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Well it was only a matter of time before Slide and rockyou pushed things too far.  Facebook’s crackdown on aggressive viral tactics has exposed a key vulnerability of these businesses.  Facebook has banned some apps and shut down two of the three most important viral channels for others (invites and newsfeeds).  And according to this TechCrunch article the growth of these apps has been dramatically squeezed as a result. 

Some websites are designed to be games. Most are not. But have you ever heard people, or found yourself addicted to Digg, YouTube, or Facebook? Have you ever wondered why? Well, it’s because they are games, at least partially! Officially, they are social networks, news aggregators, etc. and not designed as game sites like Second Life is. However, these sites contain all factors of a game. They are not only useful, but also entertaining. You can manage relationships with friends, gain recognition, and even set trends. This book will describe the view of websites as games in general, and then study Digg, YouTube and Facebook as specific case studies. It will show you what the goals of these websites are, how to play, and how to win. Applying the game perspective to more areas of the web, users may find other hidden games and can thus use those sites with greater efficiency. Web designers also can learn from this perspective and use the game design to achieve better results.

More of a surprise is what Facebook is poised to become next: a B2B (define) networking and marketing platform that attracts corporate executives and decision makers.

I took it upon myself to get some answers using Facebook's own ad targeting system and I created this abridged guide for marketers to give you a snapshot of what the real face of Facebook looks like on a Global and US level.

This is a report that I will be updating on a monthly basis to show how the population is changing and how marketers can respond. Is there anything else that you want to see?

The blogosphere is buzzing about a provocative June 24 essay by U.C. Berkeley researcher Danah Boyd suggesting that MySpace and Facebook users are dividing along race and class lines.

That’s one of the reasons why I tend to think that social media (by which I mean actual conversations and relationship building exercises, not widgets and Facebook fliers) is more aligned with the goals of a PR program than it is with marketing.

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Here’s my response: 1. I have no idea if the Facebook platform is alive or dead. I’ve got left-over MREs from Y2K, however, so I think I can survive its demise, if it should occur. 2. Asking people if they use RSS is like asking people what size air filter goes in their car. RSS is now entrenched in the infrastructure of the sharing web. It fuels widgets, it automates blog posts, it enables all sorts of gizmos and thingees that the average web user would never recognize as RSS. Nor should they. Web users should click on a button that says, “bring me information about this topic or from this source.” How it gets delivered will probably involve RSS, but who the heck cares.

Social networking, popularized by teens sharing information with their friends online on Web sites such as Facebook Inc., is now blooming in the business world, thanks to new social networks that enable professionals and executives in industries such as advertising and finance to rub virtual elbows with colleagues.