Word: socialism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Facebook games - Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Restaurant City - have become surprisingly effective at diverting time wasters among the social-networking crowd. More than 63 million people alone play FarmVille. But now accusations have surfaced that the games can lead some more gullible players, including children, into Internet scams, especially if they have a cell phone...
...Will O'Brien, general manager of social and casual games at TrialPay, a company that matches advertisers with potential online clients, told the San Francisco Chronicle that offers to swap personal information for virtual cash are designed to reach the young because they're less likely to have a credit card. But they often have cell phones, usually on their parents' plans. Indeed, while Facebook rules state that users must be at least 13, FarmVille seems to be aimed at a youthful crowd, at least by its marketing pitch: "Howdy Ya'll! Come on down to the Farm today...
...issue came to a head on Nov. 1 when the blogger Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch confronted some of the advertising providers at a virtual goods summit with accusations of scammy behavior. He blogged about it and also managed to find a former social-networking ad executive who admitted that the industry knew that not all the ads were on the up-and-up. (See how to plan for retirement...
...Mark Pincus of Zynga, the largest and most profitable of the social-networking game companies, (it created FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Cafe World) was quick to respond. "I agree with [Arrington] and others that some of these offers misrepresent and hurt our industry," he wrote on his blog. "We have worked hard to remove bad offers ... Nevertheless we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service-level agreements." He also took down all offers that involve sending a mobile-phone number. Offerpal, the biggest provider of offer advertising, also apparently responded quickly, replacing CEO Anu Shukla, shortly after...
...recurring flare-ups between Italy and Strasbourg are both anomalous to and emblematic of the continental shift in faith. The Vatican's presence within its borders keeps Catholicism a part of the public life and social fabric in Italy, where only 23% of respondents answered "No" to the Gallup poll question. But the largely rhetorical battles like the one over crucifixes mask the reality that Italian life is ever more secular, and the ethnic and religious fabric is in fact undergoing major changes with the arrival of immigrants, including many from Muslim-majority countries. Buttiglione, who called the court...