Inside Facebook

Seven year-old Mobile First is the latest payments company to enter the social gaming market. It is launching a mobile payments service today that competes directly against a range of other mobile payment providers, including Boku and Zong.

Like its rivals, the company is letting developers install a simple widget that lets users can choose a set amount of virtual currency to purchase with their cell phone. Users provide their cell, number, Mobile First sends a text message to their phone containing a confirmation PIN number, then users enter that number in the widget to complete the purchase. See the screenshots below, from the Facebook game Vegas Slots.

And, like many of its rivals, the company also provides customer support, language translation, secure payment processing and real-time reporting

Mobile First is especially interesting, however, because it is an established company. It offers a variety of premium text messaging services in 40 countries around the world, including the US, countries in Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Payment companies also typically pay significant transaction fees to the mobile carriers in countries where they are active. Mobile First says it is offering attractive payouts to developers as well.

The predictable mix of celebrities, movies and politicos — and The Bible — round out this week’s list of Top 20 Facebook Pages. This week’s list, from February 1 to 8, shows influences from the Grammys and the Super Bowl, as well as the presidential election in the Philippines.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas Hold’em Poker	10,315,265	+1,141,668	+12.45
2.	Mafia Wars	8,188,138	+1,014,916	+14.15
3.	Lost	1,702,202	+490,041	+40.43
4.	Pepsi – Refresh Everything	503,509	+203,129	+67.62
5.	Official Avatar Movie	1,330,237	+102,784	+8.37
6.	Barack Obama	7,382,220	+81,569	+1.12
7.	Justin Bieber	1,645,445	+80,713	+5.16
8.	Lady Gaga	5,149,758	+77,769	+1.53
9.	Megan Fox	5,685,734	+75,350	+1.34
10.	Dear John	929,008	+74,976	+8.78
11.	Glee	1,419,231	+73,801	+5.49
12.	Michael Jackson	10,796,535	+71,084	+0.66
13.	Manny Villar	559,513	+70,868	+14.50
14.	Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III	595,066	+70,789	+13.50
15.	Gatorade	465,122	+67,649	+17.02
16.	(RED)	529,930	+66,917	+14.45
17.	Shahrukh Khan	352,288	+64,492	+22.41
18.	Taylor Swift	3,120,853	+61,263	+2.00
19.	The Bible	1,457,621	+61,123	+4.38
20.	GILBERT ‘GIBO’ TEODORO, JR.	136,999	+59,803	+77.47

Zynga ruled the top two spots again this week with Texas Hold’em Poker and Mafia Wars and the number 1 and 2 spots, respectively.  In third was the television show “Lost,” which had  a much-anticipated premiered last week; another popular TV show, “Glee,” came in at number 11 this week.

The Super Bowl’s influence was not lost on Facebook this week as Pepsi’s Refresh Everything page landed at number 4; although Pepsi opted-out of Super Bowl advertising this year, the reason that Pepsi did so well the past week may have been because it got mentioned every time the topic of the big game’s commercials came up. Megan Fox, a regular on the Top 20, also starred in a Motorola commercial, boosting her to the number 9 spot. And Gatorade, which has been promoting its product all over its Facebook page the past week in anticipation of the Super Bowl, rolled in at fifteenth.

“Avatar” may have lost its number 1 spot at the box office to “Dear John” over the weekend, but James Cameron’s alien saga rolled in at number 5 while the chick flick came in at number 10. “Dear John” opened Friday and, with the help of teenage girls, was able to knock “Avatar” out of its domination of the box office and the romance had te highest opening ever for a movie Super Bowl weekend.

Barack Obama held sixth place.

Musicians were also a big part of this week’s list, likely due to the Grammys last Sunday, where Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift performed and Michael Jackson was honored. Justin Bieber came in seventh, Lady Gaga at number 8, Michael Jackson at number 12 and Taylor Swift eighteenth.

The presidential election in the Philippines has allowed two frontrunners, Manny Villar at 13 and Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III at number 14, to be on the Top 20 for weeks. Now, they are joined by Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro, Jr., who closed the list at number 20. The election is May 20, it’ll be interesting to see whether the winner of the election continues to be popular on Facebook after the results are in.

Finally, a mixed bag finished off the list. (RED), the non-profit to fight HIV in Africa, landed at the number 16 spot, probably due to a boost of 62,000 fans on February 6, likely the result of page consolidations. At 17 was the famous Indian actor Shahrukh Khan, whose page got a boost of 57,000 fans on February 4.

The Bible, for reasons unbeknownst to us, landed at the number 19 spot this week after what seems to be really rapid growth that started at the beginning of the month.  A look at the Facebook page doesn’t point to anything in particular that prompted its growth this week.

Health and beauty product manufacturer Dove is taking aim at the male market, with a marketing campaign that is combining the brand’s Facebook presence with a variety of other media. Dove has been pushing the “Men+Care” line for a while on its Facebook page, but recently took a huge step towards speaking to male consumers in a more direct manner with a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.

Dove has almost 113,000 fans of its Facebook page, most of whom are women. The company has been pushing its men’s line of products for a while through wall posts and some coupon offers, but most of the marketing has been geared toward getting women to buy the products for their men.

The Men+Care line currently has its own tab on the Dove fan page, which gives users a chance to watch the Super Bowl commercial, check out the dedicated Men+Care Web site, learn a little more about the actual products, and print a coupon for a buck off a Men+Care product.

Along with the Super Bowl commercial, which has been receiving a lot of praise on the Dove fan page, the band has also signed Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints as a spokesperson, using him in a few commercial spots and playing up his role as a father.

While there are plenty of cosmetic brands using Facebook to connect with consumers, the efforts of these companies are almost exclusively geared toward the ladies. There are, however, a few brands known for their men’s products that are doing quite well on Facebook, showing that there is interest in these types of products.

Old Spice has an very active page with more than 425,000 fans, while the AXE fan page has about 192,000 fans. Both brands are going after the same market as the Men+Care line, though have chosen to tailor ads to appeal directly to a certain type of guy. Dove doesn’t appear to be targeting the exact same demographic, instead opting for a more family-oriented type of chap. It will be interesting to see how much buzz the Super Bowl commercial generates for the Men+Care products, and if Dove is able to appeal to this segment of the male market.

February is African American/Black History Month in the U.S. and is commonly celebrated in many different institutions here that remember the accomplishments and contributions of African Americans to this country.

A look at how celebrations of Black History Month have translated to Facebook shows that such holidays don’t really have the cache to make it big on the social network, versus other holidays such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day.  This may be attributable to how popular the celebration is overall, or a lag between migrating content from web sites to Facebook, as Black History Month is a big deal in schools, businesses and governments across the country.

But, that’s not to say that there’s nothing out there.

The U.S. Marine Corps have been posting almost daily Status Updates recalling the legacy of African Americans in this branch of the military, including the first recipient of the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War and a video recounting a history of African Americans’ service in the Corps.

Other governmental entities have also jumped into the game, some going further than others.

There are simple listings that are included in the Notes or Events sections of some pages that simply list activities to celebrate Black History Month in February.  The Facebook page of Black Canada and Kingsport, Tennessee are good examples of this, as both posted Notes with information about related events and little else.

Round Rock, a suburb of 104,000 north of Austin, Texas, did a much better job of promoting their Black History Month activities on Facebook by creating a page specifically for this year’s celebration, Round Rock Black History Month 2010, which currently has 113 fans. The Facebook page is part of Round Rock’s Black History Month 2010 Planning Committee, of which the city was a prominent member.

Although just 9% of the local population is African American, one of the page’s admins said it was important to Round Rock to promote its local history as it pertained to the February celebration with events like photography exhibits, book signings, a dance and a large kickoff party. “When we were looking to plan our events for Black History Month I thought it would be best, considering the amount of people that are on Facebook,” said Michelle Cervantes of the Round Rock Public Library and a member of the aforementioned planning committee. “It’s easy to use, it’s easy to manage and it’s free.”

Cervantes told us that in previous years she’s helped organize the city’s Black History Month events using MySpace to get the word out about events, but with the growing popularity of Facebook, the committee was unanimous in deciding to use it to the same this year. Round Rock and the library there each have their own Facebook pages, she told us, so it was logical to create one specifically for this year’s Black History Month festivities.  Success for the city’s events has been mixed.  There have yet to be formal surveys to determine how successful Facebook has been in moving people from the online world to the real world, but that’s in the works.

“I think it has definitely increased the awareness that the community of Round Rock has Black History Month events,” she said, noting that future use of Facebook to organize the event was likely. “If Facebook is still popular, free and user-friendly, then we’re definitely open to using Facebook again.”

The University of Illinois at Chicago also created a Facebook page, Black History Month 2010, for this year’s festivities that’s been actively promoting the university’s events. The Facebook page is part of the university’s Black History Month Planning Committee under the Campus Programs department.

Then there are big businesses.

AT&T’s Twenty-Eight Days Facebook page is an extension of their web site of the same name to “forward momentum” in February in the spirit of Black History Month. Several black celebrities are a part of the AT&T campaign that urges the 720 Facebook fans to set a goal for the month of February to be completed by the end of the month. The page urges people to become active, “Everybody wants a page in history…this February, get started writing yours.

Finally there’s The Black List Project, an HBO documentary that is set to premiere a third installment on February 8. The page has 2,500 fans and promotional material for the documentary, which features Whoopi Goldberg, John Legend and Hill Harper, among other “iconic” African Americans. Interviews from those featured discuss subjects that examine their experiences as African Americans.

It’s possible that by next year, if Facebook continues its global domination of social networks, that even more Black History Month-related pages with even better features will be available.  It’ll also be interesting to see how the presence of similar U.S. holidays, like National Hispanic Heritage Month from mid-September to mid-October, compare.

One of the more interesting features within the new Facebook dashboards is the ability to see which applications and games the people in your friend list have been using. Although this is a great way to discover new apps, there were privacy concerns around having so much information visible to friends automatically.

Facebook took the first step to address this last week with the introduction of a privacy control at the developer level. Now, application developers can decide whether their app or game will appear in a user’s friends dashboards or not. This is useful for application types that a developer thinks a user might avoid if their friends knew they were using it. However, it doesn’t provide privacy options to the users themselves.

Since last week, Facebook has added a new privacy control on the user application privacy settings page (accessed from the new “Account” dropdown at the top right of the page and clicking on “Applications and Websites”) that lets the user do just that. There, you can see a new option for controlling “Activity on applications and games dashboards”, shown below:

The control gives users a number of options as to who will be able to see their application activity. The choices are similar to those that control status update and other wall visibility: “Everyone”, “Friends and networks”, “Friends of friends” or “Only friends”. Obviously, Facebook prefers that everyone shares information at least with their friend network.

Click on the “Customize” option, though, and a dialogue box appears with the ability to restrict the information to certain friends (or to hide it from specified friends), networks, or for maximum privacy: “Only me”. This effectively gives the user the ability to hide all of their application activity from their friends.

Although it doesn’t provide the ability to hide only particular applications, this does provide a way for those users who are most sensitive about the apps and games they interact with to hide their activity. However, we doubt a large number of users will end up setting this option.

Pharmaceutical companies have begun creating a presence on Facebook characterized by control and caution. Why? Despite unclear regulations in the U.S. governing their presence online, they may still be penalized for marketing materials on the Internet. The result is, in terms of their Facebook marketing content, a mixed bag of sometimes disingenuous Pages and Groups, fluffy applications and tightly-controlled discussions.

In November of 2009 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hosted a hearing to examine this very issue: how to regulate drug companies’ marketing online — including social networks, blogs, podcasts, Wikipedia, etc. More than 800 parties tried to register to speak at the two-day hearing that included 69 speakers and 77 scheduled presentations; most attendees were either pharmaceutical or marketing reps, and the rest were a tiny fraction of consumers, non-profits and consumer advocacy groups.

According to the FDA, which regulates the promotion or advertising of pharmaceuticals in that country: “The continually evolving nature of the Internet, including Web 2.0 and social media tools… have raised questions and concerns over how to  apply existing regulations to promotion in these newer media.”

Currently there are no laws governing what pharmaceutical companies may or may not do online — aside from the general expectation that they disclose risk information alongside drug benefits. The last time the FDA broached the subject was 1996 and has since been based on guidelines for print marketing: where both benefits and risks of drugs must be presented side-by-side.

“The worry is the drug companies will find a way via the much more malleable and fluid environment of the Internet to promote their product in one-sided ways — and that’s not good,” said Steven Findlay, a senior health policy analyst with the Consumers Union who spoke at the FDA hearing. Facebook Pages for or by drug companies ought to include benefits and risks of drugs, he said, and be regulated by the FDA.

Several drug companies we saw on Facebook tried to mediate the info shared on their pages by closing their Walls, disallowing comments/likes and keeping consumers’ comments to a minimum by wielding tight control over Discussions.

The Facebook pages of Nexium (marketed to relieve heartburn caused by acid reflux disease) and Claritin Eye (eye drops for allergies) both closed off their Wall post to comments and likes. Both pages include information available on their product web sites.

“If they have a Wall, they can’t control what’s on it. If people complain about Nexium, then they’d either have to try to censor it, which would be potentially a problem, or they’d have to spend time responding to it,” said Diana Zuckerman, President of the National Research Center for Women and Families. “I would say to anyone who wants information about a medical product: Facebook is not the place to get it.”

Zuckerman testified at the FDA’s November hearing and said companies creating Facebook pages are likely to present information in such a way as to highlight the benefits without prominently pointing to the risks. Charging companies a fee payable to the FDA to monitor these sites would be the ideal way to ensure this doesn’t happen, she told us.

Claritin’s page has 6,600 fans and no place for comments, whereas Nexium has 508 fans and controls discussions by employing an app users have to allow access to before posting comments or questions. Nexium’s Facebook admin closely monitors these discussions, posting answers to questions or referring people to more information on Nexium’s web site.

Additional information on the pages include tabs for frequently asked questions, product information and risks, product savings programs, community guidelines for Facebook users (e.g., no obscenity or defamatory language) and tips.

Prevacid 24HR is another heartburn medication that had 8,000 fans on Facebook but took a radically different approach to its presence there than Nexium. Comments and likes are allowed on Prevacid’s Wall, although there were no active Discussions, and they even offered a coupon for discounts on their products.

There’s no penalty for misrepresenting information about a drug on Facebook, explained Zuckerman, although there is such a fine for similar misrepresentations in traditional media. What’s happened online is that pharma companies will present risk information, but it may not be where a user is likely to look, she told us.

“I think that, at the very least, these companies should have all of the same risk information that they’re required by law to include in television ads and magazine ads,” she says, noting that the unlimited space on the Internet would make this easier for the drug companies to accomplish.

Another tactic pharmaceutical companies are employing on Facebook: customized apps. Claritin’s page employed one, albeit the app was not closely related to the product. Claritin Eye Makeover allows users to upload photos of themselves to change and edit their eye color. Johnson & Johnson’s Acuminder, with 511 fans, is an app that reminds users when to change or purchase contact lenses, as well as remind them of their next eye exam.

Some companies also offer a Page or Group around a cause related to a drug. This is an especially gray area. Some examples we looked at clearly disclosed their sponsor relationship while others didn’t — either way, it appears that companies can be liable in some circumstances.

A Page with almost 109,000 members called Take A Step Against Cervical Cancer has ostensibly organized around preventing cancer — doing so by vaccinating young women with the HPV vaccine Gardasil, made by Merck. The Wall is practically non-existent, although there is information about side effects and links to Gardasil’s web sites on the page. There’s also an interactive fact book and quiz, and an app that allows users to make their own symbol against cervical cancer to post to their Walls.

Although rallying more than 100,000 people around a cause like cervical cancer and hiding the connection to a pharmaceutical company on the Info tab is not entirely a deception, but it’s also not transparent. Some similar Pages take this a step further.

Epilepsy Advocate, with 4,300 fans describes its Page as, “a community of people living well with epilepsy, their family members, and their caregivers. Epilepsy Advocates are people just like you who have shown the courage to share their stories and provide support to others.” Nowhere on the page, however, does it note that Epilepsy Advocate is a program sponsored by the pharmaceutical company UCB, which makes drugs for the treatment epilepsy. Although there are no strict laws governing pharma on social media, is it legal to promote an organization sponsored by a drug company without saying so?

It’s a slippery slope.

In UCB’s case, the Page itself is not currently illegal; however, the company is also responsible for the content. If a “user reported an adverse reaction to its treatment there, UCB would need to report it to the FDA,” according to an analysis by Adweek from December. “What’s more, pharma companies can be held liable by regulators for people discussing off-label use of their products on their sites.”

ADHD Moms, a Page for mothers of children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, is similar to the epilepsy page, but discloses on the Info tab that its page of 9,500 fans is sponsored by McNeil Pediatrics, a self-described leader of ADHS treatment with its Concerta drug. Disclosure about the Page’s sponsor is a good thing, but the implicit promotion of pharmaceuticals via an advocacy group walks a fine line.

It’s a complicated issue, said Findlay of the Consumers Union, because pharmaceutical companies have previously walked this fine line between providing useful information and hiding their sponsorship of it. Pharma companies are legally required to disclose such information in advertisements offline and, after years’ worth of reprimands from the FDA for not doing so, they’ve gotten the message, Findlay said. The way this message translates to the online world has yet to be seen.

Findlay tells us that a draft of regulations or guidelines for online marketing could come this year with a final ruling within two years. These regulations will most likely clarify the full disclosure of risks/benefits issue, he said.

“One should never make the mistake of underestimating the capacity, the resources and the willingness of companies to really aggressively marketing their products and to walk a thin line obeying the regulations,” he says. “They’ll go right up to the point where they don’t want to cross into illegality — but they come close.”

HP, Intel, Best Buy and Rossignol have teamed up to offer prizes to Facebook users through a new game application called Go Big, in which players rack up points completing snowboard tricks. Players compete for weekly prizes, including laptops, snowboards and gift cards, and one grand prize winner will receive a vacation for two to Whistler ski resort.

Entering some personal information gets you into the game, where you control a snowboarder to attempt tricks and score points on four different slopes. You can repeat each course as many times as you like, and scores from the four venues are totaled for the high score that puts you in the running for the prizes.

Gamers can also customize the look of their snowboarder or update their gear to improve jumping ability and speed. Completing a series of tricks can also unlock larger tricks which will help score higher point totals.

The Go Big interface features easy links to the respective Web sites of the four sponsors, but only Best Buy is currently cross promoting the game on its site with a dedicated splash page highlighting a few HP products. Go Big has also been mentioned in wall posts on the HP and Best Buy fan pages, directing Facebookers to the HP game age to play to win.

Not much has changed since last week on our Monday list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly average users (MAU), taken from AppData: eight of the top 10 are either in the same place they held last week or within a few places.

The top position is still held by Birthday Cards, the juggernaut from RockYou, as it has been almost since the holidays. And Calendario de Amigos, an app your friends important dates (like birthdays) has also held onto its number two spot:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	45,831,329	+4,588,556	+10.01
2.	Calendario de Amigos	7,648,511	+3,062,019	+40.03
3.	Zoo World	18,008,311	+1,802,177	+10.01
4.	Static FBML	14,461,689	+1,566,016	+10.83
5.	FarmVille	76,677,249	+1,200,774	+1.57
6.	Truth about friends	590,265	+590,117	+99.97
7.	Yearbook	5,361,039	+574,707	+10.72
8.	Happy Island	11,146,511	+534,124	+4.79
9.	Gangster City	1,233,329	+527,156	+42.74
10.	My City Life	798,564	+520,032	+65.12
11.	FacéDouble Celebrity Look-alike Doppelganger	544,157	+455,167	+83.65
12.	Little Warrior	1,497,204	+440,125	+29.40
13.	My Top Fans	2,520,300	+415,414	+16.48
14.	My Town	1,961,793	+410,417	+20.92
15.	Wild Ones	2,603,987	+406,294	+15.60
16.	Friend Quiz	10,589,293	+386,364	+3.65
17.	Which Celeb Do You Look Most Like ?	359,109	+356,532	+99.28
18.	MindJolt Games	16,454,075	+344,935	+2.10
19.	Translations	345,882	+342,742	+99.09
20.	Go to Hell	347,382	+281,970	+81.17

Zoo World, which didn’t register at all last week, has crept in at number three. It’s also by RockYou, and has been co-promoted with Birthday Cards. But, as we point out over at Inside Social Games, RockYou is having trouble hanging onto the millions of new players it’s picking up.

Yearbook has risen to number seven. This is an older app that reminisces on Facebook’s original mission: connecting friends from the same schools. While the app’s growth hadn’t budged for a while, it started trending upwards again a couple weeks ago:

And taking Yearbook’s place from last week is FacéDouble Celebrity Look-alike Doppelganger. This face-matching app just popped up on our Friday list of quickly gaining apps with under a million users. However, users seem pretty unanimously unhappy with the results, so it likely won’t stick around for long.

Tracking the innovation between gaming and social networks, Inside Social Games has seen a great deal of new developments this past week ranging from blood sucking vampires to new World of Warcraft feeds on Facebook. Here are the headlines for the first week of February:

Monday, February 1st, 2010

• Solid Gains for Islands, Fighters and Zynga in This Week’s Top Facebook Games by Monthly Active Users‘
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for January, 2010
• The Top 25 MySpace Games for January, 2010
• Hit or Not: A Facebook Role-Playing Game Designed to Help Real Musicians

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

• OMGPOP Gives Users Virtual Currency Bonus for Syncing Accounts with Facebook Connect
• Vivox Raises $6.8 Million for Voice Services in Games
• Bubble Island: This Facebook Title Makes a Classic Arcade Game More Social
• Facebook Application Gating and Gifting Features Shift to Fit Changing Platform Policies

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

• Bejeweled, Happy Baby and My Town Top This Week’s Facebook Gainers by Daily Active Users
• World of Warcraft Launches The Armory Application for Facebook
• City of Eternals, a New Blend of Social and MMO Gaming, Goes into Public Beta
• Kwedit Launches New Direct and Virtual Debt Payments Service

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

• Tiny Town: a New Facebook City Building Game
• Two Simple Facebook Games to Make You Smile
• Hi-media’s Allopass Payment Service Expands in the US, Focusing on Social Networking and Games
• Zynga Brings FarmVille, Social Gaming to MSN

Friday, February 5th, 2010

• City Builders Replace Gangsters on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Ngmoco CEO Neil Young on the iPad, Monetization, and Challenges for New Mobile Developers
• Papermint: An Illustrated, Very Colorful New Virtual World
• Social Gaming Roundup: Valentine’s, Charity, the iPad, and More

Facebook Email-Style Messaging Upgrade Coming Soon? – The company has long suggested that its messaging service could use an upgrade — the feature is an important part of the site, and has replaced email for some users. Now, Facebook is working something called “Project Titan,” and employees are even calling it “the Gmail killer,” TechCrunch hears. Potential features include “full POP/IMAP support” so people could download or otherwise read and respond to Facebook messages from other email clients, and the ability to have your Facebook vanity URL as your email name (yourname@facebook.com). Note: Gmail creator, FriendFeed cofounder and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit says: “No, I am not working on anything related to email (nor do I plan to).”

Pew Study: Facebook Most Popular Among American Adults – A study entitled “Social Media and Young Adults” from the Pew Internet & American Life Project was released this week. One finding concluded that blogging has declined for young people but increased slightly for adults 30 and above; the report also noted that wireless connectivity use is rising for young people. A large percentage of American teens, 73%, use social networking sites, 47% of adults do and 72% of 18-29 year-olds use them. Among adults 52% said they have two or more different profiles, with Facebook being the most commonly used online social network, 73% of adults reported maintaining a profile there.

39% of Facebook Users Donated to Haiti – Facebook’s Facebook Global Disaster Relief page, which launched shortly after the recent Haiti earthquake, recently surpassed 250,000 fans. Videos with former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as links to a whole host of charities, are included on the page. A joint survey between Facebook and The Nielsen Company found of Facebook users in the U.S., U.K. and Australia: 32% donated money, 4% donated goods, 3% donated both, 21% haven’t yet given but plan to and 13% donated via text messages — 23% in the U.S.

European Commission to Revamp Privacy Laws in Response to Facebook – The European Commission announced this week that Facebook and other social networking sites may face regulation if they fail to adequately protect users’ privacy. Plans for comprehensive new laws governing data protection and privacy are in the works, given that rules currently date back to 1995. The commission is concerned specifically about Facebook, as well as other social networks, but also other technology, such as radio frequency identification, behavioral advertising and airport security. The changes are set to revise the commissions 1995 Data Protection Directive.

Print Facebook Ads Receipts – Wednesday Facebook announced that a printer-friendly version of billing receipts for Facebook ads. Those who have accounts for Facebook ads may now see a printer-friendly version of their billing manager receipt, which includes a Facebook logo and address and other billing info. The feature is available in the Billing section of the Ads manager for each transaction, the Printer-Friendly Version button is in the top-right corner of the page. Facebook said the changes are intended to streamline accounting and tax processes for customers.

Study Says Facebook is the “Most Dangerous” Social Network – A survey of 500 companies across the globe found that more than 70% reported spam and other infections arrived via social networks in 2009 and 2008, last year 72% of these companies were concerned about security breaches due to employees’ use of these networks. Facebook especially, as 60% named Facebook the riskiest network of the bunch, partly due to the fact that it’s the largest social network and also because new privacy settings expose more member-generated content to the entire Internet. Of course, saying Facebook is the riskiest doesn’t mean that it is actually risky for the typical user.

Facebook Set to be Globe’s News Reader – Facebook is set to become the world’s top news reader, according to a post from Experian Hitwise this week. Although Google Reader has most recently been the leading news reader, last week it only accounted for .01% of upstream visits to news and media websites, whereas this number was 3.52% for Facebook there’s a graph at the link. Facebook, according to Hitwise, was the fourth most popular source of visits to news and media sites last week.

Mystery Facebook Music App Appears, Disappears – This week some Facebook users found a mysterious Music application on their list linking to Facebook.com/music, but it didn’t work, linking instead to the news feed. Facebook then said they removed the application, said it might have been a bug and that Facebook has no plans to launch a music service.

Facebook Moves to Dismiss Click Fraud Lawsuits – Facebook has moved to dismiss litigation brought by several marketers as the result of click fraud this summer, arguing that Facebook’s contract with RootZoo and other online marketers provides that they must pay for all clicks — despite fraud. MediaPost reported this week that Facebook alleges in its motion that cost-per-click advertisers had to check a box agreeing to terms and conditions, including: “I understand that third parties may generate impressions, clicks, or other actions affecting the cost of the advertising for fraudulent or improper purposes, and I accept the risk of any such impressions, clicks, or other actions.” The case is currently pending in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.