“Real life. Not sugar coated.” is the tagline for Herhotspot, an online community site aimed at 20-something women. And the company behind it, Entitled Labs, wants to keep it that way.

The site is the first property by Entitled Labs, which was co-founded in late 2008 by co- James and Brette Borrow. HerHotSpot launched in January and is dubbed a one-stop shop for information, education and entertainment, where women can read, write and discuss issues that are important to them openly and honestly.

Entitled Labs integrated Facebook Connect into HerHotSpot in late February, and with that came a fair amount guys signing up for the site, said Entitled Labs co-founder James Borow in an interview.
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Today we are trying out our first live interview ever. You can view the interview via the player below starting in approximately 5 minutes. Let us know if you have any problems viewing it. Additionally, you can participate in the live chat via the AllFacebook Mogulus channel. There may be some slight bugs as this is our first attempt at a live feed but it should be pretty good. Feel free to ask questions in the chat room!

Update
Thanks to those that took the time to check out the interview. I’ll be posting a follow-up video which will be an archive version of the interview. If you want to purchase Clara’s book, you can go check it out on Amazon.com.
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This afternoon we will be doing our first ever live interview here on AllFacebook.com with Clara Shih, the author of new book, “The Facebook Era”. We will be talking about her new book, why she wrote it, what it’s about, and general things about Facebook. Audience participation is welcomed as we will be accepting questions from those that wish to be part of the show.

If you have a Mogulus account, let me know ahead of time and we should be able to get you on video live on the show to ask any questions that you have. We will be embedding the show player on this site at around 4:15 pm EST (1:15 PST) and will go live 15 minutes later. If you want a larger player to view, you can visit our Mogulus channel as well.
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While at SXSW, Kristen Nicole had the opportunity to sit down with Loic Le Meur about Seesmic’s new desktop integration with Facebook. Seesmic’s desktop application is one of the first (if not the first) to launch with full Facebook Connect support and illustrates the power of integrating into Facebook’s social graph. There are still a few kinks and additional features that Loic would like to add as Facebook continues to open up their API. Check out the video below to learn more about what Seesmic has planned for the future.
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Do you run a company that’s part of the Facebook economy? We’d like to talk to you. Send an email to allfacebook [at] gmail [d0t] com.

When Facebook announced their updated Pages product last week, it was a big deal as the Pages presents the opportunity for creating a more integrated branded experience. Last night I had the opportunity to speak with Gunter Pfau of the Stuzo Group to discuss some of the projects that they’ve been working on. He told me about the new AMP Energy Canada page that they launched in partnership with BBDO, Proximity & OMD Canada and I have to say, it’s pretty impressive.

It’s not just a simple landing page. Instead, there is an integrated application which includes videos and commenting within the Facebook Page. If you want an example of what the new Facebook Pages product has to offer, this is a great first example for any brand to check out. Below is the interview that I conducted with Gunter Pfau.
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Trazzler is a personalized travel-planning tool that was one of the most recent recipients of the fbFund. What started out as a Facebook application has since expanded to a standalone site. With new Facebook Connect features launching today, and Trazzler’s standalone site growing as a result of leveraging its Facebook app, there are a few lessons to be learned in taking advantage of Facebook’s Platform. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Trazzler founder Adam Rugel:
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Writing about large consumer brands is something that we typically don’t do on this site but recently we decided to reach out to a few brands to see what their experience has been with Facebook Pages. While Facebook presents a huge opportunity for businesses, each business needs to use a different strategy. We thought it would be a good idea to find out how other people are using the pages product and what would improve their experience.

The first person we spoke to was Bob Kraut, Pizza Hut’s Vice President of Marketing Communications. Pizza Hut now has over 790,000 fans according to our Facebook page statistics tool, which ranks them among the 200 most popular pages on the site. Below is a copy of our interview with Bob. If your company has an interesting story about Facebook Pages, please get in touch with us as we’d love to hear from you.
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Turn based multi-player games have been a huge hit on Facebook but there are few that have a real-time multiplayer environment. Sacred Seasons can’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be more multiplayer games, especially massively multiplayer games. So the team behind this virtual game environment has ‘created a Facebook application that combines the Sacred Seasons world with the Facebook community.
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Last week AllFacebook has the opportunity to speak with Shayan Zadeh, the co-Founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, one of the leading Facebook dating applications. The company has recently surged to the number one position in terms of daily and monthly active users for any dating application. Many have attributed this growth to an aggressive user acquisition model. Whatever the reason for the growth, dating is clearly a hot item on Facebook, ranking it among social games in terms of user engagement.

If you are in the online dating industry then social platforms are most definitely on your radar. Many offer a completely free platform but Zoosk differs from most in that they use a freemium model, limiting things like “flirts” and messages, charging users for increased activity. Check out our interview with Shayan Zadeh below.
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There.com – A Virtual World’s App Strategy for Facebook and Open Social

September 4^th, 2008 – Los Angeles

All Facebook sat down with Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com at the Virtual Worlds Expo in Los Angeles. Michael is a tech savvy visionary who was the 4^th employee at eBay and an early employee of Oracle. There.com is a popular 3D social virtual world that allows users to build avatars that 1) express themselves in a graphically rich, online environment, 2) communicate with other users in real time via chatting and voice chat and 3) build social networks with other members via their avatars. There.com also creates a thriving virtual goods economy, where users can create, buy and sell virtual goods through an in-game auction platform.

There.com’s Social Network Strategy

There.com recently launched a Facebook application, Facing There. Facing There’s app design, launch and roadmap are part of There.com’s strategy for operating in a world where their users have to manage participating in a growing number of social graphs. Michael explicitly cited the exploding number of social graphs online, and we discussed his company’s strategic decision making on how to partner with Facebook and MySpace versus compete with them. These large social networks do not have support for avatar based interaction, the core of There.com’s user experience. Facing There is an explicit attempt to allow users to take their There.com experience and make it a part of their social networking experience. The company is starting with Facebook and has larger plans to participate in Open Social. However, Facebook was clearly the easiest and most production ready platform on which to begin their strategy of helping make There.com a part of members’ experience on other social networks.

“Facing There” - Facebook Application

The Facing There app allows users to take their social graph from There.com to Facebook. The app allows There.com members to bring to Facebook their in-world profiles, skills, groups and events. The app extends the other way as well, enabling members to list the upcoming events that they are attending in the There.com virtual reality and then to send invites to There.com friends via the Facebook application platform. These friends will then join each other on a different social media platform to enjoy a graphically rich experience, such as competing in a 3D buggy race together. The Facing There app brings the table There.com’s substantial user information as well as well-earned member loyalty when working with Facebook as a provider of a social operating system.

Strategy Questions Raised by There.com:

All Facebook would like to highlight strategic issues raised by the There.com application:

Virtual Goods Monetization

There.com operates a thriving auction business for virtual goods within its 3D worlds. Virtual goods monetization is an important revenue stream for the company. The Facing There app allows users to view virtual goods auctions that are happening within the There.com virtual world from within their Facebook profile. If a user lists an item in an auction, this can be displayed to Facebook profile. There.com links out of Facebook in order to buy items in auction they have discovered via the app.

Facebook currently does not participate in the revenue stream of virtual goods sales that this app will help drive, instead treating There.com like any other app developer who is allowed and encouraged to make money via the F8 platform free of charge. Facebook (apparently) doesn’t send notifications in the app users’ News Feed about item listings, auction purchases, either – a viral mechanism core to the platform - which would clearly drive monetization for the application provider here.

Would a closer integration involve a revenue sharing arrangement or advertising spend?

Privacy When Merging Social Graphs

There.com struggled with and answered some interesting privacy issues when designing how to bring a social graph from another social media platform into the Facebook environment.

There.com does not assume that because two people are friends on Facebook, they should also be friends on There.com. There.com also does not believe that if two There.com members are connected in the virtual world and are also found to be friends on Facebook that they should suggest and/ or connect them on Facebook. There.com only facilitates this connection – the full merging and overlap of social graphs - if people are 1) connected within the There.com environment, 2) friends on Facebook and 3) have installed the Facing There app.

All Facebook believes this is a very savvy way of handling privacy and relationships when merging social graphs. Do you agree?

Social Media Partnerships

There.com has been operating its virtual world since 2003. As such, it is a very sophisticated social media company. The There.com Facebook app is strategically solid, which reflects their expertise in the virtual world industry. From Facebook’s perspective, however, their application 1) is useful for members of another social network, 2) is designed to pull members off platform to join virtual world experiences and 3) does not share in virtual goods revenues – which is a significant global market and one that we covered as a major potential source of revenue for Facebook.

Does this app create long term strategic threats to Facebook?

Conclusion:

Analyzing virtual worlds can provide useful insights into Facebook’s likely competitive response to other social networks’ participation in their graph via apps. In this case the social media platforms are very different: 1) virtual worlds seek to be entertaining via a graphically rich environment and real time communications and 2) Facebook is a social utility that relies primarily on a graphically simple, elegant aesthetic combined asynchronous communications features to create the experience that fueled its enormous growth. The launch of the “Facing There” app is a useful case study for understanding the possibilities for integration between two leaders from very different social media sectors.

This may well be the cannon ball “shot across the bow” of Web 2.0 social media sites from Virtual Worlds. And virtual worlds have lots of cannon balls. There.com’s integration from a position of strength illustrates how Facebook’s long term value proposition will depend on a winner take all approach when merging social graphs.

What do you think about the threat to Facebook from Virtual Worlds apps? How should it respond?