Webware

Offerpal Media, one of the companies at the center of a bitter dispute over misleading advertisements on social networks, on Thursday launched a revised policy designed to "forbid any offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable."

Companies like Offerpal are enlisted by many of the big gaming companies built on social networks like Facebook; they help those companies make money by letting game players earn points and virtual goods by completing offers and surveys rather than paying real money.

They make a lot of money doing so. So do the game companies, like Zynga and Playfish (recently acquired by Electronic Arts), which in turn advertise heavily on the likes of Facebook to recruit new players.

But then the negative press started to emerge: many of these "free" offers and surveys actually had hidden costs attached to them that weren't adequately disclosed. Some companies like Zynga started backtracking and going so far as to ban offers altogether. Facebook and MySpace, the two biggest social-network platforms, made very public revisions to their policies. But the controversy continued, and both Facebook and Zynga were named as defendants in a federal class-action lawsuit.

Offerpal, which replaced its CEO amid the controversy, has now come out and said that while it's setting a basic standard for advertisement quality, game makers and publishers enlisting Offerpal's services can opt to be even more stringent. "Offerpal will rate all offers by quality and allow its partners to select a quality level of compliance ranging from 'Level 1' for minimal restrictions to 'Level 5' for highly conservative restrictions," a release explained.

Will the new restrictions keep angry bloggers and consumers--not to mention lawmakers--at bay? More importantly, are they going to amount to anything more than smoke and mirrors? We'll see.

The simple concept of having virtual-good payments in games sent directly to your cell phone bill has gotten a lot of buzz--and stirred up a lot of rivalry. One of the start-ups looking to pull this off, Boku, announced Monday that it has signed on a dozen new gaming partners, both a few based on the Facebook platform and some others that are either Web-based or desktop downloads.

The partner companies are Waves, Cie Studios, Cyberstep, GameDuell, IGG, King.com, NHN USA, Ntreev, Outspark, PerfectWorld, Snap Interactive, and Zoosk. Most of them aren't household names: they're game manufacturers, not the games themselves, and some of them are most prominent outside the U.S.

There are a handful of companies trying to grab market share in this space, but the two who have been most vocal about making inroads have been Boku and rival Zong, which last month announced that it would allow members to sync credit cards with their phone numbers, allowing for larger payments and putting the company closer to direct competition with the likes of PayPal.

Boku says it's sticking to the mobile-number-only strategy, choosing instead to ink more deals and emphasize its global reach: with the current round of partnerships, the company says it will have 200 million registered users added to its ranks (no word on how active they all are, or how much redundancy there is across games).

Additionally, Boku has made some infrastructure upgrades that it says will improve the user experience, including the ability to detect whether a phone number that has been entered is landline or mobile--and if mobile, what carrier it's coming from.

Perhaps in a sign of how the plague of social media has numbed us all to the value of legitimate human connections, the New Oxford American Dictionary has picked the verb "unfriend," or "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook," as its 2009 Word of the Year.

At the very least, it's a testament to the ubiquity of Facebook, which now has well over 300 million members around the world.

Facebook itself takes the process of "friending" and "unfriending" very seriously. It once sent warning notes to players of a third-party game called PackRat because it encouraged players to amass huge friends lists (good heavens! they're polluting the social graph!), banned a Burger King ad campaign that let members "sacrifice" their friends to get a free cheeseburger ("Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger"), and still puts a cap of 5,000 on personal profiles' friends lists.

Last year's Oxford word of the year was the decidedly less mainstream "hypermiling."

A correction was made at 9:25 a.m. PT on November 21. It was players of PackRat, not PackRat itself, that were threatened with account suspension.

If social gaming is Hollywood, the people aren't as pretty. Well, maybe the avatars are.

Yes, yes, we know that social games are taking over the bloody world: earlier this week, gamemaker Playfish announced its $300 million sale to Electronic Arts, and on Thursday, rival Playdom retorted with the announcement of $43 million in venture funding at a $260 million valuation, and the acquisitions of smaller gaming companies Green Patch (manufacturer of Facebook-based games like Lil Green Patch and Farm Life) and Trippert Labs. Green Patch's games will up Playdom's reach on Facebook by 30 percent, the company said.

Expect to see more of these sales, as smaller developers find they're having trouble treading water in an industry where the big guys--Zynga, Playfish, Playdom--have chomped up most of the market share, and where Facebook, the biggest destination for these games, has shown that it can change the rules at whim. And the big companies, too, want to scramble to get bigger.

Plus, as Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson explained to CNET News: When gaming companies grow large, they have to deal with a lot of stuff that can get in the way of producing new games and staying on top of consumer trends. That's one reason to keep investing in new talent through acqusitions.

"The hitmakers start spending all their time on operations, and on things that don't improve or enhance the games, and so they become essentially owners and operators," he said. And likewise, "people who can create things shouldn't necessarily be operating a gaming company."

He drew the evolution of a social gaming company parallel to an entertainment studio: "a lot more like Hollywood or the traditional gaming industry" than a Web start-up.

But here's the catch when it comes to acquisitions in this space: Gaming, especially social gaming, is a hit-driven business. If a parent company buys up a hot Facebook game, that game could already be running out of shelf life: which is, indeed, sort of like a Hollywood establishment signing a contract with an actor who's had five hit films in a row, as he could easily be over the hill before long. (Hello, Rob Lowe.)

"I think we're getting pretty good at really looking at their data now, and modeling how these games will evolve over time," Thompson said. "But I think there's essentially a life cycle of growth and then decay. What we really look at in acquisitions is not just daily active users, but bringing on additional team members that can really help create new games in the future."

It was a controversial new addition: Twitter had just started rolling out a new feature that built "retweets," a user-created way to quote other tweets, into the main Twitter application. But on Wednesday, plagued by errors, Twitter appears to have pulled the feature for further maintenance.

A post on the Twitter status blog late on Wednesday morning reads that it was "working on (a) high number of errors." The Next Web dug up some discussion from Twitter's developer IRC channel and found that "retweet is temporarily unavailable while we deploy a bug fix." There is not yet word on when it will be back.

The feature was so new that some Twitter users, myself included, never had it in the first place. But it promises to significantly change one part of the Twitter experience: with official, integrated retweets, gone is the signature "RT" in front of a quoted tweet. Instead, a retweet button pushes the original tweets into the retweeter's followers' streams of messages. Like so many Facebook redesigns and restructurings, that hasn't gone over so well with existing users. The blog Twitter Watch called integrated retweeting "the worst ever."

"While current users may get used to the feature, it's going to alienate new users," the Twitter Watch blog asserted. "Twitter isn't like Facebook; it can't boast the same network effect that makes Facebook indispensable. So it needs to keep things simple for new users. But now each new user will need to understand why much of their early friend feed will consist of messages they didn't subscribe to."

But there are advantages, too: with built-in retweets, it gets much easier to track exactly how popular or influential a given message or user is.

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.

(Credit: OfficeMax/Elf Yourself)

It's that time of year again, when you trawl the Web for unflattering mugshots of your boss to embed on the bodies of dancing elves with the "Elf Yourself" holiday card promotion, going live for the fourth consecutive year on Tuesday. They're the brainchild of OfficeMax, which teams up annually with online animation shop JibJab to bring forth what might be the most successful social-media marketing campaign that the Web has yet seen.

Last year, a total of 35 million "Elf Yourself" cards were sent, and OfficeMax says that since it launched in 2006, the seasonal site has chalked up 284 million visits. So what's new this year? Well, there are two new elf dances! Yay! You can now, in addition to "Disco Elves," "Country Elves," and "Elf Classic," choose to model your creation off the "Hip-Hop Elves" or "Singing Elves" dances.

More importantly, OfficeMax is playing up how the latest edition of "Elf Yourself" ties into Facebook and Twitter, with an option to tweet out your video creation or to share it on your Facebook profile or a friend's. Additionally, it uses Facebook Connect so that you can source your embarrassing headshots from your photo albums or your friends'--that's clever.

It's not actually clear whether "Elf Yourself" drives up OfficeMax sales at all, but it does make some money on its own: you can pay to download the video, which normally expires once the holiday season has ended, or to order a hard copy.

Now go forth and tick off your human resources department.

Offerpal Media, a company that helps social-network app creators make money from offers and surveys, on Tuesday announced that it had replaced its CEO in the wake of a high-profile onstage argument at a conference and subsequent press over whether it's scamming consumers who fill out offers in order to earn virtual goods in social games.

Anu Shukla, who founded the company and had been serving as CEO since its 2007 launch, will be replaced by George Garrick, who has served as the CEO of Flycast Communications, Wine.com, Jingle Networks, and Mochi Media. Shukla "will still be involved and help guide the company," an Offerpal representative told CNET News.

A statement from Shukla makes it sound like the company's been CEO-hunting for months ("I have known George for a long time...After many months of searching, I believe that George is the best CEO to scale the company to new heights. I am looking forward to working with him closely"). But the timing is a little too good to be coincidental: a firestorm erupted over Offerpal and other companies in its niche after TechCrunch's Michael Arrington confronted Shukla while she was on a panel at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco last month. Arrington accused Shukla of running a scam operation that tricks consumers into unwittingly spending money--and of course, he then blogged about it.

Shukla's response to Arrington was "sh*t, double sh*t, and bullsh*t."

But the industry has taken the controversy seriously. Social game makers like the massive Zynga have come out and said that they would ban potentially shady and misleading offers, even though those might make up a sizeable chunk of revenue, and on Tuesday social network MySpace joined the debate and said that it had modified its terms of service to outlaw "app scams."

Shukla was interviewed by VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi in a lengthy article published on Tuesday.

This post was expanded at 4:55 p.m. PT.

So how do you say "fail whale" en español? Twitter has launched a Spanish translation, according to a blog post Tuesday (in Spanish) by co-founder Biz Stone.

It's the first of multiple volunteer-assisted translations for the microblogging site, the post explained. A look at Twitter's public timeline will show that it's used in many languages across the world, but until this point, the Twitter.com site has been English only. Now, users can go into their settings to translate it into Spanish.

This could be key as Twitter attempts to grow bigger overseas amid allegations that its traffic has plateaued. Facebook, for example, saw significant growth overseas when it started launching user-translated versions of its site.

To better inform the Twittering masses, we have gone to the trouble of plugging the term "fail whale" into Google Translate to see how you say it in Spanish. That didn't go too well with the algorithm, so we tried "whale of failure" and came out with "la ballena de fracaso." Unfortunately, that just doesn't have the same ring.

But this is not actually the first time that Twitter has toyed with launching a non-English edition. Last year, Twitter board member Joi Ito hyped up the launch of a standalone Twitter Japan site, powered by an investment from Ito's Digital Garage, that was notable because it was ad-supported (Twitter still hasn't rolled out ads or even said that it will for sure).

Biz Stone filled in CNET News on the status of Twitter Japan via e-mail on Tuesday night: "(It's) doing very well. A few of us were there a few weeks ago to launch a brand new mobile service. We had a really fun tweetup in Tokyo."

Twitter hasn't said what the next translations of its site will be, though presumably they'd pick a language that's already spoken by many users or one spoken in a region where it hopes to make big inroads. Or they could just be cutesy and launch in Klingon or Pirate.

This post was updated at 10:40 p.m. with comment from Biz Stone.