This is a great story from the Washington Post on what happens when your parents ask to be your friend on Facebook. The “No Parents On Facebook” Group is getting lots of members.
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Facebook – Making Cheating Easy Since 2004

This guy is probably getting expelled from University for being the administrator of a study group on Facebook that has been used to cheat on their course.

Beacon – Worse Than Ever

This blogger reckons the notorious Facebook Beacon service now not even telling users that the content in your newsfeed is an ad.
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Zuckerberg In a “Train Wreck” at SXSW

An interview with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was the keynote at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW). However, it didn’t go as planned with crowd heckling and eventually taking over the questions. The interviewer, journalist Sarah Lacy, was not impressed and used the power of Twitter to let the crowd know what she thought of their attitude; “Seriously screw all you guys…”. Geeks are scary when they are in crowds. Watch the video if you want to see it for yourself.
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Blood Donations on Facebook

Feeling a little empty from all your poking and sheep throwing. Now you can install a Facebook App that actually has a useful social responsible purpose.
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Facebook Poach Google Exec

Sheryl Sandberg, VP of Global Online Sales & Operations at Google, is leaving to be the new COO at Facebook.
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French Facebook is Live

Continuing their international strategy, Facebook is now live in French.
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Technorati Tags: facebook

One feature MySpace had over Facebook was the tools for musicians. MySpace really started as the social network to connect fans with bands. Now Facebook has finally introduced this feature set which could be the final nail in the coffin for MySpace. A professional music offering in partnership with record labels is also in the works.
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Dumped via Facebook

Interesting look at how breaking up works in the world of social networking.
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Interesting Presentation

Charlene Li is an analyst at Forrester Research. She gave this presentation this week at the Graphing Social Patterns conferences in San Diego. It is an interesting look at where we might be heading with social networks like Facebook.

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Facebook Poach Google Exec

Facebook have announced the appointment of their new COO as Sheryl Sandberg, currently Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. Google has not been that popular with competitors in the Valley as they have sucked up a huge amount of talent. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft has been furious at some of the key people Google have poached from them. Now it looks like Facebook could be doing the same thing to the big G.
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Viral Campaigns in Facebook – Not Exactly Built to Last

This is an excellent post that looks at how viral campaigns around Facebook Apps may have an initial peak in usage, but then trying to maintain interaction over time becomes increasingly difficult and your audience just move on to the next thing. The only conclusion to draw from this is that you should not be putting all your budget into the development of one game or tool for Facebook. A better strategy might be to just treat Facebook Apps like campaigns and focus on rolling out new applications on a schedule.
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Business Week Interview with Zuckerberg

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Zuckerberg – Youngest Billionaire Ever

The new Forbes list is out and Facebook founder/CEO is the youngest self-made billionaire in the world apparently.
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Technorati Tags: facebook

As a parent, I have to say there is no logically destination for publishing this sort of content online for sharing with friends and family. Some of my friends use Facebook, but I would prefer something where it is was easier to control who has access, which Totspot offers.

The jury is still out on niche social networks, however, I think this one might have a viable size audience.

Techcrunch have a bit more detail.

Technorati Tags: totspot

It’s Hammer Time people!

Technorati Tags: dancejam, mchammer

Facebook Cracks Down on Apps But Opens Arms to Flash

Facebook has finally given you the option to permanently block an application and stop receiving vampire, texas hold-em, etc, etc requests continuously. This is a great news for users, not so great for app developers who rely almost entirely on the viral way in which it has worked to date. One top of this, Facebook has restricted the number of invites you can send out to your friends, further reducing the viral capability. Facebook has however announced that you can start putting Flash content into your Facebook Pages (the business version of a profile). This is good news.

TheUADA

TheUADA is supposed to provide Facebook developers a united front to Facebook and advertisers, offering to broker deals and try to create standard rates for advertising and sponsorship. Techcrunch takes an interesting look at the company behind it.

Facebook for Auditors

This chap got a nasty shock when was he audited by the tax department and they had been tracking his activity via social networking sites.
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German Facebook Ready to Launch?

http://facebook.de/ says We’re upgrading. Germany is the second largest population Second Life. Will they take to Facebook in the same way?

Facebook is Getting a Facelift

New tabbed Profile screen coming soon. Get a sneak peak at the designs.

Help This Guys Achieve His Dream…

Of inducing a massive coronary. Join this guy’s Facebook Group and if he reaches 100,000 people he promises to eat all 12 McDonald’s value meals in one sitting. It is good to have personal goals.

3 Years of Jail Time for a face Facebook Profile

What the…this guy got arrested for setting up a fake profile of the King’s brother in Morocco. It seems Moroccan judges take this sort of thing very seriously as this prankster has now been sentenced to three years in prison!
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Videos – Facebook Stalker and Infomercials

For your viewing pleasure:

I have previously suggested that Facebook will need to be aware of the possibility of losing out to local competitors if they don’t naturalise the site for foreign languages quickly enough.
Well, it seems they have a bit of a fight on their hands for Latin America. Sonico has over 8 million users and has launched a Portuguese version as well as Spanish so that covers Central and South America. This site is only 7 months old. Cuidado Facebook. They did launch their Spanish language version this week, just in time.
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President Bush Joins Facebook

Not really.
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Facebook Visitor Numbers Drop in the UK

Nielsen Online reported a drop in visitor numbers of 5% between December and January. The press are keen to play this as a indicator of Facebook’s impending doom, but what they don’t say, is that Nielsen’s methodology for measuring traffic is almost as flawed as their TV ratings system. People are offline over Xmas, so I unless this is a continuous trend, I don’t think this is anything significant. You will get certain users who are fatigued, but there will still be new users joining. I get this every week, a new friend has just discovered Facebook and is incredibly active for the first couple of weeks.
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Giving up Facebook for Lent

Not logging in to Crackbook is now on par with giving up smoking or alcohol for Lent.
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How Fashionable Are You?

Facebook and Vogue are running a campaign “How Fashionable Are You?“. Upload an image of yourself in the your latest season outfit and you could be off to the London Fashion Show.
London Fashion Show Group

Facebook Exec Resigns

Chief Revenue Officer, Owen Van Natta, is leaving after more than two years.
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I do believe that the 3D web is coming and that gaining an understanding of this space is essential for all online marketers as it will continue to grow in popularity, however, right now I don’t believe the return on investment can be justified.

This hasn’t stopped MTV’s parent company Viacom, from entering the arena with their new virtual world, vLES – virtual Lower East Side. They have based this around the creative district of New York, renowned for young bands and music. You sign up as a fan, or a band. If you are fan, you can listen to and rate music, cruise around the various venues and attend live performances and events, and of course interact with other people. Bands gets to opportunity to promote themselves and get people to listen to their music as well as perform live.

This is sort of a Second Life meets MySpace.

A made a video of my first little look around vLES. There aren’t a lot of people there when I visited, although this is the first week. I actually like the concept and the execution is pretty good, however, I’ll be surprised if they can make up the numbers required to turn this into a viable community and business model.

For more on virtual worlds, check out this trailer for the upcoming documentary Second Skin which looks at this whole space:

Technorati Tags: mtv, virtualworlds, vLES

The competition involved entrants drawing “what green means to you” with graffiti.

Here are the stats:

• 7,302 entries
• 150 finalists
• Over 1 million votes!
• 6 category winners

The best overall winner was this guy. I didn’t know this, but apparently Graffiti Wall let’s you play back the entire process of the artists creating the graffiti.

This is an excellent example of how to execute a campaign that combines the best of consumer generated media with social networking. Very well done Dell.

Thanks to Andy for the link to this.

Technorati Tags: dell, facebook, regeneration

Zuckerberg Appears on 60 Minutes

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, appeared on current affairs TV show 60 Minutes. Here are the clips from YouTube:

Some highlights:

“Beacon makes Facebook less commercial.”
“we have to make money”
“it is highly unlikely we will go public in 2008″

For a detailed look at Beacon, Facebook’s newest advertising service, see my previous post.

Checkout the Techcrunch analysis and read the comments at the bottom.

Facebook in legal trouble with Hasbro

Toy company Hasbro has sent a cease and desist notice to Facebook over the third party application the Scrabulous Game, which they say breaches their copyright for the Scrabble board game.
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2% of All UK Internet Traffic goes to Facebook

This is according to Hitwise for December 2007 and is a 10-fold increase on the previous 12 months.
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Outsync puts Facebook Photos in Outlook

This is interesting, it will sync your Facebook data with your Outlook address book and import photos. Not much use to me as I would be looking for the equivalent on Mac.
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Rumours that Facebook will buy Plaxo for US$200 million

Plaxo is a utility that helps keep your address book in Outlook (or many other mail/contact manager applications) up to date for you by automatically emailing your contacts and asking them to update their details. They are up for sale, and it is suggested Facebook could be a buyer.
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New Investors for Facebook

German Internet entrepreneurs, the Samwer Brothers, have become shareholders in Facebook this week. How much money does Facebook need? The details of the deal have yet to be announced, but Facebook took US$240 million from Microsoft and US$60 million from a Hong Kong based billionaire in November 2007. I would love to see their burn rate.
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Facebook apps for Productivity

Most would regard Facebook as extremely unproductive but Lifehacker have a good post on which apps you can install for maximum productivity.
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Confused? I sure am. I don’t think I’m in the target demographic, but you should definitely take a look as it is a very different approach to a user interface.