Aaron Sorkin prompts users to test to see if he is real in the group’s description. The only problem with accomplishing what would otherwise be an elementary task is that there is no way to friend or send a message to Sorkin. Not sure how he got to have that setting but my guess is it’s via the privacy settings. The only other person that I know of that doesn’t have a friend request in the directory is Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder if this movie will be created in a similar way to The Pirates of Silicon Valley which highlighted the start of Microsoft and Apple. The only difference between that movie and the apparent Facebook movie? The Pirates of Silicon Valley had two companies that actually went public. Facebook has yet to do that. However the movie is written, this definitely sounds like an interesting beginning!

If you are more interested in what your friends are up to then what photos they are uploading and what their relationship status, you may be pleased to hear that Facebook has upgraded your friends’ statuses. Now rather than just showing recent friend activities, the most recent status updates of your friends are now displayed at the top of the news feed.

It’s clear that statuses have become one of the most important components of Facebook and many have called it a Twitter killer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing emphasis on statuses as Facebook moves forward. One interesting component about this new layout is how the statuses are updated instantaneously whereas the main news feed content is only updated periodically.

This contrasts FriendFeed where every load of the page presents new data among your friends as the site is updated in real-time. Facebook has tried to automatically filter information for users to try to select the most relevant information. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ever shifts this strategy to display more information.

This is a simple change but it most definitely highlights the importance of statuses in Facebook.

So far Facebook has had a pretty smooth transition but everyday I read about a few people who don’t like the new Facebook layout. One group I previously wrote about this month has grown to over 50,000 users. This is a really small number though when you compare it to the more than 20 million people that now have access to the new Facebook design.

Whether or not you like the new design, it won’t be a choice as to whether or not you make the shift. What “mid-September” qualifies as is left for interpretation but it’s clear that Facebook is taking their time when it comes to making the shift over. Are you in favor of the new design or do you not like the changes? Do think this is much ado about nothing?

Rather than the AP Newswire going across your screen, you now have a live activity feed of all of your friends actions. Soon enough I’d imagine that we will begin to see the activities of friends that are taking place outside of Facebook show up in this feed more frequently, making it much more of a competitor to FriendFeed. Just as with FriendFeed though, the majority of posts remain to be comments.

I’ve included a one-minute screencast below of my live stream newsfeed and I have to say that it is really impressive. Congratulations to the Facebook team on this one. One of the most enjoyable experiences with this new feature was watching the stream of feedback people were providing to the Obama speech last night. It will most definitely be interesting to watch this feed during any significant national event.

Honestly, I have a feeling that the demand for this feature of the news feed is going to grow exponentially as users get used to the new design. The only challenge will be that users that have less friends won’t have as active of a stream. Then again, this same phenomenon takes place on any social media site: the more friends you have, the more content you have to consume. Take a look at the feature in action below.

The book has been criticized by a number of people about how it exaggerates a number of components of the story, including that he is a koala-eating jet-setter as Caroline McCarthy pointed out back in May. There has been a ton of buzz about this and based on the rumors about this book it sounds like the buzz is only going to get louder. It sounds like Mark Zuckerberg isn’t covered in a favorable light, especially if he is eating Koalas (nobody likes a koala-eater).

Just earlier this week news about the movie became widespread and it looks like this will only continue as roles are cast and production gets under way. No matter how Facebook is portrayed in this movie, it sounds like this is going to be a juicy story … the anticipation is killing me! The movie will also discuss how the movie was created and try to tackle the age old question of: who did Mark Zuckerberg steal the Facebook idea from?

While I doubt this movie will come up with the accurate answer to the story, I’m sure it will be an interesting version! For those looking to purchase your tickets to the Facebook Movie (which may be title Face Off), you may be waiting a while as most movies take months if not years to produce. Our projected date of release? June 2009! This is based on nothing but gut instinct.

The most important search results on Facebook is people but many users are regularly search for specific products and services within Facebook yet those products and services are not the first results that are displayed. Most often you need to click on the “Pages” tab to find any of the brands or services. In the case that it’s a person, a fan page will regularly show up but this only appears to occur for people.

So how could Facebook help businesses leverage what’s currently an unrealized opportunity? Simple: sponsored results. If I search for “Ford” and was looking for Ford Motors and not my friend who’s last name was “Ford”, a sponsored ad will show up at the top of the search which directs me to the “Ford Motor Company” fan page. I’ve produced a sample image below of what this could look like.

Currently Facebook has the curse of extremely engaging pages. The site is so engaging that most people don’t even realize that there are ads on the side of most pages. The one place where I’d suggest that this trend breaks is when people search for things. At this point there is an amazing opportunity to grab the user’s attention.

How many people are searching for Ford on a regular basis? I don’t know but enough people are writing about it that it shows up in the Facebook Lexicon, which tracks the frequency of words on walls. If people are writing about it, then it’s probably pretty good assumption that they are writing about it. While Facebook doesn’t currently monetize their search, this is a quick way for the company to boost their revenues while they keep searching for a breakthrough advertising solution.

This version of the video only shows the photo tagging capabilities in the new version of the application but there will be additional features. As Facebook posted earlier this month, there will be an increase in the number of messages displayed in a user’s inbox. Before, users were limited to how many messages they could view.

One other feature that I’m looking forward to is location-based services. There is no sign that location-based services will be used in the upcoming release of the Facebook for iPhone application but at f8, a number of Facebook employees alluded to this feature eventually being added. This version looks great though!

Facebook Connect is still in beta mode and can only be accessed by developers but there is actual code from this plugin floating around (we actually have a copy of it). This means that rather than having to register for every site that you visit, you will simply be able to login with your Facebook account. Soon enough, it will also mean that you will have access to all of your friends that are on Facebook on any other site you visit.

For the time being, the plugin functionality is limited to comments. How does this work exactly? If you were at f8 then you saw David Recordon of Six Apart, demo the functionality of Facebook Connect comments in Moveable Type. In similar form, you will go to a comment form, click on a link which logs you into the blog’s application on Facebook and then your comments to that blog will start showing up in your Facebook profile feed.

The difference with the Facebook Wordpress plugin is that the Wordpress plugin is an internal Facebook project. This also means that Facebook wants to be able to own the comments on your site. Anytime you enable users to login via Facebook, you won’t have access to their email address, unlike Disqus and native Wordpress comments. That would probably be my greatest complaint.
Blogs as An Extension of Facebook

In the not too distant future, Wordpress will be unveiling a much anticipated social network service for Wordpress blogs: BuddyPress. The new service enables site owners to integrate social networking features directly into their blogs. If you thought remembering all of your logins was hard before, imagine what it will be like when every site you visit has its own social network.

Find a new friend on a remote social network? You can easily add them as a Facebook friend rather than having multiple locations for all of your connections. So how soon can you expect to launch Facebook functionality into your own site? No timeframe is available yet based on publicly available information.

The launch of social networking features into blogs that integrate with Facebook Connect will directly compete with Google’s Friend Connect service (which already has a service in beta).
Conclusion

While you can’t test out this plugin without being a developer, this is definitely a great first step. It also makes me wonder why Facebook put internal resources to this project when there are countless other developers working on their own Wordpress Facebook plugins. My guess is that this plugin was being developed to further the Facebook Connect documentation.

My only complaint remains to be that I don’t get access to a user’s email when they “register” to comment on my site. Leveraging this plugin provides blogs with a great opportunity to gain exposure through the Facebook news feed. Please note that if you’ve tried out the plugin but it doesn’t work, it was developed using the “Kubric” default theme on Facebook. That’s according to documentation provided by Adam Hupp, the Facebook developer behind this project.

Update
We’ve been contacted by Facebook and asked to remove the plugin since it isn’t licensed for distribution. I’ve gone ahead and done so Also, they’ve said this wasn’t technically an “official” internal project as he was working on it in his free time. Not sure what to say about that.

It’s no secret that virtual goods are a big business but how big exactly, nobody has really been totally clear. Yesterday Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners released an analysis done by the company which suggested that Facebook could generate up to $43 million this year alone from virtual goods. How does Facebook generate so much money from their virtual goods?

Well as Eric Eldon points out Facebook generates a lot of demand for their goods through scarcity. Apparently this model works because Facebook is selling a lot of gifts. If Jeremy’s high-end estimates are accurate, they are selling close to 43 million gifts. Gifting is a straight forward model and when the platform launched last year, Free Gifts became one of the most popular applications.

When Facebook temporarily removed gifts a few months back, I expected the Free Gifts application to get a significant boost. Instead, the application had a decrease in gifting activity because there was no longer a competing product which charged for gifts. Since the gifts came back, Free Gifts has continued to succeed. Virtual goods are a massive economy especially in Asia where virtual goods generate the majority of social network revenue.

That’s because advertising dollars in Asia are pretty low. So what’s the prime reason for gift growth on Facebook? The company’s rapid growth in their user base. The company has more than doubled since Jeremy Liew published the company’s findings back in January. This means that the rate of gifting appears to be staying pretty consistent.

The real question I have is: can the virtual gift economy could become a billion dollar economy on its own? If Facebook can reach $100 million eventually the global gift economy will be able to push $1 billion. What do you think?

There are a few other changes as well:

In addition to the JavaScript client library changes, iframe applications that want to preload FQL queries will receive the data along with other parameters via POST with the prefix ‘fb_post_sig’. We’re using a different prefix from the original ‘fb_sig’ prefix so we can avoid namespace collisions with the GET parameters, which will continue to use ‘fb_sig’ for compatibility with current applications which may be expecting the data. These parameters can be accessed and validated in the same method as the old parameters (for the PHP client, use get_valid_fb_params with the new fb_post_sig prefix).

The Problems

1. A variant of the Koobface worm, originally detected by Kapersky Lab a few weeks ago, has been increasingly spreading on Facebook in recent weeks. Here’s how it works:

Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, which targets Facebook users, creates spam messages and sends them to the infected users’ friends via the Facebook site. The messages and comments include texts such as Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street; Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet; Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam; Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others.

Messages and comments on MySpace and Facebook include links to http://youtube.[skip].pl. If the user clicks on this link, s/he is redirected to http://youtube.[skip].ru, a site which purportedly contains a video clip. If the user tries to watch it, a message appears saying that s/he needs the latest version of Flash Player in order to watch the clip. However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codecsetup.exe is downloaded to the victim machine; this file is also a network worm. The result is that users who have come to the site via Facebook will have the MySpace worm downloaded to their machines, and vice versa.

2. In addition, recent chain letters have started to spread across Facebook with various types of misinformation, including messages like “Facebook is going to start charging you to use the site,” “Facebook is going to start shutting down accounts that aren’t active enough,” etc.

Facebook’s Response

Facebook has responded in a number of ways:

1. Facebook is deleting content generated by the worm (Facebook says they have “again contained” it) and spammy chain letters.

2. Facebook is posting updates on the status of security issues to the Facebook Security Page and publishing best practices for users to avoid phishing attacks, like these and these.

3. Facebook is asking users to pass on the following information:

We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:

* Your Wall
* An inbox message from a friend—in other words, chain letters.
* Messages spread through Applications—if an application is telling you that Facebook is about to shut down, report it.

Since there’s been a lot of wrong information about Facebook spreading around, we’d like to clarify a few things for the record:

* We are not shutting down accounts that are not “active” enough.
* We are not going to start charging you to use Facebook.
* We will never ask you to send us your password or login information.
* We will never put the responsibility on YOU to send information to your friends. If we have information we need to share, it’s our job to get the word out.
* When we do communicate to you about the site (with the exception of posts made on this blog) it will always be from a collective Facebook. You won’t hear from me, personally, or from Mark, or from Dustin, or from any of the Facebook bloggers you’ve seen here.

So the next time you see a chain letter, chain wall post, or chain anything, report it to our User Operations team, and tell all your friends to ignore it. We could make a joke here about passing this entry on to ten of your friends, but that’s not cool.

4. Facebook is blocking Wall posts that contain links to known phishing sites:

5. Facebook is improving its automated systems to automatically detect abuse on the site more quickly.

6. Facebook is pursuing many of the perpetrators (the company sued alleged Facebook account hijacker Adam Guerbuez last week).

Conclusion

What do Facebook’s recent security issues mean in the long run? Ultimately, it’s vital for everyone involved in the Facebook ecosystem that Facebook continue to invest in security detection and prevention. Everything in Facebook depends on user trust, and everyone wants these issues to be have as little impact as possible.

While Connect is still in beta, this will be one of the first chances developers have to see early versions of Facebook Connect implementations. Here are the details:

* When: Wednesday, September 3rd
* Time: 6:30 PM- Midnight
* Where: Blue Chalk Café - 630 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA

For more, check out the event page.

One large reason: Mob Wars has baked incentivized CPA offers from Super Rewards directly into the game, and expertly tuned its virtual economy to drive offer conversions without significantly imbalancing the economy or damaging game play. (Mob Wars also works closely with CPA monetization firm Offerpal Media.)

Super Rewards has largely remained quiet on the PR front to date, but the company is working with many of the top developers on Facebook to monetize their games. Super Rewards partners include Mob Wars, Knighthood, Premier Football, and several of the top apps in Zynga’s family of games, including Texas HoldEm Poker and YoVille. The company has built a 14 person team across its Vancouver headquarters, New York office, and soon to be opened San Francisco office.

We recently spent some time with Super Rewards CEO and Co-founder Jason Bailey and President Adam Caplan to learn more about how the company is working with Mob Wars and other leading apps and social games to make real money.

Jason, how does Super Rewards help social app and game developers make money?

What we do exceptionally well is understanding the nuances of all the games we work with. We work closely with developers to tweak and balance their game play and economies around their virtual currencies. Developers come in making $100 a day and we can take them up to $1000 a day in short order.

How detailed do you get?

We provide a broad range of services, everything from pricing specific items to consulting. Some developers have experience with their economies in current or past apps and want our help putting offers in front of their users. Others come to us while their game is still in alpha and really value our input.

What’s the most important thing developers need to do to make money with CPA offers?

The most important thing is balancing your economy properly. You should support all kinds of players well, while remembering that your hardcore users will generate 90% of your revenue.

You want to make sure users want to obtain and spend points, while preserving the quality of the game play. For example, in Mob Wars, in order to replenish your health you can either wait for the system to revitalize you or you can “go to the Godfather” and earn some “favor points.” (see right)

So how do you measure performance?

The core metric we use is dollars per click. We hope our developers can get 25% of their daily active users through a Super Rewards page at some point. Of those, if the economy is balanced correctly, you should see a 40-50% click through rate, and ultimately a net 8-10% conversion rate. Developers get about $1.00-$1.50/conversion for US users, but less for international users. We’re lucky to get $0.06/conversion in China, but we have games operating in Europe and other parts of Asia at $0.25 and up.

So assuming all of a developer’s traffic is US traffic, the developer could see up to $83 per day per thousand DAUs. However, on an average basis across all geographies, we are about half that number. It goes without saying that there is a wide distribution around the average based on quality of app and balance of virtual currency economy.

What kind of apps are doing the best?

Games! Gifting and poking apps don’t do as well. Games that do the best are ones in which the players want to be on top of the leaderboard, collect items, or play games of chance.

Also, keep in mind at that a majority of the revenue generated per user is generated early in the lifetime of the users’ interaction with the games. People spend money developing their characters, climbing the leader board, and unlocking new elements of the game. Once their character is strong, they have many prizes, and have unlocked all the levels - naturally there is less desire to complete offers and pay. It is those top guys though that motivate the little guys to climb and thus spend.

As another example, there is one app that has about 200,000 MONTHLY active users (4-50k DAU). Yesterday, about 14,000 users hit the Super Rewards page (about 30%). The users were about 35% USA, 55% CA, AU, and UK, the remaining 10% all over the world. 5,500 clicks were generated (40% CTR). Revenues were about $4,500 for the day for an EPC of about $0.80. This is a newer app so its earnings per 1,000 DAU is a touch higher than average. Also it is an engaging game with a virtual currency so it is a great fit for us. It is a fairly international app, but nothing unusual. If it had more US users it would earning higher aver EPCs.

So those numbers scale well at the smaller DAUs, but when apps have 500k DAU the formula gets more complicated. That being said, there are PLENTY of apps making $6,000 a day on various platforms. But no single app that I know of making $60,000 a day consistently.

However, we’re just in the beginning. We’re starting to see bigger players move in to the space with higher quality apps. I expect to see some very high quality games released in the next few months.

And some people think our stuff looks hokey, but we purposely make it match the look and feel of the game, like in Mob Wars. That is just how Facebook games look.

Right. So, how much does the social network context affect monetization potential?

The social factor is definitely important in driving games where there is pride or ego involved in being on the top of the list. However, the main reason our partner apps are doing well is entertainment. Casual MMO’s outside of social networks would do just as well. Social networks are just a great way to grow quickly, and play against real friends and family instead of random people you meet in the lobby.

Thanks Jason. Any final thoughts?

We are very bullish on the space. We’ll be moving into other areas like casual games and web games soon.

Our 200 developers love Super Rewards, but they don’t want us to talk about it. But we’ve been optimizing our system over the last year, and are now ready for prime time.

* Status Updates now always occupy the top three story spots
* “All Stories” has been renamed to the more exciting “Live Feed”

The first three status updates also do not have the “show me more/less about this person” feedback options. It appears that Facebook is simply taking the three most recent updates without trying to prioritise

Many users have missed the Status Updates panel on the right side of the old profile, and will be glad to see it being given more prominence in the new design. Whether this is a permanent change or just an experiment remains to be seen.

What does this mean for Michael Phelps? Well, first of all it means that a run as a Presidential candidate is now warranted. It also means that Phelps is sure to attract millions of dollars in sponsorships when he returns home from the Olympics. I contacted Barack Obama for comment but have yet to receive a response as he is busy preparing for his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Colorado this week.

Hey Barack, we’re not mad at you for not replying to our emails, we know you are busy trying to become the next President. Michael Phelps was at least kind enough to update with the following wall post on his profile:

Hey guys. Thanks so much for all the support - you guys are awesome! I know I haven’t been around lately (been a little busy), but I should be able to post some cool stuff now. Just to give you an update, I got to hang out in Beijing for a couple days once I finished up and met Kobe and Chris Paul. They’re definitely bringing home the gold. Now I’m on my way to London for the hand-off between Beijing and London. After that, well…just stay tuned.

Unfortunately the wall post was on his own wall, but we’ll accept that as though Phelps had contacted us directly! Congratulations to Phelps on becoming the most popular person on Facebook. We know that this is easily a bigger achievement then winning the most gold medals in a single Olympics ever.

The only problem with this information? It doesn’t seem completely accurate. It does make a lot of sense though but this also suggests that Slide is currently generating close to $6 million a year from their top two applications. That definitely doesn’t justify a $500 million valuation though. Can you really plug all these numbers into a single equation which can tell you a company’s revenue?

Definitely not! You can definitely come close though and Developer Analytics appears to be a more realistic estimate than Adonomics (which calculated an app’s estimated valuation) was is estimating valuations. There are some intersting findings that the company has generated and a number of suggestions that have been created for most of applications based on the numbers the company has.

So what is Developer Analytics trying to create? The company is looking to generate what appear to be automated numbers based on equations they’ve created which is similar to a Compete.com or Alexa for social applications. It’s an unfulfilled niche but are companies willing to invest $200 - $800 a month after an initial fee of $500 - $8000 for company data?

I’m sure there a lot of companies already registered but the only problem with this strategy is that the data is still automatically generated. There’s definitely valuable information though. Check out Developer Analytics recent post for the latest stats.

The one place where Scrabulous is still available is India but that may not be for long. In response to a law suit filed against Scrabulous, the brothers who developed the application decided to shut it down and relaunch a modified version of the game called Wordscraper. So far, the application has attracted over 262,000 monthly users so far. That’s a far cry from the more than 500,000 active daily users that Scrabulous used to have.

Electronic Arts and Hasbro also released an official version of Scrabble which has now attracts over 382,000 monthly active users. It appears that the Agarwalla brothers will have to suffice with only a few hundred thousand active users rather than the millions they previously had. This should still be sufficient for the brothers to make a living but the battles with Mattel have most definitely stunted the company’s growth.

Facebook’s decision was guided by the risk of facing “liability for copyright and trademark infringement” according to AP News. Tough luck for the Agarwalla brothers and it’s unfortunate that they couldn’t take advantage of the remaining hours to direct Scrabulous uses to their updated Wordscraper game. I have a feeling that this story isn’t over until Scrabulous is shut down everywhere, including India.

The application allows you to adopt a Love Bunny and care for it. You can place it in various locations which appear to be proper locations for using it. You can put it in a hot tub, a bath, the living room, a chamber which appears to have cuffs hanging down from the ceiling (don’t ask me), the bedroom and the kitchen.

Personally, I haven’t been so fortunate as to interact with a love bunny but I’m sure there will be thousands of satisfied customers. This is definitely an interesting way to promote a sex toy. I’m not quite sure that I’d share this application among my friends but maybe this app will work its way into an interesting group of people.

If you want to experience the fun of adopting a love bunny, go check out the Love Bunnies application.

Aaron Sorkin prompts users to test to see if he is real in the group’s description. The only problem with accomplishing what would otherwise be an elementary task is that there is no way to friend or send a message to Sorkin. Not sure how he got to have that setting but my guess is it’s via the privacy settings. The only other person that I know of that doesn’t have a friend request in the directory is Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder if this movie will be created in a similar way to The Pirates of Silicon Valley which highlighted the start of Microsoft and Apple. The only difference between that movie and the apparent Facebook movie? The Pirates of Silicon Valley had two companies that actually went public. Facebook has yet to do that. However the movie is written, this definitely sounds like an interesting beginning!

If you are more interested in what your friends are up to then what photos they are uploading and what their relationship status, you may be pleased to hear that Facebook has upgraded your friends’ statuses. Now rather than just showing recent friend activities, the most recent status updates of your friends are now displayed at the top of the news feed.

It’s clear that statuses have become one of the most important components of Facebook and many have called it a Twitter killer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing emphasis on statuses as Facebook moves forward. One interesting component about this new layout is how the statuses are updated instantaneously whereas the main news feed content is only updated periodically.

This contrasts FriendFeed where every load of the page presents new data among your friends as the site is updated in real-time. Facebook has tried to automatically filter information for users to try to select the most relevant information. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ever shifts this strategy to display more information.

This is a simple change but it most definitely highlights the importance of statuses in Facebook.

So far Facebook has had a pretty smooth transition but everyday I read about a few people who don’t like the new Facebook layout. One group I previously wrote about this month has grown to over 50,000 users. This is a really small number though when you compare it to the more than 20 million people that now have access to the new Facebook design.

Whether or not you like the new design, it won’t be a choice as to whether or not you make the shift. What “mid-September” qualifies as is left for interpretation but it’s clear that Facebook is taking their time when it comes to making the shift over. Are you in favor of the new design or do you not like the changes? Do think this is much ado about nothing?

Rather than the AP Newswire going across your screen, you now have a live activity feed of all of your friends actions. Soon enough I’d imagine that we will begin to see the activities of friends that are taking place outside of Facebook show up in this feed more frequently, making it much more of a competitor to FriendFeed. Just as with FriendFeed though, the majority of posts remain to be comments.

I’ve included a one-minute screencast below of my live stream newsfeed and I have to say that it is really impressive. Congratulations to the Facebook team on this one. One of the most enjoyable experiences with this new feature was watching the stream of feedback people were providing to the Obama speech last night. It will most definitely be interesting to watch this feed during any significant national event.

Honestly, I have a feeling that the demand for this feature of the news feed is going to grow exponentially as users get used to the new design. The only challenge will be that users that have less friends won’t have as active of a stream. Then again, this same phenomenon takes place on any social media site: the more friends you have, the more content you have to consume. Take a look at the feature in action below.

First, this emphasizes Facebook’s commitment to making the site a social utility to browse among your own friends. There is also no longer a link to browse for users within the new design. While you can access browse by going to the following page, it doesn’t appear to be accessible via any other method. There’s another component of the missing advanced search story which is a little more sinister. It appears that someone has successfully attempted to capitalize on advanced search gone missing.

An application called “Advanced Search” claims to enable users to search through over 80 million users on Facebook. How do they let you do that? Well in the past month alone close to 50,000 people have accessed this application. When you visit the app, it automatically populates a bunch of form fields with you name, gender, birthday, schools you’ve attended, companies you’ve worked at and more. It looks just like Facebook’s standard advanced search which misleads users into submitting their information.

This application would be extremely useful for any of the ad networks that wish to use profile data to target users. The other funny thing about this application? It doesn’t appear to actually provide any advanced search functionality. Instead it simply collects data. When you view the “advanced search application” it states “Welcome to Advanced Search for Facebook - Before you start searching, please check, update and store your details so that other people can search for you.”

It then prompts users to enter there info. If you don’t enter anything, it doesn’t display the search. Yikes! I’ve tried searching for more information on this application which has been popular since last October and I couldn’t find anything. Have you been able to find Facebook’s advanced feature? Have you tried this misleading application? Do you think it should be shut down?