INSIDE FACEBOOK — Amazon launched a new integration with Facebook today allowing users who link their accounts to receive purchase suggestions based on their Facebook interests, see gift recommendations for friends with upcoming birthdays, and browse items popular among your social network. The integration pulls data about movie, music, and book preferences from you and your friends’ profiles and uses Amazon’s recommendation to suggest similar products. Curiously, there are not currently any additional sharing elements to communicate the social shopping experience back to Facebook...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Facebook launched a Page for media properties yesterday that includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook. The Page launched earlier this month and currently has more than 1,100 Likes. The media Page joins several other company-run Pages Facebook has launched in the recent past, including the Comedy Page, Politics Page, Global Relief and U.S. Congress Page. In a blog the company announced that it’d conducted an analysis of the 100 top media sites utilizing Facebook’s social plugins and developed a list of best practices...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Ford used the Facebook Page of its iconic Explorer to reveal the 2011 model to the public. The campaign has been building for awhile -- the company has been posting teaser photos and videos to the Page after it first announced the launch in early June. Scott Monty, Ford’s Multimedia Communications Manager, tells us that launching the totally redesigned Explorer through Facebook was the most effective way to get the word out about the new model, and the numbers from the first day of the launch back that up...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — We’ve seen more and more branded social games showing up on Facebook, as marketers try to use game features to promote their products. The latestis Cadbury’s Dairy Milk milk chocolate brand in Australia, with the rhythm game Cadbury Freida Smooth Moves. Cadbury is one of the largest confectioners in countries including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and England (as well as in a few select US stores). The game, it is based on a Cadbury commercial starring the dancing cow Freida, and it is clearly intended as a viral means to advertise the milk chocolate products. It isn’t as sophisticated as, say, some of the major social apps, but it is amusing in its own right...

INSIDE FACEBOOK — Facebook privacy is a big issue -- at least to some people. In our latest user survey, we set out to research whether ordinary Facebook users are concerned about the social network’s changing privacy
policies. A quick recap on the issue: Facebook has repeatedly run into criticism over user privacy following various product launches, including news feeds, Connect, and the ill-fated ad platform Beacon. This May, public anger at Facebook appeared to reach a fever pitch as the company released new features that would bring up user information on external websites like Yelp and Pandora. We covered the issues exhaustively on Inside Facebook. However, even our coverage left a question open: do ordinary users care?...