Caution is wise with Facebook games

[TallTechie]

Facebook games are great. Especially the flash ones. I admit to having passed far too much time tending to my virtual crops in Farmville. But a little while back I started wondering...how do these games make money? I haven't as of yet spent any real world coin to buy a bigger farm or the like. That's the most direct way of their making money, and as far as I'm concerned, quite reasonable. However, they also sometimes do some things that we all wish they wouldn't.

As you may know, when you want to use a new application on Facebook you have to click an acceptance button that gives the application access to your and your friends information "that it needs to make it work". There have been varying opinions on when they are actually supposed to give up that information if you remove the application, most likely they never do. Zynga, who makes Farmville, makes in the neighborhood of $30-$40 million in revenue per year. The second place social networking game maker, Playfish, was recently bought at $200-300 million (depending on performance) by long-time game company Electronic Arts (who at the same time, nice guys that they are, let go of 1500 of EA's own staff). Keep in mind that when Yahoo bought HotJobs.com it only paid $110 million. So what makes my virtual farm so valuable?

Unfortunately there is not much oversight over Facebook applications. They often put up ads and sometimes misuse personal information in such ways as selling it to advertisers or having you give up your friends to lead generation offers to make themselves money. They also often sell ad space to very questionable advertisers because scams make more money...and more money in their pocket. This unfortunately has also been done with the ads you see on the right side of your normal facebook page. The bad guys are able to direct bad ads to you and still show good ads to Facebook monitors by displaying different ads depending on where the visitor is coming from (which they can tell from your IP address - basically your "mailing address" on the Internet.

One of the worst of these that I've seen was a notification I recently got from an application called Friend FAQ. It told me one of my friends had answered some questions about me. So sure, I thought lets see what it has to say. I got into the program and it was asking me to send these notifications to some of _my_ friends before it would tell me a thing. I would have to "pay" by giving out my own information and my friends info before I can find out who said that I liked blue eyes or did well on my SAT's. So I removed the application and gave it a bad rating - quite a simple piece of programming but a very wiley approach.

So enjoy the games...but be careful when they ask you to give up your own or others information. Remember that apps on facebook are _not_ made by facebook and you are dealing with a separate company or person who may make more money by promoting scams than Netflix.

some of my references:
http://consumerist.com/5399264/socia...rs-real-racket
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31...ystem-of-hell/

[Trudy in Illinois]

Thank you so much for your input. I've learned something today, other than the pie featured will make me fat(ter).