Facebook News

Facebook, the creation of Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2004, now has over 6 million members at hundreds of colleges. Between 10,000 and 20,000 new members sign up daily. For those of you who have yet to experience Facebook, it is a social networking site. I never heard of it until three months ago when my friend
from Toronto encouraged me to log on – she joked by saying she
now has 50 friends. Considering she’s a Maritimer in the big
city – I’m happy she’s getting the chance to network.

In recent news, Facebook has launched a new platform to give advertisers a deeper level of free access to its 24 million users by providing them the ability to write applications that can be shared from person to person.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the "Social Graph" of the site's users who influence their friends and contacts. Calling the Facebook Platform an operating system to gain access to the Facebook members, he invited developers to create applications to run across the site. The hope is the advertiser applications will generate more traffic, adding ad inventory for Facebook’s paid advertising through the pages generated by the applications, which will cost nothing to the companies adding them to the site.

As part of its launch, Facebook laid claim to 65 partner companies who had already developed over 85 applications to run on the platform. They run the range from major businesses like Microsoft, Amazon and Red Bull, to online game companies like social gaming site Bunchball and entertainment fantasy gaming site FantasyMoguls.com. Interestingly, the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Obama for America have joined in – now that’s a really innovative way to get elected!

Needless to say, I haven’t had time to join Facebook but now that our MBA course is almost done for the summer, I think I’ll catch up on the great tools we’ve learned about.

See ya on Facebook!