This morning while working on one of my new projects for this site, I stumbled across an interesting site. The site is called FacebookChatMLM.com and they embed a copy of Facebook’s homepage with a screencast embeded below the login form. It’s currently set up through simple domain forwarding but their homepage configuration is not the only thing sketchy about this application.
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If you thought Facebook birthday notifications were helpful reminders of your friends’ big day, then you’ll love the new feature Facebook added today. You can now send a virtual birthday gift to your friends up to seven days in advance of their actual (listed) birthday. Facebook is offering two options for the new early birthday gift delivery: directly from your friend’s wall or via Facebook birthday e-mail reminders, which contain a direct link to send your friend an early birthday gift.
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There’s been a lot of buzz today about Mark Zuckerberg’s new “sentiment engine” that Facebook is supposedly working on according to Robert Scoble who was paraphrasing a conversation he had with Mark Zuckerberg while walking the streets of Davos. Working on a sentiment engine sounds like something which is more abstract. This is in contrast to what Tim Kendall said in the podcast I posted this morning, which was that Facebook is working on bringing status update content and the time frames of those updates to the ad platform.
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This morning I listened to Jeremy Schoemaker’s interview with Tim Kendall. The interview provided a lot of great insight into the best practices for leveraging the Facebook advertising system which still remains in its infancy. Tim expressed their dedication to scaling the advertising platform but for the time being he emphasized how they are still in startup mode.
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Facebook has been launching a number of campaigns for clients that provided branded integration with Facebook status updates. For example, CNN’s recent inauguration campaign included status update notifications which specified that they were posted from the CNN site. This feature is limited to those that have set up campaigns with Facebook. Having to work with Facebook directly can be a costly proposition on both ends (Facebook needs to provide resources and companies need to pay for that time).
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Earlier this month we wrote about Facebook surpassing 150 million users. If the growth has in fact continued at the same pace, if not a greater pace, the company should register their 160 millionth user today. Alexa suggests that the company’s growth rate has in fact been increasing which means the company could have surpassed 160 million users prior to today.
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Today Facebook announced that the World Economic Forum currently being hosted in Davos, Switzerland, will be running a serious of “real-time ‘pools’ during a select group of panels at the World Economic Forum”. There will be questions such as “Which renewable energy source is most promising?” and “If you lost Internet connectivity for an extended period, would there be vitally important data you’d leave behind in the cloud?”
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LivingSocial, the social discovery tool for sharing your favorite media items, has just added another category to its growing list of sections. iPhone apps is now available to users and site visitors seeking additional information on a given application for the popular mobile device. To go along with the new category is a Facebook application, which lets you access the majority of LivingSocial’s features for finding, rating and reviewing iPhone apps directly from your Facebook account.

The new category may seem like a tiny addition in the grand scheme of things, but the searchable database is easier to use than the Apple Store. If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated in trying to find a particular application for your iPhone or iPod touch, then you may appreciate the social way in which LivingSocial has enabled search, ratings and reviews.
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In a small addition to Facebook today, the company launched a new feature which turns photo comments into news feed stories. Previously, I believe that photo comments were automatically published to user feeds but now you have the ability to opt-out of that feed story. This is an addition which emphasizes Facebook’s ongoing commitment to user privacy.
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In an article posted today by the Financial Times, Chris DeWolfe speaks about MySpace’s advertising strategy, “We’re not going to compete against Google and their 20,000 employees. But where we’ve made strides is against guys like MSN and Yahoo on the display and branded business.” It’s pretty obvious that their strategy is a portal strategy when you visit the site’s homepage. Every day there is another branded page wrapper slapped across the MySpace homepage.
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