Tag Archives: Facebook

Playful New Ways to Waste Your Time

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Facebook provides so many ways to while away your existence.

Do I want to read about the latest baby exploits from the legion of young mothers? Do I want to try to decipher the existential koans some of my friends seem to mistake for status updates? Perhaps click through a few dozen random party pictures? It’s all so diverting.

Yes, for the vast millions on Facebook, “diverting” is perhaps the best way to describe the routine of checking back a few, or a few dozen, times a day. Checking Facebook begins as something you do between everything else — answering the phone, writing e-mail, actually working — until one day you realize you spent an entire afternoon fitting everything else between your time on Facebook. Continue reading →

Power.com Countersues Facebook Over Data Portability

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The Data Portability wars just got a little more interesting. Power.com, the service that lets users aggregate their social networks into a single hub, is countersuing Facebook for restricting users’ ability to export and move their own data. The company is claiming that Facebook is unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebook’s own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things. This should be fun.

It’s been over six months since we last heard about these two duking it out, so here’s a quick refresher: Power.com launched last August, offering users the ability to import their latest updates and user information from Facebook, MySpace, and a number of other social networks. It did so by tapping into the social networks’ APIs when available, but also by scraping user data when they couldn’t access it through other means ? a big no-no for most social networks, as we saw with the Scoble/Plaxo fiasco. It didn’t take long for Facebook to file suit against Power.com for scraping user data and storing user credentials (another violation of Facebook’s ToS). A week later we heard that the two parties might be close to a settlement, but apparently that didn’t work out ? the suit is still pending. Continue reading →

Facebook Lures Advertisers at MySpace’s Expense

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An eMarketer study says ad sales are climbing at Facebook, which recently surpassed MySpace in the number of U.S. visitors

Facebook has won over millions of users from social networking pioneer MySpace. It’s becoming more alluring to advertisers, too.

Even as overall U.S. advertising spending on social networks declines this year, ad sales are on the rise at Facebook, and the company is gaining a larger slice of the pie at the expense of News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, according to a new report from marketing researcher eMarketer. Continue reading →