They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery, so Playfish should be pretty flattered by German-based Wooga’s latest game: Brain Buddies. The application takes a similar approach to “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” but provides new forms of brain teasers. There are four alternative challenges, one of which is almost identical to one of the challenges in Playfish’s competing application. Right now the most popular strategy for success in the social gaming arena appears to be copy others and then promote.

The result has been multiple legal battles although none of them have resulted in any game changing decision…

There’s a new feature within the email notifications area of Facebook which enables users to receive an email every time somebody “Connects to me as a fan”. We first heard about this new feature last night and were able to confirm it this morning. Just yesterday we wrote about how Facebook Pages have become your friends, which is another step in the merging of profiles and Pages. The combination of profile fans and the new granular publisher controls will help complete the twitterfication of Facebook.

Facebook has been in an all out war with Twitter for the past few months,…

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Zoosk, the online dating community that launched in 2007 as a Facebook application, has raised an additional $6 million in funding. This is the third round of funding for Zoosk, and was led by existing investor Canaan Partners. The funding will go towards pushing Zoosk’s market share on a global scale, as well as adding to its team and roll out new products.

As we noted in an interview with Zook’s co-CEO Shayan Zadeh, the Zoosk application on Facebook witnessed rapid growth as a result of its aggressive user acquisition model. Having now reached a reported 30 million users as…

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If the primary service your web startup is providing to users is short profile URLs (a.k.a. vanity URLs), you might as well file for bankruptcy. Perhaps that’s a bit excessive since many entrepreneurs figure out a way to survive even after being shot in the leg (metaphorically speaking of course). Last week Techcrunch reported that Facebook would soon be providing users with free vanity URLs in a land grab that would begin later this week. That means services like Profile.to (which is a relatively popular Facebook application) will essentially be rendered useless.

Short URLs have become all the rage with…

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