Last week was a big one for Facebook as they rolled out their new privacy settings. Initially there was a fair amount of backlash and there continues to be backlash through today as each Facebook user’s friends are now publicly accessible to any user (update: this issue appears to have been resolved). While the privacy changes will continue to receive widespread attention, it’s a step forward in terms of user control over content.

Facebook Rolls Out New Privacy Settings
Last Wednesday, Facebook rolled out the new version of their privacy setting which they first demoed back in July. There was…

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Under a month after writing about Zynga surpassing the 60 million user mark, the company has now grown beyond 80 million monthly active users. A large portion of Zynga’s success is a result of their FarmVille application which is about to become the largest application on the platform at some point next week. While some companies have developed highly successful applications (LivingSocial was the largest application on the platform ever), no companies on Facebook have as large of a portfolio as Zynga does.

They have almost doubled the size of their closest competitor (Playfish) and are simply dominating the platform.…

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Last night Eric Eldon confirmed that Super Rewards, the offer-based virtual goods monetization platform, had been acquired by Adknowledge. Super Rewards, a direct competitor of Offerpal Media (both sponsors of this blog), has become one of the leading ad networks on the Facebook platform as well as other large social platforms like MySpace. According to Venturebeat the company could pull in close to $60 million in revenue this year, which wouldn’t be surprising considering Zynga, the largest Facebook app developer, is expected to bring in almost twice that.

While the relative “life time value” of affiliate offers has been debated,…

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Zynga has been expanding the gap between them and competing developers now with over 60 million monthly active users when adding up the users across all their games. Playfish, the second largest application developer, has 35 million monthly active users, an impressive number however it’s still far from 60 million. So how does Zynga have such a dominant position on the platform?

The primary reason Zynga has such a dominant position is that they have 34 games, the top three of which add up to almost 40 million monthly active users alone. Not surprisingly, the company’s fastest growing game is…

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Facebook’s Governance vote ends today and it appears as though they will fall short of the 60 million votes they were hoping to attract, attracting around 650,000 votes. Last week I suggested that the odds of the vote working was next to nothing. That doesn’t mean Facebook didn’t make a noble effort to attract the votes. Facebook actually made a substantial investment in attracting users.

According to Barry Schnitt of Facebook, the company promoted “the vote to users in a number of ways, including messages at the top of everyone’s profile (in multiple languages), ads, virtual gifts, stream stories from…

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Today Mark Zuckerberg announced the start of voting for Facebook’s updated terms of service. The new program was launched in response to the terms of service backlash that started a couple of months ago following a Consumerist blog post about Facebook’s ridiculous content ownership terms. While the uproar generated a huge response, Facebook has generated little buzz about the voting process. The initial groups created to spark conversation about the updated terms only attracted around 10,000 members each.

In order for the vote to stick, “at least 30 percent of active Facebook users” must vote. That means around 60 million…