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Facebook's safety chief responds to KIDS act

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has put out a statement to the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act (KIDS), which President George W. Bush signed on Monday along with the Protect Our Children Act.

In short: Facebook supports the act and says it will cooperate with it.

"We see KIDS as an important tool to prevent inappropriate outreach from ever occurring," Kelly wrote in a post on the company blog about the law, which mandates that registered sex offenders have all identifying Internet names, including e-mail addresses, on file with the National Sex Offender Registry. &… Read more

The disgrace of a Facebook rape defense

Lawyers don't always enjoy the finest of reputations.

Some are unquestionably sleazy. But perhaps you will find your own inventive adjective for a lawyer named Colin McCarraher.

Last week, Mr. McCarraher defended a man called Anthony Francis in Reading, England. Mr Francis was this year stopped on another matter and then subsequently charged with raping a 19-year-old woman in 2001 after police managed to match his DNA sample with that of her attacker.

Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim's Facebook page.

On that page was a picture of her at a … Read more

MySpace program targets small advertisers

MySpace has unveiled "MyAds," an advertising technology focused on small businesses and individuals rather than the huge brand advertisers that the News Corp.-owned social network is best known for. It's a platform in which an advertiser can allocate exactly how much to spend--between $25 ad $10,000--and target its audience using the HyperTargeting system that MySpace debuted just under a year ago.

With HyperTargeting, MySpace says that there are more than 1,100 specific ways to target an ad based on geography, demographics, interests, and other information sourced from public profile data. Advertisers can then keep … Read more

The virtual goods economy is booming

I spent some time this morning with Rob Frasca, CEO, Viximo, a virtual goods provider. Virtual goods have been growing both in adoption and in relative importance versus advertising, especially in the down economy. Facebook appears to have done $34.5 million in virtual goods revenue this year--primarily in the form of gifting.

Viximo has two main revenue streams: digital gifting and branded virtual goods. They provide a turnkey solution to sites who want to offer virtual goods or gifts. The user comes in and buys credits and can use them as they would any other giftcard. Viximo splits … Read more

Zuckerberg: Be patient, we're opening up

LONDON--These are tough times for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The economy is in the tank, Madison Avenue still doesn't have full faith in the social network's ability to generate ad revenue, and entertainment-industry analysts estimate that in a few years the 24-year-old CEO could be in danger of losing his title of "world's youngest billionaire" to pop singer Miley Cyrus.

But Zuckerberg lucked out on Friday with his keynote "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference. Interviewed onstage by conference organizer Ryan Carson, Zuckerberg wasn't subject to any particularly difficult … Read more

Facebook's Morin calls on developers to Connect

LONDON--A lot of hands in the audience went up at the Future of Web Apps conference when Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin kicked off his talk at the conference with the question "How many people have built something on Facebook Platform before?"

Fewer went up when Morin then asked the crowd how many had used Facebook Connect, the company's new data-portability initiative. It's live now, he said.

Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect in May amid a flurry of other companies' data-portability announcements, like Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's Data Availability, which has partners like … Read more

Zuckerberg: Facebook is all about growth

Maybe it's advice he heard from a career counselor at Harvard and took to heart: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For now, what Mark Zuckerberg wants most for Facebook is to see it grow and grow and grow some more, without too much fretting over the bottom line.

In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Facebook's co-founder and CEO minced no words on the matter: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

Of course, it could be less a philosophical matter than a practical one for a … Read more

Social application builds possible electoral map

A number of nifty applications have popped up in response to the 2008 elections, like Google's tool to search political speeches and the Obama iPhone application. One more social-networking application is attempting to gain from the current political fever with a very speculative electoral map. For an application with only 321 active monthly users on Facebook, the myPicks U.S. Election 2008 electoral college map looks surprisingly (though certainly not completely) reasonable.

Developed by the Indian company Pramati Technologies, using the Sun Microsystems' social-application tool zembly, myPicks U.S. Election 2008 is a game that lets you "run&… Read more

Microsoft search results land inside Facebook

It's hardly unexpected, but Facebook has integrated Microsoft's Live Search into its site.

As part of a deal announced in July, users can now search the Web using Microsoft's search engine without leaving Facebook. Of course, as Mashable points out, there are lots of other ways to search the Internet without leaving Facebook (say, using the Google Toolbar).

Although it's garden variety search today, there are some interesting possibilities--and also some nightmarish scenarios--one can imagine down the road, when one combines search with social networking.

The real question, for now, is how much of a boost … Read more