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Facebook Gets a New York Times ArticleToday

There is a bunch of buzz today about a New York Times article which covers the ramp up in Facebook Connect sites launching. It has sparked a dialogue among a few about data portability and what the future holds. I’m not quite sure if the New York Times article is a sign of an impending public release of Facebook Connect or if the story is really that a few pre-announced partner sites are preparing to launch their sites.

Whatever the case is, Facebook Connect has continued to rollout on a number of sites over the past month and that trend will continue. Almost a month ago Facebook announced that they would begin accepting site submissions. Unfortunately since then we have had few updates on the status of site submissions and what developers’ experience had been.

So far none of the sites mentioned in the New York Times article appear to have live versions of Facebook Connect. Mike Arrington is saying that yesterday was the day that Facebook began making their full court press on the media but the only indication we’ve s

Does Facebook Know Your Emotional State?Yesterday

This afternoon I was reading a New York Times article about improving Netflix’s Cinematch video suggestion algorithm. The article is a great overview about the benefits of using consumer activity data for commercial purposes. The more data we have about consumer activity, the more likely we are able to predict their purchase behavior. One thing that is missing from the equation, as the New York Times points out, is the ability to track consumer emotion when they are browsing the web.

In one sense, collaborative filtering is less personalized than a store clerk. The clerk, in theory anyway, knows a lot about you, like your age and profession and what sort of things you enjoy; she can even read your current mood. (Are you feeling lousy? Maybe it’s not the day for “Apocalypse Now.”) A collaborative-filtering program, in contrast, knows very little about you — only what you’ve bought at a Web site and whether you rated it highly or not.

So can’t Facebook or someone on the platform develop an application for judging your emotion based on your Facebook status? Someone once jokingly told me that Facebook can predict whether or not you will break up with your significant other in the near future based on you

Croatian Facebook Group Results in ArrestYesterday

Following the actions of U.S. Facebook users isn’t a good idea in other countries, especially Croatia. Niksa Klecak, a Croatian Facebook user decided to create a group protesting the country’s Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, after seeing the group, “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!” surpass 1 million users.

Klecak’s group, “I bet I can find 5,000 people that hate the Prime minister” has already surpassed its target size. I doubt Klecak will be updating the title of the group anytime soon though as Svetlana Gladkova reports that he has since been arrested. Prime Minister Sanader has been under extreme pressure as a direct result of the global financial crisis. According to Gladkova, he has even stated “publicly that he would not allow the wages in the country to grow.”

Croatia currently has over 400,000 users on Facebook and that is more than a 15 percent growth over last month according to our own internal statistics. Facebook tends to be one of the first locations that younger generations turn to for expressing their political frus

fbFund Voting Ends TodayYesterday

Today at 11:59 AM Pacific Time, Facebook will end voting for the second round of fbFund applications. For this pool of applications, the top five applications will win $250,000 in “non-recourse grants” to continue building upon their ideas. So far we have only had the opportunity to review 10 of the 25 applications, but there are many more great applications.

I highly recommend checking out the fbFund voting page where you can view all of the applications and still have the opportunity to make your voice heard (at least for the next 3 hours). According to our AllFacebook application statistics, just under 90,000 people have voted for applications. This is a fairly good sample size for voting considering that there are over 120 million users on Facebook (there are probably closer to 130 million at this point).

I’m sure that the applications that made it to this round are anxious to find out when the application winners will be announced. According to a statement from Facebook back in November, the winners are expected to be announced the week of December 8th, so it won’t be too long before we find out what applications won $250,000.

When asked about his thought

fbFund Review: TrailBehindYesterday

I’m not much of a hiker, but if I ever had the guts to walk on a trail, I might check out an app like TrailBehind first. It’s a crowd-sourced application on Facebook, aggregating the trails that others have already mapped and experienced. A fbFund competitor, TrailBehind lets you learn from the hiking of others.

This application also features wiki-like map options, that let you add your own learned information to a map someone else has already uploaded. You can also upload geo-data, which is pretty handy when it comes to hiking trails (especially for novices like myself).

The search capabilities on TrailBehind are pretty standard–select a location on a marked map, or enter a state, address or zip code to find a nearby trail. Details about a trail beyond the basics, however, could really benefit from a more robust wiki option. Right now, the best way to get additional information about a trail is to read any comments that other users leave.

A benefit of having TrailBehind as a Facebook application is the planning option, which presumably ties into Facebook events or lets you invite friends from within