The 26-year-old, a former Microsoft employee who helped put together the Windows Home Server product, founded a company called Esgut within months of the debut of Facebook's developer platform in May 2007. Esgut is a portfolio of Facebook applications, and a few of them, like Superlatives and Entourage, became genuine viral hits. In April, Ali sold the 12-employee Esgut to the Social Gaming Network, a Silicon Valley company backed by the likes of Bezos Expeditions, the Founders Fund, and Greylock Partners. He said the price was in the seven figures.

This job posting arrived in my email inbox yesterday: “Responsibilities: Create and maintain MySpace, Live ALTSpaces, Facebook, Bebo, MOG, Twitter, Loopt, Wikipedia, and other profiles; gather content for social profiles; and report on the effectiveness of social site placement.” Pay is up to $24 an hour, and it’s a six-month to one-year contract.

"Dear victim, you have been bitten by ..." is a phrase all too familiar to Facebook users. It is both a challenge and an invitation to join the legions of werewolves, vampires and zombies lurking in the social network's pages.

In the early days of social networks, viral games with catchy names like "Zombies," "Vampires" and "Werewolves," were all the rage. They amassed over 15 million installations--thanks in part to a bonus that rewards players for spamming friends with invites--in a matter of months.
continue reading

So after years of hearing those college interns talk about Facebook, you've finally decided to join the extremely popular social networking site.

But where to begin?
Click here to find out more!
continue reading

YOU’D think by now some news media group would try to tap onto social media, too. Actually, one major news group has – and with great results. The Chicago Tribune – about as old media as you can get – decided in March this year that it needed to hop onto the social networking bandwagon and assembled a four-person team to help them do it. The team – consisting of two coordinators, one managing editor and one social media strategist – identified five Web 2.0-type services to target: Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Digg.

There is an unprecedented increase in social networking across the globe.  Facebook, Plaxo and other networking sites are popular tools to enable users to grow their network of friends - increasingly freelancers are considering using these valuable resources to benefit their freelancing businesses too.

continue reading

Social networking sites like Facebook are increasingly offering the same applications found in Yahoo!, but the latter’s executives argue this will not drive away its users. Instead, top Yahoo! executives, who held a short briefing with local media in a visit to Manila, stressed that the company is in fact embracing social networking as it introduces new features in tools like Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail.

In its bid to go global, Facebook is facing off against itself. Clones of the wunderkind social-networking Web site — some of which resemble Facebook right down to color, font and layout — have popped up in local languages around the world. These competitor sites offer identical core services, letting users post pictures, make groups and choose their friends. All are complicating Facebook Inc.'s global campaign, which began in February and has since rolled out 18 foreign-language editions, including Norwegian and Czech, with plans for 54 more.

Creating a fake profile on a social networking website could possibly land you in trouble; A businessman whose life turned into a nightmare after an old school friend created a virtual Facebook alter-ego of him won his case and £22,000 in damages. Matthew Firsht brought the case against Grant Raphael who denied the act, putting the blame on strangers who attended a party at his place and seized the opportunity to not only create a fake profile but also give out false details, which essentially amounts to libel and slanderous statements.

Facebook and MySpace, the two largest social networks, eagerly launched new iPhone applications last Friday. Both quickly shot up the top apps list. Apple has since turned off the download count feature, but Facebook is no. 7 on the free list, MySpace is no. 11. But while both applications are useful for heavy users, they won't drive new users to the services because they failed to leverage the killer iPhone feature - location awareness.