Archives: November 2008

According to The Media Line, Iran has decided to block a number of websites “perceived as immoral and anti-social”, with YouTube and Facebook being among the blocked sites. Facebook has been the source of uprisings including Colombia where they protested against the FARC as I wrote about earlier this week.

Apparently Iran is looking to protect themselves from internet uprisings and is acting fast to ban five million websites. This appears to only be a delay of the inevitable as “30 percent of the population have access to satellite TV”. As such citizens in the country still have access to unfiltered information but without Facebook and many of the social media sites, it will be a bit harder to spread ideas.
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Last year when Microsoft invested in Facebook at a $15 billion valuation I doubt they expected Yahoo! would soon fall below that level. As of yesterday’s closing price, the company now has a market capitalization of $12.67 billion, over $2 billion less than Microsoft valued Facebook at. Facebook is now valued at around $4 billion according to leaked reports about internal stock sales.
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One of the biggest problems with Facebook’s platform for developers is the limits placed on them. Whether it’s a limit on the number of invites they can send, a limit on the types of emails they can send users, there are many restrictions. Today one of those restrictions have been loosened and developers can “now incorporate a number of HTML tags so” they can format messages as they wish.
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Leader Technologies, an Ohio-based “intellectual capital company”, has filed a lawsuit against Facebook. The company claims that Facebook has infringed on one of their patents which relates generally “to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information.” Sounds like a fairly broad patent which the company simply uses to obtain recurring revenue from large digital companies.
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Veteran online local search service Citysearch has finally revealed its redesigned site, which is currently in beta testing but will eventually become the new face of Citysearch. The site has received a near-complete overhaul, shifting the focus to become more social and hopefully more relevant to end users.

Taking cues from the majority of relative newcomers in the field, such as Yelp, Citysearch has begun to do things like look to users for more content contribution (i.e. reviews, votes), as well as an improved mobile interface for additional accessibility on the go. The mobile aspect of Citysearch is important for the ongoing upgrades for better localized content.Â
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Everyone likes a free drink. But if you have to pay for a drink (especially pay for someone else’s drink), nothing beats the rock bottom price of $1.00. fbFund competitor BarTab has taken a popular gifting strategy and set a single, low price for drinks purchased through its application.

The drinks can hen be sent to friends, and they can redeem them at a local bar. In order for a friend to redeem a drink, they must provide their cell phone number in order to have their redemption coupon sent to their mobile device which can be shown to the bar tender.So far, BarTab is restricted to a handful of bars in Arizona, but the development team is currently working on expansion.
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Who said Facebook isn’t working on generating more money? This afternoon Facebook began testing out the display of three ads on the side rather than two. Previously ads were limited to either two Facebook ads, one Facebook ad and a banner, or just a banner. Now the company is testing out displaying one more.

It makes a lot of sense that the company would begin displaying more ads considering that users are scrolling further down the page on many applications and on profiles that contain more content. This is a pretty good way for the company to try increasing click-thru rates. While it’s not definite that this will accomplish their goal of generating more clicks, common logic would suggest it will.

The company has been doing an increasing number of ad tests over the past couple months including the addition of video ads which have shown up on the homepage with increasing regularity. It’s a small change but it has the potential to boost their revenue. Unfortunately we can’t yet take a look at the company’s quarterly earnings report since they aren’t public, once they are, we will definitely enjoy looking forward to how these changes impact the company’s bottom line.

The new Facebook for BlackBerry, version 1.5, is scheduled for release in January 2009, according to crackberry.com. The latest version of the BlackBerry-specific mobile site hosts a few new features that you may find helpful.

New account creation lets you make a new account directly from your BlackBerry, and you can also access and manage your Facebook phone book. This includes the ability to view your friends’ phone numbers, publish your phone number, and request phone numbers. This is an important feature as it allows users to tie in phone numbers from Facebook straight into their BlackBerry contact lists.
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I don’t know many high school students other than those in my immediate family, but the high school students I do know are often able to get a good idea about what college life is all about based on the photos shared by their college-age friends on Facebook. But if this isn’t enough, the CheckMyCampus application could shed some light on what really goes down during those formidable college years. A finalist in the fbFund competitive round, CheckMyCampus offers a media “viewing station” to provide first hand accounts of how awesome college life is across the nation. Facebook users can upload videos and images to show their own perspective of college life. The ultimate goal of CheckMyCampus is to give high school students a realistic portrayal of life on a college campus.
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This morning Jared Cohen, a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, posted an article on Facebook’s blog. In it he covers something which I covered back in March, the creation of a group on Facebook to protest the FARC. This movement, that was created on Facebook, has been used as a case study for how social technology can impact the world. It also highlights the destruction of bureaucratic barriers between governments and citizens. As Cohen writes, “This really was a new wave of civil society in which there were no offices, government grants, or forms that needed to be filled out and filed for the establishment.”

This morning I had the privilege to sit in on a panel for the Washington, D.C. Economic Partnership, in which everybody in the room was excited about two things: the new administration’s full embrace of technology, and how social technology is transforming the political realm. It is no longer required for a group of people to get together in a room and make change happen.
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