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Facebook announces 25 developer grant finalists

Facebook has announced the 25 finalists for its second annual FBFund developer grant competition, and it now invites them to reapply for a chance at an additional $225,000 in the final round. The five winners of the second round will be announced in December.

Each first-round finalist is entitled to $25,000 from the seed fund, which began with $10 million from Facebook investors Accel Partners and the Founders Fund. About 600 developers, none of whom had received any existing funding for their app prototypes, had applied for the first round.

For the most part, the winning applications haven'… Read more

Facebook hosts 10 billion photos

Facebook might not be a photo-sharing site, per se, but there are a heck of a lot of pictures uploaded to it.

On Tuesday night, engineer Doug Beaver wrote a blog post announcing that the total count of photos on the site now stands at about 10 billion. The social network announced informally in August that it has hit 100 million active users worldwide.

To compare, the News Corp.-owned Photobucket, which has a real-time ticker of photos uploaded, stood at slightly less than 6.2 billion photos on Wednesday morning. Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, hit 2 billion … Read more

Pizza Hut misses the mark with new Facebook app

I am not saying that it is a bad idea for Pizza Hut to have a Facebook application, where users can order a pie directly, but Pizza Hut has missed the mark by a wide margin here. We are going to have to file this in the, "What were they thinking?" category. Not only does Pizza Hut's new Facebook application not bring anything new to the table, it is just downright annoying.

Pizza Hut has long had a very nice online ordering system, which I am definitely a fan of. For their Facebook application, Pizza Hut has … Read more

Facebook's safety chief responds to KIDS act

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly has put out a statement to the Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act (KIDS), which President George W. Bush signed on Monday along with the Protect Our Children Act.

In short: Facebook supports the act and says it will cooperate with it.

"We see KIDS as an important tool to prevent inappropriate outreach from ever occurring," Kelly wrote in a post on the company blog about the law, which mandates that registered sex offenders have all identifying Internet names, including e-mail addresses, on file with the National Sex Offender Registry. &… Read more

The disgrace of a Facebook rape defense

Lawyers don't always enjoy the finest of reputations.

Some are unquestionably sleazy. But perhaps you will find your own inventive adjective for a lawyer named Colin McCarraher.

Last week, Mr. McCarraher defended a man called Anthony Francis in Reading, England. Mr Francis was this year stopped on another matter and then subsequently charged with raping a 19-year-old woman in 2001 after police managed to match his DNA sample with that of her attacker.

Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim's Facebook page.

On that page was a picture of her at a … Read more

MySpace program targets small advertisers

MySpace has unveiled "MyAds," an advertising technology focused on small businesses and individuals rather than the huge brand advertisers that the News Corp.-owned social network is best known for. It's a platform in which an advertiser can allocate exactly how much to spend--between $25 ad $10,000--and target its audience using the HyperTargeting system that MySpace debuted just under a year ago.

With HyperTargeting, MySpace says that there are more than 1,100 specific ways to target an ad based on geography, demographics, interests, and other information sourced from public profile data. Advertisers can then keep … Read more

The virtual goods economy is booming

I spent some time this morning with Rob Frasca, CEO, Viximo, a virtual goods provider. Virtual goods have been growing both in adoption and in relative importance versus advertising, especially in the down economy. Facebook appears to have done $34.5 million in virtual goods revenue this year--primarily in the form of gifting.

Viximo has two main revenue streams: digital gifting and branded virtual goods. They provide a turnkey solution to sites who want to offer virtual goods or gifts. The user comes in and buys credits and can use them as they would any other giftcard. Viximo splits … Read more

Zuckerberg: Be patient, we're opening up

LONDON--These are tough times for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The economy is in the tank, Madison Avenue still doesn't have full faith in the social network's ability to generate ad revenue, and entertainment-industry analysts estimate that in a few years the 24-year-old CEO could be in danger of losing his title of "world's youngest billionaire" to pop singer Miley Cyrus.

But Zuckerberg lucked out on Friday with his keynote "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference. Interviewed onstage by conference organizer Ryan Carson, Zuckerberg wasn't subject to any particularly difficult … Read more

Facebook's Morin calls on developers to Connect

LONDON--A lot of hands in the audience went up at the Future of Web Apps conference when Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin kicked off his talk at the conference with the question "How many people have built something on Facebook Platform before?"

Fewer went up when Morin then asked the crowd how many had used Facebook Connect, the company's new data-portability initiative. It's live now, he said.

Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect in May amid a flurry of other companies' data-portability announcements, like Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's Data Availability, which has partners like … Read more