Interestingly, since this blog post was created, Facebook actually put their foot down and disallowed the kinds of ads that I mentioned here, even so far as to block ad networks that didn’t get their ads compliant within the deadline they gave them. As a result, of course, my ad revenue hit the toilet, and its barely worth me running ads at all.

So no, you don’t have to use one of the engines I mentioned. You may run into javascript issues if you try to use an ad network that isn’t optimized for Facebook though. Also, none of the FB ad networks are running those kinds of ads anymore.

Isn’t it great how simple applications can spread and become so popular so quickly? That’s the beauty of Facebook. The user base is built in, and the mechanism to spread your app around is right at the user’s fingertips.

Its absurdly simple, to the point of being embarrassing. I hadn’t expected it to catch on – was just writing it as a tutorial app. I do much more interesting and sophisticated stuff for work

Good to know! By the way, what is your Facebook app called so I can check it out?

~Tony

SocialCash is still outperforming SocialMedia (tho its in a better page position, when I had swapped them, SocialCash still did better), and I still don’t like how misleading their ads are, but I’ve kept them running. Interestingly, Facebook has been blocking certain ad networks that take the same kind of tricksy tactics (after fair warning) that SocialCash does, so I am curious to see if their ads change.

SocialCash ties into the API more, to pull friends pictures, etc – its part of how tricksy their ads are. SocialMedia dosn’t go that far, which is probably why their load time is less.

So this info on what ad networks to use (and not use) is very helpful.

I am an IT consultant by trade, so I am biased in my opinion of antivirus software. I encounter so many problems with Norton and McAfee that it’s not even CLOSE to being funny. I haven’t had much experience with Avira and false positives, however.

So SocialCash uses Javascript compression and some AV flags this as possible malware, if heuristic detection is turned on. And they don’t want to disable compression because it would affect load times. It would be interesting to see if load times are noticeably different between SocialCash and SocialMedia (which obviously doesn’t use the same Javascript compression, because the SocialMedia ads are not flagged by AV!). This probably only affects dial-up Internet users. Even still… how much JS are they using that compression is reducing the load times by a significant amount?? Sounds like a poor excuse to me.