We know, we know, Facebook has had so many changes lately it’s hard to keep up with them all. If you are a casual user, there are plenty of new features to explore. You may see some changes in accessing some of your games, or notice different content on some business pages, but generally you’re good to go.

However, it gets trickier if you’re a business owner who has developed Facebook apps. Starting October 1st, apps that run on Facebook must be hosted from a secure server. Facebook is requiring this to help protect the privacy of its users. What does it mean to you? If you don’t have a SSL certificate for your app’s site domain, your app will not show up on Facebook anymore – meaning your fans won’t see it!

Don’t worry, we’re here to help. If you host your application with us, we can get a SSL certificate set up for your domain. If you use a different host, they’ll be able to help you. Either way, you’ll just need to provide some specific information that verifies you are the owner of the site, and you’ll likely have to pay a small amount to buy the certification from the company that provides it. The most commonly known certificate provider is VeriSign, but there are plenty to choose from, with a variety of features and prices.

If we can help you, let us know. In the meantime, enjoy the latest features on Facebook… we will be back soon to guide you through more of the interesting changes that are happening there — stay tuned!

Ticker & Chat: The new ticker on the top right of your homepage shows real-time posts making them easier to go through.  Just hover over any story to see entire update.  Additionally by clicking your chat sidebar the ticker attaches to the top.  You can chat while navigating to any page you like while watching your friend’s status updates change.

Photo Layout: You probably noticed the creative way our pictures are now laid out in our News Feed.  This is purely for our viewing experience and gives business pages a more unique way to attract “likes”.

Top Stories:  Facebook’s new concept shows posts that you will most likely find interesting and puts them at the top of your feed when you first log in.  The top stories are marked by a blue tag on the top left corner of the post.  To remove them from your top stories just click on the blue tag and they will be removed.  To add a top story that you are interested in just hover over an update where the blue tab would be and click-it’s that easy!

Friend Lists:  Facebook’s new “Smart Lists” are just that-Smart.  Smart lists automatically create lists for your city, work, family, and school.  You can add friends or brands you follow to the lists Facebook automatically created for you, or you can create a new list to organize your friends even better.  To create a new list or edit an existing list click on “Lists” on the left of your News Feed.

Here you can see a list I created based on my favorite movies and television shows making it easy for me to skip all the news feed and go straight to my shows.

Friend List Dropdown:  You can also organize your friend into lists right from their profile page.

Subscribe:  The subscribe button allows you to hear from people that you are interested in, even if you’re not friends.  You are automatically subscribed to all your current friends updates and with the subscribe button you can choose which of their updates you see.  For example, if you have a friend who is always playing Facebook games (we all have those friends), you can hide all those game posts in a simple step.

Not all profiles have a Subscribe button.  Only people who allow subscribers will have the Subscribe button on their profile.  If you choose to allow Subscribers they will only see the things you share publicly.

What do you think of all these new features?  Love it or hate it?

http://buddypress.org/

Unfortunately, now having seen the trailer, I still can’t tell you much about it. Why is that? Because I was so busy marveling at the choice of music that accompanies the entire preview to notice any of the actors or plot points. The whole thing plays against a gussied up version of Radiohead’s classic anthem, “Creep,” sung by a youth choir accompanied by piano.

As I listened to it alongside a montage of Facebook status updates, changes in relationship status, profile pictures and the like, I was totally blown away by what an absolute perfect commentary it is on Facebook and the population(s) it serves. Totally one of those connections you can’t believe you haven’t already made yourself.

To whomever is responsible for this stroke of genius: Bravo.

Obviously, both of these networks hold value (and/or create value) for their users. Both are very popular and both are adding members like mad. Both are also likely to take a hit in membership over the next several years as users grow bored with them and move on to the next big thing (which will probably be something from Google – like everything else). That said, if you had to hedge a bet on the success of one or the other, you might be inclined to go with Facebook since 250 million users is a lot more than somewhere around 5 million (though no “official” membership data has been released by Twitter). But it’s another shared characteristic of both networks that gives me pause: each has yet to turn a profit.

Popularity aside, we all know that nothing is free – and if these networks can’t figure out how to turn their fame into fortune, they’re sunk. Both have legions of super-smart people working tirelessly to try and figure out how to be profitable.

So why do I think Twitter has a better shot? Two reasons:

1. This article from today’s NYTimes.
2. And this article from Newsweek.com.

I found the most important information in the Twitter article to be this:

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

For the Facebook article, it’s this:

The paradox of the social network is that trust—the very lifeblood of the site’s growth—may be the same thing hindering its financial success. Recently, the company faced a series of heavily-publicized battles when users were turned off by Beacon, an initiative by the site that targeted advertisements at individual users without their consent. After many Facebookers protested, discussions arose over what information Facebook owns about each of their users, and a new privacy code was established on the site.

Facebook members have grown too comfortable with the idea of the site being used for any purpose beyond the one it currently serves in their lives. They don’t want to get messages from advertisers in their inbox (even if they really might want what’s being peddled), they want messages from friends. Period.

Twitter on the other hand is new enough not to have fully cemented this kind of relationship with their users, and already seems to have an audience that is more open and accepting of commercial overtures. What’s more, some of the possibilities for revenue opportunities they’ve floated seem like winners. If I was a business owner or celebrity, I’d be more than happy to pay for the ability to weed out imposter accounts or access analytics of my profile page (at least one of which should be possible and free to begin with, but that’s a topic for another post).

Anyone disagree?

As part of their sponsorship efforts, Black Magic entered a customized, Ford F-150 SVT Raptor driven by the guys at Garage 419 into the rally to get in on the action and get extra mileage (pun intended) out of their participation.

To put rally fans in the passenger seat with the Black Magic team, we built a custom microsite with flash features for daily updates, race tracking and even a custom YouTube Channel. Through daily blog posts, an up-to-the-minute Twitter feed, maps, photos and videos, Black Magic fans were able to live the experience of an exclusive and world-renowned automotive event and interact directly with the brand in an engaging and authentic way. Check out our portfolio for more information or visit the site to see things for yourself!

The move to the web follows FedEx’s surprise decision to forgo ad space in the last Super Bowl after 20 years as a notable advertiser. At the time, the company felt like the expense ($3 million for a 30-second spot this year) was unjustifiable in light of the economic downturn. As FedEx’s director of advertising makes clear to the NY Times, the reach and relative affordability of the web has become impossible to ignore:

Steve Pacheco, director of advertising at FedEx, said the new infomercial campaign reflected FedEx’s acknowledgment of the growing sentiment that “lunchtime is the new prime time,” meaning that the multitudes who watch videos online while chomping sandwiches in cubicles rival those wielding remote controls at night.

“We’re still very involved in television, especially with all our sports and sponsorship support,” Mr. Pacheco said. “But digital advertising and communication is taking a bigger role in the overall plan, because we try to scale our media plan to be where our customers are.”

Niche social networking sites are absolutely something people want to do. People clearly want to do this. . .[and] as people get more comfortable with social networking via Facebook, Twitter, they will look around and say, ‘I want a social network for this particular group.’

Read the whole interview…

“The show would feature players using Twitter to follow their favorite celebrities while competing in an interactive challenge. Producer Noah Oppenheim said the show would be the first to bring immediacy of the site to TV.”

I would say more, but I just vomited on my keyboard.

Now, thanks to Charmin, users can download free mobile applications for iPhones and BlackBerrys that use GPS to show you the way to the nearest public pit stop. Not only will you get location, Sit or Squat also lets users rate each restroom based on ick-factor (an average rating above 2.5 is “sit,” below “squat”) so you can avoid less than stellar accommodations (if you have the luxury of being picky).

Being a toilet paper company, this is obviously a great fit for Charmin, and it’s getting them a lot of buzz on blogs and other traditional media outlets-which is the point, of course. What’s so interesting about it though, is that Sit or Squat was a pre-existing site – the lesson being that you don’t necessarily need to be a corporate giant for a good, common-sense interactive site or application to pay off. Certainly, Charmin’s saving some cash by avoiding the cost of custom application development and Sit or Squat now has a corporate sponsor to finance their brainchild and tell the world about it. It’s a win-win.

Beyond keeping a watchful eye on risky interests and pictures, parents should also use social networking sites such as MySpace — which had about 120 million users as of this summer — as an opportunity to learn about their childrens’ favorite movies and hobbies, as well as their top friends, she said.

“You so often hear parents say ‘I don’t even know my kid anymore.’ Here’s a very easy tool to get to know your kid again,” she said.

Here’s the whole article: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/05/myspace.teens/index.html

http://bewareofthedoghouse.com/

And can I put a plug in for their spend $25 get $10 off coupon they’ve been sending out lately. Another great way to pick up some much needed foot traffic.

Some of the arguments: “Online marketing increasingly aims for awareness, consideration, preference and loyalty all at once…Marketing managers can therefore defend their online budgets as being both above and below the line.” And in relation to traditional forms of advertising: “All this makes spending on [online] advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4259135.html

And apparently Microsoft is working on just this thing, with collaborative searching:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4292830.html?page=2 (see #7, collaborative search)

My mind’s too simple to make sense of it all, but it looks like there are some big things coming.

http://www.silverpop.com/news/press/10_02_08.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/26/what-is-the-deal-with-this-stupid-lighter-iphone-app/

This is a pretty cool opportunity for website owners who don’t have the budget or the technical expertise to build social features into their site. It’s a free gadget/widget based way to implement social features such as rating systems, user community, comments, photo sharing, etc onto a site. It helps a site grow virally by allowing you to invite friends from other social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. As with other open source projects, independent developers are contributing new social gadgets all the time, so the library is growing.

It’s still in beta invite only mode, but I’d expect to see heavy use of these gadgets in the near future.

http://www.yammer.com/

They also offer Yammer iphone, blackberry and desktop apps

How to Blog for Your Business – the Good and the Bad.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/risky-business/2008/9/10/how-to-blog-for-your-business–the-good-and-the-bad.html