Microsoft’s Zune HD team has introduced Facebook application for Zune HD media player. Zune HD Facebook application is completely free application and it can directly downloadable on your Zune HD device or download it on your computer. Zune HD Facebook App allow users to set their status to song they are currently listing, view profile page , including your wall, info, photos, videos, and more.

Download Facebook App on Zune HD

Facebook and PayPal announced a strategic relationship to make PayPal payment system available for Facebook users to buy ads and Facebook credits from Facebook. With this relationship advertisers from across the globe will be able to buy ads on Facebook via Facebook’s advertizing tool. PayPal makes it really easy for advertisers, particularly small international companies, to run campaigns on Facebook. Facebook  reaches more than 400 million people, 70 percent of whom live outside the United States. PayPal will become a payment option for Facebook Credits, which is currently being tested in a small number of games and applications. The goal of Facebook Credits is to give users a fast and easy way to buy virtual goods on Facebook, including items from the Facebook Gift Shop.

Dan Levy, director of payment operations, Facebook, Said

We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service. As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who want to buy Facebook Ads. Teaming with PayPal, a global leader in online payments, makes this possible.

Osama Bedier, PayPal’s vice president of platform and emerging technology, Said

Put simply, PayPal’s business is payments. We make it easier for customers to send and receive money online in 24 currencies and 190 markets around the world. We’ve always been an important part of the developer ecosystem on Facebook, and we’re excited to expand our relationship directly with Facebook to help grow advertisers’ and developers’ businesses

Today i got a forged E-Mail saying that my Facebook password is changed and the changed password is mentioned in attached document. While downloading the attachment i got following error message saying that the attachment contains virus program.

Following Email i got in my mail box

Dear user of facebook,
Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed.
You can find your new password in attached document.
Thanks,
Your Facebook.

According to Forrester’s research report on behavior of US internet users says one third of US internet users update their status on social networking websites once in a week. The Social Technographics is way to analyze market’s social technology behavior. Social Technographics was carefully constructed, not as a segmentation, but as a profile (that is, the groups overlap). That’s because the actual data told me that people participate in multiple behaviors, and not everyone at a higher level on the ladder actually does everything in the lower rungs.

The first group includes the ones who create personal contents (including publishing blogs or uploading original multimedia files) and account for 24 percent of the persons surveyed. The joiners, 59 percent of the total number, are those already members of a social service and they maintain their profile updated by posting frequent new content.

The second group includes the ones who updates their social networking status to converse. this data include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation. 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

Spectators are maxing out at around 70%, Joiners are still growing rapidly, and Creators are still growing slowly. Spectators  are accustomed to reading news, blogs and feeds or enjoying multimedia tidbits on these platforms.

Note: For Forrester clients, full access to the research is available here.

Facebook announced a year long partnership with McAfee to offer a 6 month free subscription to 350 million Facebook users. Facebook users can take advantage of this offer by visiting the Protect Your PC tab on the McAfee Page on Facebook. currently this offer is not available in India but Indian Facebook users can install McAfee by selecting USA or UK from country selection drop down.

For the rare case in which an account is compromised, we’ve developed a unique process that requires the account owner to take steps to secure the account and learn security best practices. We’ve also incorporated custom McAfee software into this process for people identified as having infected computers. Now, if your computer is infected, you will be asked to run a scan like the one shown below and clean it before accessing Facebook. We’re not aware of another free Internet service that takes this much responsibility for helping people keep their accounts secure.

Security Tips Published on Facebook Website

• Don’t open attachments in emails that look suspicious or come from an unknown or untrustworthy source.
• Don’t open attachments unless you know what they are, even if they’re from friends.
• Delete chain mail and spam from your email and Facebook inboxes.
• Be cautious when downloading files from the Internet.
• Be cautious of any message, post or link you see on Facebook that looks suspicious, requires an additional login, or asks you to download or upgrade software.
• Use an up-to-date browser that features an anti-phishing blacklist. Some examples include Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.0.10.
• Choose unique logins and passwords for each of the websites you use.
• Check to see that you’re logging in from a legitimate Facebook page with the Facebook.com domain.

World’s numbers 1 social networking website has announced fellowship program to support Ph.D student in the 2010-11 school years. Facebook  interested in a wide range of academic topics, including the following topical areas:

• Internet Economics: auction theory and algorithmic game theory relevant to online advertising auctions.
• Cloud Computing: storage, databases, and optimization for computing in a massively distributed environment.
• Social Computing: models, algorithms and systems around social networks, social media, social search and collaborative environments.
• Data Mining and Machine Learning: learning algorithms, feature generation, and evaluation methods to produce effective online and offline models of behavioral signals.
• Systems: Hardware, operating system, runtime, and language support for fast, scalable, efficient data centers.
• Information Retrieval: search algorithms, information extraction, question answering, cross-lingual retrieval and multimedia retrieval

Eligibility Criteria

• Full-time Ph.D. students in topical areas represented by these fellowships who are currently involved in on-going research.
• Students must be in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, System Architecture, or a related area.
• Students must be enrolled during the academic year that the Fellowship is awarded.
• Students must be nominated by a faculty member.

Application Checklist and Instructions

The application must include:

• 1-2 page research summary which clearly identifies the area of focus and applicability to Facebook. Please reference the topical areas above.
• Students CV (with email, phone and mailing address). Please include applicable coursework.
• Minimum of 2 letters of recommendation (one must be from the faculty sponsor).
• The name and CV of the faculty sponsor.

All of the above information must be submitted as a PDF to fellowships@facebook.com.

Award Details

• Tuition and fees will be paid for the academic year.
• $30K stipend (paid over 9 months of the academic year).
• $5K per year toward conference attendance and travel.
• $5K toward a personal computer.
• Opportunity to apply for a paid summer internship.
• Recipients are responsible for the taxation on any funds.

Important Dates

• Friday February 15, 2010: Applications for fellowships must be submitted in full.
• Monday March 29, 2010: Award recipients will be notified by email of their acceptance.

Selection Criteria

• Eligibility of applicant.
• The quality of application.Applicability of the project or study to Facebook.
• Other criteria as decided by Facebook in its sole discretion.
• Facebook complies with all equal opportunity laws

Facebook Fellowship Program Website

An Indonesian woman finally found her brother after 35 years through popular social networking website Facebook. Nurlianti Dehi (Woman) and Anton(Brother) both were separated in their hometown in Central Sulawesi province for neighbouring North Sulawesi, according to the online edition of the Media Indonesia daily.

Initially Nurlianti had given up hope of finding her brother but Anton’s daughter is able to find her on Facebook and contacted her.
She said she initially doubted if the person who spoke on the phone was her brother, but became convinced after they shared some stories of childhood.

At CodePlex Microsoft has released an experimental application called “Fishbowl” . Fishbowl is a desktop application that let’s Facebook users to browse all Facebook data without opening browser. This application requires Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 if it’s not there than it will automatically install. First time it will ask for Facebook user name and password as well as permission to publish posts without prompting you, and also to allow the program to access your News Feed and Wall.

It’s very easy to share and view pictures on Facebook. Fishbowl offers drag and drop functionality to view and upload pictures on Facebook. You can also watch full screen slideshows also on Fishbowl. Fishbowl is Fully integrated with Microsoft Windows 7 features such as the new taskbar so you can monitor Facebook activity and friends at a glance. Multitouch navigation and image gestures to navigate and view your photos.

The complete source code is available for download via CodePlex.

Download Fishbowl.

Download Fishbowl Source Code.

Microsoft has released a new updated version of Facebook SDK. The latest release (v3.0) includes new architectural improvements and provides an asynchronous interface for using the toolkit from Silverlight and from WPF.Facebook SDK comes with samples and tools for developing Facebook applications in ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Forms. It also features the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples.

Image Source : Silverlight Team Blog

The toolkit is comprised of the following core assemblies:

• Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier.
• Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.
• Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)
• Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.
• Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily.

Download Facebook SDK

People say friends can’t be bought but this is not the case with social networking website. An Australian online marketing company is selling friends and fans to Facebook users. Facebook is an extremely effective marketing tool.The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote.The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in. The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s number one social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from $177 to $1,167.

Basically usoical sends welcomes message or friends request from the client. If they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will; if not, then they won’t.

Facebook is now the world’s fourth-most visited website. The company, which counts venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, Microsoft Corp and Russian Internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies among its investors, has more than 250 million registered users.