In case some of you out there were wondering the, “I noticed your….” is the PR flack’s standard opening line in an email or phone call. I personally have never used that pitch, lie, since it is usually the mark of a junior PR person just reaching out for anyone. I mention this because I just finished reading Tom Foremski’s article on PR pitching through Facebook.

In Tom’s article he complains (boasts?) that he has 37,366 unread emails in his Gmail account and he typically avoids his email account because of the stress seeing all those unread emails cause him. I can understand Tom’s apprehension for avoiding his email account, this is the same reason I avoid spending time my kitchen.

Tom also says he is more likely to respond to an email through his Facebook account than he is through is traditional email account. This brings up an interesting dilemma for PR professionals and Facebook users in general. Do you add people to your Facebook account who you A: know are going to try and sell you on something, and B: do you create a separate account for dealing with professionals?

I would have to say no on the separate account and yes for adding people who might try to sell you something. Let me explain, I never was one to shy away from someone trying to sell me something. I simply do not have enough time to research everything on my own and sometimes I find the information they are providing me with useful.

As for creating a separate account I say that is just trying to hide the truth. Everyone one has a personal life, that is fine, most people have a professional life. Don’t try to hide either part from one another. I am not suggesting you send business contacts pictures of your latest kegger, but at the same time don’t lie and show me pictures of you at bible study.

Tom’s insight that he is more likely to respond to an email through Facebook is intriguing but it fails to address the problem. We are all overloaded with communication tools today. While it is easy to switch channels for a less burdensome one, the problem will migrate with you. Using Facebook to manage contacts is an interesting concept, but eventually it to will have too many messages and you will be forced to switch again.

Do you think Tom is right, should we abandon all hope on email and start managing communications through the social networks? Let me know. Also if you have a solution for dealing with communication overload let me know that too. Sorry I have to go twitter that I am about to answer my phone after I respond to this email.

After a successful Graphing Social Patterns in October, Dave McClure has teamed up with O’Reilly to bring a second Graphing Social Patterns West to San Diego March 3rd and 4th. I’m going to be hosting a panel on “Driving Fanatic User Engagement & Addictive Retention.” The purpose of the panel is to learn how to create more engaging applications so that users keep returning to your application. Also joining me on the panel is Mike Sego of (fluff)Friends, Keith Schacht of 42 Friends LLC and Tim O’Shaughnessy of D.C. based Hungry Machine LLC.

There will also be some great keynotes by Patrick Chanezon of Google, Amit Kapur and Jim Benedetto of MySpace, Charlene Li of Forrester Research, Benjamin Ling of Facebook and others. The conference will be expanding to cover MySpace and Bebo given the opening of their platforms. Want to get a 30% off discount? Use the following code when you register: gspw08spbl.

To learn more about the conference check out the Graphing Social Patterns West website. I’m also proud to announce that there will be a second edition of Graphing Social Patterns later this year in the Washington D.C. area. I will be helping organize the event so if your company would like to participate in the east coast version of the event please reach out to me.

After the ignore all requests bookmarklet became extremely popular over the weekend, it appears that Facebook immediately decided to implement it themselves. Once you have over 25 requests, an “Ignore all requests” option shows up in your sidebar. There is an additional alert that Orli Yakuel has posted to her Flickr account. This new feature was definitely needed as I already have over 87 application requests. The next step is for Facebook to add a feature that enables me to group approve or reject all friend requests.

This new feature will surely save me a ton of time by easily cleaning up my application requests. For application developers this could be yet another barrier against the viral distribution of applications. When the platform first launched, a number of applications which have now become the top applications took advantage of no barrier to growth and no limitation on invites, news feed postings or anything else.

Since then, Facebook has slowly turned up the spam protection and some have grown increasingly concerned about Facebook satisfying users over the developers who’s goal is to get as many users to their application as possible. Are you glad that they implemented this new feature?

Peter Kafka has pointed out some pretty depressing numbers about user engagement on social networks across the board. Kafka’s post was based on another post by Business Week’s Spencer Ante who has an early look at the Comscore numbers. While Facebook had fantastic growth in their overall user base, the total amount of time spent on the site decreased month-to-month.

Read more at the Social Times.

I like addicting games on Facebook. How else am I supposed to whitter away my bosses profit margins by waisting time? Most of the games I find on Facebook fail to offer the shear addictiveness of games found on Yahoo, but that changed this afternoon.

It is a cold and windy day here in DC and I was looking for something to do while I ate my 4th Chipotle Burrito of the week. Just then a dashing young man with no name through open my office door and pronounced, “You will play Herd-A-Word (HAW)!” Being a feebler man I agreed.

The man vanished and I was left with rice and steak on my shirt, and one addictive little Facebook application. HAW is an online game that challenges your vocabulary and your nerves, while reinforcing your beliefs that you should read more.

Basically all you have to do is line up orbs with letters to form words. There is a timer that counts down and reminds you why your failed 3rd grade spelling. You can then take your score and send it out to your friends and have them beat it. You can also take your longest word, Chrome for me, and send that out as a challenge to your friends.

HAW is proof that good ideas will bring users. This game is by far one of the most fun I have played in a long time. If you get a long word send it my way and give me a challenge. Chrome, man I am good.

With little fanfare, last night Facebook added statistics to application about pages. This is extremely valuable for those looking to calculate the conversion ratio of those visiting the application page versus those actually installing. One missing link currently is the number of application installations from your application about page. Measuring these statistics is critical for those looking to optimize their application for maximum growth.

Combining simple statistics such as number of page views, installations and removals with social statistics such as number of wall posts, new reviews and new fans can be used to determine what the best thing to focus on is in order to maximize growth. Another feature that appears to be missing is the ability to share your statistics with other people the same way that Google Analytics does. I also think viewing a map of visitors would be a great feature.

As it becomes more challenging to make your Facebook application noticeable, focusing on analytics is going to become increasingly critical. The only way to optimize user growth and monetization is through constantly refining the user experience. Just as Facebook and other social sites frequently update their feature set, so too will Facebook applications. Have you spent much time optimizing your applications? Do you use Facebook’s analytics package to track user growth or do you prefer to stick with Google Analytics?

According to a NY Times article today NY State’s Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, is pushing for a bill that will keep level 3 sex offenders from registering on sites like Facebook and Myspace. While I applaud the effort I wonder if the bill is just window dressing for an upcoming political season.

The bill proposes that higher level sex offenders must register an email address with their probation officer. States would then be able to share these email address and cross check them with the Facebook data base. Last time I checked getting an email address was a tad easier than picking up a hot dog at a 7-11.

Think about it. I have more email address than I can handle, look I just signed up for another one, its that easy. Currently both Myspace and Facebook bar any sex offender from registering on their sites and Myspace has a team of individuals that monitor new accounts looking for sex offenders.

Mr. Cuomo stated that he did not believe the bill would restrict the rights of any sex offenders but it will be interesting to see if anyone takes up the case when the law passes. The real problem is that creating a social profile is increasingly easy and incredibly difficult to control.

This is a problem I wish I had a solution for, it is something that can keep you up at night. What if we find an effective way to stop sex offenders from using Myspace and Facebook, won’t they just turn to Xbox Live and Playstation Home next.

If politicians and Corporate America are serious about halting sex offenders from using social networks sterner actions need to be taken. The problem then becomes, who sets these limits. Do Facebook and Myspace require a Social Security numbers or maybe a drivers licenses to register ? Do we want those companies having that kind of information. I don’t know.

The problem of sex offenders and the internet will not be solved by passing a bill that requires individuals to register an email address. I would love to hear if anyone out there can think of a solution to this problem. Let me know.

Curious as to what articles your friends find interesting on Facebook? Worry no more! Facebook and the Wall Street Journal have added a new feature that make it possible to view what articles are popular among your friends. All of the responses that I’ve seen related to this news have revolved around how this is a violation of user privacy and that Facebook is yet again crossing the line. This time I have to disagree and say that this is probably one of the more useful tools I’ve seen to leverage the “social graph.”

The new tool leverages the Loomia SeenThis application. Once you’ve added the application, any site that uses the Loomia tool will be able to track what articles you are reading and share them with your friends. The real issue arises when your friends start getting alerted that you are reading certain sites that you don’t want them to know that you are visiting. For the time being, Loomia controls what sites can join and there is a low risk of your friend getting alerted that you just visited an “adult oriented” site.

As some developers pointed out last weekend, the ability to extend Facebook to other websites has been available prior to the launch of the new javascript library. It just wasn’t publicly announced. The trend of extending functionality that we see within Facebook to external websites is going to continue over the next few months and I wouldn’t be surprised to start hearing more reports of shocked users that feel this is a violation of their privacy.

In my opinion, social functionality improves the overall experience on any website. Do you feel that these types of applications are a violation of your privacy or do they improve your overall experience on the site?

Adam Ostrow is breaking the news that MySpace is going to be launching their developer platform on February 5th. This is huge news for those in the social platform space. MySpace is currently the largest social network on the web and continues to grow at a decent pace (although it is currently being outpaced by Facebook). So what does this mean to companies looking to leverage the new platform?

Read more at The Social Times.

I’ve said it a million times: the best way to make money with Facebook applications is through branded partnerships. Jeremiah Owyang has posted a case study about Sony using the Vampires application for generating buzz about their movie 30 days and 30 nights. The statistics are impressive yet not surprising considering the Vampires application is one of the top 30 applications on the platform.

Sony pictures was looking to have at least 10,000 users register for their sweepstakes in which a 4 wheel ATV was given out and $1500. The application ended up registering almost 60,000 users. This was way more than they expected to register and as a result the client was happy. So what are the suggestions that Jeremiah came up with after speaking with Rock You? Jeremiah came up with the following three things that worked:

1. Fishing where the fish are: Sony figured out where the already existing community was (remember to fish where the fish are) and rather than trying to rebuild something completely by scratch, they leveraged an existing successful application.
2. Rely on specialists for new arenas: In my many briefings with vendors and clients, specialized firms often provide something a general interactive firm or corporate web marketing team can’t. They have experience, know their area, and in this case, they knew to rely on someone that already knew Facebook (such as Social Interactive.
3. Compliment the existing user experience: Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

The main conclusion of Jeremiah’s post was that this individual campaign was highly successful and leveraging social applications for branding can be extremely effective. For Facebook application developers, you should be specifically targeting brands and looking for opportunities to forge new relationships. Do you have any examples of other applications that have used this tactic?