Facebook Watcher

End of the month; a brief summary of Facebook stories in the month of August:

I know, I know. Facebook has 100 million users, but it still trails MySpace, which claimed it owned at least 110 million “active” users throughout the world.

I am a big fan of Facebook, and believed that it will not close users’ accounts simply because it is overpopulated. To strengthening your belief in Facebook, you need to subscribe to this Facebook Security page. All those chain letters are hoax. We know Facebook will fix it, just like they fixed the worm attack recently. Meanwhile, you can join and donate to this cause, i.e. Stop Facebook Chain Letters if you want to.

If you never heard of Facebook Connect, it is a new big thing. There will be a talk on this Facebook Connect in September next month. A talk purposely for developers. I wish I’ll get a Live Coverage of it, hopefully.

Facebook is not the place barely for users to social networking with each other, or making some business contacts. With an application called Causes built by Project Agape, Facebook users can now act as the good social network citizens and help making our world a better place to live.

According to The Tech Chronicles, Causes on Facebook has raised $2.5 million in charitable donations from about 40,000 users to help nearly 20,000 groups. At the same time, it attracted more than 12 million users with a global vision of supporting 80,000 non-profit causes.

In an interview conducted by Contribute Magazine, Causes on Facebook co-founder Joseph Green said, “Nonprofits tend to focus their fundraising efforts just on the wealthy. But cause networking unleashes the power of a multitude of younger, mainstream donors and gives what they care about a way to be heard.” Adds Sean Parker, “Facebook Causes is a way of leveraging the power of your social network to raise money or ultimately achieve a social goal. We’re very much trying to take social dynamics that exist in the real world and represent them online, which wasn’t really possible a few years ago.”