Zynga Sues Developers Over Bang with Friends App

Social games giant Zynga has sued the makers of a 'casual sex app' called Bang with Friends, claiming the title infringes on its popular "with friends" trademark.

According to Bloomberg, Zynga filed the complaint yesterday against the developers of the app, which seeks to connect anonymous Facebook users who are "down to bang." The complaint seeks a court order which would bar the company from using the name in relation to any social media apps within the United States.

“Zynga filed a lawsuit to stop blatant infringement of its valuable ‘With Friends’ brand,” said Zynga's deputy general counsel Renee Lawson in a statement. “Zynga is compelled to file suit to prevent further consumer confusion and protect its intellectual property rights against infringement.”

Zynga's been in the news recently due to its dramatic revenue losses and the hire of ex-Microsoft executive Don Mattrick.

Lucy O'Brien is Entertainment Editor at IGN AU. Follow her ramblings on IGN at Luce_IGN_AU,or @Luceobrien on Twitter.

‘Like’ This Article Online? Your Friends Will Probably Approve, Too, Scientists Say

But surprisingly, an unfair negative reaction will not spur others to dislike the article. Instead, a thumbs-down view will soon be counteracted by thumbs up from other readers.

Those are the implications of new research looking at the behavior of thousands of people reading online comments, scientists reported Friday in the journal Science. A positive nudge, they said, can set off a bandwagon of approval.

“Hype can work,” said one of the researchers, Sinan K. Aral, a professor of information technology and marketing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “and feed on itself as well.”

If people tend to herd together on popular opinions, that could call into question the reliability of “wisdom of the crowd” ratings on Web sites like Yelp or Amazon and perhaps provide marketers with hints on how to bring positive attention to their products.

“This is certainly a provocative study,” said Matthew O. Jackson, a professor of economics at Stanford who was not involved with the research. “It raises a lot of questions we need to answer.”

Besides Dr. Aral (who is also a scholar in residence at The New York Times research and development laboratory, working on unrelated projects), the researchers are from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and New York University.

They were interested in answering a question that long predates the iPhone and Justin Bieber: Is something popular because it is actually good, or is it popular just because it is popular?

To help answer that question, the researchers devised an experiment in which they could manipulate a small corner of the Internet: reader comments.

They collaborated with an unnamed Web site, the company did not want its involvement disclosed, on which users submit links to news articles. Readers can then comment on the articles, and they can also give up or down votes on individual comments. Each comment receives a rating calculated by subtracting negative votes from positive ones.

The experiment performed a subtle, random change on the ratings of comments submitted on the site over five months: right after each comment was made, it was given an arbitrary up or down vote, or — for a control group — left alone. Reflecting a tendency among the site’s users to provide positive feedback, about twice as many of these arbitrary initial votes were positive: 4,049 to 1,942.

The first person reading the comment was 32 percent more likely to give it an up vote if it had been already given a fake positive score. There was no change in the likelihood of subsequent negative votes. Over time, the comments with the artificial initial up vote ended with scores 25 percent higher than those in the control group.

“That is a significant change,” Dr. Aral said. “We saw how these very small signals of social influence snowballed into behaviors like herding.”

Meanwhile, comments that received an initial negative vote ended up with scores indistinguishable from those in the control group.

The Web site allows users to say whether they like or dislike other users, and the researchers found that a commenter’s friends were likely to correct the negative score while enemies did not find it worth their time to knock down a fake up vote.

The distortion of ratings through herding is not a novel concern. Reddit, a social news site that said it was not the one that participated in the study, similarly allows readers to vote comments up or down, but it also allows its moderators to hide those ratings for a certain amount of time. “Now a comment will more likely be voted on based on its merit and appeal to each user, rather than having its public perception influence its votes,” it explained when it unveiled the feature in April.

Duncan J. Watts, a scientist at Microsoft Research, said the overall findings fit with “cumulative advantage,” the idea that something that starts slightly more popular will build upon that popularity until it is far ahead of its competitors — and conversely, something that does not catch on will usually fade away whether or not it is good.

He cited the new crime novel “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” by Robert Galbraith, which received good reviews but tiny sales when it was released in April. When it was revealed that Galbraith was a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling, the book suddenly had the cumulative advantage conferred by the Harry Potter series and jumped to the top of best-seller lists.

“The biggest obstacle to success is just being noticed,” Dr. Watts said.

But opinions do not invariably follow popularity. In an earlier experiment by Dr. Watts, people listened to a list of songs ranked by popularity and were asked to rate them. But for some, the list was inverted — what they were told was the most popular song was actually the least popular.

The incorrect list did affect how listeners rated the songs — the good songs never achieved the same popularity as among listeners who were given the correct list, and the bad songs did better than they would have otherwise.

“But we also found, in a result that was somewhat consistent with the result here, that sometimes the songs were able to recover their sort of real ranking in spite of the manipulation,” Dr. Watts said. The listeners, he said, “in effect noticed that the song was better or worse than we had made it seem.”

Gadgetwise Blog: Listen Alone or Share With Friends

The Flips Audio headphones from Idea Village.

When it comes to a company like Idea Village, you expect to see some unusual concepts.

The company, which develops and markets “as seen on TV” products, like Stompeez children’s slippers and the Shoe Dini shoe horn, recently created a new technology division to market Flips Audio, a hybrid gadget that combines headphones and external speakers.

Placed on your head, Flips Audio delivers music directly to your ears as a pair of on-ear headphones. But when Flips is slipped around your neck, the ear cups can be turned outward for sharing with friends (or strangers on a subway train).

As headphones, Flips delivers decent sound, although a bit muddy, especially at higher volumes. The audio improves when the headphones are transformed into external speakers. Flips will not rock your next party, but the speakers are loud enough to let others nearby hear your music. When you’re done sharing, a quick flip turns them back into headphones.

The external speakers run on an internal lithium-polymer battery that Idea Village says will last two to three hours on a full charge. That’s not very long, but enough time to share your favorite songs. A USB cable is included for charging.

The biggest drawback is the lack of external controls. Flips Audio costs $120, and for that amount of money, you would expect at least an in-line remote control. As it stands, you have to keep your music player handy to change the volume or play or pause a track.

Flips Audio comes in black or white and is available on the company’s e-commerce Web site and at Walmart stores. It may not have the best sound system, but it is a fun novelty. You could easily find better headphones and a better speaker, but you’d be hard-pressed to find them both in the same gadget.

Tool Kit: Facebook’s Graph Search Makes Use of Friends and Likes

In January, Facebook began testing its new search tool, an enhanced version of the search box at the top of the site. The tool, which Facebook calls Graph Search, gets its name from “social graph,” a technical term for the giant network of connections among friends, friends of friends and so on. The social graph includes not just members’ names, but also the pages they have liked and the places where they have checked in.

Graph Search lets a user concoct short phrases, instead of stand-alone search keywords, to search Facebook; for example, “books my friends like.”

The tool does have limitations; if you’re looking for the nearest sushi restaurant in a big city, or trying to browse the complete works of the author Susan Orlean, searching Facebook is not the way to do it. In many cases, though, Graph Search lets you take advantage of the clicking and typing your Facebook friends, and their friends, have already done.

You can start a Facebook search by going to facebook.com/about/graphsearch in a desktop or laptop browser, and clicking the big button at the very bottom of the page to replace the search box at the top of Facebook with the enhanced Graph Search box. Facebook has not made the tool available on mobile apps yet, but says it will do so later this year.

Once the tool is installed, try typing a description of what you want into the search box, preferably using the term “friend” or “like.” Pages will pop up, as well as suggestions for searches based on what you have typed so far, using conversational language. This differs from the keyword-oriented style of Google, in which a user tries to think of words associated with what is being sought. Graph Search looks at Facebook’s organized data — names, likes, friends, locations, photo tags and so on — but not status updates or comments.

FIND A BOOK One of the most obvious graph searches is “books my friends like.” That will display the Facebook pages created for specific books on which friends of yours have clicked the Like button. Moreover, Facebook will show you which specific friends of yours liked each book, so you know who suggested which one.

You may have to scroll down a page or two to find a book you have not heard of before, or to dodge the collective bad taste of the social graph. (My own friends are too fond of books about social networking.) One way around this is to search for “books liked by people who like what I like.” This both broadens the search beyond your friends, and narrows it to those who have clicked Facebook’s Like button on the same pages as you.

Some authors, like Ms. Orlean, are also active Facebook users who click the Like button on book pages. That means you can search for “books liked by Susan Orlean” to see more than a dozen reading suggestions from the author of “The Orchid Thief.”

FIND A RESTAURANT Facebook cannot match Yelp’s extensive listings, reviews and block-by-block location targeting for finding a nearby restaurant. But while Yelp has a Facebook-like friend network, chances are you have not built up a network of your own there. Instead, you have built up a much larger network of Facebook friends, many of whom have been clicking the Like button on restaurant pages.

With Facebook search, you can look for “restaurants my friends like in Boston” or “nearby sushi restaurants my friends like.” As with books, Facebook will tell you which friends like which restaurant, so you know whose advice you are getting.

Keep in mind that Facebook’s idea of “nearby,” unlike that of a phone app, is not GPS-targeted. It can mean anywhere within city limits, even if it’s 45 minutes away. Facebook search works best for advance scouting of new restaurants worth traveling to, like “Japanese restaurants near New York, New York, liked by people who live in Japan,” or “restaurants in San Francisco, California, liked by people who like what I like.” In New York City, you can specify individual neighborhoods like “Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York.”

Bits: Netflix Allows Americans to Share Viewing Choices with Facebook Friends

Netflix

You no longer have to ask your friends what they are watching on Netflix. Instead, you can now simply peer over their digital shoulder.

Netflix announced Wednesday that it will begin offering United States customers the ability to connect their Netflix account to Facebook to see what their friends are watching on the video rental service. They will also be able to share their own favorite videos.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Cameron Johnson, director of product innovation at Netflix, said that the latest sharing feature would offer two main views: customers’ favorite videos and those that they have recently watched on the service.

“You’ll see what titles your friends have watched in a new “Watched by your friends” row and what they have rated four or five stars in a new “Friends’ Favorites” row,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “Your friends will also be able to see what you watch and rate highly.”

For people worried that a secret show will appear in their Facebook timeline for all to see, Netflix gives people explicit options to decide what they share to Facebook.

“You are in control of what gets shared. You can choose not to share a specific title by clicking the “Don’t Share This” button in the player,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

The sharing feature has been available in other countries for some time. But before Netflix could enable it in the United States, the company had to persuade Congress to amend a 1988 law, called the Video Privacy Protection Act, that prohibited video service providers from sharing customers’ viewing history without their consent.

It’s unclear whether American consumers really want to see what their inflated social networks are watching on television. Although the idea sounds great, if your Aunt Mildred is watching World War I documentaries, and your nephew Luca is watching SpongeBob SquarePants, your social feed might not be very useful.

But investors thought the news was great for Netflix, sending the company’s shares up 7 percent in midday trading on Wednesday.

‘Dear Friends’: Pope Takes to Twitter, With an Assist

Sitting at a desk in the Vatican hall where he holds his weekly audience, the pontiff, 85, touched the iPad with a wavering hand adorned with a large gold ring, as the audience applauded.

Video footage showed that the pope seemed confused and had trouble hitting “send,” forcing Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, to step in and touch the screen to send the first papal message.

Last week, the Vatican announced that Benedict, who writes in longhand, would begin posting messages on Twitter in eight languages under the handle @pontifex, a Latin term for pope that means “bridge builder.” Claire Díaz-Ortiz, the director of social innovation at Twitter, was at the ceremony.

Later on Wednesday, the pope responded to questions that included the hashtag #askpontifex. “How can faith in Jesus be lived in a world without hope?” the pope wrote in one post. “By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need.”

In another, Benedict said: “We can be certain that a believer is never alone. God is the solid rock upon which we build our lives and his love is always faithful.”

The Vatican has said that the pope will be using Twitter to engage with the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion followers.

The pope gained more than 200,000 followers on Wednesday alone, pushing him above 800,000 in English, more than Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York, with 65,800 followers, but less than Justin Bieber, who has 31 million.

The Twitterati had a field day with the pope’s postings. “@Pontifex tweets from a tablet? Big deal: Moses had two,” wrote Jared Keller, the director of social media at Bloomberg L.P. Another user wrote, “If someone gets blocked by @Pontifex on Twitter ... does that mean they’re automatically excommunicated?”

Earlier this year, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article that said, “Pope tweets picture of self with God.”

The Vatican has said that the pope will not follow anyone on Twitter, or retweet messages. A Vatican official has said that papal Twitter messages, as with everything written by the pope, will be part of the church’s teachings, but that they will not be infallible.

Others used Twitter to send messages to the pope criticizing the Catholic Church for the sexual abuse scandal and the church’s ban on condom use. In Italy, many sent complaints that the church does not have to pay most property taxes.

Benedict will be posting messages in Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. Other languages are expected to be added in the future.

Bits Blog: Facebook Lets Users Buy Real Things for Friends

Facebook on Thursday announced a new tool that offers users the opportunity to buy gifts for one another. It is the company’s latest test of whether users are willing to spend money on the social network – and it remains to be seen whether it will make money for the company.

The gifts range from cupcakes to sunglasses. Facebook will earn a slice of the proceeds from each transaction; a company spokesman declined to say how much but said each partner company had a different revenue-sharing arrangement.

Facebook already reminds users when it’s time to send birthday greetings to their Facebook friends. It will now enable them to send a gift along with a greeting. Gift-givers can pay with a credit card. Recipients will have to offer up their offline addresses so a gift can be delivered. The tool will roll out incrementally, starting Thursday, initially in the United States.

“You can post your gift to your friend’s timeline or send it privately,” the company said in a statement. “Your friend can then unwrap a preview of the gift and it will show up on their doorstep a few days later.”

Commercial transactions represent a small slice of revenue for Facebook; most of its money comes from selling advertisements on the site. But it has sought to diversify its revenue sources in recent months as it struggles to prop up its sagging share price on Wall Street. This year, it announced that it would allow users to buy products and services in their local currency, using a credit card. The main things bought and sold on Facebook are associated with virtual games.
The gift-giving application was built by the team that created Karma, a San Francisco start-up firm that Facebook acquired last May.

On offer are things like cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery ($35) and a box of pears, plums and apples from Frog Hollow Farms ($54). Warby Parker, the New York eyeglass company, has eight styles of nonprescription sunglasses to choose from, each at $95.

It is the first time Warby Parker has tried selling directly through Facebook. “If we see a lot of uptake with Facebook gifts and a lot of engagement from consumers from using the Facebook platform,” said Dave Gilboa, one of the company’s co-chief executives, “then we would feel more comfortable building a real Facebook storefront and allowing people to transact using Facebook.”

Amanda Bynes — Friends Are Furious Her Family Isn’t Helping Her

Sources close to Amanda Bynes tell TMZ her friends are fuming mad with her family ... wondering why they aren't doing more to help the troubled actress before something REALLY bad happens to her.According to our sources, Amanda's friends do not&...