swansonager – what is matt up to?

I stumbled upon this in my Thunderbird this morning. Typically, email headers identify the originating server that the email came from (typically, that’s Microsoft Exchange, PHPMailer, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.).

When looking at a facebook notification this morning, I noticed Zuckmail 1.0.

Mark, that’s a quality piece of software work. Kudos. Not many users would ever notice this and I bet most never have.

Keep up the great work at facebook guys!.

Have you used Friendfeed? if not, and you’re a facebook user, you very well will be soon it looks like. Facebook has friended Friendfeed and they accepted

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

Full post on the FriendFeed blog Congrats FriendFeed!!

You might have seen this alert when logging into your facebook account over the past couple days – what does it mean you might wonder. Well, today – er tomorrow at 12:01am, Facebook will be opening up their system to allow you to ’stake claim’ to your own personal ‘vanity url’. Essentially you can have something like – facebook.com/matt (where matt = your_name).

There will be a ‘land rush’ so to speak at 12:01 tonight as each name can only be claimed once. This will easily allow you to hand out your facebook profile to your friends, family, etc. etc. Be sure to log on tonight at 12:01 to stake your claim!

Here a full read on Vanity URLs from Facebook on the FB Blog…

I used to be a hard core user of Windows Mobile…. that is until, I finally made the switch to the Blackberry Pearl 2 and haven’t looked back since. I’ll save my top reasons why I can’t stand the windows mobile platform for another day, but in the mean time, if you’re a Facebook addict and use a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile based phone, you’ll want to check out these two new releases of the Facebook Mobile application that were just released. I received two emails today one from Blackberry and one from Microsoft promoting the new applications. Here’s a quick overview of what the new features are in each version:

Facebook for your Windows Mobile 6 phone

Download the new Facebook for Windows Mobile 6

New from Windows Mobile: a Facebook application for your phone! Download the new Facebook application for Windows Mobile and:

• Send messages to any of the people in your Friends list.

• Take pictures and videos on your phone, then upload them right to Facebook.
• Send messages or call people in your Friends list.
• Manage your profile and post anytime, anywhere.

Keep up with the latest news and posts with Facebook on your phone. Now your status updates can be up-to-the moment accounts of what you’re doing. Photos and videos are about as close to live-action as you can get. Show your friends what you’re up to, while you’re out and about.

Connecting and sharing on Facebook just got a lot livelier on a Windows Smartphone

Facebook on your Blackberry v1.6

Download the new Facebook for Blackberry v1.6

The new Facebook® for BlackBerry® smartphones makes it even easier to share life’s special moments while you’re on-the-go.

• NEW! View your friends’ highlights like status updates, photo uploads, comments and wall posts.
• NEW! Check out your friends’ profiles with access to status updates, wall posts, friends and recently added pictures.
• NEW! Open recently added photos, entire albums, or tag photos of friends. You can even comment on pictures!
• Receive instant notifications on your BlackBerry smartphone’s home screen.
• Send/receive message or wall posts, pokes and friend requests.
• Update your status, view and comment on your friends’ status.
• Share photos from your BlackBerry smartphone with tags/comments and post to Facebook with just one click.
• Connect your Facebook friends with your BlackBerry Address Book – including profile picture integration to bring new meaning to caller ID.
• Stay organized with birthday reminders and event integration into your BlackBerry Calendar.

Download Facebook for BlackBerry Smartphones

I’d love to hear what you guys think of the new apps – both on the windows and blackberry sides of the coin…

So when I logged in this morning, I was greeted with this great recap of the path that Twitter has taken over the last two years: Twitter Trips on Its Rapid Growth.

Then a little later on this morning, I see this on my Facebook status updates:

RT @rscheuer: RT @mshraybman: It’s official: Facebook raises $200M from Russian investor . The deal values FB at $10B.

This really got me thinking about monetization of a web property. When a site like Twitter or Facebook get so large, so fast without a true business model in place, what is the long term viability of those services, or any website for that matter. The bigger question is this (imo): Services like (Twitter and Facebook) are conditioning the general web population and everyone as a whole on the web to expect the BMW M3 for free essentially.

Free features rock – but with a COST

Look at all the awesome features that sites like Twitter and Facebook have for anyone to use (photo uploads, video uploads, etc. the list goes on and on) – I know because I use them in my everyday life, many times each day. BUT. Here’s the catch: they are conditioning us to expect FREE services.

Tell me how you can value a company at $10B as this Russian Group pumps in $200 into Facebook to get their paper value that high when we know that if revenues come in at $400M that puts a 25x multiple on them. That’s not a terribly high multiple per se, but the bigger question is the complete monetization strategy for future revenues.

By giving away the farm for free essentially, they are making all us conditioned that we shouldn’t have to pay for anything.

So will Facebook and Twitter become the next Geocities? You tell me… I’d love to hear your thoughts. All I know is that giving away something for free forever is a difficult business model to follow. Just ask Geocities. I’m sure they’ll agree with you.

Related links:

Yahoo! to shutdown Geocities

The Rise and Fall of Geocities

So I get a phone call today from my friend and his pic shows up on my blackberry pearl II – at first glance, there is nothing off about that until I step back for a second and realize that I never added his pic to my blackberry – or so I thought at least.

About a month ago, the Blackberry OS was on it’s last leg, so I decided it was time to upgrade. The upgrade process was pretty streamlined. I did a complete wipe of the phone after backing up everything, and then a fresh install of the latest Blackberry OS for my Pearl II.

Then about a week later, I upgraded my Facebook Application for my Blackberry to the latest version – 1.5. They’ve done a nice job implementing some really good UI features in addition to some other useful updates that rolled out with the Facebook for the Blackberry 1.5.

If you take a look at the screenshot from my phone, you’ll see there is a small Facebook icon located to the bottom left of the picture on the phone. The facebook for BlackBerry app integrates all your facebook contacts and pulls in their profile picture for you if you don’t have a caller id Picture setup for any given contact that resides in both your BB and your Facebook Account. This is a great feature that they rolled out in version 1.5 but it had remained hidden for me until today when my friend called me up. Do you have any favorite features of the Facebook for Blackberry devices app, or are there features that are missing you’d love to have?