There’s another rash of Facebook headlines today, and for once it looks like they’re all different. Keep reading—I’m saving the best for last!
Lawsuits of late
Facebook is always in and out of court. Sometimes they’re the plaintiff, such as in a case they’ve filed in federal court against some hackers, naming Brian Fabian, Josh Raskin, Ming Wu and Slickcash.com.
Things didn’t pan out so well for Facebook in a kind of strange-sounding case where a woman got a new phone number which happened to have belonged to a Facebook member. She was receiving that member’s Facebook updates as text messages. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a text plan, and the messages were costing her 10 cents apiece. Facebook was accused of receiving some portion of that money. (So that’s where their revenue comes from!) SFGate reports:
Without admitting any wrongdoing, Facebook agreed to make it easier for recipients of text messages to block future messages originating from the social network.
Facebook also will work more closely with mobile phone carriers to monitor the lists of recycled numbers and reduce the frequency of unwanted text messages.
Facebook will also pay the defendant’s legal fees.
New features
Facebook also announces a new feature, as reported by Read/WriteWeb. The new feature enables you to put your friends into specific lists which you create. This is to make it easier to send messages, invite people events, etc. RWW points out some extra features that would be nice, including automatic privacy controls set by group. RWW concludes that Facebook still isn’t ready for business without features like that— what do you think?
And now for the big news
Valleywag reports that Facebook has put out the call for platform developers to test a new credit card payment system. Will this lead to a real “killer” Facebook app? Will it be part of the established (but rarely mentioned) marketplace already in place? What do you think?
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