This afternoon I was reading a New York Times article about improving Netflix’s Cinematch video suggestion algorithm. The article is a great overview about the benefits of using consumer activity data for commercial purposes. The more data we have about consumer activity, the more likely we are able to predict their purchase behavior. One thing that is missing from the equation, as the New York Times points out, is the ability to track consumer emotion when they are browsing the web.

In one sense, collaborative filtering is less personalized than a store clerk. The clerk, in theory anyway, knows a lot about you, like your age and profession and what sort of things you enjoy; she can even read your current mood. (Are you feeling lousy? Maybe it’s not the day for “Apocalypse Now.”) A collaborative-filtering program, in contrast, knows very little about you — only what you’ve bought at a Web site and whether you rated it highly or not.

So can’t Facebook or someone on the platform develop an application for judging your emotion based on your Facebook status? Someone once jokingly told me that Facebook can predict whether or not you will break up with your significant other in the near future based on your Facebook activity. With all that data, can’t Facebook also likely tell you what sort of emotional state you are in?
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Following the actions of U.S. Facebook users isn’t a good idea in other countries, especially Croatia. Niksa Klecak, a Croatian Facebook user decided to create a group protesting the country’s Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, after seeing the group, “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!” surpass 1 million users.

Klecak’s group, “I bet I can find 5,000 people that hate the Prime minister” has already surpassed its target size. I doubt Klecak will be updating the title of the group anytime soon though as Svetlana Gladkova reports that he has since been arrested. Prime Minister Sanader has been under extreme pressure as a direct result of the global financial crisis. According to Gladkova, he has even stated “publicly that he would not allow the wages in the country to grow.”
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Today at 11:59 AM Pacific Time, Facebook will end voting for the second round of fbFund applications. For this pool of applications, the top five applications will win $250,000 in “non-recourse grants” to continue building upon their ideas. So far we have only had the opportunity to review 10 of the 25 applications, but there are many more great applications.
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I’m not much of a hiker, but if I ever had the guts to walk on a trail, I might check out an app like TrailBehind first. It’s a crowd-sourced application on Facebook, aggregating the trails that others have already mapped and experienced. A fbFund competitor, TrailBehind lets you learn from the hiking of others.

This application also features wiki-like map options, that let you add your own learned information to a map someone else has already uploaded. You can also upload geo-data, which is pretty handy when it comes to hiking trails (especially for novices like myself).
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Just earlier this week we reviewed fbFund competitor Real Gifts, which combines virtual gifting with giving someone a gift in the real world. I thought that combining some of Real Gifts’ elements would be a good idea, for other apps or native Facebook apps. But this Thanksgiving, Facebook is taking advantage of the holiday’s notorious shopping reputation to earn a little revenue for itself. A number of participating retailers are sponsoring virtual gifts that Facebook users can share with each other.

The point? The items represented by virtual gifts, which will be available tonight, are supposed to get users talking about all the shopping they’ll be doing on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For instance, Dell is sponsoring a festive red laptop that can be gifted to friends.
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Faith Feed, one of the Facebook applications competing in the current fbFund round, does exactly what its name implies. A status updating tool geared towards Christians, Faith Feed is quite similar to Twitter though it resides in Facebook and enables you to communicate directly with your friends. Similar to Twitter, you can post “what you’re doing” on your spiritual journey. You can also follow friends, reply to their status updates, and see what’s going on with the entire Faith Feed community.
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With the launch of the new Facebook design many users were confused about how to mange their applications. Initially Facebook appeared to come up with solutions on the fly. They removed the applications drop down resulting in an initial decrease in application traffic and then shifted application access to a toolbar at the bottom of the site. Even with the access still available to users many are confused about how to edit their application settings.
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For the past few months Google has been filling ad inventory on Facebook applications and according to individuals on the team behind the ad sales, things have been going well. When Facebook launched their platform last year, a whole slew of new startups emerged around the social advertising space. Companies like SocialMedia, Cubics (later acquired by Adknowledge), AdParlor.com, Lookery, and others each fought for a piece of the social advertising pie. Small startups are rapidly finding that it’s not a good place to play though.
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Bottle Rocket is a Facebook application currently competing for the fbFund $1 million prize. It is a wine-rating application aiming to provide you with the information you need in order to select a wine that’s right for you. Based on your continued participation, the BottleRocket application will recommend wine that fits your pallet.
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RealGifts is a fun application that bridges the gap between virtual gifting and real world gifting. A competitor in the current fbFund round, RealGifts lets you send tangible presents to your friends, which are delivered in the mail. The good thing about using such a gifting program through Facebook is that you can send and receive gifts without knowing or revealing your physical address–Facebook already knows this information.
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