Archives: December 2007

Facebook has gone through all the applications for the fbFund and have now chosen a select group of individuals to present. They sent out the following letter to selected participants:

Thanks for submitting a proposal to fbFund. After reviewing your submission, we’d like to meet you in person. Congratulations!

We’re scheduling a series of events around the US at which we invite you to give a 10-minute presentation of your proposal.

We’re currently planning the following events:

Silicon Valley: Monday afternoon, 1/7/08, 11:30am – 1:30pm
San Francisco: Tuesday evening, 1/8/08, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
New York City: Thursday evening, 1/10/08, 6:30pm – 8:30pm

If you can’t make these dates or locations, don’t worry — we’re scheduling additional events, and will invite you to the next round.

If you’d like to present during this round, please respond to this mail with the event you’d like to attend. Otherwise, please respond with your location so we can be sure to schedule an event closer to you during the next round. Please note that we would like to see mockups of your application or a working application during your presentation.

When we receive your request, we’ll respond with a confirmation and additional details about the event. We may not be able to accommodate all requests for this round of events — if we can’t meet you this round, we’ll invite you to a future event.

Of course, if you’ve pursued other funding and are no longer interested in fbFund, congratulations to you as well — please let us know and we’ll remove your submission from our records.

Thanks, and happy holidays,
Ami Vora
The fbFund team

While I haven’t received copies of fbFund submissions I’m sure that this is a fairly select group of individuals. It will be interesting to see the first applications that launch after receiving funding from the fbFund. Looks like we are months away from seeing the first round of apps given that the initial presentations have yet to take place.

I remember the days; packets of cheap soup, saving money for beer not food, wearing the same hoodie for a week straight and trying to hit on girls you really had no chance with. Well if any of you out there had a college experience like mine, you just had a flood of memories.

I also remember people complaining about spending money on books, I was a Public Relations major so I never really bought that many books, until the internet came around. Once the internet hit you could easily find books cheaper than those price gouging money mongers at the campus book store were selling them for.

I recently came across The Textbook Price Comparison a nifty little app that compares text book prices. To be honest there are a few different text book comparisons tools out there, and I didn’t notice a price difference between them.

I think this could be a nifty tool to set up for students and friends who go to the same school to compare prices of textbooks. Other textbook Facebook applications offer an exchange style tool, but I never found those services too helpful.

At worst some of your friends can make up a few jokes when they see that you have looked up the pricing for your required reading in “Depressing Women’s Lit of the 19th Century.”

There’s an application on Facebook that helps you find a ride or people to take with you on your drive, and there are (surprisingly) enough users on it to make it useful. Today there were 14,000+ daily active users, and more than a couple of rides being offered to and from my home town.

The application allows you to post carpools and to search through rides being offered. You can set basic contact info and a price. It can be used to find one-time rides or daily commutes.

I like this application a lot. It’s nice to see a very simple application with a practical use and a user base. It’s a good way to find a lift, it’s a good way to find passengers, and it’s good for the environment.

People should, of course, be very careful when taking rides with strangers. If you fancy yourself old enough and wise enough to select someone who you don’t already know to take a ride from, be sure that you add them as a friend first and make sure you still trust them after seeing their full profile. For some it might be best to stick to people with some shared contacts.

Look for someone who knows a lot of people, and who interacts with them often, and make sure somebody who cares about you knows who you’re traveling with. Don’t go anywhere with anybody who you aren’t 100% comfortable with. Safety first, right?

- Jonathan Kleiman is the founder of the Canadian Professional Network Probook, and the Legal Intellects Law Blog

If there is one thing I don’t get about social networking is the need to spam all my friends with generic greetings. Sure glitter is nice, bunnies are nice, heck glitter on bunnies is just about the greatest thing in the world, but please don’t expect me to jump up and down with glee because you have sent me a virtual bunny covered in glitter.

Currently I am looking at the “Happy New Year 2008” app by Cardinal Blue Software. This app is a generic happy New Year messaging tool that spams all your friends. Sure, the app lets you spam them with a faux picture of your home city with some fireworks over it. To be honest I live in DC, a city with crooked politicians, swamp rats, and more homeless than I can shake a stick at… so who would want to see some fireworks over my city.

I guess I am being too hard on this application. If you have thousands of friends, which I don’t, and you want to wish them a Happy New Year, which I don’t, than this app is for you!

TD Canada Trust, one of Canada’s largest banks, has released an application called SPLIT IT GIFT IT. The application basically lets you arrange for your friends to split a gift. It’s a pretty cool idea, I guess… but I suppose nobody told them that people just don’t perform practical activities on Facebook. For the 3 days I’ve been following it, the application has had 0 daily active users.

As for the actual application, it’s about as useful as a pad of paper. You bring in co-gifters and arrange to split the cost of gifts. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t offer some neat-o way to actually pay for the gifts that you’d expect from such a powerful financial institution.

The most the application does is let you keep tabs on your friends who owe you money with “Virtual IOUs”.

I’m glad I don’t work at TD… because I probably would have suggested something similar to this… and 0 users means not even the person who suggested it is using it. Maybe he or she got fired?

- Jonathan Kleiman

The looming new year recently reminded me of something I read in June. It was a fact of human history with such a profound influence on the upcoming year that it may be the source of most of the changes of late and to come. For the first time ever, there will be more people in the world who live in cities than who don’t.
According to the United Nations Population Fund in June 2007, there are 3.3 billion people living in cities, and that number is expected to grow to 5 billion within 25 years.

Around the same time, Facebook saw unbelievable growth. Facebook had 12 million members in December 2006, and boasts around 60 million only a year later, ever climbing with an additional 250,000 new members daily and 65 billion monthly pageviews.

Proudly, my own city of Toronto is the second largest network with over one million members out of the roughly 2.5 million people living here.

There’s no doubt that Facebook has seen considerable growth in the past year, and that it will continue to. The question that hit me this morning, though, has the potential to flip my entire outlook on the world.

Did 2007 bring about the tipping point of Facebook, or urban human history as we know it? and.. what else will it mean for 2008?

- Jonathan Kleiman

Searching, as I do, for a non-useless application, I was thrilled to find GoAnimate! To put it simply, the app lets you create your own animation which can be a real blast. The app has some serious programming behind it and provides a ton of fun if you have time to play around.

You get to pick from a bunch of pre-made images, settings, items, speech bubbles, music, animations and special effects, and you can customize them however you want. You then animate your frames and make some funny stuff go down. The app has a political bend, with tons of politically charged characters to choose from like “Barack O.” and “Hilary C.” but you can also upload your own images or borrow uploaded images from others in the community.

After you’re finished with your animations, you can share them with the community. Honestly, his application might be the absolute coolest thing I’ve seen on Facebook so far.

I’m not nearly creative enough… but if you make something funny let us see in a comment!

- Jonathan Kleiman

I recently stumbled upon a fantastic Facebook application that is essentially a full-featured arcade that doesn’t take quarters! Of course, on Facebook, the dirty equivalent to a quarter is usually the requirement to spam friends with ads for the application, which is not required of the user here!

There are tons of games on the application (1,500) and they’re as easy to use and access as any other flash game online. They’ve got the classics like pac-man and some great super-mario games, and you don’t need to do anything remotely spammy to play!

I suppose the benefit of having your flash-arcade-of-choice on Facebook is the ability to see what games your friends are playing, to invite them to play the same game as you, and to compare scores after.

Think of it as an addictinggames.com on Facebook with the added benefit of social interaction. People can also rate and comment games, making it easy for the most playable games to rise to the top, while a base of 1,500 games is enough to keep anybody busy for quite some time.

I definitely recommend this application if you’re bored. Let me know if you find a diamond-in-the-rough game I missed!

- Jonathan Kleiman runs a Canadian Professional Network called Probook and a law blog called LegalIntellects.com

Holiday traffic is slow traffic for most blogs but there is an overall trend that’s beginning to appear. Facebook has been experiencing a slight decrease in buzz over the past month. After the Beacon fiasco, there was little news until the Facebook payment system was confirmed. News of a Facebook payment system should have been big news but apparently not much buzz was generated. Justin Thorp is wondering where the Facebook killer application is.

I’ve been wondering the same thing and I posted about it recently. A few commenters replied that it has only been six months but I’m still a bit skeptical. I have worked with a number of clients who are successfully generating buzz on Facebook but for the majority of users, applications are becoming annoying. Two nights ago I was speaking with my good friend’s younger brother who said that he is really annoyed by them. At the same time he has installed a number of applications.

Yes, it is the holidays. Yes, there can’t be a ton of buzz about Facebook everyday. But there is definitely a lull in the amount of good content on Facebook. There are only so many posts you can write about applications, only so many that you can write about Facebook for business and only so many things you can write about Facebook etiquette. My guess is that the buzz will reignite next year but for now, all things are quiet in Facebook town.

This is not to say that I plan on stopping the continuous coverage of Facebook. This is just a reminder that people get tired of hearing the same thing over and over without much change. Yet again, somehow there are countless blogs dedicated to the art of blogging so maybe this is in fact just a temporary down time for Facebook. It may be good to take some of the heat off their back and turn our attention towards other things for a little. Do you think the buzz is dying down?

Two years ago, Steve Rubel was speculating that social commerce would be a hot topic in 2006. I don’t think he could have forseen the launch of the Facebook platform. Facebook has changed the way that we interact with each other and keep track of our ongoing relationships. Then a few days ago Facebook began looking for beta testers for their new payment system.

Next year, look for Facebook to become the dominant player in social shopping. So what is social shopping? There are many definitions but my own definition is “the integration of recommendations from trusted sources when making a purchase decision online.” While Amazon has already integrated comments on products, the largest problem is that I don’t know who made each review. As a result, those reviews are not as valuable for me.

On Facebook, we will know what types of products our friends are purchasing (via Beacon and platform applications) and will be able to use their purchases and reviews as a guide when making our own purchases. With the advent of Facebook payment system, look for advanced e-commerce applications to rise in popularity. Just as I have made many book purchase decisions via blogs, I will now make many more of those decisions based on my friends in Facebook.

While some believe that Facebook is only big in 2007, I believe that Facebook is going to further extend their dominance next year beginning with the launch of their Facebook payment system. While the paradigm shift may not be apparent overnight, by the end of next year we will have witnessed a revolution in online shopping.