When I read yesterday that the Wall Street Journal is creating a new “LinkedIn Killer” yesterday, I immediately thought about how likely it is that the company botches things up. When was the last time that you’ve visited a content site and were prompted to enter your contact information in order to “connect with the community” and then proceeded to fill out all your information? In theory it makes a lot of sense but no media company that I know of has gotten it right yet.
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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. 
Weeks after announcing a list of their official Twitter accounts, Google has officially launched their Facebook Page and has attracted over a quarter million fans so far. The page, which has already been updated five times this week, and appears to be growing in popularity. So what type of content is Google posting to their Facebook Page? Right now they only appear to be reposting most of the content from the Official Google Blog.
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Want to view which of your friends are located in Washington, D.C. or another city? Too bad because it appears as though Facebook has removed that feature. While the company previously announced that they’d remove regional network privacy settings, it wasn’t clear that they were eliminating the ability to browse by region. In a guide that I previously wrote about Facebook friend lists, I explained how useful the ability to browse by network was.
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Digg is one of the most significant implementations of Facebook Connect to date but not everything is rosy as Digg has violated Facebook’s terms in the process of rolling out their service. One month ago a developer in the Facebook developer forum began complaining that Digg was actively storing user information. One month later Matt Trainer who handles developer relations at Facebook posted that they’ve “followed up with Digg to make sure that no profile information is stored against Facebook policy.”
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Facebook posted their updated advertising terms last night and ultimately nothing was really that surprising. As far as I can tell, the only addition to the terms was around data and privacy. As previously was the case, developers cannot give any data received from Facebook to any third party. Additionally advertisements that include user data “such as users’ names or profile pictures” will require explicit authorization from Facebook.
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The past two years have been an interesting ride as the Facebook Platform has become more restricted in order to protect the user’s experience. When Facebook first opened up there were countless ad networks and developers looking to seize the opportunity to make millions. Many have generated large sums of cash and a few continue to be extremely profitable to this day but what has been most interesting is watching Facebook carefully navigate the gray policy areas.
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Over the past month we have confirmed with multiple sources that Facebook is in the process of rolling out an API for their advertising platform. How that API will be rolled out is still not clear but they are currently testing the service with a number of partners. This step makes a lot of sense considering that Google has an AdWords API and an AdSense API. When Google ads were initially evolving, a number of companies built layers on top of Google AdWords that turned in to lucrative businesses.
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Facebook is finally taking strong actions against ad networks that have been abusing the platform and starting August 3rd will have new advertising guidelines according to Nick Gianos of Facebook. According to the new policy, “ads that display user data are not allowed in Platform applications unless specifically approved by Facebook”. This is a huge policy shift and it’s one that could significantly effect the platform ecosystem as I’ve been writing over the past couple weeks.
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FarmTown users have been going crazy this afternoon as the application has become inaccessible to millions of users around the world. FarmTown is currently the most popular game on Facebook according to daily active users and it continues to grow at around 2 percent, or upwards of 300,000 new users per day. So what are the users doing while Farm Town is down? They are refreshing the application to see if it’s back up of course!
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Over the past two weeks I’ve been going through the process of simplifying and organizing my life so that it’s more manageable. While the “work/life balance” (or whatever you’d like to call it) issue always arises, I personally believe it’s important to keep yourself organized. One area where many people are disorganized is there Facebook contacts. I’ve personally boiled down my personal organization to a few items: email, calendar, tasks, documents, and contacts. Facebook should be efficient at effectively managing my contacts/relationships (something I expounded on earlier this week).
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