At Allfacebook, Nick O’Neill claims that at least one Facebook application developer is making more than $1m/month, but won’t say who it is:

There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is. All that matters is that a top application that is used for entertainment purposes is generating over $1 million a month.

So who is it? read more

Danville Area Community College, a small junior college located in Danville, Illinois, is following one of the latest trends - using social networking tools such as Facebook and Myspace to recruit students.

An article in today’s Danville Commercial-News tells the DACC story:

So this summer, Danville Area Community College Marketing Director Lara Conklin decided to meet prospective DACC students where they spend a lot of their time — on social networking pages.

DACC now has its own facebook.com and myspace.com sites.

The pages seem to be working.

DACC, a male, single, 61-year-old Virgo, has 65 friends, according to Myspace. Facebook lists more than 200 friends, Conklin said.

The DACC accounts were added to the social networking sites a little over a month ago, so any direct marketing success as a result has yet to be determined.

The college considers the experimental program a success so far…

The Daily Mail profiles the world’s oldest facebooker - 102 Year Old Ivy Bean::

Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.

The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the website, after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.

Although Mrs Bean currently only has nine Facebook friends, she said she ‘loves being online’ and is hoping for many more.

I suspect she’ll have many new friends after this article is read around the world!

According to BusinessWeek, Facebook is now the most trafficked internet site in the world having recently surpassed MySpace. Facebook has over 132m users at the time of this post.

BusinessWeek’s Catherine Holahan writes:

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to illustrate the impact of his social network, he tells a story about several young religious militants from Lebanon who changed their view of Western culture through Facebook friendships. The subtext to the tale is that free expression of ideas, enabled by the Web, bridges deep cultural divides. But we knew that: It’s one of the central concepts behind the Olympics, after all. What we didn’t know is that Facebook is in Lebanon.

Holahan credits some of Facebook’s success to the fact that instead of offering local language versions of the site, they opted for a technological solution and have instead provided translation tools into several languages. This has enabled Facebook to rollout in more countries than its competition - using highly accurate - and individually adjustable - translation tools.

Not too many, it would seem. Silicon Alley Insider counts some 38,000 people being unhappy enough with the new Facebook design to join a group. That’s nothing, when thinking about the fact that there are some 90 million or something users… And no Beacon controversy hitting the media wires either. Fun post though, speaking of redesigns and all.

Michael Arrington shares a document sent out by Facebook on how to succeed in viral marketing using Facebook Pages. Maybe that’ll help you boost those poor visitor numbers on your oh so cool blog project?

Facebook’s dead to me, but I can certainly see its uses for marketing people targeting the mainstream crowd. And other areas as well, I’d reckon, although I don’t think that Facebook is the hippest place to be anymore. Then again I’m old, so what do I know?

Today sees the launch of a new Facebook application designed to make it easier for bloggers to update their blogs and microblogs from within their Facebook account.

Six Apart has created Blog It, powered by TypePad, which allows a user to update their blogs and status reports across a number of popular blogging platforms, as well as the likes of Twitter and Pownce.

Blogging via Facebook isn’t a new concept, but Six Apart claim to have launched the first service which isn’t limited to one company’s blogging services. Popular platforms such as Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Vox, and Twitter are all included.

Of course, Facebook gives the opportunity for greater social interaction, and Blog It allows bloggers to easily notify friends and other contacts whenever they’ve posted something new, while still having full control over which services are updated.

“Blog It is one of the few applications that takes content created inside Facebook and makes it available for use outside Facebook,” said David Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead at Six Apart. “Blog It users are able to update their personal blogs, business blogs, online journals, Facebook status, or Twitter or Pownce activity all from one central environment. This is a concrete step away from the silos and walled gardens of the past and toward the open web of the future.”

Blog It is obviously a work in progress (the demonstration video talks about removing the need to use HTML in a future version) but then all good tools usually are.

How useful the service will be is likely to depend on how much you rely on Facebook versus other services. Personally, I’m not yet convinced, as I use Facebook primarily for personal relationships and Twitter / LinkedIn increasingly for business relationships. While the lines are becoming increasingly blurred, I don’t want to be tied to a web interface for updating everyone — it’s why I use Twhirl for Twitter for example.

However, I’m sure for some it will be a real boon. Let us know how you get on!

Here’s a link to the free Blog It Facebook application, and more info (including video) can be viewed at blogit.typepad.com.

You have may heard that Facebook has opened itself to advertising and marketing over the past month through several initiatives, one of them being the feature of creating pages for businesses (Microsoft) and/or personalities (Kevin Rose). If you’ve felt tempted to create a page for your own blog, that may have merits on its own as a means to create a community of fans *on* Facebook. But if you did it expressly for link credit, because Facebook pages are visible to Google, you may want to hold your horses, ‘pardner.

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Fans of the American version of Dancing With The Stars, might be puzzled as to why one of the contestants, Mark Cuban, continually avoids the jaws of defeat week after week.  Well, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks also happens to be a prolific blogger, staying true to his geeky roots (he sold broadcast.com to Yahoo as the source of his McScrooge-like billions).

And it so happens that in addition to his notoriety as an “involved” owner of a professional basketball team, Mark Cuban is *also* using his very public blog to rally votes towards his continued survival.

As I told every entertainment and news show that interviewed us after the show and this morning, the support of people who read this blog, the support of the many bloggers who got behind Kym and I and the Facebook and Myspace nations and networks that rallied behind us are what kept us alive on the show.

The Nerd Herd was in full effect. This was truly an internet showing and I cant thank everyone enough and I truly hope we earn the same level of support next week.

While every contestant on your favourite public-can-vote reality show probably does round up their own niche of fans, I think this is probably the first time a blogging “personality” has used the power of blogging and social media to boost his efforts.

We may never know how much of a contribution his blogging / Facebook / MySpace fans have made to his continued success on the show, but if his ongoing dancing skills are any indication, it will need to be momentous.

NewsGator Technologies Inc. announced the availability of NewsFriends, an innovative social news application for Facebook Platform where people can discover and share blogs, news, videos and podcasts and create a personalized and social news experience.

Leveraging the tremendous social power of Facebook Platform, NewsFriends provides a new way for people to get all their news in one place — relying on their own network of friends to choose and share engaging content without leaving their Facebook account. With this newest NewsGator application, bloggers can connect with their readers in the Facebook community, as well as expand their readership by tapping into the social graph of their current readers.

With NewsFriends, people can see and subscribe to all their friends’ favorite blogs and Web sites, view which friend was first to subscribe to the site and can also be credited for being the first person to bring a particular site into NewsFriends. Using the Facebook posting function, a simple click from within NewsFriends allows people to post any article, along with their comments, on their profile page or send it to their friends. The five most recent news articles in feed subscriptions will run on their profile page, letting friends easily see the news that is interesting to them.

News articles, blog posts, videos and podcasts can all be read or played from within the NewsFriends application. NewsFriends also includes collections of the top feeds for videos, music, entertainment, sports and more that a user can add with a just a click.