One of my favourite stories this week has to be Facebook’s curbing of the Burger King Whopper app. The clever creation was effectively simple; just add the app, use it to remove ten of your friends, and hey presto! A free Burger King Whopper voucher. Nearly a quarter of a million friends were removed in less than a week (equating to roughly 25,000 free burgers)…
But before you go hungrily opening up your Facebook account you should know that the app was this week oddly pulled by the network, for reasons that were slightly flimsy to say the least.
The core point was supposedly over issues of privacy – whereby FB cited the fact that the app notifies the removed users that…
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The folks at Facebook have had a busy week. They began with announcing a forthcoming data portability product called Facebook Connect, (which marks the abandonment of their fundamental ‘walled garden’ approach to user data management) and then went on to ban Google’s own data portability service (Friend Connect) from their Facebook API, stating a violation of terms of use as the reason.
Some bloggers and commentators have been contemplating if this might mark a new phase in the development of social networking, with the earlier co-existence of the main players now giving way to a more open tug-of-war for market share. After all, new user uptake is slowing down, and one way for social networking sites to continue to grow will…
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