American States With Highest Number Of Facebook Gamers

Where do the most number of gamers on Facebook come from in the United States? A study conducted by AdParlor looked into data gathered from hundreds of advertising campaigns to extrapolate the numbers for the entire Facebook audience. Here are the top ten states and the number of gamers that each of these states contribute

1. California : 159,841 (17.00%)
2. Texas : 119,906 (12.75%)
3. Florida : 108,963 (11.59%)
4. New York : 101,642 (10.81%)
5. Ohio : 75,768 (8.05%)
6. Pennsylvania : 73,420 (7.81%)
7. Illinois : 72,306 (7.69%)
8. Michigan : 68,683 (7.30%)
9. Georgia : 57,398 (6.20%)
10. North Carolina : 56,895 (6.05%)

Here are some more highlights from the study:

• The states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York together account for roughly 30% of all US game players.
• The highest ratio of game players to state population comes from the State of Wyoming
• The highest ratio of game players to city population comes from St. Louis, Orlando, Salt Lake City, Dayton, and Pompano Beach
• Despite a population of almost 650,000 – the city of Boston only brought in 1,792 gamers

How To Get A Facebook.com Email Address

You may have already heard about the news that Facebook is launching a new messaging system that will provide a seamless integration of SMS, chat, email and messages. The new service will let users pick their favorite form of communication and can communicate with their friends without having to worry about the recipient being on the same platform. That means, a user may text to a friend who receives it over email and something that can be forwarded to another user as an instant message. Facebook is also offering a @facebook.com email address to users who want one. It’s not a necessity though.

So how do you get one? Facebook has indicated that the new messaging system will slowly roll out to all the 500 million odd Facebook users. So, you can login to your Facebook account to see if you have any notifications in this regard. If not, then check back till you get one.

And in case you want to have it earlier than that, you can request for an invitation by clicking here.

Facebook Valuation Now Higher Than eBay’s

Facebook has technically overtaken eBay to become the third largest technology company in the United States. The company’s shares are now trading at $16 on SecondMarket – an exchange for shares of privately held companies. At this price, the valuation of the company stands at $41 billion that is a tad more than the $39.3 billion valuation that eBay holds at the NASDAQ stock market. Only Amazon – at $74.4 billion valuation and Google – with $192.9 billion value are above Facebook.

The revelation comes on the heels of speculation that Facebook is announcing a new email product to take on the likes of Gmail and Hotmail. An announcement in this regard is expected later today. The news is also likely to give a major impetus to anticipation about the social network’s IPO plans. Will Facebook open to the stock markets next year?

Upload High Resolution Photos To Facebook With Updated Android App

Facebook has announced on their Android app fan page that a new version of their application is now available for download at the Android market. This is just a minor update over the version 1.4.0 that was released less than ten days back. You would remember that the earlier update brought new features like Places and Groups to the Android app.

Unlike the earlier update, this new version primarily fixes a number of bugs in the application. One significant addition though is the ability to upload high resolution pictures from your Android phone to your Facebook profile. Summarizing what the new update is about, Facebook has said,

Hey Android fans, we just released Facebook for Android v1.4.1. This upgrade includes a number of bug fixes and higher resolution photo uploads. It’s available in the Android Market right now.

It goes without saying that Facebook for Android v1.4.1 is a free-to-download app. Do check it out and let us know what you think of it in the comments below.

Document Sharing On Facebook – Coming Soon?

Facebook has been sending invites to the press calling them up for a media event on November 15. While not much is known about the event officially, speculations are doing the rounds that Facebook could be unveiling its new email product – an application that could take on the likes of Gmail and Hotmail and would comprehensively build up the direct messaging functionality of the current service.

According to Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet, this new webmail product could come with additional integration with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. Office Web Apps, as you know, is the web form of Redmond’s popular Office productivity suite and will let users access Word and Excel files directly over the browser apart from storing these files on the cloud rather than on the local hard drives. The ZDNet rumor notes that the new webmail client unveiled by Facebook could replicate the Office Web apps integration that is presently available on Hotmail.

Considering that people spend more time on Facebook than on Google (the search engine and other products), it makes terrific sense for Facebook to bring such productivity tools to the social network. But then, given the sophistication of the Gmail service, Facebook’s new product could be more of a threat to Hotmail – Microsoft’s email service – rather than to Google or Yahoo. What do you think?

New Feature Rich Facebook Games Portal Launching Soon

Facebook is said to be getting ready to launch a new feature rich gaming portal that will offer a centralized place for all Facebook gamers to find and play all their favorite games. The social network has close to 200 million monthly gamers and the new portal will have Facebook partnering with a number of developer partners in this launch.

This news is still a rumor and although Facebook has not completely denied it, they have said that the games team is “working on building features to make it easier for people to discover and re-engage with games”. That definitely sounds like a rational explanation for the resources being put into this new portal.

The games portal shall be an extension of the gaming dashboard that Facebook launched in September of this year. This upcoming launch should centralize the whole gaming experience. The portal is rumored to launch by mid-November.

New Facebook Page Management Tools Released

If you are the owner of a popular brand with your own Facebook page, then here is something that you would be pleased to hear. Facebook has introduced a new page management tool interface that makes administering the activities on your Facebook Page a pleasure. The new interface is much simpler and intuitive and makes it much more easy for the administrator to access the several features. This is unlike the older interface where certain features were buried deep down into the management section.

One significant addition is the ability to change the Page name in case you typed it wrong during creation. This feature is however limited to those Pages that have less than 100 connections. In addition to this, the other important features are

• Condensed view page
• Basic Information and Profile picture section
• Connecting Page to Mobile Device
• Marketing Tab

Have you tried the new Facebook Page Manager? Tell us your experience in the comments. Continue reading »

Buy Facebook Credits From Wal-Mart & Best Buy Soon

Want to invest in your virtual farm but do not have sufficient Facebook credits? You can soon buy them during your weekly groceries shopping at Wal-Mart. The Facebook Credits card will soon be available in the impulse section of both Wal-Mart and Best Buy that will let consumers in the United States to buy credits to replenish their virtual cash on Facebook – something that can come of use in over 200 games and applications.

This is however not something new. Another popular American retailer, Target has been stocking such cards since September of this year and it has apparently been a successful experiment. Customers looking for such cards will be able to buy them at denominations of between $5 and $50. This is definitely an interesting move and something that could push more people to spend money on Facebook apps.

Facebook Spam Filter For Pages Releases

Facebook pages have been a great place for not just the brands and websites to broadcast to ‘fans‘, but also allows members to post content among themselves. While this is good on most counts, the number of spammers making use of this feature is on the rise as well. Facebook appears to have taken note of this as they have recently launched a ‘Spam filter‘ for fan pages.

An explanation of the service notes,

“Facebook is now helping Page admins ensure that the most valuable content posted by users on their Page wall is more visible to anyone viewing the Page. We are now offering automatic content filtering on Page walls that will ensure that posts soliciting spam are removed from public view as well as ensure that posts containing good content remain more visible.”

This is a good way to encourage genuine discussion among people with similar tastes and ideas on a page. What do you think?

Print Facebook Photos At Target Using Kodak Kiosks

Popular American retailer, Target, has offered in-store photo printing facilities to users for quite some time. These kiosks however required users to bring their photo files in USB drives to get them printed. Starting now, the company has announced that these Kodak kiosks will be getting Facebook connectivity so that users may directly log on to their Facebook account and pick and print the photos from their virtual album.

The Kodak kiosk is pretty comprehensive in that it will let you print your photos, including those from Facebook, on a variety of objects including photo paper, greeting cards, calendars, movie DVDs, etc. Target has however indicated that the Facebook connectivity will be limited to accessing the photo album; which means you cannot check and update statuses from there.

Facebook has been slowly becoming the primary photo sharing website ahead of more specialized services like Flickr. The company recently opened up options to download photos besides uploading high resolution pictures. It will be interesting to see whether and how Flickr/Yahoo responds to these developments.