While it might be the most popular U.S. website, consumers are saying they don’t much like the social networking giant, according to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business Report (it’s free for download).

Facebook grade: 64% on ACSI’s 100-point scale. At most schools, that would be a low D or D-.

This lousy score put satisfaction with the site below that of the ever-unpopular IRS. It places Facebook in the bottom 5% of all measured private sector companies and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction.

Of course, customer dissatisfaction doesn’t mean a company or organization doesn’t make boatloads of money off its business. Airlines and cable companies prove that.

Even the IRS rakes in plenty of cash despite its unpopularity. (Being able to threaten jail time might have something to do with that, however.)

Social media websites are measured for the first time by ACSI, which took a look at Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube.  Twitter wasn’t included in the category because many of its users access it through third-party apps other than Twitter.com.

Wikipedia leads the category at 77, followed by YouTube at 73, Facebook at 64 and MySpace at 63.

In the search engine category, there was also some surprising news about the ever-popular Google. The site Google plunged 7% this year. Still, it continues to lead the portals and search engines industry with a score of 80.

It’s also just the second time that Google hasn’t held the top spot, as the “all others” category of search engine competitors jumped 5% to 82.  Microsoft’s Bing search engine makes a strong first showing with a score of 77, trailed by Yahoo! (76), AOL (74), and Ask.com (73).

How does it work? The collector searches Facebook for their target and issues a “friend” request. Many folks automatically accept these requests and that gives the collector an inside track not only into contact information, but details about the debtors’ lives that could be useful.

Posts about new cars, jewelry or houses could be used by the collector to place liens on such property to recover the money owed.

There’s some debate about whether “friending” a stranger in order to track them down for debts violates the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act of 1978 which has strict guidelines about using deception in order to contact or communicate with a debtor.

But there was no Facebook — or other social media site — in 1978 when the Act was created. For now, it will be up to the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the act, to decide if this tactic is legal.

Collectors no doubt love the practice. Debtors, not so much.

What do finance folks think?

With this in mind, the company’s retreating from its idea of insisting that folks who post on their popular game forums use their real names.

Makers of World of Warcraft and StarCraft II, Blizzard had announced recently that anybody posting to these sites in the future could no longer do so anonymously or by using a game character name.

To quote the company’s announcement: “In the near future, anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it.”

The company leaders were hoping to introduce a more civil tone and friendly discourse on the forums — which was pretty lousy. Again, to quote the original announcement: “The forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling and other unpleasantness run wild.”

Well, those trolls, flamers and generally unpleasant folks didn’t like this idea at all.

After the announcement was made, they began posting their nearly universal dislike of the new policy.

After getting hit with a flood of complaints, Blizzard seems to have fully abandoned the idea of forcing posters to use real names. CEO Mike Morhaime posted the new decision on the same forum site his company’s attempting to tame.

Morhaime wrote in his post:

“We’ve been constantly monitoring the feedback you’ve given us, as well as internally discussing your concerns about the use of real names on our forums. As a result of those discussions, we’ve decided at this time that real names will not be required for posting on official Blizzard forums.”

What can companies do to insure that the forums they host retain an air of collegiality and friendliness? Do consumers really want collegiality and friendliness, or are they more drawn to conflict and hostility?

When your company sells products and hosts forums with names that include “War” and “Battle” in them, it’s tough to make a strong case for cooperation and conciliation.

Case in point: At the same time that they’re trying to introduce a level of camaraderie  and friendliness to online discussions, they’re also planning to launch “Cataclysm.”

Does this seem a little delusional to anyone out there?

Apparently, the folks at Blizzard need to take Branding 101.

A new forecast for growth in the sector predicts that this year alone, online ads will increase by an estimated 12.4% to $61 billion.

This optimistic forecast comes from Magna Global this week, the research division of IPG’s Mediabrands.

Paid search continues to be the leading format attracting marketers to the digital platform, and this performance-based media will enjoy 16.5% growth in 201, reaching $29.8 billion.

The research finds that non-search advertising will grow more slowly at 8.7% to $31.2 billion.

Says the report: “Social networking sites such as Facebook capture a large and growing share of audience time.  While advertising is becoming increasingly important for social networks — and is undoubtedly growing much more rapidly than the rest of online advertising — they generally punch “below weight” given the premium pricing that conventional content publishers can extract from their inventory.”

Analysts predict that if these trends continue over the next five years, they expect online advertising to collectively grow by 11.7% in 2011 and by an average rate of 11.0% through 2015.

But then,  global industry will generate $103 billion dollars a year.

No recession there.

A recent New York Times story profiles the career and business of Ben Huh, a thirty-something web entrepreneur who’s turned his sense of humor into a thriving online company. Huh stumbled across the hyper-popular site “I Can Has Cheezburger” a few years ago and had an epiphany about what Internet surfers are looking for: something to smile about.

Someone at “I Can Has Cheezburger” linked to Huh’s own pet website and the rush of visitors it created gave Huh the idea of creating a gaggle of these sites that capture the latest web trends in humor. Huh took some of his own cash and got a few investors together so he could buy “I Can Has Cheezburger” and start his network of silly sites.

The business model is simple: All the content is submitted by fans and visitors to the site. (In the case of “I Has Cheezburger,” it’s photos of demented-looking felines with appropriately undignified captions written for them.) Staffers — there are now 40 of them — review submissions and cull the best stuff to post on the variety of sites in Huh’s growing empire.

Revenue for the sites comes from advertising and there seems to be no shortage of that — sites in the “Cheezburger Network” attract about 16 million unique visitors a month.

That can translate into some serious cash flow.

What’s even more interesting about Huh’s business is that he routinely launches successful sites and kills ones that don’t work out. He told the Times he figures about 20% of the sites don’t catch on.

Unafraid to admit mistakes, Huh and his staff dismantle their failures and try again. So far, the strategy is working.

And so long as cats and other animals perform for the cameras, it’s likely it will continue.

Utah.

Yes, that bastion of conservative family values and religious fervor is also a hotbed of p0rn fans. The tally: 5.7 of every 1,000 broadband users in the state subscribes to a pornographic site. That’s according to OnlineMBA.com, a site that tracks stats on porn popularity, spending and habits in the United States.

Other interesting facts about Americans and porn:

• The most popular day of the week for viewing lewd content is Sunday
• The least popular day of the year for looking at it is Thanksgiving, when it’s assumed that fans are watching their other favorite, football
• About 12% of all websites are pornographic, with the total now over 24 million sites
• Every second in the United States, more than 3,000 computer users are viewing porn and spending more than $3,000 to do it
• Two-thirds of porn fans are men, with 70% of all men ages 18-24 visiting a porn site each month
• More than half of the global porn revenue in the world ($4.9 billion annually) is generated in the United States ($2.84 billion)
• About 2.5 billion e-mails, or 8% of all e-mail sent each day, contains porn
• 68 million web searches are looking for pornography — 116,000 of those searches are for child porn
• The most popular search term for porn is “sex,” followed at a distance by “adult dating” and “porn”
• The average age for first seeing online porn is 11
• 20% of American men admit to looking at porn on the job (13% of women do), and
• 34% of web users say they’ve gotten porn when they didn’t ask for it.

The bottom line is that online pornography may not be clean business in America, but it certainly is big business. And if anyone’s looking to curb the industry, it’s probably not a good idea to look for help from the folks in Utah. On a Sunday.

Zuckerberg seems to have made a less-than-inspiring appearance at the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital” conference, reigniting the furor over his site’s convoluted and confusing privacy controls.

This right after Facebook announced a revamp of those controls that attempted to streamline the process and make it more, well, intelligible. (Which was actually pretty easy, since the old controls were so totally unintelligible users often had trouble actually getting to them.)

So now the folks with a lot to gain by piling on Zuckerberg and Facebook have started to, well, pile on. Not that the CEO and his social networking site don’t deserve it. But make no mistake: There’s an ox to be gored here and a line’s forming for the entertainment.

In response to a discussion draft of a new privacy bill currently under consideration by the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, ten leading privacy and consumer organizations today called for much stronger provisions to protect consumer privacy both online and off.

Yes, that’s ten privacy and consumer groups. Didn’t know there were that many, but believe me, they’re coming out of the woodwork.

The groups, including the Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Watchdog, World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, USPIRG, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Times, Privacy Lives, and the Center for Digital Democracy, raised their concerns in a letter to Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher and Ranking Member Cliff Stearns.

Recognizing that “consumers increasingly rely on the Internet and other digital services for a wide range of transactions and services, many of which involve their most sensitive affairs, including health, financial, and other personal matters,” the groups made a number of recommendations for strengthening the draft privacy bill, including the following items:

• The bill should incorporate the Fair Information Practice Principles that have long served as the bedrock of consumer privacy protection in the U.S., including the principle of not collecting more data than is necessary for the stated purposes, limits on how long data should be retained, and a right to access and correct one’s data
• The bill’s definitions of what constitutes “sensitive information” need to be expanded; for instance, to include health-related information beyond just “medical records.”
• The bill should require strict “opt-in” procedures for the collection and use of covered data and should prohibit the collection and use of any sensitive information except for the transactions for which consumers provided it.

Any chance any of this will happen? Stay tuned.

Nothing on the site cost more than $49.95 — a mistake the site’s owners say was “inadvertent,” but still, it was their mistake.

And so they’re honoring all those middle-of-the night purchases (the glitch lasted from midnight to around 6 a.m.) and they’ll swallow the $1.6 million loss.

Ouch!

A sister site to shoe retailer Zappos.com (which is now owned by Amazon), the discount site features lots of brand name items that are deeply discounted. But not this discounted.

See, I’m kicking myself for not waiting until Friday to purchase those $200 Kate Spade shoes my daughter wanted for her wedding. (I bought them at 6pm.com a week ago, drat!)

But the folks at Zappos and 6pm make a big deal about their customer service and nothing says customer service like honoring a pricing mistake. My take on the fiasco: 6pm got more than $1.6 million in great, free publicity and customer loyalty.

Plenty of folks who’d never even heard about the site have now. Those who shop there regularly feel good about their choice.

That’s the message that’s being spread far and wide these days by Web security experts who believe most users of the social networking site have no idea how their activities on the site are being used in the marketplace.

Each time Facebook “revamps” its features, you can believe it’s not just to make finding that old college classmate or long lost cousin easier.

The message from Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online, is that each time Facebook touts a re-design or a new format, you can bet your last nickel that it’s being done as an excuse to re-set your privacy controls to a Facebook-designated default that lets the site’s owners peddle your info and activities far and wide.

Goodchild discussed the social networking site’s various privacy traps on CBS’ “The Early Show on Saturday Morning” and her top five Facebook pitfalls are worth repeating here:

• Your information is being shared with third parties
Facebook wants to make money, and they can do this by sharing your information with advertisers who want to market their products to you.

• Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
This means every time Facebook exclaims “Heads up, we’ve got a fresh look!” make sure to check your security settings and change them back to where you want them. Otherwise Facebook can share your info with advertisers — a primary function of their business model. And watch out for those cutesy  applications like Farmville or Which Jane Austen character are you? That application gets permission to access your info and could be sharing it with others without your knowledge.

• Facebook ads may contain malware
Basically Facebook is pretty sloppy about vetting their ads, says Goodchild, which could result in you clicking on an anti-virus software ad and downloading an actual virus.

• Your real friends unknowingly make you vulnerable
If one of your friends’ profiles gets hacked by a third party, that hacker can then see whatever info you’re putting out there to your pal. So if your friends aren’t making good decisions about what they share on the Web, you could be affected as well.

• Scammers are creating fake profiles
If the world knows the name of your mother, father, second-cousin and best friend from grade school, someone out there might just make a fake profile with one of their identities and beg you to say, wire $5,000 to them after they get mugged in a foreign country. Also, if you have like, a bajillion friends, the odds are that a few of those are scammers who aren’t who they say they are. Recommendation: Trim that “Friends” list down to a few trusted folks.

As Facebook grows in influence and power, it also seems to be finding plenty of trouble to get itself into.

Just last week, users discovered that a security hole made their private chats not so private — everyone on their contact list could listen in.

In addition, more than a dozen privacy and consumer protection organizations have now filed a complaint with the FCC claiming the site plays with privacy settings intentionally to make users’ personal info fair game for commercial use.

Remember the mantra I told you from the beginning? Repeat it. Now go check (or delete) your Facebook profile.

In short, you should target mothers. Moms buy stuff, lots of stuff. Mostly because most of us know that any kid or husband who wants something, merely has to mention it to the mother in the family and thereby send her into high spending gear.

Nurturing, providing, nesting … all those things take so much stuff. Many of these moms work long hours with few days off and lots of isolation with small kids who aren’t exactly great company all the time.

All this makes them want to do what? Spend money! And now, Web savvy merchants are getting a direct line to some of their best shoppers — many of them the kind of  “recreational shoppers” who have lots of time to do price comparisons and collect coupons.

One new site that distills this shop til you drop mentality is “Juice in the City,” which lets you buy local “deals” online and then redeem them at local merchants.

According to the site’s founders, Juice in the City “launched the day after Mother’s Day 2010 because neither of us got a damn thing we really wanted. ” The site  “aims to bring moms what they really want: insanely good deals on crazy-fun things to do.”

Of course, you have to live in one of the metro areas the site serves, a weird collection that includes Alexandria (Virginia, we presume) and London.

Here’s the site. Will it work?