Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker game has once again topped the ‘most liked’ pages on Facebook list. Amassing some 25.5m thumbs-up from Facebook users, the poker page beat out Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, the Twilight saga and Facebook itself. Suck it, Zuckerberg!
Meanwhile, those not liking Zynga’s work include the filers of two class-action lawsuits in the Northern District of California. The suits charge that Zynga, in conjunction with Facebook, improperly shared user’s personal data with third part companies. Both suits cite problems outlined in an Oct. 18th Wall Street Journal article about how popular Facebook apps permitted user IDs to be ‘inadvertently shared’ with outside firms, potentially exposing the user’s age, residence, occupation and more.
Finally, a new Facebook game is set to combine fantasy sports with the insatiable appetite for celebrity culture. Launching (appropriately enough for fantasy football fans) this Sunday, FanSwarm will allow players to select from a roster of 2,000 celebs – ranging from Lindsay Lohan to Barack Obama – who earn points based on how much heat they’re generating in the media, in Tweets and on blogs. “We use an algorithm that reads the heat of the social graph to figure out if a celebrity is hot or not,” said Doug Levin, head of FanSwarm developer Ayeah Games. Wonder how that algorithm would have calculated the temperature of the coffee that Shia Labeouf recently hurled at some paparazzi…
