The Social

(Credit: Ricky Van Veen, editor in chief, CollegeHumor)

With a $15 billion valuation, big-name investors, and high-profile Google employees jumping onto its payroll, Facebook can't play with the kids anymore.

That's probably why its New York branch's hyped-up beer pong tournament against dude entertainment site CollegeHumor was cancelled.

The match, scheduled for Thursday evening at CollegeHumor parent company Connected Ventures' offices near Manhattan's Union Square, was abruptly called off, according to a blog post from Josh Mohrer, director of retail at Connected Ventures brand BustedTees. "Facebook has backed out of the CH vs. Facebook beer pong tournament for 'legal and PR' reasons," Mohrer wrote. "Lame!"

For those who stepped in late, beer pong, known as "beirut" in some circles, is a popular slacker sport that involves throwing ping-pong balls at a triangle of cups half-full of beer. If you land the ball in a cup, your opponent must drink the beer in that cup. That's the basic rundown; rules and regulations differ wildly across the fabric of American college campuses.

A tipster told gossip blog Valleywag that Facebook's legal and public-relations team, which just hired former Googler Elliot Schrage as its director, took issue with the tournament.

A CollegeHumor representative told CNET News.com that the company was not familiar with Facebook's "internal stuff" and that an impending match between CollegeHumor and local blog powerhouse Gawker Media was still on the books.

Facebook declined to comment on the matter.

To be fair, Connected ... Read more

This post was updated at 3:17 PM with comment from Google's David Glazer.

A post Thursday on Facebook's developer blog explains that the social network has suspended participation in Google's "Friend Connect" project, citing a violation of its internal terms of service.

"Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we've had a chance to evaluate the technology," the post by Facebook employee Charlie Cheever read. "We've found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service."

In other words, while Facebook users would manually opt in to Friend Connect, they would not have control over the third-party sites that would then use Friend Connect through Google's API. "Our terms of service, for privacy reasons, have always forbidden redistribution of other Facebook information that an application takes," Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said in an interview with CNET News.com Thursday. For example, "where applications have tried to use Facebook data and pass it to third-party ad targeting networks to target their ads, we've shut down those applications."

According to Kelly, the social network never actually had a formal partnership with Google in Friend Connect, which allows owners of Web sites to add social features using the existing APIs from sites like Hi5, Plaxo, and Facebook. "There wasn't participation to start with. That was sort ... Read more

Brijit.com, an aggregation site that summed online news stories and other content up in 100 words or fewer for quick consumption, has shut its doors.

The shutdown is ideally temporary, the site's management said Thursday, but a placeholder on the front page admitted that Brijit "is out of money and can no longer afford to bring you the world in 100 words."

A post on Brijit's blog by CEO and Editor In Chief Jeremy Brosowsky explained further. "As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don't."

Brijit, founded less than a year ago, had been funded solely by angel investments.

Currently, the site has kept its archive of about 16,000 abstracts live but is not accepting new ones. Brijit also compensated its abstract writers with a cut of ad revenue, and said payments for abstracts written up until the site's shutdown would be sent to writers next week.

Google has released a Google Maps application program interface that enables developers to use the mapping software in applications that use Adobe Systems' Flash technology.

"We've designed it so that Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker, and info window," a n announcement by Google Maps engineer Mike Jones read, "opening up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video."

Earlier this week, Google Maps added a feature to let users see what photos, videos, and user-created maps have been associated with various places around the world.

Plenty of would-be buyers have been named for social news site Digg, but one we haven't heard much about: Current Media, the cable and Web news channel that was launched by former vice president Al Gore.

It's one of the juicy tidbits detailed in BusinessWeek columnist Sarah Lacy's book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, which hits bookstores on Thursday. In an excerpt posted to TechCrunch, Lacy writes about how executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose turned down a $100 million offer from Current in 2006 because they had, as TechCrunch paraphrased, "issues with control going forward."

The thinking is consistent with what founder Rose told CNET News.com in February when asked about selling his company. "I've had several friends that have been acquired by the Yahoos and Googles of the world, and while there is some upside in certain things, for the most part, it slows things down," Rose said at the time. "You can't get a product out the door fast enough."

Current, which filed for an initial public offering in January, now operates Current News, where users can vote on the news Digg-style and then see the top stories incorporated into an hourly news show on the cable network. Digg, meanwhile, remains the subject of acquisition rumors on the part of just about every major tech and media company around.

Online-productivity suite Zoho announced on Wednesday that it now accepts Google and Yahoo logins. An executive from Zoho parent company AdventNet announced last month that Google login compatibility was on the way.

"For Google and Yahoo users who are curious about Zoho but don't want to set up another account, we've removed that hurdle," Zoho 'evangelist' Raju Vegsna said in a release Wednesday. "Users don't have to create a Zoho account to use Zoho applications. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to try our online apps."

In addition to accepting Google and Yahoo logins for new Zoho accounts, the site also allows existing members to synchronize with their Google or Yahoo accounts.

This required collaboration with both Google and Yahoo--interesting, because Google operates Google Docs, a bigger rival to Zoho. But it's just the latest data portability announcement to emerge in the past few months, what with Yahoo supporting the OpenID standard and teaming up with MySpace.com on its Data Availability project, as well as Google launching its Friend Connect initiative.

Just a few months after it enjoyed a high-profile launch at the TED Conference, Kluster--a social site for project collaboration that allowed members to share in potential profits--has restructured.

On Wednesday, the company launched Knewsroom, a social-news site, as part of its new Kluster Labs strategy.

A look at a 'Knewsroom' submission

(Credit: Kluster)

"Seven weeks in and a million dollars down the drain, we know what works," founder Ben Kaufman said in a video he posted to YouTube late in April, when he first announced some changes.

Kluster had already "restructured" once: it got its start as iPod accessory company Mophie, and its community-focused product development strategy caught the eye of TED organizers at the Macworld conference.

Kluster's strategy had some big flaws, Kaufman admitted in an e-mail sent to members Wednesday. "It sucks when you go to Kluster, and there aren't any paid projects to jump in on," he said. "When everyone comes together to tackle a single project, the results are amazing."

That's why Kluster has decided to opt for company-created Kluster Labs projects, inviting the community to contribute. It has kept "Kluster Custom" product licensing for corporate clients.

Knewsroom, the inaugural Kluster Labs project, is sort of like what would happen if Digg users got paid when their stories hit the front page--and had a limited number of "diggs" available.

Users submit news topics and stories each day, and then they use part of a Kluster currency called "watts" to "invest" in ... Read more

Facebook Chat might've had a simple and quiet launch, but a month later, the social network is already announcing plans to upgrade.

Engineer David Reiss announced Tuesday evening on the Facebook Developer Blog that Facebook Chat will soon have an Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) interface--that's better known as Jabber. This will mean that external clients will be able to incorporate Facebook Chat, currently restricted in most cases to the browser.

Universal IM clients Digsby (which is PC-only) and Adium (which is Mac-only) have already worked in ways to support Facebook Chat.

Through Facebook's official Jabber support, which is coming "in the near future," Facebook members will be able to not only chat with their friends, but also see friends' profile pictures through the IM client and set their Facebook statuses.

When it comes to developer activity, Facebook is no longer the only gnome in the garden of social media.

Last week, a blog post by developer Jesse Farmer set the stage for some lively discussion about whether the Facebook Platform, revolutionary at its launch, is approaching an expiration date--and it only debuted a year ago. Activity in the site's official developer forum has declined sharply, he observed, new applications are less likely to become successful, and now that there are more destinations for social applications--from gaming sites to OpenSocial--developer activity no longer has a single hub.

Farmer crunched some numbers and found that they supported his hypothesis. The number of active users in the developer forum was down 27 percent since January, posts per day were down 51 percent, and he found that the average application launched in early January was 1.5 times more successful in terms of adoption rates than one launched in March.

The Facebook Platform, once a revolutionary free-for-all, has been "suburbanized." The roster of popular applications is dominated by corporations like Slide and RockYou with estimated valuations in the nine figures, and new rules and regulations have made it seem like less of an open playground where a kid with a cool idea and some spare time can start a new online fad or even make a few bucks. It's not a signal of doom for the social network, which has passed 70 million active users, according to company figures, and ... Read more

Online advertising is starting to feel the effects of a tepid economy, industry analysis firm PubMatic said in a release Tuesday.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Based on data from "billions of ad impressions" and several thousand online publishers in its AdPrice Index, PubMatic asserted that clicks per thousand monetization rates (CPMs) dropped between March and April, using it as an indicator that the economic slowdown has begun to hit the online ad industry. Large Web sites (over 100 million monthly page views) are feeling the pain, the firm said, with monetization dropping 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April. Medium-size Web sites didn't change much over the same time period. Smaller ones (fewer than 1 million monthly page views) actually showed an improvement in monetization, rising from $1.18 CPM in March to $1.29 in April.

But overall, PubMatic found, monetization has dropped 23 percent. The problem may be the rise of social-media advertising, which major figures in the tech industry have admitted yields weak click-through rates. PubMatic's results said that CPMs plunged 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April.

Here's another potential culprit: PubMatic has only been releasing monthly AdPrice Index reports for two months. Tuesday's results are consequently a comparison between months one and two. The firm's methods are still young enough so that error could be playing a role; we'll have to see if the numbers are showing the ... Read more