Facebook Watcher

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has opened a profile on Facebook, but if you want to add him as your friends, you’ll not sure which one is his real profile. Today Reuters provides a hint in an article entitled, “The real Steve Ballmer has a golfclub on Facebook.”

“If you actually look there’s about 10 Steve Ballmers and I’m only one of them,” Ballmer told reporters on Thursday.

“I’m the one who actually has a picture that looks like me on it and I’ll tell you a hint — I’m hitting a golf ball. That’s the real Steve Ballmer.”

Facebook has announced that its chat service is now available to all of its users. This service is crucial, as its current Inbox and Wall, where your friends posted messages on the space of your profile can’t really appeal to some rabid users. In fact, this chat service was launched incrementally, as some testers have the opportunities to use it before it is fully goes live. However, it isn’t perfect yet, as Facebook promised that they’ll gradually improve this newly global launched service.

For Facebook users, every one of you will see a small tiny chat bar to be appeared at the bottom right hand side of your profile when you first log-in.

TypePad has launched a free Facebook application called Blog It. It is widely considered as a valuable tool to help a Facebook user on update her blogs and Web services from within her Facebook account. One you installed this app (application), you can add different accounts you owned elsewhere, such as Blogger, Twitter, Pownce, Movable Type or WordPress, and with this app, it allowed you to post your latest update, blog post from inside your Facebook profile. I thought it would be cool for a Facebook user to post a blog post, or latest update without leaving Facebook. Consider that an user having to log-in multiple accounts and re-type a same message is trivial.

Assume you’ve a lot of friends on Facebook, simply post to blog will likely to increase the number of people who see your post. It is due to the fact that when you post to your blogs, this activity will also be included in your Facebook’s mini-feed, and your friends will definitely aware of your latest post appeared onto your blogs. However, one disadvantage is that you won’t find all the helpful editors such as Italic, Underline, Tagging, Insert Image to post on this tool. To illustrate this, I’ve inserted a picture in below, and you can see this “Post to Blog”, it was restricted to a simple interface temporarily. On the other hand, if you want to post your latest notification to some micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or Pownce, you’ll find how useful this Blog It was rendered.

Currently, Blog It supports TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter, Vox, WordPress.com, and WordPress self-hosting blogging platform.

Picture 1: Blog It

Picture 2: Post to Blog

via [allfacebook]

Buddy Media, a NY-based startup that well-known for a Facebook application called AceBucks has raised $6.5 million in a round B financing. This round of financing was led by Softbank, and joined by several other venture capital firms such as European Founders Fund, GreyCroft Partners, a Silicon Valley angel investor, i.e. Ron Conway with participation of fourteen (14) of the Buddy Media’s Series A investors. Prior to this round, they’ve also raised $1.5 million at the time of their official launch in September last year.

Meanwhile, Buddy Media also announced the official launch of its Buddy Media Ad Network. This Ad Network is an eagerly awaited products for the advertisers and social media developers. It represents the next major release of an advertising platform that built-in with some notable features which include pricing flexibility, powerful targeting, quality traffic, and etc.

Since Buddy Media’s first inception on the Web, it has been trying to position itself as a Facebook application provider. Other the aforesaid AceBucks, a virtual currency application, it also released some Skyworks games such as Sudoku, Air Hockey, Pub Darts, Mental Blocks, and Corn Hole. However, Buddy Media’s most significant move is that it has acquired two Facebook app companies, ChipIn in January this year for five of its Facebook app (Vampires vs. Werewolves, Pirates vs. Ninjas, Skiers vs. Snowboarders, Santa vs. The Grinch, Cops vs. Robbers) and Crushes in last November.

According to Facebook blog, they’ve released a decent tool called Lexicon. It is a tool which help to track the buzz surrounding different words or phrases posted on Facebook Walls over a period of time. However, Facebook respect the privacy of its users, no personal information have been collected in the process of pulling all these data for Lexicon purposes.

Lexicon has a Web-friendly interface, with back-end Flash Player to display the data compared. An user can compare up to five different words or two-word phrases and see how many people talked about that term each day, or over seven months. I’ve played around it to compare the words Friendship and Networking, as shown in the picture below. One limitation is you’ll never know what is the latest word, phrase that most frequently appeared across profiles, groups and event Walls every day, in spite of it rates high on my wish list at this moment. Again, this is a Facebook’s privacy issue.

I was amazed by a new Facebook application called Peersonalizer. This new application was developed by two Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Faculty of Computer Science students, Lior Biran and Tomer Einav, as a project under the supervision of WiPeer creators Roy Friedman and Ph.D. students Vadim Drabkin and Gabi Kliot. It allowed a Facebook user to detect any Facebook friend, or friends of those friends, even in the situation where Internet connection is not available. However, this user and her group of friends’ laptop PCs must pre-installed this Peersonalizer.

For this app to work properly, a Facebook user must installed both of the required components of this Peersonalizer, this app and a WiPeer client through WiPeer’s home page, i.e. http://www.wipeer.com. Once you installed both of these components, you’ll able to detect your Facebook friends within a distance of 900ft and making it possible to network, chat, share files and directories, play collaborative games, or actually meet face-to-face.

News started circulating on the Web that Facebook is developing a new advertising program purposely targeting at gay. This is a software project working with a vendor called Lavender Code shortly thereafter the suicide incident of a Facebook user, as reported by TheSpoof. Currently, there is no official announcement of this from any of the Facebook’s media. More as this develops, if this Gaydar is really to be launched by Facebook, it could enable Facebook to review whether an existing user might be gay, and targeted gay advertisement will be appeared on his profile. Meanwhile, any non-gay user will not receive any gay advertisement.

Meanwhile, there is a Facebook group named as Gay Six Degrees of Separation. From the number of users and the potentially huge market, it probably explained why Adify launched Gay Ad Network in last August.

If you want to know how Facebook Chat look like, or how it works, there’s a video clip that uploaded to YouTube three weeks ago, at the time of my writing. Enjoy.

A much-anticipated Facebook chat service has been launched in this week. As most of the social networking platforms have not developed their own set of chatting tool, Faceboook is unveiling its own chat service, which eventually would not let any third-party instant messenger (IM) applications to lure their users into using their apps. From the Facebook’s blog, Josh Wiseman, engineering lead said there are many notable features can be found on this Facebook chat, no installation nor buddy list is required to run this chat service, but if you’re lucky enough, you’ll be one of the first batch of users to experience this. To check whether you’ve been selected as one of them to use this service, simply notice are there any chat icon appeared on the below of your Facebook profile.

Chatting with your Facebook friends is nothing new now. I came across few third-party apps such as FriendVox, social.im, or Babuki that allowed you to do so. All these apps have been successfully integrate to the Facebook platform, and there are not niche apps anymore. When looking at the Babuki’s features, it allowed an user to go beyond the simple instant message, by offering the SMS and mail service that are accessible inside the Facebook profile.

What I was told about this Facebook chat was that it can’t be removed. For users who log-in to their Facebook profiles once, less than 10 mins in a day, when they see the incoming chats, they’re expected to spend more time in chatting with their friends, which in turn help a Facebook user to stay a longer period of time on Facebook. However, an option of “go offline” is provided if she choose not to chat through the Facebook platform.

I heard Facebook chat might also add chat APIs and Jabber support in the future. I’ll go into it in my future post. Stay tuned.

Times Online UK did an Q&A session with Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook. He talked about child protection in Facebook, identity theft, and the future market outlook of Facebook in China. Read the article thoroughly you probably know what challenges Facebook is likely to face in the future.