WebProNews

"Featured" App Status Not Free At MySpace

Here's a funny thing: if you visit the MySpace Apps page with AdBlock Plus enabled, the "Featured Applications" section appears entirely blank.  And as it turns out, developers are indeed paying to show up in those spots.

Facebook Tsks-Tsks Over Unfair Reviews, Fake Accounts

Given the number of Facebook apps in existence, allowing for reviews of them seemed like a good way of tracking which ones worked.  Fake reviews have become an issue, though, and Facebook's attempts to address the problem haven't been too effective.

Gates Zings Google On Applications

Eric Schmidt and his fellow Googlers probably can't wait for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to get the heck out of the business world and go on with his philanthropic works.

Google Preparing To Put Applications On Orkut

As with pretty much every tweak made to the social network, we're not sure this will get much attention in the U.S.  People in other countries may be interested, however, as starting this month, social applications will become available to Orkut users.

MySpace Developer Platform Opens Doors

MySpace isn't yet letting developers loose on its huge user base.  The social network is quite close, though, and has launched the MySpace Developer Platform as a way of allowing developers to get in some practice.

Slide Receives $50 Million In Funding

Last week, three German entrepreneurs invested in Facebook, and they presumably supported the company's $15 billion valuation by doing so.  Now there's word that Slide has received $50 million in funding, and its worth is estimated to be around $550 million.

Facebook News Feed To Treat Apps Differently

To be honest, I'm not all that interested in how well my friends scored on some sort of Disney princess quiz.  Yet Facebook still seems as likely to show me this as any other piece of news.  Until now, anyway - the social networking site is altering its News Feed evaluation process.

Facebook To Create Profile Cleanup Tool

The economy's plunge, famine, war - they've all got to stop.  Facebook's more immediate concern is its ongoing MySpace-ification, though, and so the company plans to introduce a tool that will help users clean up their profiles.

New Version of Yahoo Browser-Based Music Player

In keeping with the “open media” vision described by Yahoo Music exec Ian Rogers in his latest call to arms (which I wrote about yesterday), Yahoo launched a second iteration of its browser-based music player — this one allowing anyone to add a line of Javascript and have a Yahoo-branded player pop up wherever there’s an mp3 link.

Facebook Limits Applications' Sneakiness

Facebook applications can be bad enough when they're upfront about their identities; getting tricked into installing them is the last thing (aside from various privacy violations) that any user needs.  So Facebook is addressing this problem with some new restrictions on developers.