Facebook grows, makes a profit

Facebook, the world's largest social network on the internet, is finally turning a profit, the privately held company said.

The Silicon Valley, California, company, which was started six years ago by a student at Harvard University, said late Tuesday that it had reached a positive cash flow for the first time and also passed the 300-million user mark.

Facebook Usernames | Social Networking giant to put usernames in profile URL

Starting on 13 June, at 09:31, you'll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to your profile.

Facebook is planning to offer usernames to make it easier for people to find and connect with its users. When your friends, family members or co-workers visit your profile or Pages on Facebook, they will be able to enter your username as part of the URL in their browser. This way people will have an easy-to-remember way to find you. We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook username in the future.

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps Facebook has taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names.

Click Here to get a FACEBOOK Username

Import your Orkut friends to Facebook | Facebook's latest trap to catch Orkut users.

Facebook seems to be quiet interested in Orkut users, if you are one of the Orkut as well as Facebook users, Facebook now gives you the option to directly find your orkut friends on Facebook or invite them to Facebook, this seems to be a well thought of stratagy to catch hold of Orkut user, which seems to be haunting Facebook in India and Brazil, where Orkut still leads the race of Social networks.

Connect Orkut with Facebook

1. Drag the Facebook bookmarklet on to the bookmarks bar of your browser.
2. Login to your Orkut account and click the bookmarklet button.
3. The Facebook Friend Finder tool now scans your Orkut contacts list and will then show you a subset who are also on Facebook but aren’t friends with you yet. Click "Add Friends" and you are done.

Paramount to release thousands of film clips on Facebook

Paramount Pictures will become the first major studio to make
thousands of movie clips available for use on the internet, launching
its VooZoo application Monday on Facebook.
"The short clips for a movie that you've already seen before helps you
relive the moment," said Derek Broes, Paramount's senior
vice-president of entertainment.
Users of the popular social networking site will have access to
footage from thousands of movies, including Forrest Gump and The Ten
Commandments.

Facebook users can send the video clips to others users on the site.
The scenes last from a few seconds to a few minutes, covering
everything from Audrey Hepburn's monologue about her "no-name slob" of
a cat in Breakfast at Tiffany's, to Eddie Murphy's signature chuckle
from Beverly Hills Cop.
DVDs of the movies will be offered for sale through a button that
appears after each clip is played. Eventually, the studio will be
using the same method to market upcoming films.
VooZoo is expected to attract a few hundred thousand users within its
first two months.
"My benchmark for success is that people are joining and sending," Broes said.
The task of selecting clips was time consuming. Paramount staffers
worked for more than a year to archive and tag the clips being
offered.
Paramount officials they're not sure how much they may reap through
the experiment, and have no "revenue goals" attached to the project.

Facebook Releases Site in Spanish; German and French to Follow

Facebook today announced the first step in a broad plan to internationalize the site with translation into Spanish. German and French versions of Facebook are expected in the coming weeks. Nearly 1,500 Spanish-speaking users on Facebook chose to be part of the effort and translated the site from English to Spanish in less than four weeks.
Current users who want to view Facebook in Spanish can change their language preference from their account settings. Beginning on Monday, Feb. 11, any person who goes to http://www.facebook.com/ from a Spanish-speaking country will see the site in Spanish. Facebook currently has more than 2.8 million active users in Latin America and Spain.

"Over 60 percent of Facebook users are now outside of the U.S., and many live in countries where English is not the primary language," said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. "Our goal has always been to allow people to use Facebook in their native language so we built an application to enable users to participate in translating the site into their local languages and dialects. We really appreciate the contribution from users in translating Facebook."
Users who added the Facebook translation application were allowed to submit translations inline while browsing the site. The community then approved all translations through a voting system. For example, users agreed on "dar un toque" to describe the Facebook-coined term "poke."
Many translators are motivated by the impact of their contribution to making the site available to millions who speak their language. The leading Spanish translator was responsible for 1,284 of the winning sentences, almost 3 percent of the entire site.
As the company releases new features, Facebook will continue to empower its users to make these available in their local language. In addition, the translation application will soon be available to Facebook Platform developers who want to have their applications translated by the community.
Facebook users can now also access the mobile site in their supported language through any mobile device with Web capabilities. To sign up for Facebook, users can go to http://www.facebook.com/ or visit m.facebook.com from any mobile device with Internet access.

About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a part of millions of people's lives and half of the users return daily. Facebook is a privately-held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

Facebook drives your brand

With over 45m Facebook users worldwide, and 200 000 joining daily, companies are scrambling to find ways to market their brands via viral marketing to this audience.

An increasingly popular way of doing this is by utilising this social network as a platform for branded games applications with a sport, social and stress-relieving flair.

"Viral marketing is one of the most powerful forms of online marketing today, due to the potential it has to spread your brand’s message like wildfire across the Internet," says Grant Fleming, COO of Fontera, a local mobile software development company.

"Viral marketing is an influential tool, and, if well implemented, it can propel a brand from insignificance to global fame."

He adds that viral marketing has increased in popularity because of its ease of execution and affordability when compared to the cost of other advertising methods.

"Games can be designed for a company by either highlighting the brand’s benefits or merely introducing it in the form of background branding."

Some of the games Fontera has developed as applications for Facebook include Rise of the Rebellion and Counter Strike: Red Team Go, which are contributing in excess of two million page views per day and have a combined total of almost one million users.

Knowing human nature’s importance of sharing, backed by social scientists saying each person has a network of 8 to 12 people, this medium of marketing allows friends to voluntarily pass marketing messages by simply inviting fellow friends, acquaintances or colleagues to join them in playing viral games.

Fleming says this is a far more pleasant way for consumers to connect with a brand, positioning it in a different light to the usual aggressive marketing tactics.

"Once the game is made and introduced as a Facebook application, companies can sit back, relax and watch their brand start spreading like a ’virus’."

Zagat Survey Launches Restaurant/Nightlife Business Application for Facebook(R) Pages

Zagat Survey today announced the launch of a business application on Facebook(R) Platform that enables restaurants and nightlife hotspots with Facebook Pages to add a Zagat e-Decal to their Business Profile pages. The application will link to a snapshot of the Zagat Review of the business, including signature Zagat ratings and reviews. Facebook Pages allow users to interact and affiliate with businesses and organizations in the same way they interact with other user profiles.

The initial Zagat Facebook Business Application will be available to all Zagat-rated restaurants and nightlife businesses (bars, clubs and lounges) in markets that Zagat currently surveys. Consumers will be able to access the ratings and reviews of these businesses, thereby providing trusted information for those making decisions for a night out on the town. Users can also go to any businesses Facebook Page and support it as a fan, enabling them to share information about that business with their friends and act as a trusted personal referral.

"This platform is a logical next step in expanding our digital portfolio," said Nina Zagat, Co-founder of Zagat Survey. "The Zagat Survey Facebook application is yet another avenue we offer our customers to access our ratings and reviews via the platforms and devices that best suit their needs."

Zagat Survey's other digital products include its website ZAGAT.com, a mobile website for web-enabled cell phones called ZAGAT.mobi and a downloadable software for smartphones called ZAGAT TO GO.

Facebook is a social utility website that offers an efficient way for people to stay connected with their friends and the people around them. Facebook users communicate and share information through the social graph, a network of connections and relationships that exist in the world between people. With 52 million active users per month, Facebook is the sixth-most trafficked website in the United States.

Zagat Survey's application was built on Facebook Platform, a development platform that enables companies and engineers to integrate with Facebook and gain access to millions of users. Platform was recently expanded to Facebook Pages, allowing businesses and organizations on Facebook to add applications onto their pages and enable users to interact with them.

Facebook users can interact directly with a business through the Facebook Page by adding reviews, writing on that business' Wall, uploading photos and in any other ways that a business may want to enable. Once a fan of a business on Facebook, users can share information about that business with their friends and act as a trusted referral.

More than 50 percent of Facebook users return to the site each day, providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build a business that is highly relevant to people's lives.

Facebook(R) is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

About Zagat Survey, LLC

Known as the "wildly popular" "burgundy bible", Zagat Survey is the world's most trusted source for information about where to eat, drink, stay and play. With more than 300,000 surveyors, Zagat Survey rates and reviews restaurants, hotels, nightlife, movies, music, golf, shopping and a range of other entertainment categories and is lauded as the "most up-to-date", "comprehensive" and "reliable" guide ever published. Zagat content is available to consumers wherever and whenever they need it: in book format, on ZAGAT.com, via the downloadable ZAGAT TO GO for smartphones and on the mobile web with ZAGAT.mobi. For more information, visit ZAGAT.com.

Facebook Unveils Sweeping Ad Strategy

Facebook unveiled its long-awaited ad strategy here today.
The 50-million-member social network seeks to combine interest- and demographic-based targeting with peer recommendations. Ultimately, Facebook is striving to have the same impact on generating product demand as Google has in the realms of direct response and search advertising.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the initiative, called Facebook Ads, points to the future of advertising after the end of mass media.

"Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend," Zuckerberg told a packed room of advertisers, agency executives and press. He called peer recommendations, "the Holy Grail of advertising."

By Zuckerberg's estimates, Facebook is aiming for a much larger piece of the advertising market than the direct-response business Google has served. He estimated what he called "demand-generation" advertising as a $400 billion market.

If Facebook becomes a key player in generating advertiser demand, it could go a long way toward justifying the lofty $15 billion valuation attached to the company with Microsoft's recent $240 million investment. (It is estimated Facebook will only take in $150 billion from advertising this year.)

The cornerstone of the new approach is a Facebook company page, which firms can set up for free. These would act much like user-profile pages, containing applications, information, videos and other content. Users can choose to be "fans" of the various brands, allowing advertisers to send them messages or add applications. Facebook is launching with 100,000 company profile pages. These pages will replace the "sponsored groups" it had previously sold to brands.

Facebook is coupling the brand pages with a new ad system that will target both banner-like ads and sponsored stories that appear in Facebook's news feed. Advertisers can pay either per impression or per click to target ads based on both demographic data, such as age and gender, and interest categories like movies, music and books. It plans to expand the targeting criteria in the future.

Brands would be able to promote their pages through the ad system. In addition, rather than generic ad messages, Facebook will run "social ad" placements. For example, users might see ads with photos of friends telling them they rented Ratatouille from Blockbuster (and rated it highly).

Zuckerberg called it "the first advertising system for spreading your message virally through the social graph," using the Facebook-coined term for the connections that make up human interaction.

Facebook is also taking tentative steps to extend into the wider Internet.

It is letting brands place "beacons" on their Web pages so users can share information on Facebook purchases or actions they've taken on an advertiser's site. Forty-four have implemented beacons already. Example: An eBay user now has the opportunity to alert his friends about items he has posted. The information is sent to the mini-feed on his profile page and to his friends' news feeds. Like the company profile pages, Facebook beacons are free.

In some ways, Facebook is following a proven path. MySpace has become a popular place for advertisers to set up profile pages that users can claim as friends. Yahoo! last year began a program to set up brand hubs. Yet, Facebook believes its combination of profile pages and its deep targeting capability can ignite viral, peer-to-peer messaging better than rival sites.

As an example, Zuckerberg pointed to the meteoric viral growth seen by applications such as iLike, which quickly gained over 1 million users for music sharing. The key, according to Zuckerberg, is Faceboook's "massive network of real-world connections."

Coca-Cola is using all three products for Sprite. It has built a Sprite Facebook page that offers users the opportunity to customize and download applications called "Sprite Sips." The animated characters can be augmented if users enter codes found on Sprite bottle caps. The company will promote the page through Facebook ads that target Sprite's youthful demographic, as well as in certain interest categories such as music.

Carol Kruse, vp of global interactive marketing, said tapping into Facebook is part of the company's strategy to "fish where the fish are." Ultimately, Coke is "building a network of experiences," she said.

What remains to be seen is user reaction to the new ads.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that members would not be able to opt out of having their photos and recommendations appear in ads if they interact with a brand profile. They will, however, have control over whether their off-Facebook activities are fed back into the site.

He acknowledged that Facebook would hear from its users if they have objections. "We'll see if they come up and we'll react quickly to that," he said.