Should Facebook and MySpace Follow Suit?

Social network Bebo which has seen a rapid decline in popularity but is still one of the biggest such services around, has added a tiny but important new feature: a button that helps children report abuse or bullying.

The button is called the CEOP Report button, (CEOP stands for UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre), if you click on it, you’ll get advice and help about issues such as child abuse (but also viruses and hacking), as well as details on how to inform the police and CEOP.

While all that sounds nice and dandy, there’s always the problem of abusing the abuse button. If you make it easy for people to report a site or an individual as a child abuser, simply by clicking a button, some users could become trigger happy and do it even when it’s unwarranted.

In any case, Bebo () isn’t the only social network where child abuse and bullying are common occurences; we can remember several examples on other major social networks such as MySpace () and Facebook ().

We’d like to hear your opinion: do you think that Bebo’s “panic button” can really be helpful? And if so, do you think that Facebook and MySpace should take similar action? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Facebook Implements New Privacy Policy

At the end of Octoboer, Facebook announced that it was revamping its privacy policy. The change, sparked by the intervention of the Canadian government, simplified the new policy, stripped the legal jargon, and put the document up for a comment period by the Facebook community.

That period ended two weeks ago. And because of the positive response (and the fact that there were less than 7000 comments), the new privacy policy is officially in effect. If there had been over 7000 comments, the company would have put the policy up to a vote by the entire Facebook () user base.

The new policy is the same as the one proposed in late October. It discusses third party advertising, the right of users to delete profile information, the information it collects, and the rules on sharing information with third parties. Overall, it addresses the Canadian government’s concerns while making the policy easier to understand.

If you want to read the new document, you can find it here. If you take the time to read it, let us know what you think about the simplified document in the comments.

Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links

UPDATE (noon PT): Facebook has now rectified this issue.

-
Mashable () reader Ben Kerin has noticed an odd change on Facebook () that began last night: those importing their Twitter () feeds into the service no longer see their links as clickable.

In short: if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

Are you having issues with links in Facebook status updates? Let us know in the comments.

---

Disney Posts Alice in Wonderland Posters on Facebook

As social media becomes more pervasive, it’s becoming a frequently common practice for movie studios to use sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect with plans.

Tim Burton’s 3D epic “Alice in Wonderland” doesn’t hit theaters until March 2010, but Walt Disney Pictures is already utilizing social media to spread the word about it. Disney started a Facebook () campaign for the film in July and this week has used the service to show off two new posters from the film (a third is on the way).

In July, Disney created fan pages for three of the characters in the film and offered fans of the most popular character early access to the film’s first teaser. If you’ll recall, that plan was somewhat thwarted when early copies made their way onto the web a day in advance.

The Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp in the film) was the most popular fan page, so it’s no surprise that his page has received the most updates. On Monday and Wednesday, Disney posted updates to the Mad Hatter’s page, showing off new poster designs and linking users to even higher quality images on Flickr (). You can see both posters here and here.

Studios usually offer up press materials to media publications and movie blogs, who then disseminate that information to the fans. Offering this sort of publicity info directly to the interested public — using social media channels — is a pretty new concept.

For Disney, it might be all about recognizing that the target audience for “Alice in Wonderland” is Internet savvy and connected with social media. Thus, it makes sense to make a direct connection for some of this material and in effect, brand more of the buzz.

What do you think about how movie studios use social media with publicity campaigns?

Disney Posts Alice in Wonderland Posters on Facebook

As social media becomes more pervasive, it’s becoming a frequently common practice for movie studios to use sites like Facebook and Twitter to connect with plans.

Tim Burton’s 3D epic “Alice in Wonderland” doesn’t hit theaters until March 2010, but Walt Disney Pictures is already utilizing social media to spread the word about it. Disney started a Facebook () campaign for the film in July and this week has used the service to show off two new posters from the film (a third is on the way).

In July, Disney created fan pages for three of the characters in the film and offered fans of the most popular character early access to the film’s first teaser. If you’ll recall, that plan was somewhat thwarted when early copies made their way onto the web a day in advance.

The Mad Hatter (played by Johnny Depp in the film) was the most popular fan page, so it’s no surprise that his page has received the most updates. On Monday and Wednesday, Disney posted updates to the Mad Hatter’s page, showing off new poster designs and linking users to even higher quality images on Flickr (). You can see both posters here and here.

Studios usually offer up press materials to media publications and movie blogs, who then disseminate that information to the fans. Offering this sort of publicity info directly to the interested public — using social media channels — is a pretty new concept.

For Disney, it might be all about recognizing that the target audience for “Alice in Wonderland” is Internet savvy and connected with social media. Thus, it makes sense to make a direct connection for some of this material and in effect, brand more of the buzz.

What do you think about how movie studios use social media with publicity campaigns?

Facebook is Coming to the PlayStation 3

Although it’s not yet live to everyone, a new Xbox LIVE Dashboard Update that adds social networking integrations with Facebook, Twitter and last.fm is currently in preview mode to beta testers and will go live to the public in short order. Perhaps trying to play catchup with Microsoft, Sony apparently has plans to add its own Facebook integration to the company’s flagship PlayStation 3 console in a coming firmware update.

Website Scrawl apparently found screenshots buried deep within a publicly available section of Sony’s European website showing off some sort of native Facebook () integration, as evidenced by a Facebook settings subsection located in the User Accounts section of the PS3’s cross-media bar (XMB) main navigation interface.

Unfortunately it’s not terribly much to go on, and when pressed, Sony refused to comment on the leaked shots and Facebook integration rumour. However the screens do come from a legitimate Sony source, and it seems highly likely that they’d want to get in on some of the social media action considering they’re working diligently to portray the PlayStation 3 console as an all-in-one entertainment hub for the home.

Are you a PS3 owner eager for more social media integration in your console?

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans

Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

According to a note posted to the Facebook Ads Page, the functionality allows you to “expand your audience reach by delivering your ads to the friends of people already connected with your Page, Application, Group or Event.” When those people see the ad, they’ll see that their friends are fans.

It’s not hard to see why this has potential to expand your audience. Although Facebook Page ads already note when your friends are fans, by being able to target these users, you’re talking about instantly being able to reach hundreds if not thousands or millions (depending on the size of your fan base and budget) of new people who will then be exposed to your brand by way of the powerful endorsement of a friend.

Currently, you can only target fans of Pages (or Groups, Apps, or Events) where you’re an admin. It would be interesting for that to be expanded to target fans of any Page (like Mashable () for instance), though it’s also easy to see how that could be abused in competitive areas. Nonetheless, if you have money to invest in growing your Facebook () audience, this could be an option worth considering.

What do you think about this type of targeting? Let us know in the comments.

The Top 10 Facebook Apps

Each week we do a Lunchtime Poll to get a sense of what tools Mashable readers use and which of today’s services and apps are your favorites. Last week we asked you about your favorite Facebook apps, and we have the results below.

As it turns out, like much of Team Mashable, many of you aren’t actually using too many Facebook () applications these days. That’s probably what Facebook is hoping to turn around with some upcoming changes to Applications.

Still, from those of you who responded both here and on Facebook, there were some clear winners in the Facebook Apps department. Perhaps expectedly, social games figured prominently on the list. Take a look below to see the Top 10 as voted by you. Is your favorite Facebook App not represented here? Let us know in the comments.

---

Top 10 Reader Facebook Apps

---

10. Pet Society ()

9. Status Shuffle

8. Desktop Notifications

7. Restaurant City

6. Scrabble

5. Bejeweled Blitz

4. Twitter ()

3. Static FBML

2. Mafia Wars

1. FarmVille

See also: Top 10 Mashable Reader iPhone Apps

New Facebook Cracks Down on Deceptive Ads

Scammy, deceptive ads have been in the hotseat this week, as earlier MySpace and now Facebook have made commitments to track down and eradicate misleading offers and survey-related ad scams.

Social gaming applications in particular are being targeted for permitting certain types of scammy ads, that typically persuade users into contracting for services without disclosing costs up front.

In a social game like virtual farming sim Farmville, for example, users can either spend real money to buy virtual goods, or complete offers and surveys from partner companies in exchange for virtual credits. The trouble is, some of those offers include “opt-out” riders that enroll the user in some sort of paid service or subscription, and require action on the user’s part to avoid misleading charges.

MySpace CEO Own Van Natta earlier characterized these “opt-out” type of offers as misleading, and announced a change to the Terms of Use to clarify what’s acceptable to both developers and users. Popular social gaming company Zynga also posted a statement stating a commitment to weed out bad and deceptive ads, while stressing that the offers industry is still nascent along with a belief that non-scammy offer ads still hold the promise of value to both user and advertiser.

Today Facebook’s announcement represents the elephant in the room addressing the problem of deceptive offer ads, and affirms that the major players are now at the table working on solutions to eradicating this type of scam ad. Their blog post indicates they’ve already disabled two complete ad networks and addressed ad-related violations in over 100 applications, and plan to take further action to police bad ads in third-party networks and apps.

Have you seen or interacted with any of these type of offer ads inside social games or elsewhere on Facebook () or MySpace ()? Do you find the whole concept misleading or do you think there might be a middle ground where such ads might be acceptable?

What’s Your Favorite Facebook Application?

Yes, it’s that time once again, folks — time for the weekly Lunchtime Poll!

Since we already know what your favorite iPhone apps are, we thought we’d turn our attention to another application platform: Facebook (). And in light of the upcoming changes that could breathe new life into Facebook apps, it seems like a good time to talk about our favorites.

Are you in? Let’s roll the question:

What’s your favorite Facebook app?

---

Sharon Feder: I don’t use Facebook apps that often, but I do enjoy a good game of Scramble every once in a while.

Josh Catone: I actually don’t use too many Facebook applications anymore, not since Scrabulous went bye bye (Wordscraper just isn’t as good). But when I do, it’s usually for a game of Prolific. I also play Scramble on my iPhone, and it connects to Facebook … though that doesn’t really count, I guess. Clearly, I like word games.

Ben Parr: There just isn’t a Facebook App I use regularly anymore.

Jennifer Van Grove: Yeah, me neither.

Adam Ostrow: Me 3. Unless my Twitter Box counts.

Barb Dybwad: I’m a fan of Grooveshark’s () Share a Song app. Super simple: search for a track and post it to your Wall or send it out to friends. I also use the Twitter () app and the My Flickr app to automagically bring in tweets and pics, respectively.

Stan Schroeder: I’d be lying if I said I ever used any of them for more than a couple of days. Zynga Poker ()?