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Random Posts from Blogs about Facebook
The Human Pets Facebook application is a dating community within Facebook.
What started out as Connections, the creators of the app soon realized that a lot of users didn’t want their friends to know they were using a dating service. Those darn newsfeeds. Anyway, they came up with the idea of Human Pets, which is like a virtual community where humans are considered pet animals and can be bought for points. You still have to feed and groom them. They can even be bought and sold.
There are interactive games for users, or pets (or whatever) to participate in, like crossword puzzles, chat rooms and music-sharing. So, if you want to be considered an animal, check out Human Pets for the oddest-sounding dating site ever. It’s actually kinda fun.
I’m In Like With You has also launched a dating game Facebook application.
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Facebook has reportedly gone through a management reshuffle that included the demotion of chief operating officer Owen Van Nattato to the position of chief revenue officer and vice president of operations.
The move means he now shares power with VP of Marketing and Operations Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of strategy and business operations Matt Cohler, chief financial officer Gideon Yu, VP of Product Engineering (and co-founder) Dustin Moskovitz and chief technology officer Adam D’Angelo. That’s a less elevated position than his former job as Facebook’s number 2 in command, argues Kara Swisher of the WSJ’s AllThingsD.
The conclusions to be drawn, however, are a little more complex: is this the sign of a growing management team as Facebook scales, builds revenue and heads towards a possible IPO? That’s the story Facebook PR would like to tell, albeit without the tantalizing mention of an IPO.
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SocialMedia, the aforementioned Facebook apps and MySpace widgets company that will combine hosting, promotion and an ad network, has raised $1 million in funding in a round led by CRV Ventures, SoftTech VC and the Hitforge seed fund. More background, from our previous coverage:
SocialMedia’s founders include Seth Goldstein and David Henderson of the lofty attention-tracking service Root Markets, and David Gentzel, whose successful MySpace widgets Trakzor and Flikzor we’ve covered here before (there’s now also a Facebook version of Trakzor).
Getting $1M to build on top of another platform isn’t so rare now: RockYou and Slide.com have done much the same thing. And as these companies diversify beyond MySpace, their positions look a little less precarious.
[via Paidcontent]
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Firstgiving has created a Facebook application that lets you show your support for the various charities you’ve added. These will display on your Facebook profile and encourage your friends to participate in raising awareness for the charities you support as well. You’ll remember that Firstgiving shows the progress for each cause that is added to its site, and this progress will be displayed within the Facebook application as well.
The uLinkx Facebook application lets you search, view, share and organize video clips from across the major video networks. This aggregation tool lets you import and view the videos to your Facebook profile. See what your friends are watching, choose the clips you’d like to see played on your profile, and search videos from uLinkx, YouTube, MySpace, Metacafe, Revver and DailyMotion. Videos can be imported from YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Viddler.
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We’ve already noted this a couple of times in the past month, but it’s important to be aware of the ongoing shift for social networks globally, and especially in the UK.
Bebo, the UK-based social network, has overtaken MySpace to become the largest social network in the land. According to comScore’s July report, Bebo has 10.7 million unique users, compared to MySpace’s 10.1 million unique users, in addition to being the most visited social network in the UK.
Gaining on MySpace in pretty much all fronts, Bebo has also been ranked as the second most engaging website in the UK with 8.7 billion page views. Google has the number one spot, with 8.8 billion page views in the UK. And don’t forget about Facebook–it’s third in line for social networks in the UK, and it’s been gaining steam in the last year as well, having a rather successful reach for its global strategy.
Nielsen has a slightly different take on Bebo and Facebook in the UK. Read here for more details.
[via ZDnet]
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A reader tipped us off today that Facebook has launched a version of the site for the iPhone. And - wow! - have they done a spectacular job with this.
Go to themob.facebook.com on your iPhone and browser to behold what might be the best iPhone app so far. The interface slides horizontally as you choose options, and the site is laid out in such a way that the essential features are much easier to find than on the main site - browse friends, check your Facebook mail, read the news feed and use pretty much every other Facebook feature from this more compact viewpoint. The red number is your unread mail: my inbox is unusually empty at 35 mails, but I guess that’s no consolation for those who tried to contact me through the site.
This is a good job by Facebook, and hopefully other social networks will launch iPhone versions that are even half as good.
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The Facebook Secrets blog, which ignited a storm after publishing the Facebook homepage source code, has done it again: the source code for Facebook search is now out in the wild and running free.
It’s another nightmare situation for Facebook, whose founders must be wondering just how much material the blog has stored up: perhaps we’ll see a leak every few days if they don’t shut this down. Whoever the Secrets blogger is, he also has immaculate timing: after revealing the original code at the weekend, he’s chosen the dead of night US time to unveil his next trick.
Whether this has anything to do with self-proclaimed leaker Trae seems less likely: it’s possible that Facebook Secrets discovered the original code independently of Trae (or was tipped off by his discovery), and had time to dig around on his/her own. Like the Fake Steve Jobs, it’s a blogosphere mystery that could drag on some time.
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Qloud is an upcoming company that will sync your iTunes with its community to help you organize your music library and discover new songs, similar to Last.fm. While the site is still in private beta, its Facebook application has already been released, letting you load your iTunes library and music history into your Facebook account with its iTunes plugin. Your songs will be displayed on your profile, and you can also find songs from other users as well. Qloud will filter songs by recently played, most played, top artists, playlist and top rated. There’s also a “musical poke” feature that lets you attach a song of your choosing when you poke users on Facebook.
Dovetail, the Indie film community, has also launched a Facebook application. This uses P2P technology to create a sub-community within your Facebook network. Find and share indie films, rate and review them. You’ll need to download a desktop application if you want to download any of the films for yourself, but it may well be worth it for the free content. This is among the first Facebook applications to connect directly with a desktop client, as you are able to download films through the Facebook application.
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A blog from a Facebook employee implies that the Scrabulous Facebook application is a favorite amongst employees. And why wouldn’t it be?
For anyone that loves to play Scrabble, this application lets you do it your way. There are options to play with other users that aren’t even online. This way, you can let your Scrabble game go on forever. Well, maybe not forever, but at least you can play when you want to play. Once you’ve added Scrabulous, you can choose to host a game, start a game with a friend, see who’s online now, find a friend that’s currently playing, or join a table.
When starting a game or looking for a game to join, you can choose your own settings, such as what game speed you’d like to participate in. Fast means that the players are online and want to play now. Moderate means that you can stretch the game out for a couple of days, and slow means that you’ll play when you are free. You can also participate in a regular game, or a challenge, and also choose which dictionary you’d like to use for your game (English, French or Italian).
This is certainly a Facebook application on which we can all waste our workdays.
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Not intentionally, alas: a story topping Digg from an anonymous one-hit-wonder-blog called FacebookSecrets (an increasingly common tactic for spreading data around) shows that a part of Facebook’s source code was exposed to some users this weekend. The blog reposted all the code, which must surely have ruined Zuckerberg’s weekend. A server misconfiguration, not a hack, is being blamed. Facebook has since confirmed the issue.
Now we just need the ConnectU code to be exposed and we can close that case. 
This does, however, raise serious questions about how secure Facebook may be. A code leak is a major, major problem for the site - the only thing that would generate more fear would be a hack that gained access to user data.
And that’s the huge risk: Facebook promotes itself as a place to connect to your “real” self. In fact, they delete any profile that doesn’t represent a real person (I was forced to change my profile name from “Mashable” to my own, for instance), pretty much guaranteeing that 100% of the data stored there is correct. They also prevent people from signing up with names that sound fake. An exposure of user data, therefore, is the identity thief’s dream.
These risks increase as Facebook and other social networks open up: Facebook apps have yet to be abused, but there’s the potential to do so.
My suggestion to Facebook: make a PR move like hiring a “security expert” or releasing a security mandate. Anything to stop non-technical journalists picking up on these issues and blowing them out of proportion, similar to MySpace’s pedophile stories.
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