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Facebook Won The Conversation Battle Published in March 14th, 2009 Posted by robdiana in Social Media Well, it took several days, but I finally got the new Facebook homepage. With this redesign, Facebook realized the battle is for conversation. Conversation makes a site more of a destination for people, and the new redesign is completely targeted towards this. As much as sites like Twitter and FriendFeed have been battling for the conversation destination title, I warned that Facebook could just decide that they need to own something. Facebook has just won the conversation battle. Why? The reasons are fairly simple. First, they have almost 200 million users staring at the “What’s on your mind?” prompt. All of the other social sites combined do not have anywhere near this number of unique users. You will probably not hear this from many bloggers, because they tend to be early adopters. Those people, myself included, will stick with Twitter. This is about the mainstream. Facebook is most definitely a mainstream site. One killer feature they have that Twitter does not is lists. I quickly created lists for groups of my Facebook friends and was able to view their updates without the noise of the “news feed”. There are even predefined filters for photos, links and videos. Search capabilities are a glaring omission, but that is not as important to the mainstream user. That is only important for people building third party applications.

The other big reason that Facebook may be crowned king is that all of the social sites in the conversation battle have either written a Facebook application or have their feed being pulled in as status updates. It is fairly simple to import your Google Reader shared items, your Twitter status updates, your FriendFeed and SocialMedian activity. The lure of a potential audience of 200 million users is too great to not create some hook into Facebook.

No, we’re not giving anything away in this post. Instead, we’ve got some work to do, and we need you to play an important role in it. Our most interesting (and important) project for 2009 is something we are modestly calling “The Smashing Book”: a smashingly written, beautifully designed and professionally printed book. It will be created by and for the Web design community. Four key decisions have already been made: the book’s title will be “The Smashing Book”; it will be a paperback; the price is fixed, as is the release date, which is early September 2009.

The CSJ Awards recognise and reward effective poverty fighting groups from across the UK. Now in its fifth year, the CSJ Awards have brought over 64 winning voluntary groups to the attention of the national media and policy makers and given total prizes of £153,250 to date.

The winning project -- Noon Meal Improves Girls' Learning in Burkina Faso -- is a shining example of a project that marketed its work successfully to the GlobalGiving community. In December, the project attracted many donations from returned Peace Corps Volunteers. To date, the Noon Meals has generated $31,982 from 342 donors. With the eBay Bounty Prize, the project will receive an additional $5,000, putting the project less than $5,000 away from its goal.

Giving In Bear Times Michael Maiello, 02.16.09, 06:00 AM EST Forbes gathered three experts in philanthropy to discuss strategies for giving when the markets are down. For this market holiday, Forbes gathered a team of philanthropy experts to discuss the future of charitable contributions and investments as well as strategies for pursuing philanthropic goals in a bear market.