How To Sync Palm Pre With Facebook

Syncing your Facebook account with Palm Pre can add all your Facebook friends to your contacts besides giving you instantaneous updates. Here is how you will do it

Step 1 : From Palm Pre, launch ‘Contacts’ and Click open ‘Preferences‘ -> ‘Accounts‘
Step 2 : You should see Facebook in the list. Tap on the link and enter your Facebook login credentials
Step 3 : Log into Facebook from another system, preferably a PC
Step 4 : Click on ‘Account‘ -> ‘Account Settings‘ -> ‘Notifications‘ -> ‘Other Applications‘ -> ‘Show More‘ (if needed)
Step 5 : Click on the ‘Facebook for Palm‘ option and select ‘ON’
Step 6 : Now launch ‘Contacts‘ on your Palm and open ‘Preferences & Accounts‘ -> ‘Sync Now‘
Step 7 : Now from your Palm Pre, tap on ‘Sync‘ in your Facebook account (small refresh sign on bottom right of phone)
Step 8 : It will take some time for the syncing to complete.

Setting Up eCommerce Store On Facebook Becomes Easy With Payvment

You may have heard of Payvment. It is a startup that develops application that will let retailers to set up an ecommerce store on Facebook. The company has now introduced several nifty features that can go a long way in the growth of etailing via Facebook.

TechCrunch reports a new Fan Incentive-pricing feature that allows Payvment customers to introduce special coupons to customers who wish to become Fans of the company’s fan page.

The application also gives a real world feel to the purchasing experience by letting users “carry” their goods as they surf through the several shopping sites built on Payvment.

If you are looking to learn more about the service, click here to read tutorials from the company.

[via TechCrunch]

Facebook Entering China As Game Developer

There were speculations earlier this week that Facebook could be entering the Chinese market soon via an M&A or a Joint Venture. It now appears that Facebook may be looking at China as more of a development center for the West rather than as a market opportunity.

A new report from Marbridge Consulting suggests that the world’s largest social networking site may be looking at establishing a gaming development center in China that will develop high quality games for the western market. It is being reported that Facebook makes very little from the sale of virtual goods from third party developers like Zynga who are behind the popular Facebook game, Farmville. By instituting their own social games, Facebook may be cashing in on the highly lucrative social gaming market.

Does that mean the 56,000 Chinese users in Facebook will remain friendless as always?

[via Marbridge Consulting]

Chinese Facebook Launching This Year

The world’s largest social networking service, Facebook is known to be contemplating a Chinese launch later this year. According to reports published on the Chinese publication, Global Times, the company may do so either via a joint venture or through a merger or acquisition.

Despite growing to over 400 million users, Facebook has been pretty invisible in mainland China with only close to 56,000 users in this country. However, the company has its task cut out. A majority of local players have been successful merely by copying the features from Facebook. By entering the market late, Facebook may have to struggle to survive among its own clones.

Facebook registered its .CN domain name back in 2007 and launched a Chinese version back in 2008. But ever since there has not been any significant effort to popularize the service in the country. It will be interesting to see how the world’s biggest social network manages to penetrate the great wall.

[via Global Times]

Facebook Toolbar To Offer Social Networking On Third Party Websites

Facebook wants you to network and connect from anywhere and everywhere. A report on TechCrunch notes that the company is working on an AJAX based toolbar that will let third party developers to bring social networking features into their websites.

Like the popular Meebo bar, Facebook’s toolbar will reside at the bottom of the page and will let users to share, like pages that they visit and also allow chat with friends from third party websites.

What’s the point? TechCrunch writes that Facebook wants to expand to all websites thereby making it ubiquitous. Plus, the company could also plan on monetizing these toolbars with ads though that is unlikely to come during launch.

I would just hate cluttering the site with the toolbar. It could also make the site clunky. But if Facebook toolbar’s the order of the day, everyone of us might be moving towards that.

[via TechCrunch]

Facebook Insights Taking On Google Analytics

As part of its Open Graph API project, Facebook is learnt to be developing an Insights product that can serve as a handy analytics tool for developers. This could be the next big area where Facebook could be taking on Google which is pretty popular with its Analytics tool.

To use this, developers will need an API key. With an API key, various events may be tracked with basic API calls. AllFacebook quotes an instance of the API call

FB.Insights.impression(
{
api_key: ‘YOUR_API_KEY’,
lid: ‘EVENT_TYPE’
} );

Using the Facebook Insights feature, developers will be able to track virtually all activities of users including simple events such as ‘Like’ a message or other robust activities on their website.

There is not enough information on whether Facebook is building a platform similar to Google Analytics for developers to visit and track their visitor activities. However, that seems to be a very likely proposition.

[via AllFacebook]

Facebook Revenues To Cross $1 Billion In 2010

Inside Facebook has made some really detailed calculations over what Facebook could have earned in the past one year and how much the company could be making moving ahead.

According to these observations, the world’s biggest social network could have made close to $700 million that can expect to grow to $1.1 billion through this year.

A majority of the revenues in the past year has, as expected, come from brand advertising and performance advertising – nearly $575 million. The rest of the share is made from sale of virtual goods and through its deal with Microsoft.

However, as you would know, Facebook is working on a payment gateway and if it launches this year, we may expect a huge turnaround in the amount of money made from virtual goods. It can in fact be the main revenue driver for the company.

What do you think?

[via Inside Facebook]

Facebook To Reduce Notification Clutter With User Affinity Score

In a bid to reduce the clutter of notifications that third party apps display to Facebook users and also to optimize the resource consumption, Facebook has developed a ‘user affinity score‘ that will tell the system how useful a particular notification from a third party app is.

In a patent application filed with the USPTO, the fifth ever filed by Facebook, the inventors describe a way to study the implicit and explicit feedback offered by users to app notifications. The patent application elaborates

“an application can provide a notification to the member on the member’s web page. If the member ignores the notification when viewing the web page, e.g., does not click on or otherwise interact with the application, this is an implicit feedback that can be interpreted to mean that the member is neutral towards the application. But, if the member clicks on a link in the notification that unsubscribes the member from further notifications from this application, the member has provided explicit negative feedback towards the application. On the other hand, if the member clicks on a link in the notification that provides the member with more information about the application, the member has provided an explicit positive feedback about the application.”

Based on these user interactions, Facebook assigns a user affinity score to each application which would tell the system whether or not to display a notification from a particular app to users. Users could thus expect a reduction in the overall number of notifications received.

This is not all. The patent application further uses the affinity score to determine new user invitations. As most Facebook users might have experienced, there are quite a few apps that would not let you proceed unless you invite a particular number of friends to the app. With this affinity score in place, Facebook would internally determine whether to send the invitation to all selected members or only to a predetermined number.

What do you think of this? Do you think this will help reduce clutter?

Facebook Working On FourSquare Killer

“Checking-in” has suddenly become sexy and every startup in town is trying to incorporate it into their core service. After Yelp and Gowalla, Facebook too is trying to introduce a “check-in” feature to users of its mobile website.

Checking in was first introduced by New York based startup, FourSquare. The service that offered reward points for multiple check-ins has proved to be extremely popular among its users that other LBS startups too have been trying to introduce the service to their users.

However unlike Yelp or Gowalla, Facebook is a massive network that can squash the ambitions of a small time startup like FourSquare. However, Dennis Crowley, Founder of FourSquare seems unfaced and is in fact enthused by the entry of Facebook which could help make checking-in the “commodity of the year”. Crowley says

“I think we’re doing this better than anyone else and I think we’ll continue to do so. We have so much stuff on the whiteboard that we haven’t even touched yet… we’re really just getting started.”

Competition in this segment is just heating up and it will be interesting to see how 2010 pans out for each of these startups.

[via Business Insider]

Farmville Users To Get ‘Pay By Facebook’ Option This Week

Users of the hugely popular social game on Facebook, Farmville can expect the ‘Pay By Facebook‘ option to be rolled out sometime this week. The Business Insider reveals that Facebook’s payment gateway integration is so close to being implemented on Farmville that it could have been introduced last week itself.

The payment gateway is expected to be a huge money-spinner for Facebook, the world’s most popular social network that is now inching towards the 400 million registered users mark. However, despite the huge popularity of its application platform, the website itself had only been making money from advertising which did not contribute to much, considering the major part of revenues from gaming were to be made from purchase of virtual goods.

Facebook is expected to charge a 30% commission on transactions over its payment gateway. Despite this high charge, it is believed that developers would be willing to opt in considering the “Facebook stamp”. The Business Insider also notes that gaming app developers like Zynga believe a payment gateway from Facebook will in fact encourage more users to spend money, thus increasing overall revenues from the gaming apps.

[via Business Insider]