Universal Studios has launched a Facebook app for the new year, giving away 2,010 Blu-ray movies. Cute, right? The weekly sweepstakes includes 25 prize packages, with films such as Wanted, Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The hope is that the new Facebook app will gain a good amount of traction and help Universal to get a stronger foothold in the social media space.
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Google has received a lesser deal than what Microsoft got out of its deal with Facebook. The widely used social network is now being tapped for socially-driven real time search results, helping Microsoft and Google to give contextually improved search queries. Yet Microsoft’s Bing has access to all of Facebook’s public news feeds for this purpose, while the recently revealed details of Google’s deal with Facebook indicates that the massive search engine will only be able to access the public news feeds of Facebook Pages.
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Are Facebook groups the new intervention? A new group on Facebook has been started by the son of John Mellencamp, the rock and roll legend. The purpose of the group is to rally support for Mellencamp to quit smoking. The deal made between father and son is that if 1,000,000 people join the group, Mellencamp will toss the cancer sticks for good.
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I just celebrated my birthday about a month ago, and received the obligatory birthday wishes on my Facebook wall. It makes me happy to see all those birthday wishes. I’m a bit of a ham when it comes to my own birthday celebrations. But for Vikki Ortiz Healy over at the Chicago Tribune, such Facebook wishes are a plight of insincerity in the digital era.
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Face.com, the company behind the Photo Finder, has revealed a new photo-related app today called Photo Tagger. It’s about productivity versus discovery, which is the main differentiating factor between the two applications. What Photo Tagger does is search through your albums or the albums of your friends, and tags people in batches.
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Facebook Marketplace has undergone a few changes in the past few months or so, and in an effort to maintain prominence for users, the Facebook Marketplace is adding a new feature today as well. Called “Shout” the new feature aims to make the Facebook classifieds more social.
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Muggmaker is a new Facebook application that allows you to create animated avatars. The avatars can then be used as your profile photo on Facebook, or other social media sites. Unlike the trend for animating an existing photo of yourself, Muggmaker doesn’t convert existing photos but enables you to create an avatar entirely from scratch.
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oDesk, the web-based tool for workteams, now supports Facebook Connect. This goes for both oDesk registered buyers and service providers, extending oDesk user capabilities to find the right person for the job within their social graph.
The three main aspects of oDesk’s Facebook Connect integration include the ability to share information including job openings, oDesk profile updates, and test results. As your oDesk profile acts as your online resume, an update to your profile could mean you have added more job experience or have received certification that adds a few letters after your name.
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A new iPhone app allows you to record voice messages and post them directly to your Facebook profile. Called FaceMic, this new app takes advantage of the nifty new features of the iPhone OS 3.0 and provides a way for you to post updates, podcasts and other audio to your Facebook news feed. Just as with videos shared on your Facebook profile, the FacMic audio will play directly from your newsfeed.
Once you download the app to your iPhone (it costs 99 cents), there’s no registration necessary. FaceMic is integrated with Facebook Connect, so you can use your Facebook credentials to login. From there, you can pull up the app anytime, and start recording. Once you’re satisfied with the audio message, hit publish and it will appear on your Facebook profile.
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All the brands are doing it–finding a way to integrate somehow with social networking platforms, namely Facebook. And while many brands are going so far as to create an application of their own, Bombay Sapphire has teamed up with Real Drinks in order to take advantage of its gifting application on Facebook. The Real Drinks app lets users purchase real drinks for friends, by sending them redeemable gift cards of sorts that can be taken to any bar or restaurant in the U.S.
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