The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a "frictionless" social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you've probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.
If you decide to click on a link it doesn't take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post's reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it's also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They're annoyed, and they're quitting in droves

You work for the Transportation Security Administration, manning the x-ray machine at a local airport. Your day begins easily enough, quickly scanning passengers’ luggage and bodies and waving them through. But after a few minutes, you get an alert—shirts are now contraband. OK, fine, you dutifully strip people of their T-shirts as they pass through the metal detector. Then another alert: Mobile phones are prohibited, too. Wait, now coffee isn’t allowed either, but cell phones are OK again. As you struggle to keep the new rules straight, the line of cranky passengers gets longer. Wait, snakes and turbans have just been outlawed. Oh, and shirts are allowed now, but you didn’t realize that until you’d already stripped down another passenger. That’s one strike against you. Now native headdresses are forbidden, turbans are OK, but shoes must be removed. You get confused and let a snake through—another black mark. The line of passengers begins to stretch across the room even as new regulations keep coming in faster than you can process them. Before long, you are fired—not because you’ve endangered anyone’s safety, but because you failed to cope with the illogical edicts of a capricious bureaucracy.

I was on stage with Facebook advertising Product Manager Paul Adams this morning. Don’t know who he is? He came up with the research that led to Google Circles before moving to Facebook. Interesting guy, but he told me that Facebook isn’t working on ways to push advertising back out through the verbs to client apps.

Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.
You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom "premium" cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called "mooney"), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends' cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.

Needing the permission from 10 of your friends to keep playing is infuriating. But what if those friends not only had to come online and click on a link? What if to advance you'd need your friends to be online at the same time as you, doing the same activity in the same game as you for a continuous block of several hours? Then you'd be raiding in a MMORPG.

Macht plötzlich alles keinen Sinn mehr? Hat sich die Geschäftsführung die Reportings der Marketeers mal genauer angesehen und ist explodiert? Frustration aller Orten. Völlig zu Recht. Denn, da hat Mirko etwas Kluges geschrieben:

“Erfolg hängt im Social Web heute ganz stark am Engagement Einzelner. Das skaliert aber nicht. Und wer es versucht, es zu skalieren, verbrennt sich…”

Da ist es wieder, das Bild vom Social Ikarus, der sich zu nah an die Sonne wagt. Der Absturz lässt sich jedoch vermeiden, wenn die richtige Flugroute gewählt wird.

Immer mehr Web-Seiten binden die Gefällt-Mir-Buttons von Facebook, Google+ und Twitter ein; auch bei heise online stand das auf der Todo-Liste. Allerdings werden durch diese Buttons schon beim Laden der Seite – also ganz ohne dass der Anwender etwas dazu tut – Daten an die Betreiber der Netzwerkplattformen übertragen. Die enthalten neben der URL der aktuellen Seite unter anderem eine Kennung, die zumindest bei dort angemeldeten Nutzern direkt mit einer Person verknüpft ist. Facebook & Co können also komplette Surfprofile ihrer Nutzer erstellen; Details dazu erklärt der Artikel Das Like-Problem. Da dies mit unseren Vorstellungen von Datenschutz und Privatspäre nicht vereinbar ist, hat heise online eine zweistufige Lösung entworfen, die nur mit Zustimmung der Anwender Daten übermittelt.

In July of 2010, I wrote a brief answer stating that then-Googler Paul Adams' internal presentation about social (see: http://venturebeat.com/2010/07/0...) indicated that the state-of-the-art in thinking about social inside Google was much further behind than previously thought (see: Yishan Wong's answer to Should Facebook be worried about Google Me?). Rebekah Cox concurred with me in the comments and a few other people asked us to elaborate. We declined to at the time, because it's complicated.

However, this week, Google's early release of Google+ demonstrates why.

In the online world there’s a continuum from hyper-transparency/real identity all the way to obfuscation/anonymity. The poles are represented by Facebook and 4Chan. In this infographic, we take a look at these opposing philosophies and some of the space in between.

Are you who you say you are?

Facebook has released the getBalance API call as an incentive to game developers who use Facebook Credits as their exclusive premium in-game currency. The call lets developers determine the Facebook Credits balance of any of their users. This allows them to identify high rollers with a large balance of Credits and dynamically price virtual goods to increase purchase probability or profit margin, improving monetization.

Facebook Platform is an extension of Facebook, whose mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.

Platform applications and developers are required to comply with the following documents:

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities: requirements for anyone who uses Facebook.
Principles: the spirit of the law for Platform.
Policies: the letter of the law for Platform.
Here are some Examples and Explanations for specifics.

Bruce Rogers and I graduated from Facebook’s Engineering Bootcamp in January and began researching how HTML5 could apply to games across the Web. We found HTML5 poised to become a potent platform for game development but still hampered by significant performance variance among browsers and drawing techniques. We're hosting a tech talk this evening on what's becoming possible with HTML5 this evening along with speakers from Zynga and SproutCore which will be streamed live.

I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates. It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried). These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software.

Facebook engineers decide what they want to work on and are allowed to make changes across the site without asking for permission.

When I buy a AAA game from the store, I have a vested interest in liking the game. I’ve plonked $60 down for it, so there’s less of a chance I’ll abandon it just because the installer is annoying, or the tutorial is a bit dull, or because I have to create an account first. I’ll give the game a chance… at least a half hour.

But if it’s a web game, I’m not going to give it more than a minute of my time. That first minute has to hook me, draw me into the second minute. The second minute has to draw me into the third, and so on, until I’m solidly invested in the game.

I'm 16 and, unusually, I use Twitter quite a bit. I say unusually because perhaps you've heard that teens don't tweet. This first came to light last year when a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern wrote a report [PDF] where he explained that teens "realize they are not going to update it," and that "no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless."

Numerous websites have implemented the Facebook Like button to let Facebook members share their interests, therewith promoting websites or news items. However, this article shows that the tool is also used to place cookies on the user’s computer, regardless whether a user actually uses the button when visiting a website.

Facebook’s communication channels are central to social game distribution, retention, and engagement, but there’s rarely an opportunity to see what happens to a game when all of its communication channel access is cut off.

It has now been about a week since Facebook suspended all viral communication channels for most LOLapps games. Although changes will take a while to cycle into a monthly active user graph, an AppData graph of LOLapps’s Critter Island game’s daily active users shows why a communication channel suspension is almost as bad as an outright removal of an app

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.

I have spent a few weeks putting together a basic web site which uses Facebook connect as authentication.
Required Features
Check if user is already logged in to Facebook, if so, retrieve the fb_uid, name, profile pic
Return a list of friends which have also connected to this application

I added facebook connect to a site running PHP and using MySQL for the database; this tutorial assumes you will be doing so as well. I used Facebook’s PHP API to connect my site, and the same goes with that. If you’ve ever build a facebook application before, you’re familiar with Facebook’s API.

Facebook Connect allows web developers to leverage the Facebook social application for their own off-Facebook applications. This tutorial will walk you through setting up a new Facebook application for use with Connect and provide some examples on how to use the Quick Start Facebook Connect PHP API library.