Lawsuit: Facebook for Debt Collection – A woman in Florida is suing after a debt collector used Facebook to try to collect. This could be a significant case because, currently, Facebook as a debt collecting method is a gray area of the law. Facebook doesn’t like this type of activity and said it appears to violate their policies against, “any kind of threatening, intimidating, or hateful contact from one user to another.”

Reports: Accel Sells Part of its Stake in Facebook — TechCrunch and VentureBeat are reporting that early investor Accel has sold some minority portion of its stake in Facebook, with a possible valuation of around $34 million. Details, like the size of the stake, and where this positions Accel versus other investors, is still not clear. Technology Crossover Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz may be among the stock purchasers.

Mark Zuckerberg Gets Animated – Mark Zuckerberg and the saga of Facebook’s founding will be retold in an animated film form, adapted from a comic book called ”Mark Zuckerberg and the Found.” The books will be in stores in December at a cost of $6.99.

Facebook Writes UK Govt for Free Speech – Facebook and other tech companies have written an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron and the justice minister asking them to change libel laws to reflect the Internet age. One problem is that, “there is a one-year limit for bringing a defamation claim after an offending remark is published, but every time an online comment is viewed it counts as a new publication and a potential new cause for a defamation lawsuit.”

Facebook Accounts Disabled, Being Restored – A bug hit Facebook this week that disabled an untold number of accounts; Facebook says it is in the process of restoring access to those affected, and most seem to have been by this point.

U.S. Military Warned About Facebook’s Places – The U.S. Air Force sent an internal memo out recently advising troops to be careful when using Facebook’s location service, Places. Checking into certain places could compromise U.S. forces in war zones.

Plastic Jungle Raises $10M – Plastic Jungle raised $10 million this week in a third round of funding led by Jafco Ventures, and bringing the company’s total to $23.4 million, according to VentureBeat. We’ve written previously about Plastic Jungle’s work with Credits more than once.

Facebook Sells Cars – Facebook is becoming an ever important part of the auto industry, as reflected by the fact that almost every new release at the L.A. Auto Show was featured on Facebook. More at the link.

LivingSocial Invests $5M in Jump On It - LivingSocial invested $5 million to gain a majority stake in the Australian social shopping site Jump On It, according to a press release. The site will incorporate LivingSocial’s Daily Deals, opening up its money saving services to 10 million people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Oodle Acquires Grouply – Social commerce company Oodle has acquired Grouply, an online hub for social groups; the Grouply platform and its hosted groups will continue to operate on that site, according to a press release.

Zuckerberg’s FaceMash Sold for $30K – We previously wrote about Mark Zuckerberg’s original web site, FaceMash, and the fact that it was up for auction. Well, it was sold for $30,000 to an anonymous buyer last month, according to a press release.

OpenSocial 1.1 Published – The OpenSocial Foundation published version 1.1 of its specification.

Facebook Integration for TSA Body Scans - The Transportation Security Administration announced a Facebook integration for its fully body scans, allowing passengers to share their semi-nude scans with all of the world (actually, this is a joke, but almost too real given everything else the TSA is doing).

Vin Diesel, Facebook’s Sexiest Man – People Magazine nominated its sexiest man alive recently, but they took to Facebook to see what the difference would be. Turns out Vin Diesel was named the “Sexiest Man Alive on Facebook,” and according to our PageData service, he has 18.5 million Likes.

Kmart, Sears Sell eGift Cards on Facebook – Sears and Kmart have begun to sell egift cards, from $5 to $25, on Facebook. Once purchased they may be delivered either by being posted on the recipient’s Wall or sent to their email.

Facebook Influences Teen Relationships – Seventeen Magazine released the details of a survey of 10,000 people aged 16 to 21 to see how Facebook influences romantic relationships. Turns out:  79% friend a crush within a week; 60% check a crush’s profile once a day and 40% more than once a day; 72% say talking online brings real life relationships closer; 10% have been dumped on Facebook; 10% change their status to single; 27% change their connection after a breakup; 73% keep their exes as friends.

Kids Under 12 Love Facebook – Smarty Pants published a study this week that found Facebook among the favorite brands of first through sixth graders from a list of 270-plus; Facebook was number 126 for children 6 through 12 and 91 among 9 through 12 year-olds.

Facebook has reintroduced app requests to the requests module in the home page’s right sidebar, the company announced today in its latest weekly developer blog update. By displaying counters for requests in the left sidebar, and text alerts in the right, users are more likely to respond to requests and reengage with apps. Facebook now also allows Open Graph objects with less than 10,000 Likes to have their type changed without reseting their Like count.

Requests Interface Changes

In September at Facebook’s Games press event, the company announced that application requests would soon cease to appear as text alerts in the right sidebar, and would instead appear as counters on the Games or Applications dashboard bookmarks in the left sidebar. At first, users saw additional text in the right sidebar requests module explaining where the requests had been moved, but soon the counters were the only way of knowing about requests. This likely hurt game and application growth and retention, leading Facebook to reinstitute the right sidebar text alerts.

Now when users receive an application or game request, such an invite to support a Cause or be neighbors in FarmVille, they see a text alert on the right, and a counter increase on the left. The first time users click on one of the text alerts they’ll see a pop-up pointing to the corresponding counter bookmark and explaining how it works. Interestingly, the text alerts are not active links, though they appear to be. Subsequent clicks to the alerts do not open the corresponding dashboard, which could frustrate or confuse users.

Changing Open Graph Object Type

When the Open Graph protocol was announced at the f8 conference in April, Facebook began allowing websites to use meta tags to denote a type for each Open Graph object. This markup could be read by Facebook, so if you clicked a Like button on an Open Graph object with its type set to “Movie”, that Like would appear in the Movies section of your profile interests. However, little additional instruction was given as to what type some objects should be classified as. This probably led to many objects being mis-classified, but changing the object type would reset all the existing Likes, severing those connections which are valuable to the object’s owner.

Now, Facebook is allowing the admins of Open Graph objects with fewer than 10,000 Likes to switch the type to another from the type list or a custom type without resetting its Likes. Very popular Open Graph objects do not have this option because it allows admins to alter a user’s profile without their permission, which at that scale could have too big an impact.

Admins with objects under the cap should check to ensure they have the optimal type selected. If applicable, admins should use the Activity, People, or Products and Entertainment types which appear in special categories with more prominence than Likes lumped into the general “Other Pages” section. This increased prominence can lead to more users discovering the object in the profiles of friends.

Recruiting great job candidates is a costly yet crucial endeavor for companies of all sizes. Often times these candidates are already socially connected to current employees who don’t always pass along job opportunities despite referral bonuses. Meanwhile, posting on traditional job boards can lead companies to receive huge volumes of unqualified applicants.

These companies need a structured, efficient way of incentivizing employees to leverage their social networks to share openings. New web application Pursuit aims to fill this need by offering employees monetary referral bonuses, social recognition, and interesting influencing who is hired to work with them.

Bootstrapped, three-person, San Francisco-based Pursuit’s goal is to help companies quickly get more referrals and less applications, as there is a high cost for leaving a position unfilled or mis-hiring. It’s currently free for authorized companies to post job’s through the site’s beta, though Pursuit collects 20% of any bonuses paid out for referrals it helps generate. Pursuit is accepting new users slowly as not to overwhelm the existing job listings, but beta invites can be requested on the site.

The company sees LinkedIn as a place where people post or look for jobs, not share them with well-matched candidates. Other companies building recruiting applications include BranchOut, which focuses on showing who has employed your friends, and Work For Us, which revolves around company-specific job boards.

Pursuit lets users create personal job boards of openings they think others they know would be interested in. Job postings includes job descriptions and requirements; the referral chain leading to the posting; an unique referral URL which can be shared publicly, and a comment reel so users can leave feedback on the company or job.

A multi-friend selector allows users to forward or refer specific people on Pursuit, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or email. Those interested can click through to apply for jobs by submitting a personal message and uploading a resume.

Users follow each other, and can view an activity streams of jobs added to the boards of people in their network. The site uses social game-style status bars to denote a user’s profile completion and the “Karma Points” they earn through referring jobs and helping people get hired.

In the future, Pursuit plans to include Like buttons on the site for instant sharing. To prevent referral spammers from trying to cash in on bonuses, companies can mark referrals as unqualified, which over time flags those referrers as illegitimate.

Pursuit includes links to a user’s social network profiles which they’ve connected to their account, raising questions about how companies will use this info. In the early years of social networks, recruiters used photos on social networks to inform their hiring decisions. Pursuit co-founder Russ Heddleston sees users getting more savvy with their privacy controls and posting less controversial content. But he also believes “Not hiring someone out of college because they have a photo with a beer–that’s not a good indicator of how someone will be as an employee. You’re actually hurting yourself if you use that as criteria.”

By facilitating a path between an employer and job candidate instead of broadcasting job openings, Pursuit is in fact more social than other recruiting or job search applications. While under-qualified candidates could potentially follow masses of other users and clog openings with low quality applications, job seekers and recruiters should be eager to add this relatively low-noise channel to their efforts

The Facebook Careers Page had a few job listings this week that highlight different parts of its growth strategy. One is a mobile manager position that will help the company expand its presence on devices, another is a developer advocate spot that builds in its past developer outreach efforts, and a third is a manager position to organize a “high volume” university campus recruiting drive.

The Partner Development Manager of Mobile in Hong Kong is set to help Facebook develop strategic mobile relationships in Asia. This person must identify and manage new strategic partnerships to grow Facebook’s Asia userbase, focusing particularly on mobile operators, device manufacturers, platform providers and Asian mobile developers. The Hong Kong mobile manager will also represent Facebook at mobile functions and travel about 30% of the time. Some context on Facebook’s latest mobile efforts: Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently said there’s no “Facebook Phone” coming but the company has been busy offering a variety of mobile native apps, web apps, and other tight integrations. We and others have heard it’s looking at operating system-level integrations.

Over on the platform side, Facebook is hiring for a position called Developer Advocate — distinct from other platform engineering and marketing positions it has had to date, and building on other recent expansions. It recently brought in Doug Purdy, who held a similar title among others during a long career at Microsoft. Over the past year or so it has made a new effort to simplify and clarify developer policies and documentation, and explain upcoming changes. There have been bumps, and this latest position is a continuation of its Platform investment. The particulars from the listing:

• As a Developer Advocate at Facebook you will be responsible for broadening the adoption of the Facebook Platform with software developers
• This is a highly technical role. You will both write code and speak with the most innovative engineers inside and outside of Facebook every day. You will be responsible for our outreach to third-party developers, particularly with the startup community
• You will represent Facebook at developer conferences, events, and with the technical press/bloggers. You will write code samples, articles and tutorials for developers highlighting the power of the Facebook Platform
• Most importantly, you will advocate for the needs of the developer community within Facebook itself, working closely with the product and engineering teams to determine features and strategy
• Our goal is to make Facebook an essential platform for developers with you leading the way.

A few other interesting listings popped up recently as well.

Expect to see Facebook hitting campus job fairs more this coming as it’s looking for a University Recruiting Manager to manage “a team of recruiters to execute all campus recruiting activities for high volume fulltime and intern hiring.”

Facebook is also seeking a Monetization Analytics Lead to be based in Palo Alto, Calif. This senior analyst will focus on the “marketplace advertising business” to provide product and engineering teams analysis of customer usage to guide Facebook into the future. Ultimately this analyst will be responsible for recommending product/positioning changes based on user/advertiser behavior and is expected to have an advanced mathematics-related degree.

There was also a position for Marketing Communications Analyst based out of Palo Alto. This person is set to help Facebook work with sales, marketing and product teams to develop marketing and analyze programs for global brands. Another marketing position, that of Marketing Strategist, will be based out of the same offices and will similarly work on “creating marketing solutions on a global and long-term scale for the Global Customer Marketing team.” This person will help be innovative with branding for global marketers.

And for more Facebook-related jobs, check out the Inside Network Job Board.

Another relatively unknown developer has come to the fore on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those quickly growing toward, but still under a million monthly active users. Web Evolution has added more than 800,000 new MAU to Tag Friends:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Tag Friends	880,020	+834,484	+1,833%
2.	Island God	849,305	+612,201	+258%
3.	Game of Truth	669,905	+520,967	+350%
4.	عيد على صحابك	434,243	+401,241	+1,216%
5.	Entrevista Amigos	866,071	+376,041	+77%
6.	THE WTF GAME	812,539	+310,258	+62%
7.	TravBuddy.com Countries Visited Map	817,074	+226,101	+38%
8.	CSI: Crime City	966,822	+215,419	+29%
9.	Vegas	871,994	+214,401	+33%
10.	TRY TO PASS THIS GAME	421,740	+209,482	+99%
11.	friend.ly	664,968	+200,253	+43%
12.	Prizee Jackpot	724,186	+177,529	+32%
13.	Happy Hospital	296,031	+171,555	+138%
14.	The Smurfs’ Village	187,392	+170,270	+994%
15.	Epic Fighters	169,483	+169,477	+2,824,617%
16.	FameTown	434,500	+169,019	+64%
17.	Tư vấn vui	192,160	+161,971	+537%
18.	Little War	309,710	+159,921	+107%
19.	Qui t’aime pour ce jour ? (l)	497,347	+158,997	+47%
20.	Profile Stats	520,188	+155,872	+43%

Tag Friends is a modification of the popular friend quiz format. Where a friend quiz has you answer a question about your friend, which is posted to their wall, Tag Friends simplifies the process even further by just asking you to click on a tag. Game of Truth, the second fastest-growing non-game app, does much the same thing with yes / no questions.

Island God is a game that’s quite similar to GodFinger, an iPhone game that was popular several months back. In Island God, which is by Digital Chocolate, you take control of a tiny island on which your worshipers can build various structures. There are plenty of interesting games, but we’ll cover the rest this morning at Inside Social Games.

Although neither Tag Friends nor Game of Truth gives the friend quiz a really unique spin, friend.ly actually does. It still asks you questions, though about your own opinions. The really interesting part, though, is that these questions are shared out among the general userbase of friend.ly. The app bills itself as a way to find new friends.

January 25th | San Francisco

As we announced recently, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco. We’re excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs that are planning to attend!

Today, we’re excited to announce 3 new speakers for Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011: Anil Dharni, Co-founder of Funzio and Founder of Storm8; Jens Begemann, Founder & CEO of Wooga; and Eric Goldberg, Managing Director of Crossover Technologies. They will be joining our full list of speakers below.

Finally, if you’re considering attending Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, take advantage of early registration pricing and sign up now. A limited set of early registration tickets are currently available at the Early Admission price of $249. This price will be good through Friday November 19th only, so we encourage you to register now.

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps from a global perspective.

Who’s Speaking?

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network

Key topics for the day will include:

• Growth and User Aquisition on the Facebook Platform
• New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?
• Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
• M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers
• Monetization on Facebook in a Credits World

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $249. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco!

Today, Myspace announced ”Mashup with Facebook” allowing users to port their Facebook Likes to Myspace to “create a personalized stream of entertainment content.” By offering new users signing up through Facebook Connect a way to populate their stream, users are more likely to stay engaged until they can establish friendships on the network. Meanwhile, existing Myspace users can augment their stream. The integration operates under the assumption that while everyone has a Facebook profile with Likes, there is content from these publishers that is unique to Myspace.

At the end of August, Myspace began allowing users to syndicate the content they share to Facebook. One million MySpace users took advantage of the option in the first month, underscoring the interest in deeper integration between the two networks. Last December, Myspace said Facebook Connect would be heavily integrated into the social network in the coming year, and now the site has made good on its promise.

Myspace users will see a large prompt on the right side of the home page allowing them to “Connect with Facebook”. Once a user gives Myspace permission to access their Facebook profile, they’re shown a list of Likes which can be replicated as Myspace friendships with official entities similar to Pages.

After interests have been confirmed, users see a stream of updates from these entities. As well as status updates, photos, and blog posts which can also be found on Facebook, users get Myspace specific content like automatically generated playlists of songs by their favorite musicians. MySpace also begins to suggest friends, events and other preferences based on a user’s Facebook information.

Some claim that these recent integrations signal the end for Myspace, but syndicating content to Facebook is available on Twitter, and Likes can ported to a variety of Facebook Connect sites such as Amazon. Instead, the move indicates that Myspace understands its role in the social network ecosystem. Using Facebook to strengthen its core functionality as a rich content channel between celebrities fans should benefit Myspace’s users, even if at the expense of the company’s pride.

Facebook Credits gift cards are now on sale at grocery store chain Tesco and videogame retailer Game in the UK. The cards can be purchased with any payment option the physical stores accept, making them accessible to teens without credit cards. The cards can be redeemed by scratching off the back and entering the code on the Facebook Credits webpage.

Making the gift cards available in the UK is another step towards Facebook’s goal to provide hundreds of payment options for Credits. The cards were first sold at US big box outlet Target, and are now also available at Best Buy and Wal-Mart, supermarket Safeway, and electronics and game retailers Radioshack and GameStop.

Facebook has recently added a number of other payment methods including mobile phone payment provider Boku, loose change counting kiosks CoinStar through Rixty, and third-party gift card exchange Plastic Jungle. Putting Facebook Credits in retail stores not only makes them more accessible, but seeing the cards on the shelf reminds people of the virtual economy they could join.

Between Game’s 683 and Tesco’s 2,482 locations, users can purchase gift cards in £5, £10, £20, and £25 denominations. Facebook also continues to say that it’s possible user may eventually be able to spend Credits on Facebook-integrated third party websites, in addition to the Facebook canvas where they can currently be used.

Facebook is testing a “Pay Later” option for purchasing goods within social games. Users who have never purchased Credits before can spend Credits they haven’t paid for and repay the balance later. Users can only repay a balance with a credit card or PayPal, not offers, gift cards, or mobile payment. Therefore, the option may be designed to get users to comfortable with buying virtual goods and get them to put their credit card or PayPal details on file with Facebook for quick purchasing in the future.

Facebook has signed deals with all the top social game developers including Zynga to make Credits the exclusive direct payment method. With plenty of games that accept Credits, the biggest barrier to users actively spending is getting their payment information on file. Pay Later, which seems to only be available for some users in some games, addresses this barrier. We obtained this information via an industry source and are currently unable to access the option ourselves.

When a user who has never bought Credits goes to purchase a virtual good, they’ll see a dialogue pop-up asking if they want to pay later and have “Facebook send you a bill for [price of the good in local currency].” They’ll then see their negative Credits balance in red with a link to “Repay” while playing games or using the Games dashboard. Users also receive a receipt for the purchase via email with a link to settle their balance.

Clicking these links brings users to an Unpaid Order History page showing the goods they bought, their existing balance, and a “Repay” button. If users choose to repay, the only payment methods which are offered are credit card and PayPal. Once a user has input payment details for one of these methods, future purchases only require a single click.

If users want to make another virtual goods purchase, they’re given the option to also pay off their debt during the transaction. However, users aren’t required to first settle there balance, and can still buy more goods through the Pay Later system, increasing their debt.

Purchasing virtual goods is still new to many Facebook users. By providing a free introduction to the purchase process, Facebook may be able to get users hooked. Then, by only allowing users to repay balances with methods which can be quickly reused later, Facebook has converted non-buyers into one-click-buyers.

Update: We’ve learned that that users can only go as far as -50 Credits into debt using the Pay Later option, significantly limiting Facebook’s liability.