Social Networking Watch

Facebook First Bit Site To Really Embrace OpenID

TECH CRUNCH -- Apr 27 -- In addition to the news that they are making activity stream data available to third party developers, Facebook will also be making an announcement around OpenID. The announcement is that they’ll become what’s called a relying party, meaning anyone with an OpenID (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace are all issuers, and Microsoft is in beta) can create and log into a Facebook account using those credentials. . There are two ways websites can participate in the OpenID framework. Issuing parties make their user accounts OpenID compatible. Relying parties are websites that allow users to sign into their sites with credentials from Issuing parties. Facebook has been a wild card with OpenID. They’ve talked about adopting it eventually, but their Facebook Connect product has actually muddled the situation - Facebook actually competes directly with OpenID when allowing users to sign in to third party sites via Facebook Connect. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Facebook Opens Site To Developers Of Services

WALL STREET JOURNAL -- Apr 27 -- Facebook is expected to announce significant plans to open up core parts of its sites, namely the information that appears in the stream of updates on users' homepages and profiles, to third-party developers so that they can build new services on top of it. The announcement means developers can build services that access the photos, videos, notes and comments users upload to Facebook, with users' permission. That's a big change for the social-networking site, which has exercised tight control over the look and feel of its service and how developers can interact with it. To take advantage of the new services, users would have to allow the companies to receive access to their Facebook data, according to people familiar with the matter, and users' privacy settings on Facebook will extend to any new services built. FULL ARTICLE @ WALL STREET JOURNAL

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Charities See Potential And Risk With Social Networks

ASSOCIATED PRESS -- Apr 24 -- With millions of users worldwide, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace would seem fertile ground for fundraising experiments — especially ones where users aren't asked to make direct contributions. But it's far from certain that social networking will prove as effective as more traditional fundraising methods such as direct mail, telephone solicitation and even e-mails to past donors. It's yet another avenue for raising money and awareness, supplementing direct online contributions generated by running ads and sending e-mail to past donors. Social networks can potentially be more effective because they are cheaper and involve referrals from friends. However, as people's time and wallets are stretched ever thinner, they could decide that installing an application is their "charitable good deed for the day," leaving them less inclined to write a check or volunteer at the soup kitchen. FULL ARTICLE @ SF CHRONICLE

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Facebook 1.5 for BlackBerry Goes Live

INFORMATION WEEK -- Apr 22 -- Research In Motion, the makers of BlackBerry, announced Facebook 1.5, the latest version of their application. Upgrades features include:

* Receive instant notifications on your home screen.
* Send/receive message or wall posts, pokes and friend requests.
* Update your status, view and comment on your friends’ status.
* Share photos from your BlackBerry with just one click.
* Connect your Facebook friends with your BlackBerry Address Book.
* Birthday reminders and event integration into your BlackBerry Calendar.

FULL ARTICLE @ INFORMATION WEEK

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Twitter Launches Rival To Facebook Connect

ONLINE MEDIA DAILY -- Apr 21 -- Twitter has recently introduced its Facebook Connect competitor, “Sign in with Twitter”, which allows users to log in to third-party sites using their Twitter user name and password. The new feature provides a more secure alternative to Twitter API because third-party developers don’t handle passwords. FULL ARTICLE @ MEDIA POST

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Facebook Goes International

READ WRITE WEB -- Apr 20 -- Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. The active user base in Germany grew 60% in the last four months, and the Czech Republic (191%), Bulgaria (105%), and Macedonia (95%) are currently seeing some of the most impressive growth rates in Europe. Asia and Africa saw growth rates of 73.7% and 86.9% respectively, and in Indonesia, active users few by almost 240% in the last 12 weeks. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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Qik Adds Mobile Video To Facebook

MASHABLE -- Apr 20 -- Qik, the live streaming video service for mobile phones, has launched its own Facebook integration application to help publish videos to the social network. Users can now upload mobile video directly to the Facebook video app. You cannot post live video, but Qik allows you to post a link to live video on their website instead. Qik also has the ability to share videos via Twitter. FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE

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The Fastest Growing Social Sites

MASHABLE -- Apr 20 -- According to Nielsen Online, these are some notable developments from March in social networking:

- Ning is currently the 2nd fastest growing social networking property. Its traffic is up 283% YOY, and it now reaches a total of 5.6 million people in the US.
- Bebo has grown 148% in the past year, and now reaches more than 6.1 million people in the US. Bebo is known mostly for being big overseas, so the next few months will tell if this was a one-time pop thanks to AIM integration or a continued trend.
- LinkedIn continues to be one of the quickest growing social sites and has more than doubled its size in the past year. It now reaches better than 15.8 million people in the US, ranking it 3rd in total size behind Facebook and MySpace.

- The “big three” stories remain much the same: Twitter is now growing at a mind-boggling 2,565% and reached more than 13 million people in the US during March. Facebook saw 69.1 million visitors in March and continues to extend its lead over MySpace, which saw only 55.9 million.

FULL ARTICLE @ MASHABLE 

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GenePartner On Facebook

SNW -- Apr 15 -- GenePartner announced their Facebook app. today. Users can now match against their Facebook contacts who also have a GenePartnerID.

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This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch.

Facebook Accounts For 30% Of All Online SN Time

THE DIGITAL CONTENT BLOG -- Apr 15 -- According to Comscore, Facebook is the sixth most popular website in the world with 275m unique users each month. Facebook is ranked as the most popular social network in 11 of the 17 countries comScore monitors. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK

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College Facebook Fans Get Lower Grades

INFORMATION WEEK -- Apr 13 -- College students who use Facebook spend less time hitting the books and get lower grades than students who haven't signed up for Facebook, The Ohio State University study showed. Users said they averaged one to five hours a week of studying, while nonusers studied 11 to 15 hours per week. FULL ARTICLE @ INFORMATION WEEK

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Facebook Now Has 200M Users

TECH CRUNCH -- Apr 8 -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just posted a message on the company blog confirming the number of users. The blog post, titled ‘200 Million Strong’, says the milestone will effectively be achieved today. In Jan this year, the official number of users was still 150m, and grew to 175m in Feb. That means that 50m people signed up for Facebook in 2009 alone to date (or 500,000 per day). FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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MySpace Is Losing Popularity

THE OBSERVER -- Mar 29 -- MySpace is now less than half the size of Facebook. Three executives recently quit and there is speculation its co-founders will follow. Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, could walk away in Oct after the end of their contracts, each worth $30m over two years. MySpace had 124m monthly unique visitors last month, a decline of 2%, according to comScore. Facebook, by contrast, racked up 276m unique visitors, an increase of 16.6%. FULL ARTICLE @ GUARDIAN.CO.UK

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Social Networks 'Monitored'

BBC NEWS -- Mar 25 -- Social networks could be monitored by the UK government. It is part of a plan to store details of all phone calls, e-mails and websites visited on a central database. Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake said the websites contained sensitive personal details and he was concerned information could leak from any government-controlled database. Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, was considering lobbying ministers over the proposal, which he described as "overkill". FULL ARTICLE @ BBC NEWS

Mark Brooks: Totally overkill. Your comments please.

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Boomers On Social Networks

USA TODAY – Mar 27 -- Currently, 16.5m adults ages 55 and older engage in social networking, according to comScore. Facebook is seeing the most growth among users age 30 and older. MySpace has 6.9m 55+ users and they spend an average 204 minutes a month on the site. FULL ARTICLE @ USA TODAY

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Facebook Is Hunting For More Money

BUSINESS WEEK  – Mar 26 – Facebook wants as much as $100m in debt financing. Facebook has been shopping for credit from a number of large financial institutions, including Bank of America. The company's expenses are rising as it adds millions of new users. At the end of Feb, the company reached 275m users around the world, up from 100m last Feb. Facebook spends heavily on equipment such as storage technology. Facebook is now the world's largest photo-sharing site with  10 billion photos on the site. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WEEK

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Facebook Mulls Over Virtual Currency

LA TIMES -- Mar 24 -- Facebook is "looking at" adding virtual currency. In Web games such as Club Penguin and Maple Story, players pay real dollars to get virtual currencies they can use to buy online outfits, homes and pets. Analysts estimate that consumers have spent more than $1.5 billion worldwide on virtual goods. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES

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Netflix Integrating Movie Ratings With Facebook

REUTERS -- Mar 24 -- Netflix users can now use Facebook Connect  to share their ratings of Netflix rentals with their Facebook friends. FULL ARTICLE @ REUTERS

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