Funny how Internet giants could affect each not only in the negative way but positive as well. Take the case of Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine and its Facebook fan page. After running an ad campaign offer within Farmville, the most popular game in Facebook, Bing’s Fan Page was able to gain around 400,000 new fans from Monday’s 100,000 fans. The trick? – the ad campaign offers 3 Farm Cash to anyone who will become a fan of Bing’s Facebook page. Farm Cash, in case you’re not aware is Farmville’s virtual currency.

Now, you might ask what’s the big deal in  having tons of fans in a Facebook page? Well, if you’re a Facebook Fan Page administrator, that means a lot. It’s the sole reason why you are working as a Fan Page administrator – to promote the brand that you are campaigning and get as much followers as you can.

Here’s the more interesting part. According to published data, Farmville has around 84.1 million monthly active users. And last Tuesday alone, active users were around 28.7 million. This means that those who became fans of Bing’s Facebook Page were just a minute part of the total Famville users. Can you just imagine how positive its effect to Bing would be if more of those users sign up to become Bing’s fans?

What’s good about Bing’s ad campaign is that it is not senseless after all. In fact, Bing’s ad campaign is promoting how Bing could help Farmville players with some of the “pressing” issues they encounter on Farmville.  And that is by searching for answers to those issues using Bing search.

If the number of new fans who signed up in one day is not enough indication that Bing’s ad campaign is not working well for it, how about if we tell you that majority of those who’ve seen the ad campaign actually love it because of the Farm Cash?

Hopefully, as Bing’s Facebook Page fans grows bigger, those fans would actually take some time off to try using Bing if they are still using Google or Yahoo. Bottomline is, the number of fans will be useless if those fans will not use Bing after all.

But still, Bing’s awareness campaign through the Farmville-related ad campaign is pretty clever.  Something that others may try to emulate in the coming days. So, expect more of those ad campaigns showing up as you play Farmville.

Although Facebook Chat is very popular, web interface lacks many features you would like to see on your IM client, that’s why we provide you with best and full function Facebook Chat desktop clients for Windows and Mac platforms.

Digsby

Digsby is very powerful client that knows the “language” of many popular social networks and email services. I will name just largest platforms: Facebook Chat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL/AIM Mail and others. It can really become your only software to update all your networks, check email and chat with buddies. Digsby is available for Windows – Mac and Linux versions coming soon (Thanks Mihnea!).

Check out this video to see main features and how it all works:

Adium

Adium is the most popular IM client among Mac users mainly because of features it may offer to mac users. As it is developed specifically for Mac it runs very smooth have native interface. Adium offers large number of services you can integrate together: AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, Facebook Chat and others. If you own Mac – try Adium!

Pidgin

Pidgin is great client for Windows and Unix systems, although it doesn’t support Facebook chat by default you can integrate it using this plugin. Besides that you will be able to connect with your buddies on large number of networks and remember plug-ins, they offer almost unlimited possibilities for developers to add new features and networks.

Chit Chat For Facebook

App that is built specifically for Facebook and if you don’t want to get crazy integrating everything in one desktop client (trust me, it can be very annoying) you can go and install Chit Chat. This IM doesn’t have nothing too fancy, but there are all basic features you may want to require for Facebook Chat. Runs on windows only.

Palringo

Palringo have strong focus on mobile devices and if you like to use your phone for connecting to your friends – try this app. Currently it have applications for Android, Iphone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, Simbian, Windows mobile and Java application. Also supporting large number of social networks and IM platforms – check out full list on their site.

According to Nielsen, last year we spent 82% more time on social networking sites than we did in 2008.

The sites to blame for such increase of course are Facebook and Twitter – these networks shows impressive growth in their visitor numbers too:

United States with largest audience is also among the countries whose users spent over six hours per month on social media sites. Leaders is Australians spending nearly 7 hours networking online. Japan users somehow managed to limit their time online and it is almost twice as low as an average time spent by other users.

I’m wondering whether Facebook and Twitter, as the sites responsible for the most hours spent by users, will be able to hold (increase) the attention also next year.

via [ReadWriteWeb]

Here you can find solutions that will cover most of users whatever you work on a PC, Mac or keep your photos online.

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto

Plugin for iPhoto (Mac) that will let you easily export photos to your Facebook account. This plugin have also tag your friends feature.

Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook

I don’t know why this app is called Photo Uploader because it is pretty solid Facebook client actually, with all necessary features to communicate with your friends. As it runs on AIR you can use this app or PC and Mac. Of course image uploading is made super easy – just drag and drop files in to the uploader and you are done!

Bloom Facebook Photo Uploader

This desktop app is specifically designed to manage Facebook albums and it does it pretty well. Runs on PC, Mac and Linux.

Facebook photo uploader for FireFox

Very powerful FireFox plugin not only for facebook, but supports many different services like Flickr, Picasa, Box, net etc. If you don’t want to install dedicated program on your computer – maybe this choice is for you.

Picasa uploader for Facebook

Handy tool for Picasa users – an easy way to quickly upload photos directly from Picasa to Facebook.

Flickr to Facebook

Very small tool that allows you to upload pictures from Flickr to Facebook. Add this bookmarklet to the browser and use when you need to chare some picture with Facebook buddies.

Feel free to share some cool Facebook tools that let you manage your photo albums in the comment section below!

Below you can find some of the best tools including South Park and Simpsons character generators. Of course that’s not all – you can find many more apps for this online. Feel free to share your findings in comments!

Simpson Avatar Generator

Face Your Manga

WeeWorld

South Park Avatar Maker

Yahoo Avatars

Portrait Illustration Maker

When you first start your updated application you will be asked to allow push notifications, but remember to configure them trough settings later to leave only important updates pop up.

Another great feature is address book syncing. Now you have the option to add Facebook profile picture and homepage to your contacts saved on iPhone. You may leave already assigned pictures and links that are on your device.

To be honest, I noticed that some of the pictures added to my contacts isn’t right – maybe that’s just me naming my contacts awkwardly.

Add yourself as a fan on RotorBlog’s fanpage.

How big is your numbers – I bet you feel really small :)

Created by Online Education

Facebook for Adobe AIR

If you need an app just for Facebook than this is my choice Nr.1 – very easy to use and clean application running on AIR, that has all necessary features to be a great tool for real Facebook addicts. You can download this app here.

Tweetdeck and Seesmic

For me Tweedeck and Seesmic are almost identical apps – looks and works very similarly and if you already use one of those for Twitter than that’s should be your choice. Of course those little things makes them different (to be honest I’m more as a Seesmic dude) and you should try out them both to see which one works for you best. BTW, Tweetdeck have also LinkedIn support.

Fishbowl

Fishbowl is Windows only Facebook client that is directly designed to work with Facebook only. It also looks very interesting from user interface perspective and have all features to become your main tool to communicate with Facebook friends.

Socialite

Socialite is very powerful social networking tool unfortunately for MAC only. It isn’t limited to Facebook only – it bay also be your RSS reader, Twitter client, Flick uploader and much more. And if you are looking for great native MAC app you should defiantly go with this one.

Hey, we also have our page on Facebook – check it out and become a friend!

Twitter

Chromed Bird – Really cool twitter client integrated right into your Chrome browser. You can also try Chrowety, Tweetings or some other built-in Twitter client.

TwitterBar – easy to use plugin for posting to twitter – no unnecessary features just type in and post.

Fast Twitter Search – this extension adds Twitter search button to the toolbar so you can quickly find something on twitter.

What the trend – very interesting plugin to see what’s are the top trending topics on Twitter right now.

TwittMark – small extension that let’s you to post bookmarks directly to twitter.

Facebook

Facebook for Google Chrome – extension for quick access to your Live feed and notifications. Using this extension you also can quickly update your status.

Facebook – this extension offers more functionality than previous one and if you are communicating a lot on Facebook maybe this suites you more.

Facebook Adblock – very simple but useful plugin that hides ads on Facebook and Facebook Lite. To me ads on Facebook isn’t big issue but maybe you have other thoughts. Check out also AdBlock.

Alwittizer Facebook Enhancer – only one Facebook beautify extension that actually makes things better not worse. Probably the smartest thing is to use Facebook as it is because installing plugins like Beautify Facebook actually makes things look worse.

Feel free to check out these great Chrome extensions and if you know more cool and useful tools others may use – share your thoughts in comments.

If proxy don’t work for you or you feel it’s not the solution you like to use – try Virtual private network services (VPN). Other great advantage of using VPN is hiding your personal information online.  VPN services hide your real IP address and encrypts transferred data so you can be sure nobody tracks your activities online.

So here are some of the best and free VPN services available today:

AlonWeb – Free VPN service

Choosing AlonWeb you get almost premium service absolutely for free. All your traffic is encrypted and compressed using this service so there is no need to worry about privacy. Check out also premium version with VoIP support and no traffic limits.

Hotspot Shield

No doubt Hotspot Shield is most popular VPN service right now and many users trust this software. It has it’s downside too – some of websites (Hulu for example) are fighting to block users who use Hotspot service. But anyway it is a great soft and you can defiantly try it out. Hotspot Shield have support Windows 200/XP/Vista and Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard.

GPass

GPass also is a great solution for anonymous web surfing and accessing blocked websites and services. It has support for streaming audio/videos, email, instant messaging, download managers encrypted socks tunnels and backup tunnels using Skype and Tor

UltraVPN

UltraVPN is a VPN service based on OpenVPN. This soft gives you possibility to use VoIP software like Skype, connect to MSN if it’s blocked and use Hulu for example or other services restricted to US users only. Of course you get total privacy as using other VPN services.

CyberGhost

CyberGhost gives you 1GB of traffic/month with free account and up to 40 GB with premium accounts. Premium accounts have also speed guarantees which can be very important for people transferring a lot of data.

Share your experience and techniques of accessing blocked services, websites in comments below – our readers will appreciate it!

Halloween Haunting

Haunt your friends with this Halloween app. Select any Halloween gifts that you think would scare your friend.  Everytime you login you will be awarded with Freaky Funds which you can later on use to purchase other Halloween treats.

What should you be for Halloween?

If you haven’t decided yet what costume you wil be hearing during Halloween, this app will help you by asking several questions that will determine its final suggestion  for what you should be.

Halloween Countdown

Want to have a Halloween countdown clock on your profile, this is the Facebook app to to use.  It allows you to select background for your Halloween countdown clock as well.

Halloween Pumpkins

This app lets you carve a pumpkin and put it on your profile or carve another one and send it to your friends.

Halloween Wars

If you like Mafia wars, this app is a simple taken on yet another war game. But this your objective is to terrorize Halloween night.

Halloween Eating Contest

Challenge your friends into a virtual eating contest featuring some yummy halloween-inspired treats.

Halloween Hatchlings

Kill the new breed of monster hatchlings before the evil Count starts creating a new of monsters and release them to the world.

Halloween Quotes

Pepper your Facebook profile with cool Halloween quotes complete with nice looking background. The app lets you display a single or random quotes.

Halloween Treats

This app lets you send Halloween Treats to your Facebook friends.  You can select various treats such as scary, spooky or funny pictures and animated GIFs. You will be able to unlock more treats eavery day.

Halloween Name Generator

Still don’t know what name to call your self, use this app to get your Halloween Name. Just type in your name, select your sex and select a background to use in your Facebook profile.

Which sexy Halloween costume is right for me?

So you want to join the Halloween fun but could not decide what costume to use that will make you still look sexy? Take the quiz and find the perfect sexy costume that will suit you.

Call Me with Google Voice

This app lets you display your Google Voice widget in tab, profile and box. It allows you to make phone blasts to your Facebook News feed, create widget link that you can append to events and customize flash load image.

Call-My-W&ll

This is a simple with one simple and yet useful purpose – it lets you call in your Facebook status updates and then leave a voice status.

Reach Me On My Mobile

A pretty useful Facebook app that allows your friend to contact you through call, chat, text and voice messaging from your Facebook profile. It also prompts you to get online and log-in to your Facebook account for new file sent by your friends.

Telephone

Talk and send instant messages to your Facebook friends for free. You can also leave a voice message to your friends.

Party Line

This is an easy-to-use and useful app that lets you make instant conference call with your Facebook friends.
Jottby Jott, Inc.

Jott

A voice-to-text service app that allows you to capture thoughts, send emails and text messages as well as connect to popular web services through a simple phone call.

GuerrillaTel – Call for FREE

If you’re in the US or Canada, this app lets you make free phone-to-phone calls via your Facebook profile. You simply click on a friend’s picture to connect via phone patch for free.

Talkster Phone Party

This app lets you call a friend or a group of up to 5 friends at once for free. It allows you to use any mobile or landline phone, internationally.

Calliflower- FREE Conference Calls

Another app that lets you start a conference call for free. It allows you to call from home, mobile, Skype or any VOIP service.

Calls & SMS worldwide

Lets you make calls as well as send SMS from your Facebook account directly to your friends. It also lets you friens call you or leave a voicemail to you directly from your Facebook profile.

Share through SpinVox

This app lets you update your Facebook status as well as you Twitter and Jaiku accounts through a simple phone call. It also sends your messages into SMS.

Have you used any of these applications in your Facebook account?  Share with us your experiences by leaving a comment below.

Guess what I told him? I said he doesn’t need a personal blog. He can do all those things just by creating a Facebook account.

To be honest, it was a spur of the moment reaction. After teaching my friend how to create a Facebook account, it finally dawned on me – Facebook indeed has become a personal blogging platform. And I could think of 5 major reasons why Facebook is the new personal blogging platform.

1. Chronologically Arranged Blog Posts – You can create pseudo blog posts using Facebook’s status updates right? It doesn’t limit your updates to a certain number of characters like Twitter. And Facebook even automatically parse long updates and gives you a “read more” feature.

2. Photo Attachment to Status Updates – Facebook status updates also lets you attach related photos to accompany the texts  content of your updates. Or you can even post just photos with a caption which can also be considered as a regular blog posts (aka status updates)

3. Restricted Readership to your Facebook Friends – Since we’re talking about personal blog here, most likely we want to have a restrictive readership. Facebook of course has that facility.  As all your updates are accessible only by your Facebook contact.

4. Comment/Like Features – If you’re going to use Wordpress you’d probably need to find a post-rating plugin to enable your readers to rate your blog posts. If you use Facebook, it’s an embedded feature called – “Like”. As for comments, I don’t have to tell you that Facebook has a great commenting feature. Even better is the fact that Facebook comments are spam-free. Not unlike the usual blogging platform.

5. How About Categories? – Like I Said, my friend wanted a personal blog, so Categories is not really relevant when you are running a personal blog, right? And besides Blogspot.com didn’t have the category feature at first, right? Do you agree? Or you have any other idea on how to have this feature on your Facebook personal blog?

There you go, five major reasons why you can use Facebook if you want to start a personal blog with restricted readership. Did we miss anything?  If you have something to add to the reasons why Facebook is becoming a personal blogging platform, feel free to leave a comment.

And don’t forget to get your personal name as your Facebook account name, in case it is still available.

1. Stop answering those trivia quizzes – Ok folks, I know it’s fun to do. But doing it in moderation may not be bad all. I’m talking about the slew of  all sorts of Trivia that you can play while you are in Facebook. There’s all sorts of things here really. Be it music, movies, 70’s music, 70’s movies, all-time favorite movies, among other Facebook Trivia Quizzes. And why do you need to stop playing these trivia quizzes? I don’t know, ask yourself are you trying to convey a message that says how laid-back you are that you can afford to stay log-in in Facebook anytime, anywhere answering these quizzes. Does answering these quizzes fulfill the function of a social network? – that is to socialize?

2. Stop Playing Mafia Wars and Farm Ville, etc. – Similar to Trivia Quizzes, updates and notes keeps on arriving on my email regarding a friends latest conquest in Mafia Wars, or when an animal appears on a friend’s farm.  I don’t care whether you’ve moved to the 200th level in Mafia Wars or whether you have grown this and that in your Farm.

3. You Dont’ Need to Tell the World Who Your Friends Are – We can see them by clicking on the Friends Tab on your Profile. We don’t need to know either what type of friends they are. I’m referring of course to this app which lets you show your friends in a widget-like box.

4. Avoid the one-liner status updates - “home now”, “have a good weekend everyone’, “craving for sweets”. You get the drift?

5.  Get the Hang of Using Facebook Chat – And avoid using the comments in the status updates.  Don’t you find it annoying when people talk using the commenting feature of Status updates? Especially when the one who post the status updates replies to a comment of his friends? That’s what the Facebook chat facility is for.

There you have it, 5 things that you may avoid doing to improve your social presence or profile via Facebook.  You may agree or disagree with me by leaving a comment below. But if you do disagree, please be nice. :-)

Photoeffects

As it name’s suggest, this Facebook photo app lets you apply various effects to your Facebook photos and then share it with your friends and family. Choose from around 81 photo effects that you want to add to your photos using an easy-to-use interface.

Photo Tag

This Facebook app lets you add custom speech bubbles and other items to your photos. It allows you to use as many photos as you want. What’s good about this app is the fact that it automatically tags your friends when you’ve taken their photo and decided to share it with other people on Facebook.

Blast Your Photo

This is a pretty straightforward photo app that lets you do one thing with your photo – add an effect that will make you appear as if you’re gargling with Listerine. It’s a simple app and yet could be fond, especially if you’ll apply it to the photos of your friends.

Your Baby Photo

Again another simple Facebook photo app that lets you do one thing, “babify” your own photo to make it appears as if it was taken when you were actually a baby.  Another fun and cool Facebook app worth trying, if only for some laugh that you’re going to give once you see how the app will turn your old photo into your baby photo.

Lunapic

This app is a cool way of editing your Facebook photos using a single click. Choose from various effects such as cut, crop, rotate, sharpen, blend and other cool animation effects. Even more fun is the fact that you can edit your friends’ photos as well.

Phixr Photo Editor

Phixr lets you edit your photos from simple cropping to resizing, removing red eye, adding speech bubbles, removing photo noise as well as other effects and tools. It’s actually a web browser plug-in which is ported to Facebook.

BW Photo

Although this Facebook photo app’s main purpose is to turn your photos into black and white it also allows to add other  fun effects such as Sepia, Shadow, Saturate and more.

FotoFlexer

Now here’s a powerful photo editing toos for your Facebook photos. And perhaps one of the most used as well by Facebook members. It lets you create fun greeting cards, enlarge, crop, rotate, cartoonify, distory, and many other things that you can possibly do with your photos and with your friends’ photos as well.

Funny Photo Widget

Just by the example funny photo above, i’ll let you decide whether you’ll find this Facebook photo app funny or not. Alright, of course it’s a funny and cool photo editing tools. You can use the edited photo as your Facebook profile pic and what’s so good about it is the fact that the effects randomly changes.

PhotoMagic

This Facebook photo app provides cool configurable image processing effects that you can apply to your photos. It’s easy to use as well. All you need to do is to select a photo from your Facebook photo albums, select the effects you want added and automatically upload it to your album. The effects include blur, sharpen, threshhold, sepia, pencial sketch, paint draw, speckle.  Yeah, it kind of reminds you of the various Photoshop effects, right. The app is pretty cool, try it.

• send postcards from the Pope to your friends
• download and read the Pope’s Message for the 43th World Communications Day
• spread friendship with the Pope and become a witness of Christ in the world through the web

It’s a good thing that whoever is in-charge of the Pope’s online publicity program decided to create a Facebook app rather than a Facebook profile for the Pope. At least, Facebook users would not expect to really communicate with the Pope since Pop2You is just an application rather than a Facebook profile.

If you need more social media applications relating to Pope Benedict XVI and his activities you may also want to check out the Pope’s YouTube Channel, as well as an iPhone app which was just released recently.

I wonder when will the Pope have his Twitter account?

To use this feature, click on the Chat icon at the bottom right corner of your Facebook home page. You’d be asked which of your Friend List you’d like to be displayed in the chat pane. That is of course, if you have already created a Friend List before.

You can also create new a New Friend list from the Chat Pane.  Simply enter a name for that Friend List and drag friends you want to be included on the list.

If you want certain group of Facebook contacts not to appear on your Chat Pane, simply uncheck that list. And to view your Facebook contacts alphabetically, just simply uncheck all the Friend Lists.

Now, here’s an interesting feature (which some of you may not like). In the Chat Pane, you’d notice green switches opposite the Friend List name. Clicking on that green switch will turn off that Friend List. Meaning, your friends in that list will see your status as offline, even though you will appear online in your other Friend List.

So, if you don’t want your co-workers know that you are in Facebook at certain time of the day, say during office hours but you still want to connect with your other friends, then this feature will be very useful.

Another feature which was “re-activated” is the facility to view your Facebook friends’ status updates. You can view this list from your Facebook Home Page by clicking on the “status updates’ tab at the left side navigation. If you don’t see the link yet, just click on “More” and simply drag the “status updates’ link on top of the list to make it appear every time you access your Facebook home page.

If you’re asking why these two filters were placed in different location, here’s what the Facebook blog has to say:
We’ve added the filter for status updates to your home page, rather than the Friends Page, because the two play different roles on the site. The home page focuses on showing you what you’re friends are sharing, while giving you options for filtering that content. The Friends Page is the place for organizing and finding friends.

There you go. Hope this would make everybody happier with Facebook now.

For those who can already see the new Friends Page, the first thing you’d notice is of course the search box on the upper right-hand corner of the page. Just enter any information and you’ll find a list of friends connected to your Facebook account. This also goes true for people who connect with you via email on Facebook.

This is a cool and useful feature and yet just the tip of the iceberg.  The most notable feature of the new Friends Page is an easier interface for organizing your Facebook friends into groups. By default, you can only see the “All Friends List”. Below this tab is an option to create a new list. Clicking on this tab will display a box asking you to enter a name for the friend list. After entering the name for your list, you will be brought to a new screen where you can either enter an information to search for a friend that you want to add to the list. Alternatively you can choose to add multiple friends.  All your friends will be displayed and you can just select the friends you want to add to the link. After saving, you can now see the friend list you created at the left-hand side of your Facebook page.

Cool thing about this Friend List is the fact that you can send invites, shoutouts, share links and photos to specific friends only. You can also filter the updates you receive on your Friends Page to a specific group of friends only. This will reduce the noise on your Friends Page and would be most useful if you’ve hot high school buddies who are fond of answering stupid quizzes on Facebook.

• Julius Harper, co-founder of the first and largest Facebook group against the previous change to the terms
• Anne Kathrine Petteroe, co-founder of the first and largest Facebook group against the previous change to the terms
• Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• The Consumerist, which originally reported on our revised terms in February

Or if you’re one of the more than 1.4 million Facebook users who didn’t care about this exercise,  you might want to ignore the results of this voting and continue with your Facebook activities.

But for those who care, you might find it interesting that there were only 600,000 of you who voted. While these maybe a significant number, it still is way below 50% of the total number of Facebook users. 74% of those who voted were in favor of the new documents.

Despite the low turn-out of votes, the proposed documents shall be instituted once the audit is done.

Now maybe it’s about time for us to read the proposed Facebook governance documents to avoid possible legal impediments later on.