After posting the last video I ended up browsing around Current.com for a while and found a number of other interesting videos. I found another one which tells the story of Oscar, a Colombian who created a group on Facebook that turned into a massive protest against the Farc. It’s happening worldwide but this video helps express the significance of what’s taking place. Check it out below!

The community outreach manager from Current TV contacted me today with an awesome program about application development on Facebook. The video follows around the developer of the carpoolers application. It’s a really high quality video and I thought it had some great content. Check out the video below and let me know what you think:

Back in November I wrote that the Hong Kong billionairem, Li Ka-Shing has invested $60 million at the $15 billion valuation Microsoft had set on Facebook. According to Marketwatch, the original investment has been raised to over $100 million. This would give Li Ka-Shing almost 1 percent of Facebook.

Facebook has been raising as much money as possible at their current valuation because it has enabled to run in the red for a while and has empowered them to acquire new employees (and steal them from Google). Li Ka-Shing sees a serious opportunity for leveraging Facebook’s technology on the mobile phone operations companies that he currently has holdings in. If you are looking for a amazing combination look no further then the joining of mobile technology and Facebook’s social graph technology.

It is impressive that Facebook continues to be able to raise funding from a select group of individuals. They must realize that the true value of Facebook could be in the hundreds of billions once the social graph is effectively monetized. You may be wondering how will Facebook be monetized effectively? Well, I would argue that Facebook will leverage our iCPM (individual CPM) in the very near future. I’ll save that for another post though!

Earlier this year I reported that Facebook would be adding a friend recommendation tool to the site. Just yesterday they turned on the feature and today I was finally able to view a list of friends that I may be connected to. This is similar to LinkedIn which also began offering the feature recently. As you can view on the left, Facebook displays a couple of individuals that you may be connected to from your homepage and then a complete list on find friends page.

This is one of the tools which we will see become a standard on all sites that are trying to become a center of your social graph. In a world where having 1,000 contacts is no longer a foreign concept, having automated systems for helping us to connect will become increasingly important. This tool illustrates how Facebook is leading the way in becoming a central management system of all of your contacts.

For those not on Facebook, joining is going to become increasingly important. I would also suggest that soon enough, managing granular privacy settings will become a standard practice across all social sites. While it may be initially complex, it is the kind of control that all individuals have a right to when surfing the social web. Have you benefited from this new friend suggestion tool?

Gary Vaynerchuk makes an amazing point about the Facebook newsfeed. He makes his point in reference to Twitter (something I have become increasingly active on). Twitter is instantaneous and very fast. The Facebook newsfeed on the other hand updates every 15 minutes or so. With that type of delay, a market for a faster newsfeed has opened up and right now both Twitter and FriendFeed is filling that void.

Facebook is starting to face competition (no pun intended) from all sides and they are going to be forced to adapt rapidly as they have in the past. This is not to say that Facebook won’t continue to grow and it doesn’t mean the average Joe understands what Twitter or FriendFeed is. It simply means that these new services have exploited weaknesses in Facebook’s system. Facebook has the upper hand though, all they need to do is adapt.

It makes a lot of sense that Facebook’s newsfeed is slow considering all the data they are processing and filtering through their complex algorithm. As I’ve previously stated on the Social Times, without filtering sites like FriendFeed and Twitter become way too cluttered really fast. As such, it’s necessary to filter. So far Facebook does the most effective job of filtering but perhaps they’ve filtered too much. We want more information about our friends!

So Facebook, turn up the volume and give us more of what we want! We want more news about our friends. We can’t get enough. That’s why people keep coming back to the site in the first place. One simple solution would be to add a link which provides an unfiltered newsfeed. Would you find this useful? How could Facebook improve their newsfeed?

Are you a fanatic about complete transparency in this digital era? If you are then you must add the new FindMe application to your Facebook profile. Every 15 minutes your approximate location will be updated in your Facebook status thanks to a simple technology similar to Google Maps mobile technology which determines where you are based on cell phone towers. I’m not quite sure why on earth I would want to let anybody know where I am at any given minute but this is a great tool for parents that want to track their activity offline.

Did your girlfriend say she was going to a movie with her friends today? Why is she driving around another state then? You can now put your relationship to the test by adding the FindMe application. Then again I would suggest against this application if you want to maintain any sort of normalcy in your life. Imagine your friends calling you “Hey man you just drove by my house but didn’t stop by! Great friend you are!”

This application also makes sense for those hard working truck drivers but really how many truck drivers are really active on Facebook? This tool raises the bar for invasive technology but then again you have to opt into it. Do you think this application is useful? Will you be installing it? If you want to you can go grab the Findme application.

This morning I wrote about the new OpenSocial foundation. Unfortunately I missed out on the press call but there were definitely some key takeaways. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a great writeup of the call. Two significant statements made was that Orkut will go live next week and that 200 million users will be reached by all the applications.

Who wasn’t present on the phone call? Facebook and Microsoft. These are the two remaining companies that have not joined OpenSocial. They are still holding out an ultimately are trying to battle the underdog who has gained significant momentum: OpenSocial. It’s hard to call any standard promoted by Google an “underdog” but technically there are less application install on their platform but more potential users.

Read more on the Social Times

Erick Schonfeld has posted that one Ethan Beard, a Google executive, will soon depart to become Director of Business Development for the company. One after the next we are watching a number of Google executives depart from the company to join Facebook, the hottest “startup” in Silicon Valley.

Ethan joins a team of other Googlers including COO Sheryl Sandberg, who started at Facebook yesterday, Benjamin Ling, Gideon Yu and Justin Rosenstein. I would say “Oh how the mighty have fallen” but the reality is that while Google’s stock may be at a 52-week low, the company is still near the top of the food chain. Just yesterday there was also a lot of buzz surrounding Google applicants blowing their interview.

Regardless, Facebook appears to be increasingly recruiting from Google which is a smart move and also attractive to many Googlers that are looking to grab a piece of the Facebook stock options. I have to wonder how long-term this investment is by the new employees. Google was able to monetize early in their history and became exceptionally profitable. Facebook on the other hand likes to run at break-even and has not focused on heavily monetizing the site.

This new hire may be a signal that Facebook is beginning to take revenue generation more seriously. It will be interesting to see what new executives join the team in the coming months!

Nope, not yet. That’s why Ringside Networks will be announcing a new service that “will let developers easily port Facebook apps to any other website and it will integrate company websites with social graph and communication features back at Facebook.” The service appears to be abstracting the social layer and letting the social networks handle that while providing full integration in company’s existing websites.

This new offering is extremely useful for companies because they will be able to rapidly integrate with multiple social networks. Ringside is positioning themselves for enterprise level social development. Figuring out how to integrate with existing social networks is a complex task for businesses and this new application could make the process substantially easier. The service sounds awesome in theory but ultimately corporate partnerships will be critical for this company’s success.

I could also foresee this company making a white label social network offering to sell alongside this new service. This would make it easy for companies to integrate external social networks with an internal face quickly and easily. The service sounds great in theory. I’m curious to see what type of response they get from businesses. Perhaps this is part of the larger trend of social applications making its way into major organizations.

Yesterday the Times Online has an interesting article about a coalition of children’s charities “urging ministers to make it illegal for companies to trawl Facebook and other social networking websites for information on prospective recruits.” One of the campaign leaders suggested that teenagers should not have digital records of their you used against them when applying for jobs.

Has it become a fact of life that the difference between successful candidate and unsuccessful candidate for employment is their ability to manage their online identity? For many web professionals, we have accepted it as a standard of practice to monitor what you post online. The smart ones are able to manage all of their postings to create this pseudo-reality which is their digital identity.

Granular privacy controls such as the ones that Facebook now offers makes it easier for users to manage their digital identities but for those that weren’t privy to such luxurious privacy features in the past, their online reputation may already be tarnished. This brings into question what is right and for those that did make child-like mistakes (which we all have made … ocasionally even as adults), should they be punished for making those mistakes at a young age?

I have to agree with this article in that we should embrace child-like behavior and not punish individuals for doing crazy things when they are young. This is a part of experimentation and every child should have the chance to experiment. Maybe we all become hypocrites with age and decide to punish the youth because we wish we hadn’t made the mistakes that we did. I don’t know what’s right but I know that nobody is perfect.

Do you think prospective employees should be punished for pictures of them doing stupid things when they were teenagers?