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Google shows no signs of stopping its social networking start-up shopping spree–it acquired social gaming service SocialDeck on Monday.

The acquisition was announced Monday via the SocialDeck blog.

SocialDeck is a social gaming company that makes games for various mobile platforms (including Blackberry and iPhone) that are playable across multiple devices and social networks. For example, you can play a game on your iPhone and then switch over to Facebook on your computer and play with the same profile.

Some of SocialDeck’s games include “Shake & Spell,” “Pet Hero MD,” and “Color Connect.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google has been in talks with popular game developers to offer their products on “a new service it is building” (courtesy of WSJ’s “people familiar with the matter”). Perhaps the acquisition of SocialDeck shows the direction in which Google wants to go with its rumored new gaming service–games that work seamlessly across multiple platforms and devices, that is. The WSJ reports that the companies in talks include Playdom Inc., EA’s Playfish, and Zynga.

Google acquired Angstro, a company known for its Knx.to product (a centralized address book that combines a user’s connections from social networks), just a few days prior to this latest acquisition. Angstro was the fourth company acquired by Google in August (SocialDeck was the fifth)–it previously acquired social games developer Slide, virtual currency maker Jambool, and visual shopping engine Like.com.

The real question is this: is Google about to roll out some funky new life-changing social network, or does it just want to own everything that’s tangentially related to social networks?

In the past weeks, when rumours of Google launching a new social-networking site swirled the internet and discussion forums, it came as a little surprise to most people, given its earlier tryst with the concept although with a limited success.

 The first attempt of Google to corner the market started with facilitation the development of Orkut Büyükkökten’s eponymous social networking site, Orkut in 2004. 

 Orkut went on to become a hit in Brazil and India, with those two countries making up the vast majority of traffic to the site.

 In other countries, the U.S. included, Orkut hardly carries the same caché of other Google properties.  Hence in 2007, the company once again tried to acquire small stake in Facebook for millions of dollars but its effort again went to vain.

 And, when their new products failed to create a new ‘wave’ or a ‘buzz’ for them, the guys at google realised that it is time for them to go back to drawing board to design a new product to lure users back into its den.

 There is a reason why Google is so keen to make a statement in the social networking market and why Facebook is posing a serious threat to Google. Facebook is turning out be more than just a fast-growing social network.

 It is, potentially, an enormous source of personal data. Internet users behave differently on Facebook than anywhere else online: They use their real names, connect with their real friends, link to their real email addresses, and share their real thoughts, tastes, and news.

 Google, on the other hand, knows relatively little about most of its users other than their search histories and some browsing activity. And customized advertising is the next big thing in the online marketing. That is why Google is so keen to break into it.

 Another reason, experts argue is the rise of, what can be called as a ‘personalized, humanized Web’, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline.

 In near future, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the centre. In other words, right where Google is now.

In the coming months, the fight between these two Internet Giants is likely to intense as we are going to witness new and new products and services being launched by them to tap this social networking bandwagon. We will keep you posted about the latest updates.

Leicester players have been banned from using Twitter after Jordan Crane revealed he could be out for three months via the social networking site.

Crane, 24, injured his left ankle in Leicester’s 17-13 pre-season win at Munster last Friday night and then shared his disappointment on Twitter.

The Leicester No8, who suffered ankle ligament damage last season, initially wrote: “Ankle again bad times”.

Crane then followed it up on Monday with the message: “It’s a dark day and it will be three long months.”

The Leicester director of rugby, Richard Cockerill, said Crane has “a bit of damage” in his ankle but insisted they are still waiting on the results of yesterday’s appointment with a specialist.

Cockerill said: “He is banned from tweeting. The next time he does that I will break both his ankles. None of our players will be tweeting or Facebooking anything about Leicester Rugby Club ever again.”

Asked whether Cockerill was angry because Crane’s message was wrong or just because he did not like reading it, the Leicester captain Geordan Murphy stepped in.

“When you get an injury as a player you are always a hypochondriac. You always think the season is gone,” said the Ireland full-back. “Until you have had three or four scans and spoken to a specialist it is not fair to comment on anything. Potentially it could be two weeks, potentially you could be finished. Who knows? It is probably not worth him speculating.”

If Crane is ruled out for three months, he would join Leicester’s list of long-term injured forwards with the locks Richard Blaze and Geoff Parling not expected to see any action before November while Louis Deacon is struggling with a back problem.

The Tigers kick off their Premiership title defence against Northampton on 5 September and Cockerill insisted their position as reigning champions changes nothing.

“The Leicester board expects us to win the Premiership and do well in Europe. That is the same every year,” said Cockerill.

Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc., with more than 500 million active users in July 2010. Users can add people as friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by workplace, school, or college. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be aged 13 or older to become a member of the website.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The original concept for Facebook was borrowed from a product produced by Zuckerberg’s prep school Phillips Exeter Academy, which for decades published and distributed a printed manual of all students and faculty, unofficially called the “face book”.

Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Pakistan, Syria, People’s Republic of China, Vietnam, and Iran. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook settled a lawsuit regarding claims over source code and intellectual property. The site has also been involved in controversy over the sale of fans and friends.

A January 2009 Compete study ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace. Entertainment Weekly put it on its end-of-the-decade ‘best-of’ list, saying, “How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers’ birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?”

Mark Zuckerberg wrote Facemash, the predecessor to Facebook, on October 28, 2003, while attending Harvard as a sophomore. The site represented a Harvard University version of Hot or Not, according to the Harvard Crimson. According to The Harvard Crimson, Facemash “used photos compiled from the online facebooks of nine Houses, placing two next to each other at a time and asking users to choose the ‘hotter’ person”. To accomplish this, Zuckerberg hacked into the protected areas of Harvard’s computer network and copied the houses’ private dormitory ID images. Harvard at that time did not have a student directory with photos, and basic information and the initial site generated 450 visitors and 22,000 photo-views in its first four hours online. That the initial site mirrored people’s physical community—with their real identities—represented the key aspects of what later became Facebook.

The site was quickly forwarded to several campus group list-servers but was shut down a few days later by the Harvard administration. Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights, and violating individual privacy, and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped. Zuckerberg expanded on this initial project that semester by creating a social study tool ahead of an art history final by uploading 500 Augustan images to a website, with one image per page along with a comment section. He opened the site up to his classmates and people started sharing their notes. The following semester, Zuckerberg began writing code for a new website in January 2004. He was inspired, he said, by an editorial in The Harvard Crimson about the Facemash incident. On February 4, 2004, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com.

Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard was registered on the service. Eduardo Saverin (business aspects), Dustin Moskovitz (programmer), Andrew McCollum (graphic artist), and Chris Hughes soon joined Zuckerberg to help promote the website. In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale. This expansion continued when it opened to all Ivy League schools, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States. Facebook incorporated in the summer of 2004 and the entrepreneur Sean Parker, who had been informally advising Zuckerberg, became the company’s president. In June 2004, Facebook moved its base of operations to Palo Alto, California. Facebook received its first investment later that month from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005 for $200,000.

Facebook launched a high school version in September 2005, which Zuckerberg called the next logical step. At that time, high school networks required an invitation to join. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies, including Apple Inc. and Microsoft. Facebook was then opened on September 26, 2006, to everyone of ages 13 and older with a valid e-mail address. On October 24, 2007, Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion. Microsoft’s purchase included rights to place international ads on Facebook. In October 2008, Facebook announced that it was to set up its international headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. In September 2009, Facebook claimed that it had turned cash flow positive for the first time. In June 2010, an online marketplace for trading private company stock reflected a valuation of $11.5 billion.

Traffic to Facebook has increased exponentially since 2009. More people visited Facebook than Google for the week ending March 13, 2010. Facebook has also become the top social network across eight of individual markets in the region, Philippines, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Vietnam, while other brands commanded the top positions in certain markets, including Google-owned Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea and Yahoo!’s Wretch.cc in Taiwan.

This week, Facebook added what we believe is a new feature to the application settings dashboard that lets developers add “Advertising Accounts” to their applications. What is an Advertising account, compared to a normal Admin account for an application? Essentially, those users granted Advertising Accounts for an application are considered authorized to use the “connection targeting” feature to place Facebook Ads targeted to users of that app.

The “Advertising Accounts” field is on the “Advanced” tab of the application settings dashboard

While developers could have always theoretically allowed any advertiser to use a developer account to place connection-targeted Facebook Ads, now it’s easier to manage. As a result, developers may be more encouraged to think about ways of generating value from Facebook Ads shown to users of their apps, like partnering with other agencies that are helping advertisers bid on Facebook Ads inventory.

Of course, Facebook wants to find ways to increase the number of bidders for as much of its inventory as it can. This update is one way it can do so that is aligned with the interests of developers. One thing Facebook doesn’t allow is connection targeting against applications (or pages, groups, or events) that an advertiser is not authorized for – that would lead to a lot of nasty ads.

We have asked Facebook to comment on what we assume are their intentions for this new feature, and will update when we get an official response. We’re still seeing some bugs in it as well.

Over the past couple of months, Google’s Android mobile operating system has made significant headway, both in the public and in the tech world, with reports showing Android sales catching up to the iPhone. Yet we’ve also seen multiple sources note that Android has not succeeded on Facebook.

That judgment has been based on the stats for Facebook’s Android smartphone app. At right, you can see Facebook’s own monthly active user measurement for Android, which led to the confusion. By appearances, the Facebook for Android

app has only 68 monthly active users.

We’ve checked in with Facebook about the Android app, and gotten the real story: the mobile app has over six million MAU. In combination with theHTC Sense app, which is mostly used on phones with Android as an underlying platform, Android has well over seven million MAU on the social network.

This is significant not only for Facebook, which wants to encourage smartphone use, but as a measure for the overall smartphone market, in which sales numbers often must be estimated.

There’s actually a distinct possibility that Android has even more users on Facebook than we’re estimating, because Mobile, which you see above with almost 20 million users, is a catch-all app for feature phones. Any number of Android users could have set up to use this app instead.

So, going strictly be the numbers above, Android appears to be at least a fifth the size of the iPhone.

Seeing the true user numbers for Android gives new perspective to Facebook’s recent decision to release an Android software development kit. When Android was initially released, Facebook didn’t do anything with the fledgling operating system, and an executive even reportedly insulted Android. But for several months, Facebook has had an inside view onto the platform’s growing significance.

One more interesting data point to note: judging by the HTC Sense app, Android users tend to spend more time than any other smartphone group on Facebook.

That 70 percent DAU / MAU beats the iPhone’s 52 percent or the BlackBerry’s 59 percent by a significant stretch. It could be that Android users tend to be average consumers who use Facebook often, while the BlackBerry is used by the business crowd and iPhone users have a broader sampling of other apps to use, like Foursquare.

Unfortunately, the Android app appears to be buggy in more than just its stats; users have been complaining about connection problems for several weeks. But with such strong user numbers, we wouldn’t be surprised to see both Facebook and Google put more emphasis on working together in the future — at least in this limited context.

Until a month ago, developers on Facebook’s platform were not allowed to retain user data for more than 24 hours (even though many did, anyway). Then Facebook said at its f8 developer conference in late April that it would let them store user data indefinitely — provided they continued to follow its policies around data retention.

Yesterday, along with a wider range of privacy changes, like the ability for users to block Platform completely, Facebook updated its developer data policies. From a brief mention in a blog post yesterday:

We added a few clarifications in our simplified data policies to help address some confusion around your rights and responsibilities with respect to user data. For example, our removal of the 24-hour caching policy eliminated a technical burden but does not change the rights you have to data, which continue to be subject to explicit user consent.

We’ve confirmed the specific new wording with Facebook — see below. The gist is that Facebook is concerned that developers are abusing user data; indeed, we have heard reports that some developers and advertisers have been scraping user data via applications and ads, breaking Facebook’s policies to create their own databases of users.

It’s not clear how big of a security issue this is; we think it could be abigger problem than many other security issues that critics have cited. But the changes to the policies are indicative of the abuse.

III. Storing and Using Data You Receive From Us

1. You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data.

2. You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date. This permission does not give you any rights to such data (including the right to transfer) absent explicit consent from the users who own the data.

3. Users give you their basic account information when they connect with your application. For all other data, you must obtain explicit consent from the user who provided the data to us before using it for any purpose other than displaying it back to the user on your application. A user’s friends’ data can only be used in the context of the user’s experience on your application.

4. If you stop using Platform or we disable your application, you must delete all data you have received from the Facebook API unless: (a) it is basic account information; or (b) you have received explicit consent from the user to retain their data.

5. You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use. You can use connections between users who have both connected to your application, subject to your privacy policy.

6. You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide an easily accessible mechanism for users to make such a request. We may require you to delete data you receive from the Facebook API if you violate our terms.

Going by the highlights, you can guess what the different methods of potential abuse have been. Per 2, some developers have apparently been using and transferring user data without gaining consent; per 3, they have been re-appropriating user data to use in ways that they lack user permission to do; per 4, they have not been deleting all the data they should have (though with Facebook launching the bulk app deleteryesterday, this clause may have been added commensurate with the launch of this feature).

[Update: Facebook product director Bret Taylor tells us in the comments that the policy changes were not in response to specific abuses. Rather, they were intended to generally clarify how data can be used, following the announcement at f8. Whatever rationale Facebook has for the changes, however, our understanding is that 1) there has been abuse involving developers improperly using and transferring Facebook user data, and 2) Facebook has been taking measures to stop the abuse.]

The problem, for Facebook, is the terms only really matter to the more legitimate developers on the platform. If someone is willing to accept the risk of being taken to court by Facebook, there’s no other mechanism stopping them from abuse. Some countries do not effectively enforce laws against data theft and other security crimes, so it’s possible that the worst abusers are running free, with chunks of Facebook’s social graph at their disposal. We’ll be covering this issue as more evidence emerges about what’s really happening.

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been speaking about the latest privacy changes, not because he’s trying to avoid the issue, but because they are working on rolling out major changes on the privacy front. In an email to Robert Scoble he stated that the company will “start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week.” From the sounds of things, it’s going to be a relatively major overhaul.

The full text of the email is below:

Hey,

We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.

I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.

Mark

While Tim Sparapani, Facebook’s Public Policy Director, told Kojo Nnamdi last week that new privacy settingswere in the works. Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that new privacy setting are in the works and hopefully that the company will rebuild the trust of the users once the latest privacy debacle is handled.

While there is clearly an argument to support Facebook’s position up until now, we’re hoping to see changes that give users much greater control, and also avoid duping users into sharing more information, as the last privacy redesign did in December. We’ve preached the concept of giving users control on multiple occasionsand continue to believe that users should have control despite the debatable issue of how important the information being exposed really is.

Facebook is under immense pressure to bring forth new changes, not only backing down on some of their aggressive new programs announced at f8. We expect Facebook to release new features which both give users greater control and making privacy control much easier. We’ll be following the topic closely as Facebook prepares to roll out their privacy upgrades this week.

Erick Tseng, a senior product manager on Google’s mobile operating system, Android, has left for Facebook. He’ll be its new head of mobile products.
Android is managing to gain significant market traction on its own. It’s an alternative OS to the iPhone and other smartphone rivals that any manufacturer or carrier can use for free, and modify as they want. But Facebook’s mobile products are also booming. More than 100 million of the company’s 400 million officially-announced monthly active users (the actual number is likely more like 500 million) are using at least one of its mobile products.

Facebook mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, and other devices are widely popular, and many carriers and manufacturers around the world have been integrating Facebook components (like SMS status updates) into their own systems; Apple itself looks to join its many rivals on this front with the launch of the iPhone OS 4.0. See our analysis of Facebook’s mobile efforts in our Inside Facebook Gold report for more.
Tseng has, among other jobs, held product management roles at Microsoft and Yahoo. He’s been at Google nearly four years. He most recently has focused on Google’s self-branded Android phone, the Nexus One.

His tweeted announcement about the new job, from yesterday:

About to begin a new, exciting chapter in my life. Heading to #Facebook on Monday to help innovate at the intersect of mobile and social.

The official statement from Facebook:

We can confirm that Erick Tseng is joining Facebook as the head of mobile products. Erick has a long track record of building engaging experiences for people on mobile devices. We are thrilled to have Erick join us as Facebook continues to help build products and features that enable people to share and connect at anytime, from anywhere.

It’s official. Facebook has become a worldwide phenomena.

Almost every company nowadays has a Facebook page in an attempt to reach more people and better inform their current customers. ESPN’s Gameday has one, and there are multiple NCAA Football pages, none of which have been confirmed by the NCAA.

The popularity is unrivaled at the time for social networking, but is it really a good thing for college football? Players can voice their opinion to the world without being in a press conference now, all while using their smart phones and sitting in class.

Some coaches have tried to restrict access to Facebook by mandating it as part of the generic “team rules” policy. Many players fought this ruling, saying it was a violation of Free Speech. Since then, many coaches have avoided the topic all together publicly.

Almost every college program has a policy pertaining to Facebook. Although those policies usually are not made available to the public, they basically boil down to not embarrassing the university, coaches, other players, or talking about opponents period.

Those seem like very reasonable guidelines to follow when getting a free education; unfortunately some players do not realize the great situation they are in. Jamere Holland and Buck Burnette are perfect examples of how free reign on Facebook can spell trouble for college football players and the programs they play for.

Both Holland and Burnette have been kick off their respective teams for comments made on Facebook. Jamere Holland was a former receiver for Oregon and Buck Burnett was a center for the Texas Longhorns.

“Chilln thinking of another status to %$@! with the readers heads, I wish I could block whites as friends and only have blacks LOL, cause apparently I’m misunderstood” quoted Holland on his Facebook this spring. This was just one event in a long chain of disruptions the Oregon receiver had caused for his team, but this time it was his last. He was kicked off the team shortly after he posted this.

Buck Burnette also chose the racial route on his Facebook page shortly after the Obama election. “”All the hunters gather up, we have a #$%&er in the whitehouse”, Burnette posted after the results came in. Mack Brown was quickly notified of this post and he removed Burnette from the team.

The players fail to realize or care that the assistant coaches frequently check in on the players Facebook pages to ensure no infractions have been made. In both cases, the players were removed from the team within hours of these posts.

It is not only the players and coaches that have to worry about comments posted on Facebook. The NCAA has become very interested in Facebook when recruits are mentioned before they have committed to a certain team.

The NCAA informed NC State that they needed to take action against a student who had created a Facebook page encouraging top basketball prospect, John Wall, to commit to the Wolfpack. The NCAA says that creating Facebook pages and groups during recruiting season is out of bounds and a violation of recruiting rules. The NCAA believes that when fans create and post pages, they are acting as boosters in an attempt to influence the choice of a recruit.

NC State had the student change the name of the page so that it fell into line with NCAA guidelines. “We don’t see it as a free-speech issue. What we do see it as is a recruiting issue, we want to be sure that we limit that level of intrusion that comes into their lives,” quoted NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson.

A quick search on Facebook will yield many of the same types of pages directed at encouraging a top recruit to go to one school or another.  I found a page on similar guidelines called “Bring Terrelle Pryor, The #1 QB in the Country to The Ohio State University”. To date Ohio State has not had any dealing with the NCAA on the issue.

The question quickly arises as to how the NCAA, colleges, and coaches enforce student or fan interaction like this on the Internet. Did any of those three entities encourage fans to create such a page? Doubtful, but they are getting punished for it either way.

The issues with Facebook and college football are not easily solved. The social networking site can be a great forum to advertise pep rallies, fan appreciation days, and game times, but it can also have a darker side.

As Facebook becomes more popular these incidents will continue to come up, but how they will be handled still has no uniform direction from the NCAA. This is something the NCAA needs to address sooner rather than later.