Facebook ranks even lower in customer satisfaction than IRS e-filers, according to a report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, produced in partnership with ForeSee Results (pdf). Facebook ranks in the bottom 5 percent of all measured private-sector companies, at the same level as airline and cable companies.

“Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results.

“At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience,” Freed said. “Compare that to Wikipedia, which is a non-profit that has had the same user interface for years, and it’s clear that while innovation is critical, sometimes consumers prefer evolution to revolution.”

This is the first year that social media was rated by the ASCI. Wikipedia leads the category at 77, followed by YouTube at 73, Facebook at 64 and MySpace at 63. Twitter wasn’t rated because of the amount of people who access it via 3rd party tools.

The media complains about Facebook, and some individual users complain about it as well, but among mainstream audiences, Facebook continues to grow, and not even looking at the numbers it’s easy to argue that user engagement is higher than ever, unless you don’t trust observation.

What the findings do indicate is that if there were another service that would come along that replaced Facebook’s popular functionalities without having the privacy and PR issues, some users may jump ship.

At this point, it’s obvious that removing Zuckerberg would be the fastest and easiest way to improve brand image. Investigations into Zuckerberg’s ethics and motivations are damaging the company and threaten to put it into continual crisis mode.

In other tech categories, Google dropped 7 percent, but continued to lead search. At 80 percent satisfaction, Google scored only three points better than second-place Bing.

“Bing’s first measure is impressive and could put some pressure on Google. The new search engine is already making gains in market share and using clever marketing and advertising to distinguish itself from the market leader.”

Booyah does not yet have the brand-name hype of Zynga or Foursquare in Silicon Valley, but if we talk about their two first apps, MyTown and Nightclub City, it’s clear Booyah is already becoming a serious force.

Booyah was created one year ago in Palo Alto with the goal of “creating new forms of entertainment for the masses by bringing together elements of the real world and the digital world.” The team has a strong background in the gaming industry: Keith Lee, CEO of Booyah, was formerly lead producer at Blizzard for Diablo III, one of the best known game franchises, and other members of the team worked on World of Warcraft.

Booyah has already succeeded on two platforms everybody has dreamt of: the iPhone and Facebook. That’s not just in terms of active user number (2.5 million for MyTown and 4.5 million for Nightclub City), but also in terms of engagement (time spent and user activity) and revenues generated through virtual goods and advertising.

MyTown is “monopoly for real life,” as Booyah has branded it: you can check-in on your iPhone at real places, manage them by getting revenues from people who walk into your virtual “locations,” and upgrade them. MyTown has only been released in the USA on iPhone and iTouch and has reached 2.5 million users in 6 months, which is great in comparison to the other location-based services startups.

Nightclub City was launched 2 months ago with little advertising (Booyah just published a blog post today to make it official) and has already reached 4.4 million active users. The game is simple: you’re the manager of a club and you can choose the music, change the decor, pay for celebrities coming into your club and go to your friend’s virtual club to mix and refuel their bar when they are not online.

Keith Lee’s passion is DJing, which has something to do with Nightclub City. Booyah would love to involve the entire electronic music scene in the game: it could be a new distribution channel for indie music. And it pays, as Nightclub City was awarded best social game on Facebook for 2010, according to Inside Social Games late June.

Booyah raised $20 million from Accel in May, so you can be sure they will grow quickly. As Google just invested in Zynga last Friday, maybe next time it will be Microsoft who’ll invest in Booyah.

When you like a friend’s post on Facebook, you contribute to the 65 million daily Facebook likes. Think about it, that’s more than one daily like for one out of every nine Facebook users.

Facebook growth has slowed a lot, according to figures from Inside Facebook. New U.S. sign-ups dropped from 7.8 million in May to 320,800 in June.

For the most part, the people joining Facebook right now are either younger or older than the 18-44 demographic that first filled up Facebook. The largest growth among U.S. users is among 13-17-year olds, followed by people in the 45-54 and 55-65 groups.

Interestingly, of the 45+ group, a sizable larger percentage of women are joining Facebook than men. In the 45-54 group, it’s a matter of 2:1, with 98 thousand women becoming new members, while only 48 thousand men did. Among older users, the difference is not quite as big, but it’s still there: 78 thousand million female sign-ups versus 45 thousand men.

Fifty percent of Facebook users log-in daily. If one thinks of one’s own behavior, that’s not really surprising. But when one telescopes that out to 250 million people – a sizable chunk of the world’s population – that’s incredible. The 65 million likes mentioned at the top of the article represent 26 percent of Facebook users.

It’s boring to pull out platitudes when talking about Facebook. But when you see a still-young service that can get 1/100th of the world’s population to undertake an action – any action – on a daily basis, that’s still an awesome feat, no matter how bored we are of Facebook stories.

Ad targeting company Media6Degrees mines online social connections to deliver advertising to customers as well as the people that are connected to them.

Media6Degrees’ concept of social ad targeting is different than common perceptions, President and CEO Tom Phillips told eMarketer’s senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson today. While not literally social media data, the Web data used to construct custom audiences for brands does come from the social Web.

Instead of constructing audiences based on demographics, Media6Degrees uses "data that comes from connections between prospects and customers." The brand loyalists are seeds that Phillips gets directly from the client. The company technology and algorithms identify an audience based on the connections between the sites that the seeds visit and the sites that other Web browsers visit.

While there is not an explicit connection between two specific people on Facebook, for example, person A may look at content (images, blog posts, etc) from person B, and we may assume there is a connection based on this. "But it could be someone I don’t know; we both end up at the same obscure food blog or political blog or sports blog—or whatever it may be," Phillip clarifies. The data is empirical, and the connections are measured so that the most productive are valued higher in a campaign.

The business functions as a performance ad network, taking advantage of these connections for major marketers’ campaigns. "The two metrics we measure our performance by are view-throughs to site visits and view-throughs to conversions." These metrics are what clients are looking at when they quantify performance.

Media6Connect does not believe they are making demographics obsolete, but that this approach is more important. "If all the trends are in our favor, then we’ll do a better job finding audiences for marketers than the conventional way," Phillips predicts. If Facebook moves beyond demographics to abstracted data, "it would be huge for us."

In technology as in culture, when the traditional players take a page from the innovators’ playbook, one of two things generally happens.

The traditional player’s adoption of innovation can be so successful that it co-opts or even bests the innovators (remember back when Google’s acquisition of Twitter was inevitable? Remember Google Buzz?).

Or the opposite can happen, and traditional actors become plot points on the way to the paradigm shift (see: AOL, MySpace).

We don’t know if either of these scenarios will play out with Visa’s entry into PayPal’s space with Rightcliq, but PayPal, debit cards, waning customer confidence, micropayments, new legislation and even Gen Y are certainly chipping away at the credit card industry.

Visa’s Rightcliq “is an online shopping tool targeted to consumers that assists online shoppers by offering the ability to browse multiple merchants and select items consumers are interested in looking at in one central location, making comparison shopping easier,” Joseph Saunders, Visa’s chairman and CEO, said in an October 2009 conference call.

Rightcliq is essentially a place to collect your payment and delivery information. It allows users to collate a “Wishspace” where they can bookmark their desired purchases, comparison shop and e-mail product images to friends. In essence, it’s an emulation of PayPal, which has 81 million active accounts and whose recent partnership with Facebook brings aboard more than 300 million potential customers.

Rightcliq is currently available in beta. Not many details are available right now from Visa, but analysts expect a more robust version to be available in Spring.

Analysts see the move as an attempt to take a share from PayPal, according to Internet Retailer.

“It’s too early to tell if Visa is going to be a challenger,” said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor Corp . “They can get the consumer usage piece, but working with SMBs and the stored-balance piece remain to be seen.”

Surprising news yesterday from Facebook: the social network officially signed a strategic agreement with PayPal to become one of the alternative methods to pay for Facebook ads and Facebook credits. Neither the length of the contract nor the sharing ratio is specified but it’s a 180° shift in strategy on Facebook’s part.

The announcement was not expected as Facebook had its own payment system in beta for years (see here and here) which will still exist for virtual goods.  One simple fact can explain this decision: already 70% of Facebook users live outside the US, as do the advertisers.

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Image via CrunchBase

Barely two days after launching Buzz, the social networking feature for Gmail, Google bought the social search engine Aardvark for $50 million on February 11.

This acquisition is part of Google’s strategy of going social in order to compete with Facebook and Twitter.

Aardvark is a social search engine founded in July 2007 by former Google employees. The San Francisco startup, which launched its service in private beta in 2008, allows web users to ask questions which are then distributed through their social network and sent to someone who can answer them.

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Spam and malware attacks on social networks have risen 70 percent in the last year, according to data protection firm Sophos.

Thirty-six percent of respondents to Sophos’ survey have been sent malware over social networks in the past year, an increase of 69.8 percent. Fifty-seven percent of respondents have been spammed via social networks.

“Computer users are spending more time on social networks, sharing sensitive and valuable personal information, and hackers have sniffed out where the money is to be made,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

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I spend infinitely more time on social networks in 2009 than I did in 2008, as did most people, according to Nielsen.

Globally, time spent on social networks increased an average of 2.5 hours per month between December 2008 and December 2009, a growth of 82 percent year-over-year, the research firm announced last Friday.

In December of 2008, people spent an average of just under 3 hours and 4 minutes per month on social networks; in December 2009, the total time jumped to 5 hours and 35 minutes per month.

Obviously, Facebook accounts for most of this time, but it’s amazing to see that the amount of time spent on social networks since the days of static MySpace pages. Sixty-seven percent of global internet users visited Facebook last year, and those who use the site end up spending more than six hours per month on it.

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It’s fair to say that Facebook is not the best place to go if you’re trying to avoid the temptation to spend.

From the sometimes-effective-oftentimes-hilarious targeted advertising to updates on what your friends are purchasing – whether it be a vacation, dinner and drinks or Avatar tickets – the fact is that a lot of Facebook activity is predicated upon money spent, or waiting to be spent.

Until now.

Stop Me from Spending! is a Facebook app developed by Youth Media International (Youth Radio) and Context Optional to help young people budget.

“‘Stop Me from Spending!’ grew out of the recognition that young people are hugely influenced by their friends, so this was a real opportunity to tap that peer orientation in a positive way,” said Lissa Soep, PhD, senior producer and research director, Youth Radio.

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