Apparently Hulu launched their implementation of Facebook Connect early last month but few people actually noticed. The Connect implementation enables users to view what videos their friends are watching. One thing that doesn’t appear to be an integral part of the Connect support is the ability to publish stories about what videos you’ve watched to your feed. Hulu has been receiving a lot of traffic which will also help Facebook expand the reach of Connect.
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Join us on July 31 for our Social Curation Summit in New York, where you'll learn new strategies to connect and engage with your audience using visual communities such as Pinterest, BO.LT, and Tumblr. Speakers include Scott Belsky (Behance), Shane Rahmani (Thrillist), and Elias Roman (Songza Media). Register by June 7 and save. 
This is a guest post by Bill Grosso, the Chief Technology Officer of Twofish.
As the social application space has started to mature, more and more application developers have adopted a “metrics driven” approach to game design. Driven partially by the availability of data gathering and analysis tools, partially by the distributed nature of the internet, and partially by the quick turnaround times that are possible if you analyze customer behaviors in real-time, it seems like almost every aspect of application design has gone under the analytical knife.
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oDesk, the web-based tool for workteams, now supports Facebook Connect. This goes for both oDesk registered buyers and service providers, extending oDesk user capabilities to find the right person for the job within their social graph.
The three main aspects of oDesk’s Facebook Connect integration include the ability to share information including job openings, oDesk profile updates, and test results. As your oDesk profile acts as your online resume, an update to your profile could mean you have added more job experience or have received certification that adds a few letters after your name.
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Yesterday I was testing out a few features of the Facebook advertising system and noticed a new feature which suggests related keywords based on the ones you enter. Facebook hasn’t provided any details about how the keyword suggestions system works but it appears to work relatively well. I tested it out with the phrases “Marketing” as well as “Michael Jackson” and Facebook effectively returned associated phrases.
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Grassroots Enterprise, the D.C. based communications firm, has announced today the launch of “Actions”, a new application which let’s page administrators enable page visitors to immediately send letters to Federal or state officials. While there are lots of companies which provide similar services, none that I’ve seen so far are integrated into the Facebook platform. It’s honestly surprising that it’s taken this long considering all the companies I’ve spoken to which have expressed interest in developing similar products.
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Today Facebook has announced the appointment of David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Genentech as the chief financial officer of Facebook. Gideon Yu was the previous CFO and was let go under rumored tension between him and Mark Zuckerberg.
The company has been searching for a new CFO since the departure of Gideon Yu. While reportedly looking for an executive with “public company experience”, there was little known about the end of Yu’s job. The new CFO, David Ebersman will likely oversee Facebook’s public offering at some point in the next few years if all goes well.
Last week I wrote that Facebook was beginning to phase out friend details from the site. It now appears official and according to Facebook, “the friend details that were already established on your account have been converted to Friend Lists.” If you go look at your friend lists there will now be lists that you hadn’t created as the company tries to eliminate this feature all together.
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You run the marketing for a business of any size and you’re trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook to increase your reach and generate more sales. With so much buzz, Facebook is hard to ignore but many people have yet to figure out the most effective way for using the site to generate sales. After studying the ecosystem over the past two years, we’ve generated a few models that we think are most effective to marketing on the site. The model I’ll present today should assist in increasing sales no matter the resources.
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Tonight Facebook will be opening up usernames to Facebook Pages that have between 100 and 1,000 fans. According to our page statistics tracker that accounts for over 429,000 pages or just over 30 percent of all Facebook Pages. This presents a huge opportunity for those businesses that don’t currently have as large of a following. Page administrators will be able to claim their usernames after 11:59 PM EDT tonight.
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Facebook’s most recent feature announcement about the new granular publisher controls received a lot of attention for being a move against Twitter. We’ve been covering the drawn out battle between Facebook and Twitter for months now but what’s more important is the immense amount of control that Facebook is attempting to give the user. While Facebook has been criticized on numerous instances for aggressive new features that push the limits of access to our friends’ information (news feed, beacon, etc), the company is trying to hand control over to the user rather than giving them the twitter-like option of private or public.
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