"When you take the friction out of sharing, you also remove the value."

Massive, quite useful presentation from Paul Adams at Google

"Captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook [...] in a database you control, and makes it easy to search, sort, filter, export, and visualize in useful ways."

"I'm not willing to accept that it's impossible to create a legitimately enjoyable game experience in the confines of the short attention span Facebook model, though. Scrabble, for example, lends itself perfectly to asynchronous, light, casual play (cf Scrabulous, Words with Friends). But it's legitimately fun at the same time. You're rewarded for imaginative approaches to solving problems. You can play with no skill or lots, but either way, you'll always find ways to get better. Most important: You're genuinely spending time with your friends. Sharing an experience that creates a memory. This is a big deal. This is missing from almost every other pseudo-social game."

"Here's how to make sure other people can't tag you on Places."

The big one is basically spend at least $10,000 on Facebook advertising in order to get an account manager in order to get approval.

New Spotify with a number of interesting new features.

"The current Facebook privacy policy already allows your “publicly available information,” which includes your name, gender, geographic region, friends list, fan pages, and your content marked “everyone,” to be automatically shared with external web sites when you visit them. The only thing apparently preventing this from happening right now is technology – Facebook has not yet rolled out an official means for Facebook Connect sites to automatically access such data. Apparently they soon plan on adding that technology for certain “pre-approved” sites, an update which the newer governing documents make more explicit."

This is brilliant. But argh, Farmville. "The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness."

"The unspoken premise of [Jesse Schell's] DICE 2010 lecture is that people are prisoners to external reward systems. "External reward" is practically a curse word to me, a thing I'm ever vigilant against. I don't need experience point systems giving me a false sense of mastery, or Xbox "achievements" for watching the opening movie of a game (that's a real one). But people absolutely are driven by external rewards. So much so that Schell doesn't even question it, he simply takes it as given."

Facebook Page apps.

API and FBML test consoles plus Facebook Connect playground.

"The general rule of thumb is – if you don’t actually need to use any scripted languages like PHP or ASP, and you don’t need to access the API to get the user’s information for any reason, you probably don’t actually need an application."

Info on the new(ish) embeddable Fan Box for Facebook Pages.

"All your social networks (including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Jaiku, tumblr, TinyURL, Yammer, Basecamp...) in one place."

Clever. Evil.

"According to a recent Nielsen Mobile Advertising Report MySpace Mobile is the leading mobile social networking site in Europe, occupying first or second position in four of the five key markets measured. Visiting social networks on mobile phones is experiencing big growth in Europe."

"According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are interesting - but there are also some big caveats to keep in mind."

"Learning to say a polite thank you, goodbye and see you later to your consumers isn’t always easy but that’s the right way to behave with short-termed SNS activity."

"Facebook has 59 million users [but] you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site"

"A jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages."

"Standardized Data Portability is the next great frontier for the web. As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors." Not sure how I missed this.

"The big problem with Facebook is the plain fact that it’s an extremely annoying piece of software. I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about all the stupid, nasty, and sometimes scary things Facebook has done"

"Facebook doesn't exist to be good in the sense that Google wants (wanted?) to be [..] Your network of friends and the data you share amongst them happens to be a nutrient-rich bath in which advertisements can flourish and spawn."

"Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you're looking to avoid."

"A systematic analysis of the 100 most popular applications - those that have at least 1million users - in an attempt to get a better grasp on favoured activities that take place in this global playground."

"This online marketing revolution is going to generate quite a lot of these creepy feelings. We're going to be wondering how companies know so much about us, why they're talking to us in such a familiar way and how come they get everything just slightly w

"Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it."

"Ning, is participating in this week's launch of a new open web API called Open Social, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Google's own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Fli

"It's clear to me that Facebook might be the one thing that saves advertising agencies from an ignominious slide into irrelevance. Because now, finally, there's a mass, popular digital tool out there that senior agency people are using for it's own sake"

"Charlene Li from Forrester Research gave a presentation entitled 'Big Brands & Facebook: Marketing Case Studies & Best Practices.' The theme that she came back to a few times was: Facebook marketing requires communication not advertising."

Useful (if sometimes obvious) insights.

"When you see your client's pubic bone, something has changed."

"An overview and analysis of the Facebook Plaform and what we have learned about it in the three weeks since it launched."

"A reference for developers interested in the Facebook Platform."

"Rather, the user's own identity online on Facebook, would become a personalized portal through which to view the constantly shifting relationships that matter most to that individual."

"With Agape, users can create causes, take donations, and recruit members. Whenever someone creates a cause or joins one, it shows up in their news feed for their friends to see."

"There is also a crucial viral component - when a friend adds an application, it is noted in their news stream on their profile. Clicking on the item brings you to the app, where you can add and/or interact with it yourself."

"Everything you need to get started building a Facebook Application."