Interviews

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Sean Flannagan, the product manager at Etsy responsible for their recent Facebook Connect implementation. Numerous companies have been implementing the service and we’ve been keeping track of the experience for developers as well as marketers. Etsy recently launched their first integration with Facebook Connect and from the sounds of it, have a number of other exciting Facebook-enabled products on the way. Below is my interview with Sean Flannagan about the company’s experience with implementing Connect.
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Last week we got the opportunity to speak with the team behind NutshellMail, a recent fbFund winner. NutshellMail enables users to manage all of their social network email accounts through one system. I took the time to sign up last week and I have to admit that the service is pretty slick. I actually don’t use multiple social networks to manage my contacts (although I still occasionally log in to LinkedIn), but many users have distributed contacts across many networks making this product extremely useful. Check out my interview with founders Mark Schmulen and David Lyman below.
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MyChurch, the winner of the most recent fbFund incubator program, has undergone a lot of changes this year. A relaunch of its application a few weeks back and the participation in fbFund ’09 has provided a wealth of opportunity for the MyChurch team, as they find useful ways in which to create an application around existing faith-based organizations that need additional social networking tools. I had an opportunity to interview Joe Suh, CEO of MyChurch, who speaks on the relaunch of the application, as well as being a winner of the fbFund.
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AdNectar is one of the most interesting advertising companies that currently service the Facebook platform as well as other social platforms. What makes them unique is their laser focus on virtual gifts. When I first met them in person earlier this year, they were one of the presenting companies at a conference in New York and I had a chance to learn more about what their company offers. AdNectar is in an interesting position in that they are competing directly with companies like Facebook who currently offer branded gift campaigns outside of the platform.
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When Facebook hosted the first ever governance vote a couple of weeks ago, one of the biggest winners of the vote was Wildfire Promotion Builder, the company that developed the Facebook Governance voting application. As soon as I noticed that Facebook hadn’t built the application internally I had to find out who was behind the company.

After doing a little digging I found out that the company was a winner in the last round of the fbFund, Facebook’s seed fund for entrepreneurs looking to build applications with Facebook’s social technology. The company appears to have perfect timing, offering a suite of tools for developing branded interactive promotions, many of which are targeted at leveraging Facebook’s new public profile format. Last week AllFacebook had the opportunity to talk with Victoria about the company’s plans.
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Online social networks lend themselves to anonymity, but sometimes you just need to know if a person is really who they say they are. Purewire Trust offers a service that verifies the reputation of online users, breaking search tabs down into people, things and places. The purpose of Purewire Trust is to make the web a safer place for communication, and its recent support of Facebook Connect is the latest step Purewire Trust has taken down that path. Below is an interview with Purewire Trust CTO, Paul Judge, PhD.
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fbFund winner LuckyCal is a social calendar tool that takes advantage of Facebook for its connectivity amongst users and application platform for interactive purposes. Months after being awarded funding from the fbFund, LuckyCal has been pushing forward and seeking growth. One way in which this application is looking to gain more users is through a promotion where users are entered in the chance to win a prize by inviting their friends to join in on the LuckyCal fun. I took the promotion as an opportunity to catch up with LuckyCal, and learn more about the promotion.
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Yahoo launched Fire Eagle last fall as a location-based “switch board” of sorts, enabling individual users to take control of the geo-data they’re pushing out across the social web. As developers of sites and applications began using Fire Eagle to extend location-based features to their own end users, we saw in interesting interaction between these three aspects of geo-data as a service such as Fire Eagle actually helped individual users become more comfortable with sharing geo-data.

As Fire Eagle has recently launched an application of its own on Facebook, I interviewed Tom Coates, head of the Fire Eagle project, to learn more about the goals of Fire Eagle and its aims for growth.
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Last week I did our first live interview on AllFacebook with Clara Shih, the author of “The Facebook Era” to discuss her new book and what lies ahead for Facebook. Over the past week she has been speaking at a number of conferences and also at Harvard Business school. Her website for The Facbeook Era just launched which includes a bunch of information about the book and has other links for more information.

If you didn’t have a chance to check out the interview the last time around, I’ve embedded it below. It’s less than 20 minutes and discusses everything you need to know about the book.
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“Real life. Not sugar coated.” is the tagline for Herhotspot, an online community site aimed at 20-something women. And the company behind it, Entitled Labs, wants to keep it that way.

The site is the first property by Entitled Labs, which was co-founded in late 2008 by co- James and Brette Borrow. HerHotSpot launched in January and is dubbed a one-stop shop for information, education and entertainment, where women can read, write and discuss issues that are important to them openly and honestly.

Entitled Labs integrated Facebook Connect into HerHotSpot in late February, and with that came a fair amount guys signing up for the site, said Entitled Labs co-founder James Borow in an interview.
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