Archives: May 2009

Worio, the discovery-based search engine, is integrating with Facebook in order to leverage your Facebook activity to help you find information about the topics of interest to you. By looking at the information on your Facebook profile and the activity of your news feed, Worio can provide recommendations for information you may like. The interesting part of this recommendation system is that Worio is able to take advantage of your friends’ data coming through the news feed in order to generate more search discovery tools.
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At some point in the past 48 hours Facebook has made public profile comments and likes public information. Earlier this week I was browsing through public profiles (aka. Facebook pages) and noticed that comments and likes were not public information. Then this morning I was browsing through Facebook pages (while not logged in to the site) to check out how much more popular Vin Diesel had become. Honestly, I was searching for was the number of comments and likes on any given feed story. Suddenly the information had become public and now I’m able to view all of the comments and likes for any given feed item.
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If you’ve spoken to me about development at any point in the past few months, you’d know I’ve become a big fan of CodeIgniter for quick application development in PHP. Any regular programmer will always look for ways to save time during the development process. If you happen to be developing a Facebook Connect enabled site, then a Facebook Connect library can help save some time. Thankfully Elliot Haughin has done just that for CodeIgniter developers.
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This afternoon Facebook has announced this year’s participants in the fbFund incubator program. Two out of the eighteen participants are non-profits, meaning that they will not receive any funding but will still be able to participate in the incubator program. We’ve discussed the fbFund on a number of occasions. Over a week ago we discussed 25 of the 50 fbFund finalists, the remaining 25 of which were never posted but some of them are in the list below.
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This afternoon Hulu announced the launch of Hulu desktop which is extremely impressive. The service lets users view all Hulu videos through a single application which provides an interactive interface for navigating videos and queuing up new ones. It’s essentially a video media player for your desktop. So what ever happened to that Hulu and Facebook Connect partnership that was announced a year ago? So far we still haven’t seen Connect implemented on Hulu.com.
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The model is extremely effective: take a quiz and enter your phone number to find out the results. The only problem is that once you enter your phone number you’ll be charged $20 a week. The quiz is not actually hosted on Facebook though. Instead, users will view the advertisements on applications like the “How Well Do You Know Me?” application. The developers of the application (and the collaborating ad network) have cleverly embedded advertisements that fit well with the application.
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Omniture, the marketing optimization company, has added Facebook application demographics to its suite of solutions. What the new Facebook integration does is offer insight into Facebook marketing by offering data rendered from user behavior surrounding Facebook applications. The purpose of this new product is to offer Omniture clients a set of tools regarding Facebook marketing in order to help them make more informed decisions, specifically when it comes to Facebook apps.
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Rather than updating its payment terms without notice to users, Facebook has decided to post its payment terms to the Facbeook Governance page and is open for user feedback for the next 3 days. As Joe Sullivan, Facebook’s lead counsel for product posted today, “The new payments terms will replace the existing Terms of Sale and the payments-related sections of the Online Advertising Terms and Conditions.”
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How much would you pay for a Facebook fan? That’s a question that many are determining as they look at potential Facebook fan page acquisition opportunities. Today Orabrush, a tongue cleaning product, will announce that they’ve acquired the “Kisses” Facebook page which has over 1.15 million fans. The page was acquired from Dominic Holland who created the page back in January. While the company won’t say the exact price that the page was acquired for, fans that were acquired since the Facebook redesign are selling at a premium to old fans.
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Last year we hosted the inaugural Social Ad Summit in New York City. The event also happened to be hosted on the same day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the markets began to slide downward. Despite turmoil around the corner on Wall Street, 250 people still managed to get together to discuss the future of advertising on the social web (although many were hopping in and out of the event to see if sky had fallen).
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