Facebook Developers Documentation Community Forums Events Open Source Resources Get Started Case Studies Facebook Connect fbFund Partnerships Bug Tracker Tools News Facebook Open Platform Open Source Projects Open Source Home Thrift Scribe memcached Cassandra phpsh Facebook Animation Facebook Firefox Toolbar Facebook Exporter for iPhoto flvtool++ PHPEmbed Public Patches Library Facebook Mirror Facebook Open Platform is a snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook

The Economist on social networking - world of connections This week,  The Economist, every Capatilist’s favourite magazine, has published a special report on on social networking . Introduction: A world of connections “Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play” What joy. A World of Connections , provides an excellent overview of the current state of social media for those still trying to get to grips with it.

I have already written List Building Using Ning Social Networks and List Building Using Twitter . However, in this article I discuss the use of Facebook for building your list. As explained in List Building Paradigm Shift , list building in today’s social media world is the process of acquiring and nurturing a rich and heterogeneous following across diverse platforms which include Rolodex , autoresponders , social networking sites and I will want to revisit Ning and Twitter in the future.

Callan Green has just published a great post on Mashable about brands who are really getting it right in Facebook Fan Pages. To make the most of Facebook Fan pages (or Bebo, any other social network), you need to actively engage with your fans. Phillips, herself a mother of ‘millennials’ – roughly defined as those who were pre-teen at the turn of the century - quotes her own research into how young adults view brands who attempt to ‘befriend’ Sure, she says, “anyone can build a fan page in under 10 minutes, and some big brands may even attract fans without any real effort.

Well, the number of Australians on Facebook has shot through the roof. If you hunt through this blog, you’ll notice that I’ve been tracking Facebook users in Australia since May 2007 (around 200,000 members I think) to today and 1/3 of Australian population. Here’s the description of a Monthly Active Use r according to Facebook, as well as the August figures for Australians on Facebook. After sitting on 6 million for a while, we have 7,900,000 monthly active users, 6,900,000 over 18 years old. That’s quite a jump.

In a past post I elaborated on social networks like Twitter as being a Help engine; an alternative to a search engine in some cases in finding answers and making decisions. by connecting you to a social network of people you trust who will be willing to help out in a reciprocal relationship (which which also helps out in the re-contextualising process as you share a common wavelength or level I also paralleled this concept to the aims of KM, productivity, performance, sense-making, decision-making, etc: “I think it’s getting us closer to the KM productivity (sense-making) aim that knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer has always aspired to, which is:

The biggest group on Facebook are not university or college students, or even people in their 20s in their first job. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs , the biggest group of users on Facebook are 35-54 year olds. Their study of figures for the US that are publicly available to advertisers shows that over 28% of Facebook users are in this age-range, with a further 12% of users aged 55 or over. Image via Wikipedia In fact the 55+ age-group is the one that has seen the largest growth in the six month to July 2009 – an impressive 514% increase in users.

Research released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK suggests that people are growing increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages or install brand applications in Facebook and other social networks . When asked what they disliked most about social networks, the most popular response (with 31% of respondents citing this) was too many invites to install applications. The research found that almost two in every three of the 2,000 respondents to the survey were fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications. Digging deeper

It just takes time for the older generation to find out where the photos are being uploaded, lives being discussed, and they want in. Women over 55 take Facebook by storm The number of US women over age 55 using Facebook grew by 175.3% since September 2008, making mature females one of the fastest growing demographic groups on the social network, according to usage statistics released Wherever the grandkids are, the grandparents follow. This is not a-typical.

The rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter has created lots of excitement. Facebook , MySpace , Twitter , LinkedIn and Ning are ranked 4th, 11th, 25th, 89th and 154th among all websites in the world, respectively. Facebook , Twitter , LinkedIn , and the Ning family of social networking sites are the most popular social networks with wide business appeal. Alexa ranks the world’s most popular websites. From a business point of view, MySpace has become primarily a niche site for the music industry.