Yesterday I wrote a post about how to claim a username that someone else has already taken. Unfortunately, the form that we linked to has since been removed and the help page states that Facebook has “a strict no transferability policy.” While the company states that this should prevent squatting from taking place, there are still a few occurrences of this taking place. Unfortunately for those users, there’s no system for reporting usernames being stolen.
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A new iPhone app allows you to record voice messages and post them directly to your Facebook profile. Called FaceMic, this new app takes advantage of the nifty new features of the iPhone OS 3.0 and provides a way for you to post updates, podcasts and other audio to your Facebook news feed. Just as with videos shared on your Facebook profile, the FacMic audio will play directly from your newsfeed.
Once you download the app to your iPhone (it costs 99 cents), there’s no registration necessary. FaceMic is integrated with Facebook Connect, so you can use your Facebook credentials to login. From there, you can pull up the app anytime, and start recording. Once you’re satisfied with the audio message, hit publish and it will appear on your Facebook profile.
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If you were curious about the most popular names on Facebook, we’ve got a special treat for you! Today Rapleaf, a social media research company, has produced a report with some of the most popular names on Facebook. Bringing in the title was John Smith, with 75,980 users named John Smith. Coming a distant second was Joe Smith, with 14,648 names. The number of users with the last name Smith was pretty impressive: 1,049,158.
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Social media technology has changed so muchsince we first published The Holy Grail Of Facebook Privacy that we no longer carry this e-book. Instead, you can get more up-to-date content for free by clicking here.
Over the past day or two I’ve had multiple users reach out to me regarding the friend details feature disappearing. Previously, Facebook would let you keep notes about how you know each of your contacts on the site. When you approve a friend, you have the option of adding friend details at which point a pop-up will display, prompting you to ask “How do you know [person's name]?” It was a small feature but one that many users found to be extremely useful.
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This evening Facebook added the ability to display your alternative names. Apparently the alternative feature existed previously but I personally was unaware of it. The difference is that now you can actually display that name and as Sophia Huang writes, you can also make it “visible on your profile, in search results, in friend requests, and on other places on the site.” One group that will find this extremely useful is multi-lingual groups, something Sophia Huang happens to be a member of.
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In the past few days, Zynga, the leading Facebook platform developer, quietly released a new game called “FarmVille”. If you’ve played Farm Town at any point in the past few months then you won’t need any education about how to use Zynga’s version of the game as it’s almost an exact duplicate. The only feature the company needs is the ability to import the game from Farm Town over to FarmVille and they’ll have come up with a great tool to take over the users.
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This morning while browsing through out our Facebook application statistics are, I noticed that the leaderboard had changed drastically. Many of the top applications were no longer appearing which didn’t make much sense. After browsing around I noticed that most Facebook applications were now reporting their monthly active users as 0. It’s a minor glitch but it ended up throwing off all of our statistics and developer stats are not being reported properly as well.
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Did you participate in the Facebook username land rush only to find out that your username was taken? So did many other people, but a few have figured out how to get their name back. Over the past week I’ve received a number of inquiries from companies that had their Facebook username taken on the site and are trying to figure out how to get it back. Two of the people that contacted were able to get their username within 24 hours from filling out a little known form.
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Over the past few weeks, big affiliate advertisers on Facebook have reported a spike in fake clicks, but this is only part of where Facebook has faced challenges within its ad network over the past few months. The reason for the surge in fake clicks is a result of a number of things including the creation of Facebook ad scrapers that are being used to track advertisers’ ads on the site and what pages the ads are linking to.
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