Hasta La Gadget!

Remember the Facebook Gift Shop, that place where you could pick up virtual Troll dolls and send them to your friends? Well, it died. But, a phoenix has arisen from its ashes — Facebook Gifts — which will allow you to send real Troll dolls to your friends. You’ll be able to order gifts for people directly through the social network and suggestions to pick up a little something will be tied into birthday reminders and life events like weddings. The new initiative is the result of its decision to purchase Karma, a social “gifting” app, in May. Over a 100 retailers have signed up for the launch, including Starbucks, and Facebook obviously will be taking a small cut of each sale, which could be a huge source of monetization for the company, especially on the mobile front. Interestingly, friends can be notified before a gift is delivered and will be given a chance to tweak orders — just in case you don’t know your mom as well as you think you do. Gifts is rolling out slowly in select cities now and will expand in the coming weeks. Though, it also has a viral element since once you’ve been sent a gift you are also blessed with the ability to send gifts yourself. Check out the source links for more details.

Filed under: Internet

Facebook Gifts swaps virtual trinkets for real life goods originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook has finally gotten round to deleting thousands of fake user accounts and removing illegitimate likes in a bid to clean up the social network. It’s not clear quite how many accounts have been wiped out, but plenty of pages have seen massive drops in their fan numbers over the last two days. More »

If there ever was a Resident Evil style outbreak in the real world, and the undead roamed the earth, you can call upon Mark Zuckerberg and company to help exterminate the zombie population. After all, they have had experience by removing zombie Facebook fans, causing a severe disruption in “Likes” throughout the social network environment. For instance, Rihanna is down by 22,000 fans, and the same applies to Shakira. Lady Gaga has 32,000 fewer people liking her as of today, and Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker might want to fold after knowing that they are down by 100,000 fans.

All of this happened because Facebook began to get serious and crack down on fake users, fake accounts, and fake Likes. This effort has been ongoing for a while, where Facebook claims that this is to make sure that only real people, made out of flesh and blood, are connecting with real brands. The average figure for removal of Likes on any Page stands at under 1% at this point in time.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook bug results in messages on friends’ walls that cannot be deleted, Dropbox file sharing comes to Facebook Groups`,

If you’ve got a business that has an extraordinary amount of likes on Facebook and have suddenly felt a bit lighter today, you’re not alone: the social network has brought out the axe. This week Facebook has begun implementing many of the changes and rules they outlined in a very basic way several weeks ago regarding fake accounts and likes. If you’ve payed for likes from odd sources or are the sort of person who makes large amounts of fake accounts just to like your own products, you might be in for a wakeup call.

This situation is being reported by multiple sources who speak on the fan count of large pages like Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker which TechCrunch says lost 96,000 fans in less than 24 hours. Facebook has noted that most pages will not experience any gigantic changes in their amounts of likes and “real” Facebook fans, but they should expect some manner of change or another in numbers. Do not be afraid though, these changes are not in the number of actual users, but robots and accounts created just for likes instead.

In other words, if you’ve got a page that’s liked by nothing but accounts with single photos of a strangely promiscuous lady who has little to no information up about herself, only a note about how she’s “new to this Facebook thing”, you’ll be seeing some drops. This is part of Facebook’s big plan to give another new wave of legitimacy to the social network universe – with the cuts of the unreal masses, investors will be able to have a much more accurate view of how Facebook is doing (with real humans.)

Have a peek at a few more recent Facebook bits and pieces in the timeline below to see how the company has been changing since they went IPO earlier this year. As a public company, their initial offering did not do so fantastically well. Now that they’re a few months down the road, they’re staying tough about everything, even the knocking off of their own huddled robots.

Facebook terminates fake accounts with extreme prejudice is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Although Dropbox is predominantly known as a cloud storage service, it has also come about to be known as a file-sharing tool. File sharing using Dropbox accounts is not new and the company has been making encroaches into the social media with that feature.

Apparently, it has now partnered with the undisputed champion of the social media, Facebook, to bring Dropbox file sharing straight to Facebook Groups. The feature becomes available once you link your Dropbox account to your Facebook account. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Facebook bug results in messages on friends’ walls that cannot be deleted, Zombie Facebook fans hacked down, zombie apocalypse staved off for now,