According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, nearly all of the most popular apps on Facebook—including Farmville, Causes, and Quiz Planet—have been sharing users' information with advertising and tracking companies. Here's how to stop them.
When will Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wake up and realize he made an idiotic mistake by copying Twitter? The Facebook-loving masses loathe the new look — as do Facebook's best pals in Silicon Valley.
Yesterday's ViddyHo worm, which spread over Google Talk and Gmail, has been linked by some to Hoan Ton-That, a San Francisco software developer. A very San Francisco software developer.
Social networks have a lifecycle: They start with a small core of early adopters, swell as mainstream users get pulled in by their friends, and then see growth taper off as people get turned off by spam. That's why Friendster is forgotten and why MySpace is looking increasingly stagnant. The price for reaching an…
Today at Facebook's developer's conference, social games widgetmaker Zynga will announce a $29 million round of funding — the company's second — led by Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm that backed Amazon.com and Google. Zynga has also acquired virtual world app YoVille and added former Electronic Arts creative exec Bing…
This partial screenshot from a tipster's Facebook homepage needs no explanation. He's since found the "ignore all" button. Here's the full version:
COO Sheryl Sandberg and PR chief-turned-platform politician Eliot Schrage, Facebook's no-fun adults, are fully in charge of Facebook. The latest evidence? Facebook's second annual F8 developers' conference has another "hackathon." But unlike last year's all-night session, it hardly deserves the name. It starts at 3…
Facebook will follow its F8 developers conference this Wednesday with another 8-hour "hackathon" for third-party developers and Facebook engineers to work on widgets. This will be fun to watch, because those two groups kind of despise each other right now. Last spring, Facebook began taking a hardline stance against…
Over the past month, Facebook has shown itself to have a quicker trigger when it comes to banning applications from its site for rule violations. It's part of the reason, observers say, that venture capital for Facebook-app startups is slowing down. The punished include apps from major developers RockYou and Slide.…
Facebook will not launch a payments system for its platform application developers at the upcoming F8 conference. Inside Facebook says though Facebook engineers are working on a system, it just won't be ready in time — even though Facebook began asking developers to participate in a payments beta test last December. …
They can't say they didn't have it coming. But widgetmakers are angry all the same about Facebook's decision to clone Slide's Top Friends application as a feature in its latest redesign. "It would be insane for a new developer" to begin creating new apps the platform now, says an executive at one of the many…
