In what appears to be a final burst of notoriety-seeking and odd behavior, Funnyjunk’s crack lawyer, Charles Carreon, told Ars that he had won because now he was “famous” and “notorious”.

“Mission accomplished,” he said, apparently without irony or self-awareness.

The Oatmeal’s lawyers at the EFF wrote:

It’s my undying hope that this doesn’t encourage others in the doldrums of their career to take on visible web presences in order to get a little Google juice. Clearly it’s worked – to a degree – as his website is high atop a list of news stories about case. Any sane web 3.0 entrepreneur looking to hire a lawyer in 2020 may be a bit put off by watching their representative bully a cartoonist.

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Last week, developer Tom Waddington uncovered Facebook code that points to the creation of a “Want” button — a plugin that potentially points to a new kind of commercial innovation being developed by Facebook itself, different from “want” buttons already being developed by third parties (one example here), and partially working but only within Facebook’s Graph API tester.

He’s continued to dig around and today has presented us with some of his latest finds: looking deeper into Facebook’s code, he found more references that point to how Facebook might be thinking about how users can share purchasing information with each other.

The presence of a “Want” button and these related commercial actions point to ways that Facebook can continue developing other streams for revenue-generation to complement what it is doing in advertising and existing commercial services, such as in-app purchases.

Playing around with the Want action, Waddington focused on the object of the Want action, called “ogproduct”. “I think they’re using ogproduct while testing – it’ll move to product when [if] it goes live,” he says.

While looking around in the ogproduct code, Waddington found code for a “product.purchased” action, with options underneath for a donation, message, product, and game_item.

While Inside Facebook has pointed out how the Want button would be useful for indicating purchasing intent, versus the more general “Like” button — and subsequently enabling more targeted ads against Wants — these newer details potentially give a clue as to what kinds of purchases Facebook could enable, and allow to share on your timeline.

Donations could be about charitable donations; but they could also be about group donations for purchases or events (similar to what Crowdtilt does today). Product and game_item also seem pretty straightforward. “Message” less so: could that be a way of incorporating an element of the social gifting service Karma, which Facebook bought in May?

Facebook has told us, in response to the emergence of the “Want” button, ”We’re always testing new Platform features, however we have nothing new to announce.” But in addition to the kind of detail mapped out above, there are other signs that a social commerce product might be closer than you think. “It’s clear that Facebook is working on a new OpenGraph representation of products. They’re even calling the current Product object ‘Product Old’,” he writes in his blog post.

“Basically, the potential for an official Facebook channel for Wants and Purchases (and game purchases) using similar methods to articles read / music listened to / videos watched stories is pretty huge,” Waddington told me later. And the more you look at those other areas, the more you can see how obvious the monetizing potential is behind them. “I’m not sure, but when Facebook Music aggregates the same songs across multiple providers, there might be scope for that in products, too.”

And the presence of a tag within the “Want” button code, for “socialcommerce”, also shows that this may not just be about purchasing intent, but actual purchases, too.

There is another interesting detail to add to these commercial hints: among the patents that Facebook owns or is applying for are some related to e-commerce (“Systems and methods wherein a buyer purchases products in a plurality of product categories”, U.S. Patent Number 7,188,080; and “Method, computer product and apparatus for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers”, U.S. Patent Number 7,526,440). You can start to see how all this could be part of a big plan finally coming together.

• FACEBOOK

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

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Facebook’s news feed is so slow to give you the goods, you could almost call it prude. But you’re about to get lucky. Now the feed will load faster, as it will be pulling in fewer stories to start so you can get browsing immediately, Facebook just told us.

Plus, if you don’t want to see every little move your friends make, there’s a new “Hide Ticker” button in the top right of the web home page.

But the real hotness is still bottled up. My sources say Facebook is about to release a much faster version of its mobile apps that will load the urgent elements first so it’s more snappy. That’ll be nice considering that whenever I launch my Facebook app currently, it’s like I’ve drunk a bottle of cough syrup and gone into some sort of slow-motion trance.

Nick Bilton of the New York Times was one of the first to catch wind of the the supercharged app and he squeezed some details from a few nameless Facebook engineers, so it seems surely on the way. Considering the flack Facebook’s been getting for the laggy iOS app, you know, possibly the most popular app in the world, I think it’s high-time it got a bit sleeker.

For today, though, we’ve got this little speed boost. Previously Facebook may have been needlessly loading too many stories before it let us see the first one. But now you’ll be able to look, Like, and comment as soon as a couple updates are there. So go ahead, take the 12 seconds while you wait in line for coffee to get a little news feed sugar.

Page admins be warned, your Facebook news feed reach metrics may suddenly sag because less stories get loaded, but really your metrics are just more accurate now since only people who actually see your posts will be counted.

So why’s a little more speed a big deal? Because Facebook is now showing Sponsored Story ads in the mobile news feed and they’re working, considering they get clicked 13 times more often than Facebook’s desktop ads. If Facebook can make its mobile app feel like you’re some slick social ninja nimbly maneuvering through the feed, you’ll visit more, scroll through more posts, and see more ads.

(And if you’re wondering about this post’s featured image, at first I was trying to convey that Facebook is becoming some fast-soaring firebird. But I accidentally created a Facebook tramp stamp tattoo and ran with it.)

• FACEBOOK

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.

The original…

Learn more

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/E-INXEYYuTQ/

A website called Lynx2Games.com has a new approach to buying and sharing that could help consumers avoid paying full price for video games.

When people buy a games on the site, they’re buying them in pairs — there’s a “borrower” and a “buyer” (friends can make a purchase together, or Lynx2Games can match up consumers interested in the same product). The borrower pays 25 percent and gets the game for the first three weeks, then they ship it to the buyer, who pays 75 percent and then gets to keep the game indefinitely. The average new console game costs $60, so that breaks down to $15/$45.

If you just want to play the game once, you can probably do that, and you pay less money than you would to rent (Redbox charges $2 per day, for example). And if you don’t care about getting the game right away, you can get it slightly later and slightly used for a 25 percent discount.

Lynx2Games is the latest service from startup LynxSquare. Co-founder and CEO Zul Momin says this kind of trading is happening already, when a customer buys a game then sells it back to a retailer like Game Stop when they’re finished. Usually the retailer makes most of the money on the deal (because it buys the game for a fraction of the initial cost, then sells it for near full price), with the first and second buyer only seeing small savings. Lynx2Games takes the reseller out of the equation.

LynxSquare is applying this model to several different products — the company plans to re-launch Lynx2Books, Lynx2Movies, and Lynx2Music in the six weeks. It emerged from the Austin Technology Incubator and has raised $750,000 from incubators.

It’s a cool model, but I wondered if it would become obsolete in a few years, as more and more games, books, movies, and music are consumed digitally. Momin says the secondary video game market is a $2 billion industry, so there’s no immediate threat. As for the long-term, he plans to launch a digital sharing product in 2013.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/social/~3/jG38Sp3-3nQ/