Last night Josh Elman posted on the Facebook blog about the rise in applications that are embedding videos provided by the television networks. Watercooler’s TVLoop applications use Hulu to display videos of show episodes and Mesmo TV is displaying the shows as well. Both have had mixed results and Mesmo TV has dropped from over 681,000 monthly active users to around 472,000 as displayed in the chart below.
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Spam definitely doesn’t pay in the long run. Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital learned that when Judge Jeremy Fogel awarded Facebook $873 million in damages for them sending “sleazy messages” to their users. According to Facebook, this is the “largest judgment in history for action brought under the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM)”. You can read more about the act here.

Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t expect that they will ever receive the $873 million awarded to them as spammers typically don’t pay and traditionally operate from abroad. I wrote about the Facebook suit back in August and it looks like the case has finally been closed. I’m guessing that the defendants never appeared in court as they most likely would have been arrested on arrival. A copy of the judgement has been embedded below.
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It’s typically not in the best interest of a court case for jurors to speak about the trial, even to friends and family. But one British woman thought that her network on Facebook could help her decide which way to go regarding a trial for which she was a juror. According to CNet, the woman, who’s name has not been disclosed, posted a note on Facebook detailing the trial and holding a poll, in order to help her make a decision.
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For the past few months I’ve had multiple people ask me about the best places to get statistics about Facebook applications on the web. There are now a number of services that offer ways to track applications, some more accurate than others, and each with their own set of features. For the past couple months I have been programming in what little free time I have to build the first iteration of our Facebook Application Statistics service.

This is simply a starting point for tracking everything that is taking place in the Facebook economy and I have some pretty cool features rolling out in the coming weeks. One feature that I wanted to ensure was immediately available is the ability to embed charts that you find on this site and place them elsewhere around the web.
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As a popular online social network, Facebook is quite useful for spreading the word on things like political causes, and events. Need a few friends of friends to show up at your party? Post the event on Facebook, and all those friends of friends are likely to see the event. I can’t tell you how many event planners befriend hundreds of Facebook users in a particular geographic area, for the sole purpose of promoting a weekend party.
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This video below popped up in my newsfeed this evening and I had to post it. Jack Lindamood posted the video of the Java application he created at the Facebook hackathon. It is pretty impressive and produces some pretty cool animations. Check out the video below for more.

As a privately held company, Facebook can avoid some of the woes that publicly traded companies are facing during this major economic downturn. and Facebook would like to keep things that way. In a recent ruling from the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), Facebook has been deemed exempt from having to disclose financial results publicly, reports BusinessWeek.

According to the Securities & Exchange Act of 1934, a privately held company is to disclose financial results publicly after reaching more than 500 stockholders and $10 million in assets. With Facebook hiring a slew of new employees in the past two years and often offering the new employees stock options, Facebook is getting dangerously close to the 500 stockholders mark. The pressure is on. Or is it?
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Yesterday evening Om Malik posted about the new Facebook application for the Sony Ericsson Xperia phone. As the Xperia device runs on Windows Mobile, the release makes this the first Facebook app optimized for a Windows Mobile platform. Having already conquered the iPhone and Blackberry (including an upgraded version early next year), Facebook apps are on their way to becoming standard ware for mobile users.
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LuckyCal is the business traveler’s guide to getting lucky. You know, for landing sales deals and stuff. At least that’s what it was designed to do. For those business travelers that need to make a trip to a far away city, what better use of time than to find others in the area that may be available for a meeting as well? More meetings, more sales, and more savings for which your manager can take the credit.

LuckyCal is the tool that lets you keep track of the proximity of your colleagues and friends. Similar to Dopplr and TripIt, you can share your travel plans with others so that you can schedule a time to meet up with those that are in the same town as you–at the same time. LuckyCal works by syncing with your Google calendar, iCal and Outlook, so that there’s little manual work you need to do within LuckyCal, outside of adding contacts.
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Even though lower gas prices may give your wallet a little more wiggle room, there’s still an outstanding need to pinch a few pennies here and there! With all the price comparison tools on the web, there’s certainly plenty of help available, but what about when you’re actually at the store? Pongr is one of the finalists in round 1 of the fbFund competition, and it lets you do your price comparisons while you’re out shopping. How? With bar codes.

I know what you’re thinking. Aren’t there existing apps that take photos of bar codes in order to give you more information on a product? There are, and they’ve been slower to adopt in the US versus countries like Japan, due to the lack of standardized and inclusively distributed software on mobile phones. But Pongr gets around such constrictions by offering a number of options for submitting information about a product. Instead of taking a photo of the bar code, you can provide the UPC number and send it to Pongr via text message or email.
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