INSIDE FACEBOOK — WildTangent is continuing its foray into Facebook and social gaming, now providing brand-advertising offers on developer Playdom’s Facebook app, Tiki Farm. The tropical island farming game is beginning to feature brands that sponsor particular existing virtual goods in the game. Instead of a user paying for the good, they watch a video or somehow engage with an ad to get it. The first available is an orange tree, sponsored by Herbal Essence. Although WildTangent has been offering a variety of sponsored advertising services for casual games, massively multiplayer online games, and other web-based games, it began focusing on tighter integration of virtual goods recently with the launch of BrandBoost...

TECHCRUNCH — Last August, we wrote about Lunch.com, a reviews site that’s setting out with the goal to make the world a better place by changing the way people think about each other (as I wrote then, it’s a pretty lofty goal). Today, the company is launching a new feature called Communities that lets users build their own review sites around any niche topic. The new feature can be likened to a ‘Ning for review sites’. As a community founder, you select a topic on whatever you’d like, then invite other users to contribute reviews and other content (you can elect to moderate this as it comes in)...

VIRTUAL GOODS NEWS — This week Boomerang Offerwall announced its entry into the ad offer space, with a new crowdsourced product that may set it apart from its rivals. Where most ad offer networks serve ad offers based primarily on location, Boomerang Offerwall allows users who've accepted an offer to rate it with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Highly-rated offers rise to the top of the offerwall so they'll be visible to as many users as possible, while poorly-rated offers will sink to the bottom or be removed outright by Boomerang. The Boomerang Offerwall also collects demographic data about users, primarily age and gender...

ZDNET — One of the biggest challenges of social media managers who oversee large consumer or enterprise brands is content manageability. It seems as if a new social network is born every day, and only a few days after it’s introduced to the world a multitude of people push to figure out how businesses can benefit. With many companies taking the be everywhere for everyone approach to social networking, trying to keep it all in sync is a major feat. Calling it lack of manageability might be too simple of a way to put it. Some of the intricate challenges are...

VIRTUAL GOODS NEWS — This week AdNectar announced the results of a recent campaign on Facebook for Jameson Irish Whiskey. The campaign introduced a new type of branded virtual good for AdNectar, one that contained an embedded link to a Jameson Facebook app that asked users to vote for the official Jameson drink of the upcoming St. Patrick's Day holiday. Casting a vote at the Jameson app adds an official Jameson "supporter" virtual gift to a user's profile, shaped like the user's Jameson drink of choice. As of this writing, over 100,000 votes have been cast. The AdNectar branded Jameson goods appeared both in social games that participate in the AdNectar network, and in adult virtual gifting apps like Pass A Drink and Drinks On Me...