The free food days at Google are numbered. Googlers will no longer be getting free dinner, tea trolley, or afternoon snack attack services. Valleywag broke the story and according to their source, “Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program”. As the publication puts it, “Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company’s resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they’d add perks, rather than cut them.”
In 2004, More»

Labels: Apple, Facebook, google, iPhone

There’s a new facebook group trying to influence Barack Obama’s choice of Vice President. The story here is that in the old days, there really wasn’t any way for Barack Obama to get real time polling information outside of a few hundred poll calls and there certainly wasn’t an effective way for a community to quickly ban together to influence such a decision.
But now there’s an outside chance 100k people might directly influence his VP pick – in real time. That’s awesome – that’s the power of Web 2.0. Other than physically More»

Labels: Facebook, web 2.0

Individuals and businesses are becoming increasingly dependent upon the Internet for social, entertainment, research and business activities. This has created the incentive and opportunity for companies to collect, use, and disseminate data regarding online users. There is concern, however, that tracking individuals’ Internet activity and gathering information from online users violates their expectations of privacy. Individuals often are unaware what information is being collected about them, how it is being used and to whom it is disseminated.
The Committee will consider the current state of the online advertising industry and that market’s impact More»

Labels: Facebook, google, Online Advertising

Visa will be giving away $100 in Facebook ad credits to the first 20,000 small businesses that download the Visa application on Facebook. The goal of the application is to connect small businesses on Facebook. Both Facebook and Visa hope to cash in on the 80,000-plus small business that have already signed up on Facebook.
Facebook hopes that if the businesses receiving the ad credits are impressed enough with the results they will continue marketing on the site. “That’s what we certainly are hoping for,” More»

Labels: Facebook, visa

For 99 cents you can buy 200 Facebooks friends on eBay. A seller named pseudopr415 is auctioning off 10 fake Facebook profiles, each with a minimum 200 real “friends,” who live in major cities across the U.S. The idea: Marketers might want to buy these profiles to sneakily advertise their wares under the guise of a real person. eBay has a ban on the sale of virtual goods such as online friends, flower and games.
- Samantha (age 19) - loves music, makes art, and enjoys the outdoors- John (age 35) - health purist, More»

Labels: Facebook

The answer is simple. First, create a Facebook application; next, all you need is one person to like it, then their friends find out and it spreads and soon you will be making $500,000 a month. What’s the catch? It could you up to 2 week to start making $500,000 a month. That is what Chamath Palihapitiya, the company’s vice president of marketing told attendees at a conference two weeks ago. He went on to disclose that about 33 percent of Facebook application developers reported profits of up to $500,000 a month. At last count there were 200,000 More»

Labels: applications, developers, Facebook, Online Advertising

Yet another social network is shutting down. This time is it Verizon’s social network. The social network which let users write blogs, post photos, and discuss in forums, will close June 16, 2008. The existing social network on the Verizon website will be moved over to the Verizon page on Facebook. Verizon jumped into social networking like many other companies, thinking it would be easy. They even branded it as “Join The Conversation” however they soon realized that branded social network wasn’t worth the effort and they are moving to where the conversation is.
In January, Conde More»

Labels: Facebook, MySpace, Online Advertising, social networks

Facebook announced today that it will be opening up its code. Dubbed Facebook Open Platform or fbOpen, this move is viewed as being in direct competition to Google’s OpenSocial which is also an open source development platform for creating social apps.
“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology. We’ve built in extensibility points, so you can add functionality to More»

Labels: Facebook, google, open social, Open Source, social media

Glam is a publishing and advertising network that, according to VentureBeat, reaches some 64 million people. The Glam demographic is mostly women and skews to higher incomes, making the Glam audience potenially lucrative for advertisers. Glam’s plans to become something of a celebrity watching social network appear to be shifting to what they see as a more lucrative network of blogs and publishing from other sites as well as the Glam network.
To succeed in the video space Glam has a lot of work ahead, and it won’t be glamorous. Video advertising remains More»

Labels: blam, Facebook, MySpace

Two recent studies indicate how social networking over mobile devices is going to grow into one of the online world’s most significant activities.
Opera’s research about the use of their mobile browser is a bit misleading however because it appears to be from those who use the browser on their phones - obviously a group much more likely than others to participate in social networking:
Select global highlights from the first quarter report:
Social networking consumes almost 41% of traffic: The United States, South Africa and Indonesia have more than 60% of their traffic going to social More»

Labels: Facebook, Mobile, mobile web, Social Networking