As the social games space matures, we’re seeing a diversification of the types of games being released. This is no better evidenced by the recent release of Paradise Paintball 3D by Chinese developer CMune. The game is a first person shooter, but is actually very social and leverages Facebook well.

The game attempts to fill the gap between MMO, FPS and social game, and involves standard FPS play. You sign in, create your username and avatar, and then start blasting at other players. As you play, you gain currency which allows you to upgrade your equipment and buy new decorations for your avatar. Of course, if you want to accelerate your growth, you’re able to purchase upgrades using real money as well, and you can buy better weapons and ammo.

The game also is multi-platform, and players can play across MySpace, Facebook, the games main portal, or through a widget. The gameplay is definitely smooth, and you really get a great FPS experience playing the game. After the release of ngmoco’s ELIMINATE fps for iPhone, we’re seeing a slow growth of the FPS genre, and it may lead to a wave of these types of titles.

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com By Neil Vidyarthi

Slashkey, the developers behind FarmTown, is actively alerting users to a new virus going around thanks to rogue advertising being displayed within the game. The advertising tells users to beware of a new virus on their computer and once clicked, they are infected with malware even though there was no virus installed on their computer to begin with. Below is a copy of the alert being sent to users.

According to Sophos, Slashkey has posted the following alert within their forums:

If you suddenly get a warning that your computer is infected with viruses and you MUST run this scan now, DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK, CLOSE THE WINDOW IMMEDIATELY. You should then run a full scan with your antivirus program to ensure that any stray parts of this malware are caught and quarantined.

If you do research on many of these spyware programs you will also find a myriad of sites proclaiming they are the only ones who can rid you of these programs. This is not true and on a personal level I urge you to use great caution as some of these so called wonder cures are as much of a scam as the malware you are trying to remove.

Apparently hundreds of users have already been affected but the company is now alerted to the problem and should be filtering out these advertisements. This isn’t exactly a new tactic, as other sites have had similar problems in the past, however FarmTown users have been consistently falling for this scam over the past few days.

I’m not quite sure why Slashkey is having developers simply report the problem, however I’m sure the issue will be resolved in short order. Have you seen any of these “virus alert” advertisement scams? Are you the victim of one?

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com By Nick O’Neill

Ladies, if you fancy a date with a professional football player, NFL’s New Orleans Saints’ tight end Jeremy Shockey is hosting a contest on his Facebook Page. Videotape yourself telling him why you deserve a date with him, post it, and you could win said date. Perhaps this is the new way to become romantically involved with celebrities?

The tattooed, 6′ 5″, long-haired Shockey currently has over 60K fans on his Facebook Fan Page. If you haven’t guess, this football player is single and using social media to look for love. The comments from female fans in regard to this contest are quite amusing — most of which tend to the “you should date me anyway” category. There are already a few videos from “contestants”, including one of a young woman in a bikini either skiing or snowboarding, and another who seems on the verge of being a football groupie.

Shockey’s yet another celeb who is using social media, though I think this contest approach on Facebok is an interesting way to have fun doing so. If you’re a fan, you can also follow his bare-chestedness on Twitter. Pictured with him in his Facebook profile pic (above) is another Twitter user, rapper/ actor Ice-T, who recently tweeted a fairly offensive response to musician/ singer Aimee Mann’s comment about why anyone would cast him for any TV show (e.g., Law and Order: SVU).

If you want a chance to go on a date with Shockey, note that the contest ends this Sunday, Apr 18th, 8pm EST. Just don’t forget that some UK health experts believe Facebook is a leading cause of syphillis.

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com By Raj Dash

Germany’s consumer protection minister is expressing her concerns over Facebook’s privacy policy, and has written an open letter to the social networking company. Ilse Aigner is worried about Facebook’s recent announcement that changes will allow the site to share personal information with “pre-approved” third-party web sites. This sharing of information has had its share of concern around the web, and the fact that now a government official is addressing it may be worrying Zuckerberg and co.

Facebook has defended its position, stating that users can opt out of sharing their data. That does mean that by default, users’ data will be accessible by third-party sites. The only reason I can see that Facebook would take such a risky move in terms of bad PR is that the final service offered to users will be great, or they are going to make a lot of money by selling this data. Certainly, Facebook doesn’t refer to their changes as “selling data”, and probably have plans to allow users to get customized versions of sites based on their preferences, thereby improving their web experience. But nonetheless, at the end of the day, this is what a lot of Facebook users have been worried about: their intimate data being spread across the web. Also, a recent Sophos poll revealed that 95 per cent of Facebook users oppose the privacy changes.

“I was astonished to discover that, despite the concerns of users and severe criticism from consumer activists, Facebook would like to relax data protection regulations on the network even further,” she said. ”Networks such as Facebook link millions of people across national boundaries, and it is for this very reason that particular importance must be attached to protecting privacy.”

While certainly not meant to be humorous, it’s a bit funny that Ilse has threatened to shut down her own personal account if Facebook does not stop the changes. As a person with political power, I guess that does some damage to their reputation but I wonder if she’ll succumb to a phenomena we talked about a month ago: trying to quit Facebook and failing.

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com By Neil Vidyarthi

When Offerpal started out a couple years back, it was focused exclusively on online surveys and marketing offers. That’s no longer the case, as last year the company joined the race to become a full-fledged payment platform offering dozens of ways for users to send money to application and game owners.

Its latest raft of additions, announced this week, includes three payment options targeted at children and teens, including those overseas. For the US, Offerpal has partnered with BillMyParents, which lets kids tap into their parent’s credit cards with direct supervision, and Rixty, which uses existing ATMs and convenience stores to let kids pay for online credits in cash. In Asia, Offerpal has added MyCard, which sells gift cards throughout Asia.

Three other new OfferPal partners don’t specifically target kids. For the world market, it has added ClickandBuy, which lets users pay in 120 different currencies, while in Europe Offerpal has added Paysafecard, another pre-paid card. And for the US, the company now has STi prepaid cards.

Over time, the so-called “payment wall” loaded up by Offerpal for users should cater to just about anyone; in fact, it’s hard to imagine that anyone in the US would be terribly hard-pressed to figure out one way or another to pay for a virtual good or service, including the private virtual currency that Offerpal launched last August.

The picture overseas is more fragmented, but Offerpal is at least addressing the major markets of Europe and Asia. As each of the various payment companies fills out its wall of offerings, we’ll begin seeing them battling over finer points in their business models — which is probably why Offerpal also just hired Alex Brutin, who has previous experience with both Google Checkout and PayPal, as a new VP of business development.

Offerpal also just acquired TapJoy in March, which is part of a separate-but-similar move into mobile monetization for the company.

This blog is taken from insidefacebook.com By Chris Morrison

The latest ComScore numbers for the search market reveal an interesting fact: Facebook’s search query volume is rapidly approaching that of the smallest major search engine, Ask. Citi Group, in its own take on ComScore’s numbers, noted Facebook’s 647 million queries in March, which was in turn picked up by Liz Gannes at GigaOm.

That number is equal to about 2.7 percent of all searches performed in the U.S. market — a big number, especially for a company whose business isn’t really search at all. But with almost half a billion users trying to find their way around an ever more sprawling social network, there’s a real need for all those queries.

Measuring Facebook against, say, Microsoft’s Bing does sound like an apples-and-oranges comparison at first. Then again, ignoring the site would create an excessively narrow definition of what search is. It’s not unheard of for large destination sites to become search portals of a sort; YouTube, for example, serves as a portal for a lot of kids, some of whom will go straight to the video site when they need to look up something. Over the years, YouTube has grown big enough that it can actually serve a general search audience, especially with the help of content creators like Demand Media.

The purpose of search on Facebook is a bit more narrow. People tend to be searching for something in particular: a person, a group, an event or an application. Yet over time, if Facebook becomes a central location for those categories of information, it could end up drawing traffic away from the dedicated search engines.

Of course, we all know there’s a lot of money to be made in search, and it’s not hard to imagine how Facebook could successfully seed some results with sponsored results, and create another revenue stream.

In fact, the company is already starting to take advantage of this, via its strategic partnership with Microsoft. Right now, it is running links to Bing web results for searches made on the site, recently tweaking this interface to make Bing more prominent by adding the the official logo. But that’s just the start. The companies also plan to use Facebook data to improve the relevancy of Bing’s own search results, and Microsoft is handling search ads on Facebook. While these initiatives are not too far along yet, they could make Facebook search even more significant.

This blog is taken from insidefacebook.com by By Chris Morrison

In the runup to the April 20 voter registration deadline, Facebook is helping to get U.K. voters registered. Via the Democracy UK Page, there is a tab with an application that enables voters to register directly from Facebook. The new page, which was built in cooperation with the Electoral Commission and Techlightenment (a UK-based social media agency), still requires users to print and mail in their registration form.

So far the Facebook Page has attracted over 16,000 users, but my guess is that there is some form of promotion taking place to drive users to the Page to spread awareness. Facebook made a significant push for registering voters during the U.S. Presidential elections and this is a continued non-partisan effort to drive more voters to the polls.

At this point the promotion has 11 more days to get users to register before the April 20th deadline. Richard Allan, director of policy at Facebook, told the BBC, “One of the strengths we have is to try and capture that group, particularly the 18-24 year-old voters, who have often not turned out to vote, and use the fact that many of the things on Facebook are familiar to them to get them engaged.”

While it will be difficult to determine how many people actually mail the form in, the company will be able to count the number of users who filled out their information on the voter registration application before the deadline. Any number of new registrations is always better than none, and with more than 16,000 fans, there’s a good chance that a decent number of users have already been registered.

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com by Nick O’Neil

While Facebook is not a company known for pot jokes, the company has decided to limit status updates posted through applications to 420 characters, in contrast to Twitter’s 140 character limit. The status message length was confirmed via a quick post published by Facebook this afternoon, notifying developers of changes to the stream.publish API call.

Due to complications, any status updates that include attachments will be published as general stream stories and will not have the status updated at the top of a user’s profile. While Facebook has limited status updates to 420 characters for some time now, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook publicly acknowledge the limit. Makes one wonder when this limit was imposed and how it was determined.

My guess is that it was an arbitrary number but one would imagine it was somewhat of a youthful decision to chose this limit. Rather than dwelling on the status update length, I’ll let any developers go check out the stream.publish API documentation.

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com by Nick O’Neil

An environmental activists campaign urging consumers to nudge chocolatier Nestlé away from using Indonesian palm oil in its products exploded last week on Nestlé’s and its Kit Kat product’s Facebook Pages. The outcry helped prompt the company to announce plans to eliminate the oil in its Kit Kat product by mid-May, and reiterate its commitment to use only oil certified as sustainable by 2015.

For Facebook Page administrators, the lesson here is to be clear and responsive about user concerns, regardless of the situation. For activists looking to use Facebook as a campaigning tool, the jury is still out on how big of an effect it can have, overall. Here’s a closer look.

The anti-Nestlé effort was launched last Wednesday by environmental group Greenpeace to help promote its new report, “Caught Red-Handed: How Nestlé’s Use of Palm Oil is Having a Devastating Impact on Rainforest, The Climate and Orang-utans.” It detailed how the demand for palm oil from Nestlé and other large companies is prompting palm oil growers to illegally chop down endangered rainforests for more land.

In addition to the campaign’s web site and Facebook page, Greenpeace provided a visceral boost with a viral video featuring an office worker inadvertently eating an orangutan finger instead of a Kit Kat. Combined, the efforts got many Facebook activists to post to Nestlé and Kit Kat’s Facebook Pages, with reactions ranging from sensible to silly to outright angry. Fans, on the behest of Greenpeace, asked Nestlé to stop purchasing palm oil specifically from Sinar Mas, a company accused of breaking Indonesian law by clearing protected rain forests to grow palm oil.

Protesting fans used profile pictures that featured orangutans holding up signs with altered Nestlé logos. As we reported last week, Nestlé was also scolded by fans for attempting to censor the Facebook outcry by posting the following language, “To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don’t post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic–they will be deleted.” More than the legal complexity of this claim, fans felt like Nestlé really wasn’t listening. Eventually, it backed off the tactic. Meanwhile, “fans” — people who joined the Pages specifically to criticize Nestlé — are continuing to post about the accusations.

But Nestlé has been trying to recover the PR battle. The company said in a lengthy statement last week that it has already stopped working with Sinar Mas, been investigating abuse and looking closely at ways that deforestation-grown palm oil was entering its “complex” supply chain. There’s already corporate precedent for ditching the supplier – Unilever previously dropped its palm oil contract with Sinar Mas, following a similar Greenpeace campaign. While it has gotten some coverage on this point in media outlets, the Pages continue to be dominated by activists.

The company could be doing more to use the Page to explain its side. For starters, it should post the statement on the site — perhaps as a note, leaving it open for discussion by fans and critics. It should also assign representatives who can speak on behalf of the company in response to specific points raised by the company. Nestlé is responsible to its shareholders for its overall performance, not just the most vocal Facebook users; and while many people will not agree with its decisions, the company has at least taken the time to provide its perspective in public. It shouldn’t let this effort go to waste.

We’ve reported that social media has helped activists make a difference in their communities, such as Iran’s Green Revolution and the violence in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, yet all of these examples are anecdotal.

Aside from the timing of Nestlé’s response, we don’t have a lot of data showing results from Page. The stock price appears unaffected, for example. How many consumers are going to stop buying Nestlé products as a result of campaign? Even if Facebook helped influence the announcement timing, how will Nestlé’s changes impact the palm oil industry?

For brands facing organized campaigns, the obvious take-away from this situation is to try to address consumer concerns instead of censoring them. Antagonistic responses — or lack of any response — just makes the brand look guiltier of all accusations, no matter how fair they are. Brands need to make Facebook Pages a key place to respond directly. Nestlé did a good job of articulating its complex position, but it should use its Page to continue doing so. While this may not be comfortable for companies, the other options can be even more damaging.

Meanwhile, for activists looking to build movements using Facebook, the takeaway is similar. Greenpeace and other groups should (and we expect will) continue steadily promoting their views to Facebook fans. Using viral tactics to expose damaging business practices is a good one-time tactic, but building long-term awareness about issues is a constant process. It’s easy for a user to post a pre-planned campaign message on a Page, but it’s harder to get them to do substantive things, like change buying behavior, or become informed, helpful members of the cause.

This blog is taken from insidefacebook.com By Sara Inés Calderón

As Facebook makes its way into the inner workings of how governments interact with the public, we’re comparing how different governing entities — from small communities, big counties and entire states and countries — are using its tools. We’ve previously looked at other areas, like parks and libraries. This week, we compare how different governments large and small are using Facebook to get the word out about elections in the US.

Although national and state elections won’t be happening until this November, the topic is relevant today for a few reasons. One is that many local elections happen throughout the year, meaning local governments are busy trying out Facebook as a new place to encourage voting. They’re likely encouraged by seeing Facebook’s relevance in big 2008 campaigns, when both major US political parties, and especially President Barack Obama’s campaign, used the service to promote themselves.

Facebook has also grown by more than 200 million monthly active users in the last year or so, 60 million of whom are in the US. Today, more than 112 million people are using the site every month — that’s a third of the US population, and another reason Facebook is a venue that governments can’t ignore.

But before we start digging in, we should note that there are always a bunch of caveats when it comes to governments and the way they use the web. A variety of laws and established bureaucratic processes define which employees can interact with the public, and what information they can share. For example, one Page we saw posted a link to local election results, but didn’t state the actual results on the Page. Why not? There may be laws that require election results to be posted on public forums (such as a departmental web site) before they are shared anywhere else.

But, those concerns aside, the departments we saw did some pretty interesting things with their Facebook Pages, sharing information almost exclusively from their official web sites, but presenting it in a fun and interactive way. Walls were the primary depository for most of the information in the form of shared links such as press releases; many had open Walls where users could share their own posts. Notes were used frequently by about half of the Pages. Photos, when used, were pretty interesting and many used events to promote governmental activities.

All the Pages we saw included basic contact information, although one red flag was that several of the Pages have not been updated since the end of 2009, sort of defeating the purpose of using Facebook to update the public about elections (unless, of course, there have been no elections).

The Office of Alabama Secretary of State’s Facebook Page has 210 fans and shared the RSS feed of official press releases on the Wall in lieu of status updates. This turned the Page into an informative, albeit not very interesting, place.

Williamson County Elections Department’s Facebook Page has 69 fans and took a different approach to sharing information, providing good, useful information with status; the department also has a Twitter page. Some of the information provided via links shared on the Wall and status updates included the number of early voters, a notice of electronic voting equipment tests, the early voting schedule, and polling places, among other things.

Another good example of sharing useful information on Facebook was Delaware’s New Castle County Department of Elections with a Page counting 55 fans and announced several candidates who had filed for office on its Wall.

The Office of the Los Angeles City Clerk-Election Division had a Facebook Page with 160 fans that makes good use of the events function up until it stopped updating the Page in 2009. The Wall is filled with updates about elections voting information, like time and place, and how to apply for special voting privileges, like vote by e-mail. Another good feature of this Page is that the landing page for the account is a well-informed “about” section that lays out the department’s purpose.

The Ohio Secretary of State’s Page also lays out the department’s purposes on the Info tab in a lot of detail, much more than any other Pages we saw. Specific details about the office were provided via status updates. One directed fans to a full list of candidates, for example, while another shared the language of the May primary ballot and yet a different status update announced initiatives for women in Ohio; most of these linked to the department’s web site.

Florida’s Polk County Supervisor of Elections didn’t lay out its departmental purpose as explicitly as Ohio’s Secretary of State, but provided details with status updates about what the department does for the public. An update on March 19 was “Ever wondered how many registered voters there are in Polk County? Or how many live inside a city vs outside? You can find all sorts of interesting statistics on polkelections.com under facts and figures.” One on March 18 was “Have you moved recently? You probably remembered to change your drivers license and update your magazine subscriptions, but did you update your voter registration? Visit polkelections.com to find out how.”

The Page also made good use of events and shared some interesting photos of elections-related events.

What we saw is that elections departments are looking to Facebook as a way to disperse important, if not always exciting, information that affects their constituents in very tangible ways. Some of the departments that seemed to take more time and expend effort into creating interesting status updates, or post photo albums of elections events, ended up with Pages that piqued curiosity, whereas other Pages that simply used Facebook as a repository for election-related information didn’t manage to step from informative to interactive.

As more government entities begin to experiment with Facebook we’re likely to see new and different ways they find to make usually uninteresting bureaucratic information more relevant to people. If you’re in government and looking for more details on how you can use Pages to raise election awareness, be sure to check out our Facebook Marketing Bible.

This blog is taken from allfacebook.com By Sara Inés Calderón