It appears to be some sort of automated affiliate program that they’ve put in place to take advantage of people typing in the URL incorrectly. Not a bad way to drive what I’m sure is a substantial amount of traffic to your advertising program. Many other CPA programs are known for taking a large quantity of low-value leads and turning them into paying consumers.

I went ahead and registered for the date a cheating housewives website and …. just joking. Seriously though, there is a lot of money generated each year off of misspelled domain names. Don’t become a victim yourself! Go and purchase all the domain names similar to your that result from typing too fast. Let us know if you end up trying out any of the site that the Facebok site owners redirect to.

So who owns the Facebok site? Nobody knows unfortunately because they have used a private registration for the domain name. So don’t go and accidentally type Facebok into your URL, unless of course you enjoy dating married women (which I’m sure are real of course).

There.com – A Virtual World’s App Strategy for Facebook and Open Social

September 4^th, 2008 – Los Angeles

All Facebook sat down with Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com at the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles. Michael is a tech savvy visionary who was the 4^th employee at eBay and an early employee of Oracle. There.com is a popular 3D social virtual world that allows users to build avatars that 1) express themselves in a graphically rich, online environment, 2) communicate with other users in real time via chatting and voice chat and 3) build social networks with other members via their avatars. There.com also creates a thriving virtual goods economy, where users can create, buy and sell virtual goods through an in-game auction platform.

There.com’s Social Network Strategy

There.com recently launched a Facebook application, Facing There. Facing There’s app design, launch and roadmap are part of There.com’s strategy for operating in a world where their users have to manage participating in a growing number of social graphs. Michael explicitly cited the exploding number of social graphs online, and we discussed his company’s strategic decision making on how to partner with Facebook and MySpace versus compete with them. These large social networks do not have support for avatar based interaction, the core of There.com’s user experience. Facing There is an explicit attempt to allow users to take their There.com experience and make it a part of their social networking experience. The company is starting with Facebook and has larger plans to participate in Open Social. However, Facebook was clearly the easiest and most production ready platform on which to begin their strategy of helping make There.com a part of members’ experience on other social networks.

“Facing There” - Facebook Application

The Facing There app allows users to take their social graph from There.com to Facebook. The app allows There.com members to bring to Facebook their in-world profiles, skills, groups and events. The app extends the other way as well, enabling members to list the upcoming events that they are attending in the There.com virtual reality and then to send invites to There.com friends via the Facebook application platform. These friends will then join each other on a different social media platform to enjoy a graphically rich experience, such as competing in a 3D buggy race together. The Facing There app brings the table There.com’s substantial user information as well as well-earned member loyalty when working with Facebook as a provider of a social operating system.

Strategy Questions Raised by There.com:

All Facebook would like to highlight strategic issues raised by the There.com application:

Virtual Goods Monetization

There.com operates a thriving auction business for virtual goods within its 3D worlds. Virtual goods monetization is an important revenue stream for the company. The Facing There app allows users to view virtual goods auctions that are happening within the There.com virtual world from within their Facebook profile. If a user lists an item in an auction, this can be displayed to Facebook profile. There.com links out of Facebook in order to buy items in auction they have discovered via the app.

Facebook currently does not participate in the revenue stream of virtual goods sales that this app will help drive, instead treating There.com like any other app developer who is allowed and encouraged to make money via the F8 platform free of charge. Facebook (apparently) doesn’t send notifications in the app users’ News Feed about item listings, auction purchases, either – a viral mechanism core to the platform - which would clearly drive monetization for the application provider here.

Would a closer integration involve a revenue sharing arrangement or advertising spend?

Privacy When Merging Social Graphs

There.com struggled with and answered some interesting privacy issues when designing how to bring a social graph from another social media platform into the Facebook environment.

There.com does not assume that because two people are friends on Facebook, they should also be friends on There.com. There.com also does not believe that if two There.com members are connected in the virtual world and are also found to be friends on Facebook that they should suggest and/ or connect them on Facebook. There.com only facilitates this connection – the full merging and overlap of social graphs - if people are 1) connected within the There.com environment, 2) friends on Facebook and 3) have installed the Facing There app.

All Facebook believes this is a very savvy way of handling privacy and relationships when merging social graphs. Do you agree?

Social Media Partnerships

There.com has been operating its virtual world since 2003. As such, it is a very sophisticated social media company. The There.com Facebook app is strategically solid, which reflects their expertise in the virtual world industry. From Facebook’s perspective, however, their application 1) is useful for members of another social network, 2) is designed to pull members off platform to join virtual world experiences and 3) does not share in virtual goods revenues – which is a significant global market and one that we covered as a major potential source of revenue for Facebook.

Does this app create long term strategic threats to Facebook?

Conclusion:

Analyzing virtual worlds can provide useful insights into Facebook’s likely competitive response to other social networks’ participation in their graph via apps. In this case the social media platforms are very different: 1) virtual worlds seek to be entertaining via a graphically rich environment and real time communications and 2) Facebook is a social utility that relies primarily on a graphically simple, elegant aesthetic combined asynchronous communications features to create the experience that fueled its enormous growth. The launch of the “Facing There” app is a useful case study for understanding the possibilities for integration between two leaders from very different social media sectors.

This may well be the cannon ball “shot across the bow” of Web 2.0 social media sites from Virtual Worlds. And virtual worlds have lots of cannon balls. There.com’s integration from a position of strength illustrates how Facebook’s long term value proposition will depend on a winner take all approach when merging social graphs.

What do you think about the threat to Facebook from Virtual Worlds apps? How should it respond?

One of the animated banner campaigns has been embedded below. The banner says “Your business is about customers, not keywords. Reach them with advanced targeting.” It’s clear that Facebook knows who their competitor is and they are now putting a larger amount of resources into competing with search. Just yesterday news of a widening gap in online advertising surfaced.

Interestingly, Facebook’s advertising as well as other social network advertising was left out of the Wall Street Journal article which was a source of much discussion. I’m not sure if that’s because social advertising is still so early or if they decided to group this form of advertising into the “other” category. Whatever the rationale for leaving social advertising out of the article was, it’s clear that search has the best position in advertising on the web.

Should Social Try to Compete With Search?

Social advertising is clearly an alternative form of advertising currently. Typically buyers understand advertising in terms of CPM, CPC or CPA but they definitely don’t understand the new forms of engagement which many social networks offer. Luckily for these buyers Facebook does provide this form of advertising but large buyers should approach Facebook directly as the self-service forms of advertising have significant limits placed on daily spend.

With these new banner advertisements Facebook is clearly searching for smaller businesses with smaller advertising budgets than Fortune 500 companies. It’s interesting to see Facebook going after the smaller guys for money. One has to wonder if making Facebook Ads an alternative to search is really the best solution though. What do you think? Is this proper positioning for Facebook Advertising?

Wait, can’t any website do the exact same thing? Yes it can! These researchers came up with a new way of attacking their victims though. As the article revealed:

The researchers developed an application called “Photo of the Day,” which serves up a new National Geographic photo daily. But in the background, every time the application is clicked, it sends a 600 K-byte HTTP request for images to a victim’s Web site.

Those requests, as well as those images, are not seen by someone using Photo of the Day, which the researchers have termed a “Facebot” application. The effect is a flood of traffic to the victim’s Web site, known as a denial-of-service attack.

The application remains listed on Facebook and still hasn’t been shut down. While I’m guessing this application will be shut down within the next few hours it’s interesting to see a known application which is testing vulnerabilities is allowed to run on the platform. Then again, monitoring all of the packets being transferred between the application and the user and still determining a packet is harmful is completely unlikely.

I’m not quite that the vulnerabilities described are unique to social networks. Instead it sounds like the argument is that there are more “vulnerable users” on social networks then any random website. I’m not sure I agree with this argument but I’ll leave you to decide.

According to Eric Eldon even Facebook’s sub-tabs are experiencing a substantial decrease in traffic. Eldon has somehow translated this decrease in access to the sub-tabs into a decrease in overall page views. I’m not quite sure if this translation makes much sense. A profile, is a profile, is a profile on Facebook whether or not there are tabs.

One thing that’s clear from Josh Elman’s post last night is that developers want to drive more traffic to their applications within profiles. The sudden switch in metrics from daily active users to monthly active users has made it difficult for outsiders to judge the impact. Nobody knows what this mysterious new feature is but I’m sure all the developers want to know.

For now we’ll have to wait in anticipation as Facebook prepares to roll out a new the new feature and switches everybody over the new profile design.

According to this July’s comscore data the fastest growing locations for search are Facebook and MySpace. MySpace had 539 million searches and Facebook had 173 million and posted 20 and 10 percent growth, respectively. My guess is that these searches are only domestic searches which would account for the large difference. Whatever the case is these numbers are far below Google’s search volume which fell just under 10 billion searches for the month with 4 percent monthly growth.

Last week I suggested that Facebook has a huge search monetization opportunity and this solidifies that argument. Facebook has a ways to go before it catches up to the large search giants (aka Google) but they are almost a quarter of the size of AOL in terms of search and almost half the size of eBay which has a shopping system which is practically built on search.

As the Wall Street Journal higlighted today, search is dominating advertising with the most growth. The article suggests there is as an increasing gap between search an other advertising models (primarily banner). Social advertising is a new form of medium though so growth is hard to measure, especially since Facebook and other social networks don’t publicly release their ad revenue.

While MySpace and Facebook are searching for non-traditional advertising methods online, their quick path to profitability may be staring them in the face. Then again Google’s search deal with MySpace has been under-performing according to Google. This is troubling news considering that MySpace accounts for more searches then eBay, Craigslist, Facebook and Amazon at this point.

It will be interesting to see how the advertising battle plays out but given that social advertising is still such a nascent industry, one can only expect to see growth. We have seen a massive influx of new social advertising solutions and according to people I’ve been speaking with there are more that are about to hit the market.

While most of the market is out experimenting it may be time for Facebook and other large social networks to try what has worked for the past decade: search.

Read the full story on the Social Times

The link will be used to report offensive content on the site. So how much is 1.5 million impressions in the grand scheme of things? Not much. According to comscore Facebook served 3.65 billion ad views in June making this less than .04 percent of all impressions. So the odds of you seeing one of these links is extremely low. We would also expect many of these impressions to take place specifically in New Jersey.

As the A.P. news points out, in May, “Facebook agreed to add 40 new safeguards to protect users from cyberbullies and sexual predators following talks with 49 state attorneys general.” This appears to be one of those safeguards.

Update
It appears that the icon being used is the “Report Abuse” icon described on the state of New Jersey’s website.

Hey you! Don’t let me catch you adding too many friends or messaging too many users or you’ll wind up getting blocked! You may have seen it yourself, a warning dialog box which pops up and alerts you that your activity is of a rate similar to someone that is abusing the system (a spammer). Every day I receive emails from people that have been banned and they can’t get access to the site and receive no response from Facebook.

How Does Facebook Know You’re a Spammer?

Facebook uses a proprietary algorithm for determining unusual usage. The system automatically disables accounts whereas the reinstatement process is manual. Facebook states that “the speed at which you are acting and the sheer number of actions you have made are both taken into account.” After a little bit of analysis it’s pretty easy to determine what methods are used for determining spam.

Here’s the factors that we’ve determined Facebook uses to block users:

• Number of friends - Do you have 20 friends or 1,000 friends? This is important because the more friends you have on Facebook, the more active you probably are on the site. As such, don’t think you’ll be able to blast out messages or wall posts to 300 people when you are friends with 50.
• Content Similarity - If you are browsing through the site and writing the exact same wall post on everybody’s wall, there’s a good chance that Facebook considers this spam activity. Get creative and switch up the content you are creating. Otherwise let’s be honest, you are acting like a spammer … right?
• Average Message Usage - How active is your Facebook inbox? If you receive 40 messages a day, you shouldn’t be punished for replying to them. [We assume that] Facebook calculates an average message usage for each user. If you fall outside a certain statistical deviation from your normal usage, you will be warned and possibly banned.
• Time - A sudden surge in usage will set off Facebook’s alarms. If you haven’t sent a message in days but suddenly send out 50, you will look like a spammer.
• Facebook Activity Factor - All of these factors (and others that we don’t know of) are used to generate an overall Facebook activity factor for each user. When your overall activity falls outside the statistical norm for you, you will receive a warning. If your usage doesn’t drop to fall within your normal usage levels within a specific time frame, you will be banned.

How to Avoid Being Blocked by Facebook

So now that you know what will get you blocked by Facebook you should pretty much know how to avoid being blocked. Don’t send too many messages, don’t post too many wall posts, don’t go adding friends at a ridiculous rate. Is this model fair? Well that’s really open to philosophical debate but Facebook has to battle spam and the easiest way to play nicely is to stay under the spam radar.

Facebook’s Internal Spam Conflict

As Kim Hart wrote in the Washington Post today, Facebook has an internal spam conflict. Facebook wants to ensure that users don’t get attacked by actual spammers. In the past year the volume of spam on social networks has increased. Both Facebook and MySpace have turned to lawsuits to try to end some of the largest spamming attacks. While Facebook wants to protect users’ right to communicate, they also want to ensure that spam doesn’t drive users away from the site.

Facebook has leveraged a model in which automated algorithms try to determine which users are spammers and ban them from the system. Unfortunately this model hasn’t completely worked as some spammers have found security holed and has leveraged those to spam users from accounts not owned by the spammer.

The bottom line is that Facebook continues their battle against spam. Just as luxury goods stores battle thieves, social networks must continuously allocate resources to battle spam. It has simply become part of the overhead in the social network business.

Does it Matter Where You Engage Your User?

When clients turned to “Facebook experts” last year and asked “Why should we add so many features within a Facebook application?” they regularly received the same response: “The more features you add, the better. It doesn’t matter where you are engaging your users as long as you are engaging with them.” The same argument still holds true for the most part but theoretically clients could finally get what they wanted in the first place: users driven to their website.

Sometimes you just need to give the client what they want. Over the past year I’ve heard countless companies request that they’d like to drive users to their website, not to a Facebook application. The biggest problem with running Facebook campaigns was that users were driven to a Facebook application but they never converted into website users. This could change with Connect.

Do Install Campaigns for Connect Apps Make Sense?

When users install a Facebook Connect application, they can be redirected to an external website. It can be as something simple as a commenting application, or something more complex that leverages the user’s data to produce a more custom experience. The purpose of using the Facebook platform has always been the same: access to valuable user data including the user’s relationships.

There is also the desire to have access to viral distribution channels. Facebook extends both of these capabilities to the web. While we haven’t seen the release of the first Facebook Connect applications, when Connect is released from beta later this year we could see a massive influx of new applications. As for those install campaigns of the past? My guess is that we could see more of them, except this time around the end result is going to be an external website, not Facebook.

Does This Help Facebook?

One has to wonder if Facebook will end up developing some sort of policy which says “All Facebook Connect application installations must originate from external sites.” The main issue is that increasing pageviews is one of the primary benefits of the Facebook platform but this isn’t accomplished through external install campaigns. Right now all we have is theory and speculation to go on but I could see this becoming a complex issue for Facebook.

Do you foresee external Facebook Connect application install campaigns in the future? What do you think are the biggest implications for Facebook?