Archives: March 2009

Facebook is well known for their hidden Easter eggs around the site. For those of you not aware of what I mean by Easter eggs, they are little things that developers leave behind in the process of building out a product. For the Facebook site there are currently two random photos that have been found. One that many people have been pinging me about for the past month is the photo of a guy who has a baby bib on which says “Little Celtics Fan”.
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According to Jessica Vascellaro of the Wall Street Journal, Facebook’s Chief Financial Officer, Gideon Yu, is leaving the company. We wrote about Gideon Yu joining back in July of 2007, prior to the company raising $240 million from Microsoft. Since then, there have been rumors that Facebook is seeking more financing but so far no attempts have been successful.

Jessica Vascellaro speculates that Facebook “is stepping up plans” to go public “despite the rocky economy”. My guess is that it’s more related to Gideon Yu’s unsuccessful attempts at generating new rounds of funding. Whatever the reason behind the departure, it is bad timing considering that just 3 weeks ago, Net Jacobsson, the Director of Business Development at Facebook, left the company as well.
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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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You’ve spent countless hours on Facebook and while navigating through your friends’ profiles you occasionally come across somebody with 1,000 or more friends and think to yourself: does this person really know 1,000 people and why do they have so many friends? Whether you like it or not, the number of friends you have on your profile has suddenly become a regular topic of conversation and many users wear it as a badge of honor.

Aside from the social value developed through a large network, there are many other benefits of improving your network. In his book “How to Win Friends and Influence People“, Dale Carnegie explains how to achieve financial success through building more effective relationships among other things. Facebook can just as easily be used as a tool for accomplishing your goals in similar ways that Dale Carnegie taught.

Below are 10 of the best ways you can use Facebook to win friends and influence people. Please feel free to add to this list in the comments!
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Today Adobe announced the launch of a new library that developers can take advantage of for integrating Facebook directly into their Flash applications. Previously, developers like Zynga and Playfish, were forced to developer their own libraries and workaround that made it possible for their popular gaming applications to integrate with the platform.
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Facebook’s redesign a couple weeks ago created a lot of backlash among millions of users but one company not complaining was Quiz Monster, who has now become a staple of every user’s news feed. The company has now also shot up the developer leaderboard to become the 10th largest application developer. One of the company’s more popular applications takes the name of the company, Quiz Monster, and lets users create their own quizzes that can then be published to the news feed.
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When Facebook released the upgraded version of public profiles (formerly “Pages”) a couple weeks ago, they gave businesses and public figures access to a new direct channel of communication with fans: the news feed. Since then, comments and “likes” of public profile stories have jumped substantially and many are finding the redesign to be much more effective at engaging users. There are still many features that are lacking though.
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When Facebook released the Facebook developer platform two years ago, one of the greatest incentives to developing was the viral distribution of applications through application invites. Soon enough, invitations were limited as users began complaining about the massive influx of new application invites and developers began abusing the system.
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Tomorrow Facebook should theoretically be crossing the 200 million users level tomorrow based on our estimates but according to Wei Zhu of Facebook, the number could be as high as 280 million. While speaking at a Facebook Tech Talk, Wei Zhu slips and says that the site has 250 million users if not 280 million users (I’ve included the video below). At that point a communications person (I’d assume) jumps in to correct him on the number to 200 million.
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Facebook started out as a network for college students, so it only makes sense that organizations like Kaplan turn to Facebook for outreach and to make themselves available to college and post-grad students as resources. This week Kaplan is launching a new suite of Qbank applications for the SAT/ACT, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT and NCLEX. These follow the success of Kaplan’s USLME Qbank application for medical students that was released on Facebook just weeks ago.
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