This afternoon Facebook has announced this year’s participants in the fbFund incubator program. Two out of the eighteen participants are non-profits, meaning that they will not receive any funding but will still be able to participate in the incubator program. We’ve discussed the fbFund on a number of occasions. Over a week ago we discussed 25 of the 50 fbFund finalists, the remaining 25 of which were never posted but some of them are in the list below.
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We regularly hear stories of people losing their jobs due to things they’ve posted on Facebook or of relationships that have been broken up due to their public Facebook activity. Facebook can be a great supplement to your existing relationships but if used incorrectly it can be devastating. People post information that they don’t expect to become public but within a short period of time, most information becomes revealed and the users learn their lesson. We’ve compiled 10 signs that you’re a Facebook Noob. If you don’t know what the term “Noob” means, check out the Urban Dictionary’s definition.
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We’ve been expecting LivingSocial to become the top application for a week or two now but as of today the statistic is official. With 20,009,207 monthly active users, the application has surpassed Causes who has dropped to 19,930,177 monthly active users. We haven’t been able to put our finger on the reason of the massive drop by the leading application but whatever the cause, LivingSocial has leaped to the top of the leaderboard in just a couple of weeks.
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Mattel put up quite a fight when a game application called Scrabulous appeared on Facebook. But after losing the court battle towards blocking a game in the likeness of Mattel’s own Scrabble, the company has since welcomed the powerful branding opportunities that a Facebook application could provide. The latest gaming application from Mattel is for the well-known UNO, which is being launched with partner company Gamehouse.

As of today, the UNO application is in public beta. The application itself is simple enough: you can play the game, or leave feedback. There are no solo options for the popular card game; you’ll have to wait until there are enough available online players (4 players total), in order to participate in the UNO application. There is a live chat option so you can converse with fellow players during the game.
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In a new twist of events Facebook has decided to begin running test ads with Facebook applications. An announcement is expected on the Facebook developer blog in the next 20 minutes. David Swain of Facebook says that its running only a few small tests, but as an ad network running on Facebook this would certainly draw my attention.

Currently there are few details on the types of ads being displayed but I can only assume that they are similar to Facebook’s existing ads. In the halls of industry conferences, the idea of Facebook filling application ad inventory is something that has always been discussed.
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Meebo is back in business with Facebook. After adding Facebook support for its multi-client chat tool late last year, Facebook requested that Meebo remove the service due to issues with the way in which Meebo was connecting to Facebook’s network. But the standing issues between Meebo and Facebook have since been resolved, and Meebo is able to add Facebook chat support by leveraging Facebook Connect.
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We all have skeletons in our closet, but we don’t typically expect those skeletons to emerge and make millions of dollars for other people. It can be a scary situation to face, and if you’ve spent a considerable amount of time building a reputation around a pristine image, then compromising that image isn’t really an option.

That’s part of Valleywag’s conjectured reasoning for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg having finally made some sort of amends with Eduardo Saverin. A fellow classmate at Harverd, Saverin has had an ongoing feud with Zuckerberg, maintaining that he’s a co-founder of Facebook and deserved some recognition. Now that Ben Mezrich, best-selling author of “Bringing Down the House,” is working on a book detailing the ugly side of Facebook’s beginnings, perhaps Zuckerberg is hoping that settling the score with Saverin will minimalize the amount of material he could have otherwise provided for Mezrich’s upcoming book.
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Earlier today Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted on the company blog that some personnel changes have been made to the Facebook Connect and Platform leadership teams, in an effort to help Facebook Connect and Platform grow and provide resources for third party applications. From the looks of it, this is an executive shuffle, where existing Facebook employees are taking on new roles within the company.

for starters, Mike Vernal will be taking over as the new manager of the Connect and Platform engineering teams. Vernal was previously involved in building Facebook Connect, and Zuckerberg notes that Vernal has already been involved with thinking through some of the upcoming challenges Facebook Connect will have as it continues to grow.
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Yesterday we reported on a Facebook screenshot that replaced the Advertising tab to read as the “Lying” tab. We initially thought the screen shot may have been a hoax because of the tab’s alignment, but later learned that the screen shot wasn’t altered. What we didn’t learn yesterday, however, is what Facebook had to say about it.

In the face of having a serious and ongoing issue with the public perception of its ad network, Facebook has revealed today that the word “Lying” appeared as a result of its language translation application, reports TechCrunch. This was, in fact, an English to English auto-translation that managed to allow the word lying to replace the advertising tab in certain regions.
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Wayne Change of Facebook posted a blog post this afternoon about the results of adding the ability to comment on friends’ status updates. According to the post, the company received “nearly a million status comment in the first 24 hours.” That’s pretty impressive but what’s more interesting is the notable increase in user comments on status updates.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that friends have increasingly commented on my status updates. Well Facebook has said that this has been an overall trend and mobile access has been key to this growth. The site’s new design can also be attributed to this increase in comment traffic. While there are other social networks with more mobile members, Facebook is rapidly on track to become the largest mobile social network.

Facebook’s Blackberry application has over 1.8 million installations and their iPhone application is one of the most popular in the iTunes app store. As the site continues to expand globally, their mobile presence expands as well and it becomes an increasingly integral component of Facebook’s success.