a second thought as to who's reading their posts or what effect it could have on them further down the road. For example, did you know that 30% of today's employers are using Facebook to vet potential employees prior to hiring? In today's tough economy, the question of whether to post those embarrassing party pics could now cost you a paycheck in addition to a reputation."
The full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/09/16/16readwriteweb-5-easy-steps-to-stay-safe-and-private-on-fac-6393.html
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder Colorado USA | Posted at 11:32am on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | The Russians are buying into Facebook, the New York Times reported on May 26, 2009:
"A Russian investment firm, Digital Sky Technologies, has invested $200 million in the social networking company Facebook in return for a 1.96 percent stake, the two companies said Tuesday.
The investment values Facebook’s preferred stock at $10 billion, a $5 billion drop from October 2007 when Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake. With the latest round of financing, Facebook has raised about $600 million since it was founded in 2004."
The full story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/technology/internet/27facebook.html
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 12:23pm on Friday, April 10th, 2009 | Advertising is the business strategy of Facebook, COO Sheryl Sandberg told BusinessWeek Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler in early April 2009:
"It's a really simple answer, which is that our business is advertising. We're not waiting to find our business. We found it, and it's actually working very well. Marketers all over the world have to sell products and services, and they have to generate demand for those services. They do that typically where people are spending their time. But there is a real imbalance right now: Between something like 28% to 29% of people's time is spent online, but only 8% to 10% of the dollars are spent online. So there is this migration of ad dollars from other places going online.
Then the question is how do advertisers make that useful? What we do is we enable connections. We enable people to connect with users and provide advertising in such a way that it's not obtrusive at all, but it's part of the advertising experience and part of the user experience. And so we're doing really well financially."
Read the full interview:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc2009048_429871.htm
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 5:08pm on Monday, March 30th, 2009 | Facebook may be getting too big too fast, according to an article in the New York Times on March 28, 2009:
"When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.
That staggering growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.
Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower — most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages."
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Mondo Times editors
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 2:58pm on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 | February 18, 2009: Business Week magazine reported on "Facebook's Fine-Print Fiasco:"
"It's always a good idea to pay attention to the service terms on social media sites. The importance of reading the fine print became especially clear over the President's Day weekend during a recent brouhaha over social network Facebook and recent changes to the terms of service users must sign digitally before joining.
Initially, users paid little heed to a move by Facebook in early February to update its terms of service, announced with a brief note on the company blog by legal representative Suzie White, who said Facebook "simplified and clarified a lot of information that applies to you." At issue is the clause that says users, by signing on, give Facebook "an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license" to use, retain, and display content posted to the site. Facebook removed language saying that the license expires when a user leaves the site.
On Feb. 15, The Consumerist, a consumer blog, called attention to the changes, saying, "Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later."
After witnessing an uproar in the blogosphere and on Facebook's own profile pages, on Feb. 18 the company retracted the changes and announced it would revert to its old terms of service. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg explained in a blog entry that the company had "received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information." The company is inviting users to contribute to a new version of its terms, in a group on the site called Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, which will be formed over "the next few weeks," according to Zuckerberg."
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Eric Kallgren
Boulder, Colorado USA | Posted at 10:40pm on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 | February 13, 2009: The New York Post reported that the value of Facebook has been reappraised:
"It turns out even Mark Zuckerberg never thought his social-networking Web site Facebook was worth $15 billion.
While the world believed the popular Web site had achieved that lofty valuation after software giant Microsoft plunged $240 million into the company in exchange for preferred shares equal to a 1.6 percent stake, at least two separate appraisals, including one authorized by Facebook itself, tell a very different story.
In the months after Microsoft's purchase, which valued the company's preferred stock at $35.90 a share, separate examinations of the company's common stock valued the stock at no more than $8.88 a share.
That places Facebook's market value at just $3.7 billion, nearly 75 percent less than the value given it following the Microsoft deal."
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