Marie* was expecting a typical day when she arrived at her advertising job one January day earlier this year. By the end, she was among the 15 percent of her company who had been laid off as part of a downsizing at the New York company. She was so devastated that she didn’t have time to say goodbye to co-workers with whom she had shared so many memories.

Like millions of people, Marie faced the harsh reality of the current economic recession that has led to double-digit unemployment in the United States and many other countries. She looked to support from her friends, family and former co-workers — and she found it by logging onto Facebook.

Facebook allowed her to reconnect with many of her former colleagues who had similarly lost their jobs, and they were able to support each other through a difficult time. Marie expected her first day without a job to be filled with sadness and isolation. Instead, she said she was greeted with well wishes and even job leads from previous co-workers and others who had been in similar situations.

“This gave me a great sense of support and connection,” Marie said, “As I gladly received wonderful messages and followed up on leads, I realized that this would not be possible without Facebook.”

One of those leads was for a marketing position, and Marie diligently followed up. Months later, on another day she thought would be typical, she received a job offer. Now she’s working full-time and grateful for the support and advice of her friends. As Marie said, “Facebook really helped me stay connected, receive kind words, and indirectly secure employment.”

Nikki, a specialist on Facebook’s user operations team, is grateful to have found her job through Facebook, too.

*Marie is a pseudonym we used at the request of the Facebook user to protect her identity.

Official facebook news!

Source: Facebook Blog

Revenue is then generated via the sale of virtual goods. The business model is sound but the question is how long can Zynga rely on this single game dynamic? It appears that the model is working extremely well as the company has outperformed all other Facebook application developers. While there may not be much of an incentive to change strategies, I can only imagine that a diversification of game algorithms would reduce their risk, if not add value to their existing portfolio.

For the time being, the current game dynamic works and FishVille, which the company recently launched has already grown to over 22.9 million monthly active users in under a month. With that sort of success, there’s little incentive for Zynga to shift their game plan. Now the only question is whether or not PetVille will experience the same success that the company’s last few games have experience. There’s a good chance it will.

Source: All Facebook

According to the company, PetVille allow Facebook users to “raise, dress, and care for a pet” that they have creaed. Gamers can also visit their friends’s houses and play with their pets to earn coins that can be use to make their house the coolest on the block.

PetVille joins the legions of pet simulation games like Pet Society, Happy Pets and NeoPets.

On a quick impression note the game seems highly inspired by PlayFish’s Pet Society (which inturn borrowed heavily from Nintendo games such as Nintendogs and Animal Crossing).

PetVille follows Zynga’s recent patterns of letting other companies innovate a game category, review what works, then release their own version of the game using their secret social game sauce.

Going by Zyngna’s recent run of their games, PetVille might soon be a leader on the Facebook gaming chart or atleast on the pet simulation games.

If you have enjoyed Zynga’s games in Facebook, this one too seems fine to give a try, though it seems heavily inspired by PetSociety.

Related posts:

1. EA Takes On Rival Zynga With Poker Rivals
2. Zynga Games on Facebook
3. New Facebook Login Polls

Source: Facebook Login

Those big name implementations of Facebook Connect however keeps the company’s identity platform in the press day after day, while Google Friend Connect gets brief spurts of attention. One can understand why Google feels so strongly about competing in the online identity wars. The primary reason is of course that the company doesn’t have an effective system of determining who our friends are (aside from their email services of course).

While it’s difficult to dismiss Google Friend Connect given their wide reach, the service doesn’t appear to be as strong of a competitor given their loosely structured data. While I’m sure there are plenty of people who would say Google Friend Connect is a formidable competitor, I would argue that they are running a distant second to Facebook.

For those who think that a distributed web could win, I’d say “Fat chance!” The main reason being that Facebook has the largest representation of the social graph and the more people they have, the greater the incentive is to join. This snowballs at a rapid pace, and right now there’s nobody close to matching Facebook’s image of the social graph.

Rather than ramble on about why Facebook will win the identity war, I’d simply emphasize how this is clearly a last ditch effort by Google despite the millions of people that have implemented the Friend Connect service. While implementing Twitter as another identity service is a useful feature, Google is essentially attempting to piece together a group of widgets to take on Facebook.

Do you think my dismissal of Google Friend Connect is an unfair assessment?

Source: All Facebook

There are some clear challenges that Diditz will face in terms of gaining significant traction, the most significant hurdle is getting Page administrators to use Diditz instead of Facebook’s existing applications. There are plenty of Page administrators who would like to have a more robust media content platform though, and I have a feeling that many smaller organizations will take advantage of Diditz for that purpose.

Right now Diditz is still an invitation only product, but for those Page administrators looking to try out the product, up to 100 people can register via the application for free with the code “AllFacebook”.

Source: All Facebook

(Source: http://www.computerworlduk.com )Forrester recently received a flurry of inquiries concerning social network access inside enterprises. Many firms are reluctant to deny their employees’ access to social networking sites but at the same time are worried about consequences such as malware threat, data loss, and the loss of productivity.

More specifically, risks associated with social networking come in three flavors:

• Malware and phishing: Social networks have become a hot bed for malware and phishing activities. As such, allowing access to sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc., does carry a certain amount of security risks.

• Data loss: Employees post content to social networking sites pose a potential threat of data loss, which has many up in arms about the use of social networks in enterprises.

• Damage to corporate image: There is no reliable way to ensure that no one can set up a fake corporate page in LinkedIn or Facebook, and that no one takes your official promotional video and repost it to YouTube after unauthorized edits.

Should you allow access to social networks and social media? The answer is “yes”. Even if you do not currently allow access to social networks, you will have to soon — access to social networks is approaching the status of a “must-have” at work places. Competitive pressure will sooner or later make you rethink your restrictive stance on social network access. One question we often get asked is: “How many firms out there are allowing access vs. denying access to social networks?” We do not have an accurate answer to that. A small survey we conducted in the beginning of this year indicated that today nearly 40% of companies (enterprises and SMBs) allow access to social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

What best practices should you follow in regulating access to social networking and media sites?

First, you need to establish an acceptable-usage policy with respect to social networking and media access. Consider these aspects when writing your policies:

• Does everyone need the same level of access to social networking sites? The answer is often “no”. For instance, the marketing and sales team may need to post video and other media files for legitimate business purposes. But for other parts of the company, there isn’t such a compelling need. Perhaps a read-only policy is adequate. Of course, this would depend on the general company culture — how liberal or how restrictive you are in terms of personal computing at work plays an important role in these decisions.

• Be vigilant about software downloads. Remember that malware travels via software downloads over the Web, a prudent policy might allow users to access Facebook content but will block any software installation as a result of visiting Facebook pages. This will of course dilute the social networking experience, but in many ways, it is an acceptable compromise for workplace access.

• Should you allow access any time any where? Again, the answer depends on how liberal your company culture is. On one hand, you do not want to place unnecessary restrictions. On the other hand, there has to be a balance between personal uses of social media vs. workplace productivity. So, the acceptable-usage policy may state that employees should use their best judgment when it comes to the amount of time they spend on Internet social networking sites. Or, if the company culture allows, you may enforce time or bandwidth-based limitation on access to social networking sites.

• Acceptable data posts. Social networks allow data posts, which may pose a data leak threat to enterprises. In your usage policy, make it clear what kind of data/content is considered non-appropriate in data posts to public social networking sites. For example, some companies prohibit their employees from posting endorsement or commenting on the company on LinkedIn.

Second, you need to clearly communicate the policies to your users and educate them on the risks of social networking and acceptable usages with regards to data posts and software downloads. Make it clear that these security threats are not just against individuals, but also have the potential to compromise the security posture of the corporate environment.

Lastly, if you decide to enforce your policies (if any) technologically instead of simply stating the policies and hoping for compliance, you need to employ a Web filtering product (you probably want one regardless for anti-malware reasons). You may also want the product to collect and report usage statistics on your users. For any outlier population, e.g., the a few employees who spend an exorbitant amount of time on social networks, his/her manager can be made aware of the situation and deal with it in an appropriate way.

Often, just the knowledge that access to social networks is monitored would curtail such behaviours. Be mindful that not every Web filtering product is equipped to deal with script-based Web malware.

The ones that come with an antivirus engine but no script processing capabilities do not fit the bill. Finally, it is imperative that the Web filtering product comes with data leak prevention (DLP) capabilities to enforce acceptable usage policies for data posts.

facebook stalker application

Source: Facebook Applications Development Company

For all the Washington D.C. area Facebook developers however, you are welcome to come to the DC Facebook Developer Garage. Make sure to RSVP for the event and join the Developer Garage Washington DC group. For all those who would like to come to the social event, Facebook will be updating the event shortly with the location of the social event.

Source: All Facebook

For all the Washington D.C. area Facebook developers however, you are welcome to come to the DC Facebook Developer Garage. Make sure to RSVP for the event and join the Developer Garage Washington DC group. For all those who would like to come to the social event, Facebook will be updating the event shortly with the location of the social event.

Source: All Facebook

The only question now is whether or not Facebook can continue with their breakneck growth through next year to remain atop the annual Google Zeitgeist.

Source: All Facebook

The only question now is whether or not Facebook can continue with their breakneck growth through next year to remain atop the annual Google Zeitgeist.

Source: All Facebook