Paying money for virtual goods has always raised a few heckles in the media. The thought that people are spending hard-earned pennies on virtual strawberry seeds in Farmville or virtual pumpkins to decorate the kennels of virtual dogs in Pet Society get traditional media organs a bit het up.

Admitedly paying money for what is essentially a few pixels can seem ridiculous but the counter-argument is that people always have and always will spend their money on dumb stuff. And just because the stuff is virtual doesn't make it more or less dumb.

Anyway, now it's all going one step further as online games makers Playfish now sell Playfish cash cards in shops in exchange for real cash.

Their release reads:

"Playfish Cash cards are now available to buy in WHSmith and Sainsbury's and can be exchanged for Playfish Cash which can be spent in all of Playfish's supported social games. Playfish cash can be used to buy virtual goods, for example in Pet Society, Playfish's most popular game which has over 19 million monthly users, you could buy your pet a new set of clothes, or some cool furniture for their house. In Restaurant City, which has over 15 million monthly users, you could buy a new jukebox or some great new tables and chairs for your restaurant."

I don't think Playfish game tokens are going to take over from book tokens anytime soon, but given the number of users, I can see these selling.

You know the way there are dating sites which encourages people to date your friend? There now a Facebook app that encourages people to hire your friends.

Hire My Friend is a free Facebook application that allows you to attach a mini profile of a job-seeking friend to your very own profile, showcasing their skills to your network. Okay so you may not have the HR department of Procter and Gamble as Facebook friends but you probably know some people right?

As the developer says: "If you could gather 500 of your friends in a room, and tell everyone about your friend who needs a job, someone in that room is likely to know someone who will be searching for someone of their skill set. This is a virtual way of instantaneously notifying everyone you know in a non-obtrusive manner. People naturally like to help, but don't always like to feel the pressure to do so."

It all makes sense given how shaky employment is for youngsters and well, pretty much everybody these days.

Hire My Friend on Facebook here

Facebook could help you stop smoking, if you take advantage of this app and are the sort of person who responds to peer pressure.

WeQuit is a Facebook application that lets you challenge your friends or yourself to quit: set the amount of time you want to quit for, track your progress, bet your mates and earn virtual medals for your progress, if the health benefits aren't enough to start with, part of the app also lets you donate your spare money to charity.

The project takes the fun aspects of social media gaming and uses them to help people quit smoking. We imagine there's still a fair amount of will power involved, but hey, it's free and worth a try huh?

Challenges don't start until 10th March, no-smoking day, and there are no reviews or dicussions yet, but try it out for yourself on Facebook
See website: www.wequit.co.uk/facebook

There has been a surge in men joining Facebook in the past two months according to statistics from the Inside Facebook blog. Facebook membership is growing in all sectors, but more more quickly among men.

Looking at growth statistics for February 09 it appears that men are joining at a much faster rate than women in all the younger age groups.

The site membership is still more female than male with 56.6% of users being women. The demographic group least represented on Facebook is older men, not suprisingly half of all members are between 18 and 34.

Inside Facebook's analysis of the shift - men are following women, latching perhaps onto the potential of the site as a place for "dating"/stalking people you fancy. Also of course, since the intial take-up among men is smaller there's more room for growth. Still shows Facebook membership is very far from reaching saturation point..

[graphs via Inside Facebook]

It's the sort of app that everyone wants but fears and knows would ruin social networking. Something that lets you track who looks at your page and how often they click on it.

These apps pop up from time to time and run until Facebook find out about them and squash them. I was sent one disguised as an event recently: the informatively-named - "NOW YOU CAN SEE EVERY 1 WHO VIEWS YOUR PROFILE!!" The gist is that you visit: "www.tinyurl.com/whosee" and download what looks like a Mozilla Firefox extension called the Feboz Social Networking Toolbar (also works for IE and Safari).

The event structure and the "invite all your friends" command just ensures the viral spread of the app. They claim here that "now it's 100% possible to see that views your profile or spying on you". Anyone know anything about Feboz? only contact details are a query form, I'll let you know if I hear anything back [UPDATE BELOW]. They have a page on Facebook which claims they have 152,291 registered users and let you track your visitors. Until we hear something back we can safely assume it's either a scam of some sort or not doing what the text below promises.

Now defunct Facebook app Top Visitors was a less dodgy version of a clicktracker - it logged how often your Profile page was looked at and by whom. The app also uploaded a hit counter to your Profile page and displayed information about each visitor including how often they have visited, when they last visited, and where they are currently located.

Facebook had set up technical blockades to prevent this, but the developer Shaun Walkers found a loophole in the Facebook code which let him insert a tracker in. He explains how he did that in a blog post here. The loophole is now closed and the app doesn't work, but it is interesting how popular it was: getting 10,000 users in two weeks.

The only authorised example of click-tracking on Facebook can be seen on Facebook fan pages where you can see who's been looking at and interacting with your fan page by age-range and gender. It's pretty interesting, but it's not personal.

Top Visitors developer Shaun Walkers says:
"The one thing I find most perplexing about the whole thing is the fact that Facebook has not yet added such a feature to their platform [...] As far as privacy is concerned, Facebook could leave the feature disabled by default and allow users to enable it at their own discretion through their privacy settings. And including the Visibility capabilities similar to those I included in Top Visitors would provide users with ultimate control."

Are you sold? What do you think?

Related: Popjam - a Facebook app that hooks you up with randoms on chat

**UPDATE:** message from Feboz in answer to my question about whether you can use Feboz to track who looks at your FB profile:
Dear Anna. Toolbar is used for Signup. And there is an apps which works with Feboz. You can see who views your Feboz Profile on Feboz. its not related or Part of Facebook.
Thanks

**UPDATE 2:** message from Feboz after I asked them if they were aware of or responsible for these events that misrepresent what they do:
Dear Anna. We check and got many complaints about the Events. Those Events are not Created or promoted by Feboz. There are few people who try to get points from those events. And as you talk about picture I just check them they didn't said that you can see who views your FACEBOOK* Profile. The word Facebook is not used in that event. But again let us clear that those events are not created or promoted by Feboz. and Toolbar is only for Feboz. like you can use feboz from your feboz toolbar. Its easy to use and always in your explorer.

Like a Chatroulette for Facebook chat, Popjam is a fun little app that relies on the spirit of random to connect you up with strangers. And let you exchange timeless words of wisdom, like those above..

Except unlike Chatroulette which opens up a live webcam, Facebook app Popjam opens up a chat box with another Popjam user. But it's still full of the spirit of random. This is highly likely to be a complete stranger and could come from anywhere in the world. Though the user I ended up talking to, turned out to be a UK student.

Popjam shows up your first name and your profile picture then lets you chat. There were only 14 people online when I tried it, so this service may take a little time to warm up. It's also not quite as smooth as Chatroulette, and when I was on, took quite a long time to connect up with other users. It also needs to make an alert noise otherwise when someone chats to you otherwise you won't notice that you actually have connected to "Simon" and have been ignoring him for 5 minutes.

I guess this app makes Facebook a little more overt about being a massive dating site. What would be even better is if it selected people according to attributes you chose, you know, like being the UK or liking the Rocky Horror Show or something. But then it wouldn't be random would it..?

Try out PopJam here (you have to sign in using Facebook connect)

NB Popjam the Facebook app grew out of failed LOL-sharing site also Popjam.com which worked as an aggregator of humourous things on the internet.

Facebook have just opened their popular chat service up to external developers. This means that from today you will be able to instant message your Facebook friends from outside Facebook, using a client service instead of the main site.

It will be like what Tweetdeck does with Twitter or like the old MSN. Facebook says:
"To make Facebook Chat available everywhere, we are using the technology Jabber (XMPP), an open messaging protocol supported by most instant messaging software, including iChat, Pidgin, Adium, Miranda and more."

By building chat into the Facebook Connect developers will be able to incorporate Facebook chat on other websites. If you want to limit the amount of people that are available in this new more pervasive chat you can use the Facebook friend lists function to adjust who you see and who you don't.

Apparently 2 billion messages are sent every day on Facebook chat, making it one of the most popular instant messaging services in the world. That's obviously a strength Facebook will want to build on...

While this must have been on the cards for a while, it's hard not to see the move as a fightback against the launch of Google's social network Buzz, coming so shortly after its launch. Opening up chat will spread Facebook's reach beyond its website and make it more of an ever-present web service.. something you'll leave on in the background. Since Buzz plugs itself into a popular email service - gmail - Facebook could do with spreading its influence beyond facebook.com.

ReadWriteWeb hoped that facebook running one of its key services on an open technical standard would eventually lead to interoperable chat - where you could talk to any chat service from any chat service - reducing the amount of accounts and log-ins you need to have. That looks unlikely, though apparently Facebook are investigating "interoperability".

Information on how to set up Facebook chat on your desktop: here]

If flirting on Facebook is easier than flirting in person, surely flirting via cuddly animals on a Facebook app should be easiest of all - no? That's what Pet Society are claiming anyway as we face the final few days before Valentine's Day. They suggest getting your furry Pet Society avatar to kiss to your love object's pet as a romantic icebreaker.

If you fancy a less direct approach you can hug them, give them flowers or buy them a drink.

It's like in "real life" when your dogs get tangled up in the streets, your eyes meet, 5 weeks later you're married etc, etc.

Of course your love object might not be on Pet Society, or they may have forgotten and routinely ignore notifications along the lines of "xxx just bought you a drink".

Still - it's a worth a try. Maybe back it up with a Plan B strategy (like stalking them through FourSquare and accidentally bumping into them?) That's my tip for the moment.

Pet Society is a social game played by over 21 million people which lets you create and look after your own virtual pet. Your pet lives in a town, populated with the pets owned by all of your Facebook friends, so you can go round for a visit and just kiss them, in a way you wouldn't in real life.

Kudos to Facebook for continuing to innovate. The homepage of Facebook's 350 million users has just undergone a big front-end update that forefronts what's new and makes it just that bit harder to log out (two clicks not one now). It pushes Facebook marketplace to the front, tidies apps up in a list, makes you check your message inbox more than you used to, cause it comes up with that little red bubble now that's really hard to ignore... and makes chat a bigger feature, now you can see more easily whose online.

Overall it's a more complicated homepage - a multifuncition dashboard, as opposed to "the news feed" and a few notifications - but it does push some of Facebook's lesser known but good features to the front: Marketplace for example (now a viable alternative to eBay/Gumtree/Craigslist etc) As Facebook put it "easy access to your whole Facebook experience".

Other pages highlight the new features in them. The friends pages makes Facebook friend grouping easier (you know you can organise your friends into lists like on Twitter right?) It lets you organise privacy better, restrict certain information to certain groups, and create a friend hierarchy.

Related: We do want privacy: half of Facebook users have customised their privacy settings and milBook - the Army's version of Facebook..

Facebook released some stats on how users have adapted to the new privacy environment on the site, introduced at the beginning of December.

There were worries that people wouldn't bother to customise their privacy settings and would just let Facebook's new public-by-default policy sweep them into public view by accident. But it looks like people do care about their privacy. 33% of Facebook's 350million monthly users did respond to the privacy message Facebook sent out and changed their privacy settings.

Add on to that 10 -20% of users who had already customised their privacy settings before the changes set in and you have an optimistic assessment that about half of all Facebook users have customised their privacy.

The December privacy changes reset the defaults on all profiles to public. The changes also made some information automatically public: friend lists for example. See inside facebook explanation here.

[via Inside Facebook]

Facebook usage shot up 600% over the last year on mobile phones, says mobile web browser, Opera Mini. Twitter made gains as well according to the browser's stats - being the fastest-growing social network on the mobile web, surging more than 2800% in just one year.

Opera Mini is a mobile web browser and records hits to different sites that people access through it on their phones. Their stats don't not include sites people accessed through other browsers like Safari or Internet Explorer or through apps. Their figures do show a strong trend towards the big social networking sites at the expense of local ones like Russia's VKontakte (still very popular however). Facebook is now the most popular social networking site on the mobile web.

Opera Mini is popular on Nokia handsets and compresses the data sent by 90% to make internet access faster and cheaper.

The Opera Mini browser is popular in Asian countries and Russia, with the top 10 countries ranked by number of Opera Mini users being: Russia, Indonesia, India, Ukraine, China, South Africa, United States, Vietnam, Nigeria, and United Kingdom.

Their strong base in Asia, from being embedded on Nokia handsets, shows Opera is part of an explosion of mobile web usage in countries like Indonesia and China. From December 2008 to December 2009, page views in the top 10 countries of Southeast Asia increased by 599%, unique users increased by 385%, and data transferred increased by 587%.

"Four years ago this month we released Opera Mini to the world," said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software. "Fortunately the divide between the mobile Web and the Web accessed on PCs is now disappearing. People want to use the same sites, regardless of whether they use a phone or PC to access those sites. The success of Facebook and Twitter among Opera Mini users shows that consumer habits do not change even though their devices do."

See the Opera website

Facebook game Farmville has raised almost $1 million dollars for the relief fund in Haiti. Farmville players have been buying special White Corn through micro-payments of real money in the game, and 100% of the profits on this particular purchase go to the World Food Program.

Farmville has been supporting relief work in Haiti since 1st October 09, when makers Zynga initiated a Sweet Seeds for Haiti charity built into the game. That campaign raised $1.2million over the three months it was running.

It does throw the importance of games into the light again.

I guess the good thing about Farmville's campaign is that it makes people feel they're buying something real and tangible with their donation money and I imagine that makes them more likely to donate. Apart from that Farmville has upwards of 69 million users, so even if each is just donating a few cents then the combined total still has the potential to be huge.

I wonder if the charity sector could use games even more to get out messages they need to for less cost. Instead of say... posting out leaflets to thousands of households... they could buy space in a game like Farmville and maybe model an island, based on say Haiti, and combine real-time news and donation appeals modelled in a 3D virtual world. It would show you what's going on plus improvements that are being made and let you make donations to specific areas. Would be a way of both getting news out about what's going on where and also a way of getting donators more involved.

To Buy White Corn for Haiti on Farmville visit the app here.

Any Pet Society and Celebrity Big Brother fans out there? Combine your interests with a.... Lady Sovereign Pet Society character, the sort of weird beast that the create-a-virtual-pet game lets you make.

The British rapper and grime MC got kicked out of the celebrity Big Brother house last night for eating other people's food, a corned beef sandwich among other things..

In Pet Society you can create your own pets and with a snappy response to current events, Facebook game Pet Society employees have created a Sov character that comes with its own corned beef sandwiches, raps and dances and kicks footballs around inside.

The likeness isn't exactly striking.. here's the original Sov:

And the Pet Society version:

But I will say that the Pet Society version is IMHO cuter.

It's the most popular game in the world, but even its biggest fans won't claim that it's an adrenalin-packed rollercoaster. Facebook game Farmville is a quiet affair that involves growing virtual rice paddies and decorating your virtual garden. Some folks like it, some don't, this young man in video below doesn't. See his pretty funny "ad parody" for Farmville below:

[via PaidContent]

While over 6million Christmas trees were sold in the UK in December '09, there was a roaring trade in virtual Christmas trees being done as well...

Facebook game Pet Society, created by Playfish, sold 4.2million Christmas trees to Pet Society members. In the game players create, train and care for a pet and they can decorate their animal's house with items like Christmas trees.

Admittedly these trees cost a bit less than the real-world equivalents - clocking in at under a pound in real world money, but the demand is still impressive, showing the strength of Facebook games.

Last month Facebook game Farmville from Zynga was revealed to be the most popular game in the world - by number of players - showing the power that Facebook games have. While Pet Society is played by over 21 million people each month. These Facebook games mesh the power of the social network with traditional game structures to create sociable and co-operative games that you play with your real-life friends.

The model of having a free game but selling virtual goods for real money has been successful for Farmville and it seems for Pet Society too. Every day game-makers Playfish sell around 20 million virtual items through its 11 games, with users spending £3 every week on average. Last Halloween, Playfish sold 8 million pumpkins in Pet Society to people wanting to create a spooky home for their pets. More in fact than got sold in real-life in the UK, around 1 million.

See Playfish for more information http://www.playfish.com/?page=game_pets
Pet Society on Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/petsociety/gameinfo?pf_ref=x1019

An interview with an anonymous Facebook employee on blogsite The Rumpus confirms that yes, Facebook knows exactly who you are stalking and when where you're clicking and yes it does store all that information. Permanently. It's a good read but sobering to know for definite just how much Facebooks knows and stores.

The full interview is here, and not all the information is new but a few jump-out statements included:

1. Facebook saves stuff that has been deleted or untagged: that drunken status you deleted when you woke up is still on a server somewhere.

2. Facebook saves your viewing history, it has a log of clicks and so it knows whose pictures you've been going through

3. Facebook logs stats like how often you interact with or click on the profile of a given person and makes judgements about how good friends you are with them (you can see this when you start to type a friend's name into the search box - the results are no longer ordered alphabetically, but by the people you have interacted with the most).

4. Facebook employees can find out any message you've sent or detail of your browsing history - ever - simply by querying the server where all this information is stored.

5. Instead of simply relying on trial and error to test out new features, Facebook now do psychological tests on new features, including tracking people's eyes as they scan the screen.

Enough already, I think you get the gist.

[via Boing Boing]

I'm not a big fan of putting relationships on Facebook, primarily because having to change your relationship status after you break up just adds an extra painful/embarrassing layer to the traumatic end of a relationship.

Let's move on.

Back in the day, it used to be funny to say you were in open relationship with your flatmate or Ian Paisley or something. Now Facebook has got more mature, everyone takes it a bit more seriously. And Facebook's new reminder service for romantic anniversaries will make it get even more serious.

Now when you register your relationship with Facebook it asks you what date you want to mark as your relationship anniversary.

You will now get reminders that it's you and your partner's anniversary when the date crops up. So will your friends... giving them the opportunity to buy you anniversary presents, or at least to write something supportive or funny on your wall.

Mashable reckons that "congratulating happy couples on their five-year anniversary is just another way for Facebook to consume even more of our Internet time." I think this extra information is just contributing to Facebook's general knowledge of everything that's going on ever.

Personally I'd like a customisable anniversary app... So Facebook could issue reminders of other significant events in life - like that night you and your friend inexplicably ended up in Swindon? Or the day you learnt what WTF meant, or when you got your gmail account? Times like those...

[via Mashable]

A facebook app that encourages you to de-tox sounds like it could be useful. Especially come January, that month of penance and eating detox soup. But, on closer inspection, this app - MirrorMe - also sounds like it would make you run screaming away from your computer screen.

According to a press release, the MirrorMe app uses the same facial recognition technology that the CIA and police around the world use to show you what your face will look like if you persist with your bad habits. After answering a few questions about your lifestyle, it takes a suitable photo from your Facebook profile to produce an image of what your future face will look like. After you've ravaged it with Quality Street, cocktail sausages and booze that is...

The app takes medical factors into account, as well as factors such as location and ethnic origin.

Of course eat lettuce all you want, there's not a whole lot that can be done about the natural ageing process, it's part of being a human isn't it.

Anyway, if for whatever reason, you want to guess what your face will look like in 10 or 20 years, try the app out. It's free and according to the site, "fun". Yeah real fun...
Jeremiah Alexander from Ideonic, the team behind the app, says: "In a way the MirrorMe app reflects what Ideonic is all about - a fresh and innovative company which seeks to inform and educate but in a fun, free, innovative, non preaching or judgemental way."

Mentionned on Channel 4's Embarrassing Bodies programme. There you go.

App here: http://apps.facebook.com/mirrorme
Images here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mirrormeapp
Website here: www.MirrorMeGallery.co.uk

Facebook's new age of Glasnost and Perestroika hit another milestone today when it announced that users will be able to post to Twitter from their Facebook profiles. The change should be in place by the end of the week.

Over the past few months Facebook has been opening up to the web: encouraging users to shift more of their content into the public domain and doing a deal with Google to get content showing up in searches.

Web services like Tweetdeck or Friendfeed already allow you to publish to multiple social networking sites so the idea of using one site to post to another is not that revolutionary. More significant is Facebook's acknowledgment of Twitter as useful public broadcasting service, something that it wants to offer its users.

It is also a land-grab by Facebook hoping to pull Twitterers back to Facebook, though with a loyal fan base and useful clients like Tweetdeck, it's unlikely Twitter will be knocked out by this new Facebook facility.

[via TechCrunch]

Facebook is introducing changes to its privacy settings, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced last night in a blog post that puffed the site's recently-relased massive user figures and announced 3 major new changes.

1. An end to regional networks
Back when Facebook members were largely students it made sense to have specific networks for universities or schools. Now cities and even whole countries have their own "regional networks" for example there's one for all of China. Several networks already have millions of users.
They've got too big to be useful so these are going to get cut.

2. Control Who Sees Each Piece of Individual Content You Add or Upload
More general privacy controls will be replaced with very specific option for each piece of information you upload. For example are your statuses open to everyone but your photos only open to friends of friends?
There will be three options for each item you upload: visible to friends; friends of friends; or everyone - and all the options will be more accessible as they pop up from a lock icon.

3. Setting your privacy controls will get simpler
The lock icon will bring privacy controls out of the backpages they languished on before, but the main privacy menu will get simplified as well. Don't know the details yet, but we expect that will affect profile privacy, helping to differentiate between information like hometowns and favourite movies. It might offer some control over videos or photos that you have not uploaded but have been tagged in.

In some ways minor changes, they have stirred some resentment with members of regional networks getting upset at losing their status as members of particular schools or groups. Zuckerberg's post has over 34,000 comments...