Watching the meteoric rise of Facebook has been fascinating. Even just a few years ago, it was viewed primarily as little more than a place for young people to interact, not a place that brands needed to be concerned with. This has of course changed completely.

Today there are plenty of important social networks in America, each filling an important niche. But Facebook doesn’t inhabit a niche. It towers over every other social network. It has over 500 million users … and a major motion picture!

Even considering this prominence, a couple of recent articles on Facebook by Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington on are nothing but eye-popping. More Information…

So what is this Facebook places? At the moment, it’s a fairly limited addition to the Facebook empire that lets users “check-in” to real world places from their mobile phones. When you’re physically in the vicinity of some sort of business, park, national monument –anything really- you can “check-in.” Your Facebook page will be updated with the info that you’re at this place. It’ll appear on your profile and in your friends’ newsfeeds so people can keep tabs of your moves around town. Additionally, you can see if friends have checked-in nearby you … essentially, it opens a whole new level of obstacles when trying to avoid people you don’t want to see at bars and restaurants (kidding).

Places is pretty spartan at the moment, but expect WAY more features coming within the year, from location based advertisements to coupons and suggestions of places to visit. More Information…

Effective Monday August, 23rd Facebook is changing the maximum width of all custom pages from 755 to 520 pixels. Additionally, the site is removing the “Boxes” tab, which has been an important feature for developers of 3rd party applications. This means major changes are in store for the look and layout of fan pages.

Having designed many fan pages for our clients we feel a responsibility to notify everyone in time of the change. If you don’t make the change by August 23rd your page will look something like this:

(notice the cut off images in the 3rd column)

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Lil Bow Wow	#1) Bow Wow, Tweeting while drunk driving: "Im f*ked up!!! Ohhhh damn. Y i drive the lambo. Chris might have to drive after next spot" Wait…Bow Wow is old enough to drive?? This stunt by hip-hop wonderboy turned menace tops them all. Somebody please make sure @MADD keeps an eye on him...
Governator	#2) The Governator, Knifegate: Arnold showed who is in charge in Sacramento by wielding a massive hunting knife in this 27 second video he released on Twitter. As if Predator wasn’t enough to convince Democrats not to mess with him...
Al Roker	#3) Al Roker, Tweeting photos from jury duty: Al Roker created quite a PR storm for himself when he found time to drop in a few tweets of his fellow jurors while in court for jury duty. The congenial weatherman apparently takes his broadcasting career a little more serious than his civic duties…
Larry Johnson	#4) Larry Johnson, Too many to count: Insults to his coaches, homophobic slurs, threats to fans…Larry Johnson can always be counted on for tweets that have done more damage to this guy’s career than an ACL tear. He whips out 140 characters of radioactive text faster than you can say “What team does he play for again?”
Erykah Badu	#5) Erykah Badu, tweeting while giving birth: “I see the head! It’s covered in hair!” Yes she really did tweet this. In 2009, a baby wasn't the only thing she delivered...She brought 140 characters into the world at the same time. What do you think the child will have to say about this when she grows up?

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There has been much talk in recent years of the effect the Internet has on our brains. There is more information free for the taking than ever before, by incredibly huge margins, but many argue there is a dark flipside to this mass of easily accessible information. The Internet promotes surfing, multitasking and skimming. It isn’t important to have facts locked in your brain, it’s important to know what path you need to take to gain access to those facts. As a result, our ability to focus is diminishing and less information is stored in our long-term memory banks.

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I recently stumbled on something very curious. Nutella, the hazelnut-chocolate spread loved by children all over the world (though mostly in Europe) has over 3 million fans. That’s not the weird part, though. The weird part is that after filtering out all the user comments on the Nutella Facebook page, there’s only one comment by Nutella. In Turkish. From 2008.

As far as I could tell, Nutella has done absolutely nothing to promote their Facebook fan page. After a bit of Googling, I discovered that I’m not the only who’s noticed this oddity. More Information…

The Facebook Empire has seen a growth unmatched by any other human interaction or company in all of history. Facebook announced that this week it expects to reach the 500 million user milestone. That is half a billion users in the companies short life span of six years.

The Washington Post reports that “the population inhabiting Facebook now equals that of the United States, Japan and Germany combined. Or, two Mexicos and a Brazil.”

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The Internet has changed tremendously over the last decade. AOL rules the roost no longer, public chat rooms have given way to the closed doors of Facebook and other social media networks, among many other changes. However, there are some holdovers of the past, stubbornly sticking through the Internets’ rapid evolution like crocodiles or platypus. One such example is the discussion forum.

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Digital music marketing blog Sandbox.FM took a look at the social media habits of the top 20 musicians on social networks. Turns out, most of them have been neglecting Myspace. Many hadn’t posted to their Myspace page at all in 2010, others had only done so once or twice compared to hundreds of tweets or Facebook posts.

The decline of Myspace is old news. The company has been hemorrhaging employees and traffic for quite some time now. It’s remaining island of relevance has been entertainment, particularly music, but that dominance is slipping.
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During the World Cup, Akamai’s Net Usage Index, which tracks visitors per minute on more than 100 of the major news sites in Akamai’s network.

In 2002 social media, compared to what we have now, was non-existent. Some would argue that the word “social media” had not yet been coined. In 2006, there was no such thing as Twitter. Now, another four years into the future and we are dominated by a world full of social media outlets. In 2002 Japan/Korea hosted the world cup and built websites for each participating team –with minimal success. In 2006, Germany hosted the cup. Nike created a social networking site for soccer fans. But still, only four years ago, Facebook was restricted to college and high school students, and Twitter was in the beta stages. More Information…