Archives: April 2009

As Facebook searches for ways to increase their revenue, some users are being asked if they are willing to pay for vanity URLs. For those unaware of what vanity URLs are, they are the short strings that follow “facebook.com”. For example, the AllFacebook.com public profile has a short URL which is “http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook”. A number of celebrities and high profile individuals have been granted profile URLs for free as a way to encourage them to update their Facebook public profiles more regularly.
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Ready to join Facebook? Excellent. The first step is to add everybody that you’ve ever met by importing your contacts from your email and adding everybody as friends. Just make sure that you add these individuals to pre-selected friend lists. That way you can configure all your privacy settings as necessary. Don’t know how to configure your Facebook privacy settings?
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Today the updated version of Facebook for Blackberry has gone live. I just downloaded the application by visiting mobile.blackberry.com from my Blackberry’s mobile browser. I previously wrote about the updated Facebook Blackberry application back in March and all of the cool new features that come with it. It looks pretty slick and I’m waiting to finish installing it so I can post a video review.
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This afternoon Google posted about a new feature which enables users to search for “me” to find their own Google profiles. Google recently upgraded their profile features but the company is now investing heavily in making profiles a more integrated part of search. Want to find somebody on the web? If they’ve set up their Google profile properly, they will show up in a box that displays profile results (as pictured below).
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Just over a week ago I wrote that LivingSocial has become the top Facebook application. The company has continued to expand their lead and as of today have become the largest Facebook application ever based on monthly active users. Previously, Causes held the record of 26.95 million monthly active users. Today LivingSocial breached the previous record, jumping to 27.13 million monthly active users, up from approximately 20 million just over a week ago.
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Over the past few days there has been increasing buzz about a market for Facebook public profiles. I’ve even received a few emails on the topic, one individual who was asking me about reasonable rates for purchasing public profiles. While I haven’t heard of any finalized transactions yet I’d expect this to become increasingly regular. Just last week Jason Kincaid posted about CNN acquiring the extremely popular CNNbrk Twitter account from another Twitter user who had been personally managing it.
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LOLapps is officially launching today, after having been in stealth mode for well over six months now. The company is actually a developer firm that’s behind many apps you’re probably familiar with, including Quiz Creator and Gift Creator. If you spend any time on Facebook, you’ve likely come across one of the many user-generated applications LOLapps powers, such as “Which Sex & the City Character Are You?” among others.

The company reports that its official launch comes with over 44 million monthly unique visitors to its applications. The data itself has been difficult to verify since LOLapps was in stealth mode for so long and has not listed itself as the developer behind Gift Creator and Quiz Creator. But with $4.5 million in funding from Polaris Ventures and angel invstors including Ron Conway, the company certainly has the resources to reach a great deal of users across several social networking platforms.
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This evening Qik is officially announcing support for Facebook Connect which means videos that you streamed live via Qik can now be uploaded directly to Facebook. Recently I had posted a comment on the AllFacebook.com public profile suggesting that whoever develops a live streaming video solution for the news feed will get a ton of users. This is the closest thing to my live streaming concept.
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Deutsche Telekom has pulled their Facebook advertisements after they were positioned next to Neo-Nazi groups. The first advertisements to be pulled from the site were for 3min, a German website which publishes original video content. According to one of our readers, Viktoria Steinmeyer, the advertisements for “4010-der Telekom-Shop in Mitte” (found here) were also pulled. This is not the first time that extremist or politically affiliated groups have resulted in companies pulling their advertisements from Facebook.
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Cooliris is a browser extension that lets you browse photos, videos games and news stories from various websites. A new Facebook application for Cooliris is taking the browser extension to the next level with Facebook-specific media enhancing features, including an interactive 3D wall for speedy browsing.

The Cooliris Facebook app allows you to scan all of your friends’ photos at once, in this 3D wall. The interactive portion comes into play when you note you’re able to skip to more photos of a friend based on their tags. These photos will also be seen in an interactive 3D wall.
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