Facebook Watcher

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.”

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.

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.

Facebook For BlackBerry Smartphones, a popular application released in October last year, achieved a historical milestone by reaching more than one (1) million downloads. It is available for free on the Facebook’s application directory, and as you visit the application’s page, this app has been translated in four languages, that are English, German, Spanish and French.

In using this app, users can gain wireless access to their Facebook profiles and perform activities such as post new messages, wall posts, view new friend requests, check status, etc. from their BlackBerry smartphone.

Facebook intends to add 22 new languages and integrate these languages to their platform, so that users can open their profiles, add friends, or etc. in their own native languages. Open the Translations application will see there are 22 new languages currently open for translation, this include: Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara, Galego, Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, 日本語, Norsk, Nederlands, Polski, Português do Brasil, Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ภาษาไทย, Türkçe, 中文(简体), 中文(繁體). If you’re interested in doing Facebook a favor, please visit the Translation page.

Most recently, Facebook has launched its German and French versions, with the availability of Spanish and English version as well.

Since The Washington Post launched its Facebook app (application), i.e. The Compass, it was making headlines and gained favorably acceptance by a huge crowd of Facebook users. You can read the personal blog of Rob Curley, as he wrote:

“Still, the numbers for our Facebook app are very respectable. For the first several weeks, The Compass was one of the Top 10 most-downloaded apps on Facebook, and even cracked the Top 5 a couple of times.”

“As of today, The Compass has about 300,000 Facebook users who have it on their profile page, which still puts it in the Top 50 most-downloaded Facebook apps.”

As of today, The Washington Post Facebook app has reached another milestone, by reaching the 350,000 downloads since its first appeared on the Facebook platform. And thus, Beet.TV has interviewed the Executive Editor of The Washington Post.com, where you can watch the video in the below.

It should be noted that not long ago, in November last year, The Washington Post also developed another application called, newsTracker, a kind of app that allowed users to create their personalized news feeds, according to their preferences on the topics that appeal important to them.

The Compass:

newsTracker:

via [Beet.TV]

Last week, a video-sharing community site Vimeo has launched its Facebook app. By adding this application, Facebook users can showcase the videos they uploaded to Vimeo site to their friends directly on their profiles. It seemed likely that this is a big news for existing Vimeo users, with a great chance to share their videos in a totally different channel.

By late 2007, there are so many video related applications listed on Facebook application directory. However, Vimeo would not viewed as an inferior product compared to other similar type of applications as it was distributed videos with a resolution of 1280 pixels by 720 pixels, the standard for high-definition. According to New York Post, Vimeo is the first Web site to make high-definition available for user-generated videos. Don’t count them out.