It’s been a while since I posted about something directly going on with Facebook. There were mostly plenty of new applications that ended up, well, nowhere, but this is different. This is Facebook’s own application for instant messaging. According to TechCrunch, it’s coming very soon, like in the next week, and it will be built on the Jabber platform most probably (just like GTalk).

There are third party instant chat applications on Facebook, like Social.IM or Instant Chat, but their days may be numbered once Facebook introduces its own instant chat service. According to AllFacebook, openness will be key, and I agree. Having the ability to import contacts from other chat clients like GTalk and Skype will be a great start. But why not an even more open platform which would add the ability to chat with a Facebook user (who’s logged in) from another site where the chat client can be embedded.

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Great news for all hi-tech adopting professionals (smart phone oriented) who find LinkedIn a useful business social networking tool - LinkedIn released a mobile version of their service. It’s available at m.linkedin.com. The interface allows for any mobile internet enabled device (with Wireless Application Protocol) to access the service, although there is a special beta version for iPhone.

The team behind the new mobile LinkedIn is working on introducing more applications to the mobile LinkedIn platform, such as LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Experts.

The new mobile LinkedIn service is available immediately in these languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, but additional languages are to follow in the near future.

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Gypsii is a social network for people who use mobile devices and the web. The core of the network is that all content is geo-location tagged. This means that if you produce content in form of pictures, text, video - it will not only be shared with others on the network, but also tied to the exact location where the content creation took place (country, city, street, club, bar, restaurant, etc). Your friends on the network will be able to get information about the exact time and place where the shared event happened. That’s not all - users can create points of interest (ex. restaurant with good food and low prices). Each user can find these points of interest and get distance from their present location to the point of interest. There are plenty more ways to use this network, for example for checking what another friend did today (where they went, and corresponding generated content if available), and their present location relative to your own (if they are close by). Friends can easily find each other and meet for coffee or lunch, or at a common point of interest (a sale at a fashion store). Their video does a good job of explaining features, so check it out.

Gypsii officially announced their services at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. It’s available in several languages for now - US English, UK English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Korean, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

The fact that geo-location is deeply integrated into the service, may represent a nice advertising opportunity for local services and vendors. Each advertised business could easily be added by the user as a point of interest.

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So, MySpace has decided to join the social network development community. While other social networks, like Facebook, have introduced their developer platforms over the past months, MySpace seems to have been sitting on the sidelines taking notes from the field. According to Mashable, they’ll be addressing some of the problems associated with social network development platforms such as privacy, monetization and data ownership. These issues have been obstacles, especially in the case of Facebook. User experience will be top priority, while developers will be probably be enabled to monetize their applications through some sort of shared revenue program.

MySpace applications should be embeddable on other sites, and will support Google Open Social from the very beginning. The official opening is on February 5, but you can pre-register now (requires MySpace login).

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… if everything happens according to the predictions made by eMarketer’s latest study on the impact of social networks in the coming years. The study looks at numbers from 2006 and 2007 and makes projections all the way until 2011. If everything goes well we are looking at about $4 billion advertising spending on social networks in 2011, and about 49% of social network users in the US will have logged on to their favorite social network at least once during a period of one month.

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Facebook is certainly all over the news these days, especially concerning privacy issues and some changes on the site oriented towards monetization its member potential. It’s been a while since I posted anything about Facebook as I think there’s simply too many unimportant news about it lately, that even the occasional good stuff gets lost somewhere in the midst of it all. Besides, there are plenty of blogs concentrating on Facebook, which channel pretty much all information you’ll ever need to know about it.

One such blog is Inside Facebook, where I read a post written by Justin Smith about 24 ways to use Facebook for marketing purposes. He takes a detailed approach to explaining pretty much all Facebook tools and how they can be used for viral marketing. Even if you’re only trying to get some idea about FB as a platform, this is useful because it gives a kind of an overview broken down into specific parts with short explanations of how each tool works. I was hoping for some more specific details based on marketers’ experience on Facebook so far (having followed some coverage on this recently, these experiences are mostly moderate if not poor), which would give a more detailed picture about the usefulness of certain interaction channels on Facebook compared to others, but none were given. Like Justin pointed out, it’s still a bit early and there is still plenty to learn about Facebook as a marketing platform in order to be able to judge its performance more objectively.

One thing is for sure, Facebook members are from all over the world, in growing numbers, on a platform that enables companies to communicate with everyone on a more personal level. With about 58 million members from almost every corner of the planet, this community should be considered in a company’s marketing plan. Trouble is, the specific way communication takes place on Facebook, through specific tools, represents an obstacle some companies still find hard to overcome, but since more marketers are getting involved in Facebook campaigns every day, the combined experience will soon be enough to get a stronger signal on the marketing radar.

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MyArtInfo is a social network for artists, featuring members/artists from all over the world (USA, UK, Poland, India, Spain, Russia, Mexico and many other countries). The site has a searchable database of artworks (performing arts, fine art, decorative art, gastronomical art, design, written artworks). All art presented on MyArtInfo can be rated. You have to register to be able to enjoy other functionality on the site such as rating artworks, communication with other members and submission of artworks. There is also a blog featuring posts written by members on various topics. There is a variety of multimedia content.

The site still needs work in my opinion (it’s still in beta), but is already interesting enough to spend a couple of hours on just looking at all the various artworks posted by members. The site already gives a way to inquire about advertising options, which threw me off a little. I am sure there will be room for this later on, but it may be interpreted in a wrong way this early on.

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I ran into this post on Valleyvag which discusses indications that Facebook employees may have access and actually check members’ profiles and private information. Not very amusing, if true. For now there have been incidents of employees looking into things like whose profile a member frequently visits, but what can and do they really look at? Our messages perhaps? Is our privacy really protected on Facebook according to their privacy policy? The seed of doubt has definitely been sowed.

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There is a lot of coverage on this in the past two days - the big news that Microsoft snatched the deal with Facebook right under Google’s nose (official press release here and here). The investment itself, even though small ($240 million) compared to its last financial quest with aQuantive which cost them $6 billion, represents a far greater value for Microsoft. With an exclusive deal for ad distribution on Facebook, Microsoft gets a very good opportunity for international market penetration, since about 60% of Facebook users are actually based outside of US. Whether Facebook is actually worth the $15 billion that it’s now valued at (after this deal) is questionable. The site has yet to show a major revenue generating model (that actually works). Facebook Flyers were a good start (similar to PPC ads in many ways), and there are Facebook Polls as well (pay for opportunity to do detailed targeted research using Facebook demographics data and users). The fact that Facebook is now valued at $15 billion is not that important for Microsoft, because they got what they wanted - more exposure and chance for growing revenue on a phenomenon that some compare to Skype.

Naturally, there are reasons to think the $15 billion valuation of Facebook is not realistic, even indications that recent valuations for other Internet companies are leading into another bubble crisis. Facebook is moving forward for now and doesn’t show signs of slowing down. Changes are constantly happening with new possibilities emerging almost weekly. Hype or reality? No one can state with certainty, but the Facebook cake tastes so good, even the most skeptical are feeling the urge to take a bite. There are plenty of pieces of this cake to dish out for now, but at a certain point someone is going to have to pick up the check. Microsoft already paid its piece $240 million and will probably make much more than by the time things go bad (f they go bad).

On the other hand, AdCenter will be one more distribution platform richer, and what a targeted platform that will be! With all the detailed demographic data on Facebook, it should be easier than ever to user PPC ads and get better results. With increasing PPC prices, sometimes reaching ridiculous amounts, this will be a good change. Sure, the prices will probably be just as high, but the targeting will be much better, and thus the results much more precise. Or at least that’s the idea Microsoft/Facebook, right?

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For all those using Plaxo (Pulse) - now you can show your pulse to others by embedding this widget into your site pages. It’s a breeze to create and embed into existing pages. I don’t really see any great benefit from this though, unless you embed this widget into a site you own (for example into your MySpace page, or on Facebook) and want to promote your other site/blog with a social approach through Pulse (well, ok I guess that’s one benfit ). Anyway, this is what the widget looks like in action…

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