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As of today, FB has a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.

We're working closely with these partners so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information. When you arrive on these sites, you'll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page. You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by "No Thanks" on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites.

We are a generation constantly terrified by the idea of someone, somewhere, effectively advertising to us by way of glancing at our "data" and knowing whether or not we like country music or alternative 1990s rock. But is it really so terrifying to have annoying banner ads offering deals on some product you might actually enjoy?

It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done. Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.

A recent interview takes a look at what Facebook’s recent platform changes mean for businesses. It begins, “Recently at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, the company introduced a series of action verbs into its social platform. ‘Read,’ ‘Watch,’ and ‘Listen,’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained, were added to help build a ‘language for how people connect.’ The one missing word, of course, was ‘Buy.’ That’s really why Facebook and its army of content partners from news, publishing, music, and film and TV are rushing to set up shop on the famous platform with 750 million users.”

The interviewer “sat down with Gi Fernando, an expert on social-networking data, to help explain what Facebook’s platform changes mean for brands, consumers, and marketers.

When asked about the single biggest change that Facebook is making, Fernando replied, “The biggest change is Facebook driving toward becoming the semantic web. The semantic web is making sure that the Internet has a dictionary and a grammar that can be understood by consumers, yes, but also by advertisers and brands. It’s also understanding how people behave on the Web rather than just clicking on stuff: what are they actually doing? You read, watch things, you get instant feedback, your friends can read and watch with you, but then the brand knows what you and 13 others are reading, watching, listening to as well, and you can target advertising based around that. It’s a beautiful feedback loop both for the consumer and the brand.”

The overall market for virtual goods in the US is headed towards $2.9 billion for 2012, according to the Inside Virtual Goods report. That’s up from $2.2 billion this year, and $1.6 billion in 2010.

Virtual goods on Facebook are continuing to comprise more than half of that, going from $835 million in 2010 to $1.2 billion this year to $1.6 billion next year. The gains each year are around $400 million, which means growth is going from 50% down to around 35%. While the report doesn’t break out company-specific numbers publicly, Zynga’s pre-IPO filings indicate it made more than $300 million last quarter. Assuming that number stays around the same, look for Zynga to continue to its historical dominance with about 75% of the Facebook virtual goods market.

Mobile has also been coming into its own in the last 18 months, report co-author Charles Hudson tells me. The report estimates that mobile virtual goods (for games only, not including other digital media like iTunes songs) made $350 million this year, and will grow to $500 million next year.

Dunkin’ Donuts is rewarding loyal customers with prizes in a new campaign that uses Foursquare and Facebook Places. “Get GifteD’D” runs through to December 23rd at Dunkin’ Donuts locations in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Users can check-in up to three times each day (at least an hour apart) for the chance to win prizes.

If they win, they are sent an email with instructions about how to redeem their prize. Each time someone checks-in, they are also entered into a sweepstake to win the grand prize of a $1,000 gift card and a Travelpro luggage package.

Through the campaign, Dunkin’ Donuts is giving away more than 1,780 instant prizes including gift cards from 1800Flowers, Mountain Creek and Pinstripe Bowl, coffee and Dunkin’ Donuts merchandise. Cathy Chavenet, New York-based field marketing manager at Dunkin’ Donuts, said: Mobile check-in programs like Facebook and Foursquare present an opportunity to reward Dunkin’ Donuts’ loyal fans by doing something they are already doing – visiting Dunkin’ Donuts. The goal of the check-in, Get GifteDD program in particular, is to give our loyal guests a chance to win great prizes every day, just by checking into Facebook or Foursquare while at our restaurants in New York.

21 Tips for Using Twitter

Agencies Mizbala and twentythree created an eerie location-based campaign for If I Die, a Facebook application that lets people record a message that will only be published after they die. Of course, no one think they're going to die anytime soon so people needed a bit of prompting. Mizbala used th APIs of popular location services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Twitter and Google Latest to track checkins all over the world. Once they located a person, they'd place a call to the location the person had checked into and asked to have the establishment to put the person on the line. Once they had the person on the line, they'd leave a creepy message and tell the person to go to the If I Die Facebook app. You can check out the demo call to Mashable's Adam Ostrow in this video to see what it's all about. Did the campaign work? Oh yes it did. Without any advertising, the campaign received lots of press in newspapers, blogs, radio and TV coverage which resulted in an 800 percent increase in recorded messages being left on "If I Die". But ask yourself. Do you really wants to be found this easily?

Auction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.

Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. S

Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.

Facebook is now getting even more personal, announcing that starting late Tuesday it will begin calibrating how it presents its News Feed feature

The company says the new News Feed is made to “act more like your own personal newspaper”

presenting the most interesting news that has been published since the last time a user signed in

the Facebook newsfeed on your mobile phone would deliver to you everything you want to know: what news to digest, what movies to watch, where to eat and honeymoon, what kind of crib to buy for your first born. It would all be based on what you and your Facebook friends liked. Facebook’s algorithms would be refined so that it would all be sent to you — “pushed,” in Mr. Purdy’s words. You wouldn’t have to search for it.

What he didn’t have to say was that in this future world, you wouldn’t need Google. How would Facebook profit exactly? “There is a tremendous amount of value in here because we’re providing the user experience value,” he said. “That means users come back to Facebook. They come back again and again and again. That allows us to show advertising.”

Over the past year, American Express has been making several key payments partnerships with technology companies and launched its take on the digital wallet, Serve. Serve integrates a variety of payment options into a single account that can be funded from a bank account, debit, credit or charge card. The company has also landed a number of lucrative carrier partner deals for Serve. Separate from Serve, American Express’ recent partnerships in the payments space include Foursquare, Facebook and even Zynga for personalized deals. We sat down recently with Harshul Sanghi, American Express’ new VP of Enterprise Growth Group to chat about Serve, the digital wallet and how the company plans to dominate the payments space.

Sanghi, who was formerly the Managing Director of North American venture activities for Motorola, joined AmEx in September. His focus is on further developing the Serve brand and forming these partnerships that help expand the card member base into new segments.

Sanghi explains that while every payments company (including even Google) and credit card company is releasing their own version of the digital wallet, it’s whats in the wallet that’s truly important. “The wallet that has the most brand partnerships is what customers are going to gravitate too,” he says. And this wallet needs to tie in seamlessly with loyalty programs, and virtual currencies, which is why AmEx bought virtual currency monetization platform Sometrics a few weeks ago. And the wallet needs to store offers and deals as well so that consumers don’t have to carry around coupons or discounts to a store.

It looks like Facebook has just acquired mobile video and image app developer Digital Staircase, according to a blog post on the startup’s site. We’ve embedded the blog post below and emailed Facebook for confirmation.

Digital Staircase has developed a number of apps for video recording, image editing and more. MovieCam, which is available as an iPad and iOS app, is a camcorder app that provides recording features like 8x digital zoom, pause-and-resume recording functionality, and contrast enhancement. The app also allows you to add 18 movie effects and filters while shooting video.

From the post, it appears that the development team may be adding some of these functionalities to Facebook itself. Unfortunately, Digital Staircase will be removing its apps from the Apple App Store.

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

geo-tagging (think Foursquare or Facebook Places), street view, face recognition, the Wii controller and the fact that sites like Facebook both impact and are impacted by the physical world to argue that “digital and material realities dialectically co-construct each other.” This is opposed to the notion that the Internet is like the Matrix, where there is a “real” (Zion) that you leave when you enter the virtual space (the Matrix) -an outdated perspective as Facebook is increasingly real and our physical world increasingly digital.

"Facebook has done well with the Friendster patents and patent applications that it acquired. Just last week, a patent application for passing personal info between users based on degrees of separation became public. Now, thanks to the Friendster IP purchase, Facebook pretty much owns the technology for publicly identity-tagging digital media of any sort in a database."

Wednesday at the Social Good Summit, ABC News correspondent Juju Chang announced a new Facebook game aimed at educating people about maternal health.

The game, which is a piece of the larger Million Moms Challenge initiative launched earlier this week by ABC News and the UN Foundation, is called 1000 Days and guides players through a series of educational mini games that teach about things such as proper diet, breast feeding and government regulations.

users are presented with opportunities to connect with outside organizations in the maternal health space for additional information.

Why are brands killing the Facebook conversation? I read this post by Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers, writing on Econsultancy, about the lack of interaction of brands have on their own Fan pages. Apparently only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand – shocking really! It’s really shooting yourself in the social foot – first it’s plain rude, second the more interactions you have, your brand updates get wider exposure in streams due to the way Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works.

Here is where Project Spartan may come in. Project Spartan is the unofficial name given to Facebook’s mobile HTML5 efforts. “I am not sure what Project Spartan was,” demurs Taylor before proceeding to explain how the mobile web it fits into Facebook’s overall mobile strategy. Facebook wants to be available everywhere on any device. If that means native mobile apps, that’s fine. But if someone doesn’t have a Facebook mobile app on their device, there will always be a mobile web version as well.

As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.

roughly 30 percent more individuals in the U.S. carry a smart phone than buy a daily newspaper.

New York Public Library In a move that embodies the public intellectual history of America and the perfect application of social media, the New York Public Library plans to celebrate its centennial smart phone style.

It recently launched a “Find the Future” Foursquare badge that encourages and rewards exploration of public libraries in New York City. It transforms visitors into library ambassadors who, via location-based check-ins, end up promoting library services, programs, and collections to their Foursquare friends.