Facecard Lets You Spend Cash in Facebook

Social gaming companies are beginning to let users buy virtual goods using prepaid cards available in retail stores — and that method of payment seems to be working on Facebook. But Facecard is taking another angle to transactions on the site.

As part of a new version released late last week, it introduced an application so people can spend money within Facebook. Users can send money through messages, create wishlists of things they want, then accept donations from friends and family, and send gifts to each other — so both an image of a gift as well money for buying the real thing. It’s sort of like PayPal, but in this case designed more for kids on Facebook.

As with other prepaid cards, Facecard wants to make it easier for parents to both give their kids an allowance and regulate their spending. The service also comes with a dashboard to monitor spending.

In case you’re not familiar, the company lets users buy prepaid, reloadable cards. It runs on Mastercard’s credit card system, so the card can be used anywhere that accepts Mastercard.

10 MORE Must Have Twitter Tools

Due to the extreme popularity of TwiTip’s “10 Twitter Tools that Help You Work Smarter” post, we’re proud to present 10 MORE must have Twitter tools to help you get more done with less! This post is by guest author Sherice Jacob (follow her @sherice), a web designer, copywriter and author of Get Niche Quick!

If you loved our 10 Twitter Tips that Help You Work Smarter, you’ll find our newest list of even more “must have” Twitter services and plugins even better! Special thanks to fellow TwiTip readers whose suggestions were invaluable in helping us create the latest list. It was difficult to narrow it down to just ten, but here they are!

1. HootSuite – Streamlined Twitter account management from one clean, user-friendly interface is yours when you use HootSuite. In addition to being able to manage multiple Twitter accounts and profile from one application, you can also schedule tweets, track clicks to your links (using HootSuite’s ow.ly URL shortening service) and get an entire overview of each Twitter account with easy tab-based navigation.

2. TweetChannel – Confused by #hashtags in Twitter? You shouldn’t be after reading this tutorial but if you’d like an easier way to send your tweets to a specific audience, you’ll want to check out Tweet Channel, a simplified, user-friendly interface to working with hashtags. See the most popular channels as well as the newest created channels directly from the Tweet Channel website.

3. Tweet2Tweet – What ARE they talking about? With Tweet2Tweet, you can see the @replies between any two people in just minutes. Keep up on any conversation instantly. Just enter both screen names on Tweet2Tweet to see the results in reverse chronological order (most recent entries first).

4. TwitterSnooze – TwitterSnooze provides a very valuable (and free) service. If you follow someone who’s rather…”talkative” you can temporarily “snooze” them and their tweets without unfollowing them permanently. Choose a timeframe anywhere from a day to a month. Perfect for your more “verbose” tweeters.

5. TweetCube – Want to share audio, video or images on Twitter? TweetCube is a free file sharing service that lets you tweet larger files to your followers. Just a couple of clicks is all it takes to start sharing files through your TweetCube account.

6. Twitterless – Thanks to a vigilant TwiTip user, we learned that a previous resource in our Top 10, Qwitter, is no longer sending out unfollow notices (even though their site is still up as of this article writing). Fortunately, Twitterless offers the same unfollowed notification service at Qwitter – just follow @tless to sign up.

7. CoTweet – CoTweet lets multiple people at the same company manage their business Twitter accounts together while keeping tabs on their brand name and how it’s being used. CoTweet can also be used to assign tasks to different departments and follow up on results and feedback.

8. OutTwit – Microsoft Outlook is an indispensible part of the day for many individuals, businesses and organizations. OutTwit’s feature list is too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say that if you use Outlook, you can manage and post to your Twitter account directly from your Outlook interface. You can also track keywords and have the details sent to your email, even if you’re not following the original tweeter.

9. TweeTake – TweeTake lets you backup your entire Twitter account into a .CSV file (commonly opened with Microsoft Excel). Back up your tweets, followers and people you’re following in just a few minutes. Since many people have lost followers in the past due to Twitter downtime, or you may want to refer to an older Tweet (Twitter doesn’t currently let you keep older tweets), TweeTake is a must-have tool for keeping a copy of your Twitter account should the inevitable happen!

10. Twitt(url)y – Twitt(url)y lets you instantly see what people are tweeting about and linking to. Track the hot trends instantly. A great source for possible blog entries and new followers since you can see who tweeted or re-tweeted the link as well as the URLs they used. You can also see how often the link was tweeted in a certain timeframe.

Latest Data on Facebook’s US Growth by Age and Gender – October 1, 2009

We’ve been keeping track of Facebook’s self-reported demographic statistics on the US market for a while now, and here’s the latest update for October 1, 2009. While Facebook says these stats, provided to advertisers, are not necessarily real time, they do give us a sense of how Facebook is growing.

On the whole, Facebook’s US audience grew by 8.6% in September to 88.3 million uniques (compare to latest data from Quantcast, Compete, and comScore). Here’s how Facebook’s gender and sex numbers break down as of today:

(Note: about 5% of users do not report either gender or age, and are not included in this chart.)

Where did the growth come from? Primarily from younger audiences. Females 18-25 led Facebook’s demographic categories this month, adding over 700,000 monthly active users to over 12.8 million. In addition, women over 45 showed strong growth, while increases in males over 35 were lower.


However, on the whole, we see that Facebook is still growing most quickly percentage-wise amongst users over 45 – an interesting demographic trend that started earlier this year. Anecdotally, more Americans are using Facebook for intergenerational communication today than ever before.


Overall, nearly 50% of Facebook users in the US today are over 35, and nearly one-fifth of all US Facebook users are over 45. Most of America’s biggest brand advertisers are working with Facebook now, and it’s clear that they’re reaching users across the age spectrum.

Facebook Releases Connect for iPhone 1.1

It’s been about six months since Facebook first publicly released its Facebook Connect for iPhone client libraries at SXSW in Austin. Since then, app developers from Playfish to Urbanspoon have integrated Facebook Connect into their iPhone apps, making it easy for users to share content to the Facebook stream and easier for developers to add more social context to their iPhone apps.
Tonight, Facebook just released an update to its Connect for iPhone libraries. According to Facebook, the update “will fix some of the more common bugs we’ve been hearing from you, and will supplement FBFeedDialog with FBStreamDialog, a new class for feed form dialogs similar to the FB.Connect.streamPublish feed forms from our JavaScript client library.”

Now, the feed forms on the iPhone will more closely match the feed form design on Connect websites. Facebook also says it pushed a refactored version of all Facebook Connect feed forms, so if you see any issues, file a bug here.

Post Tweets Directly from Facebook with Social Twitter

Social Revitalizer is the latest company to offer a tool to bring together Facebook and Twitter — Social Twitter, a Facebook application that lets users of both social networks to post Tweets directly from their Facebook page.

Using Social Twitter to update your Twitter feed from your Facebook page is pretty straightforward. You need to add the app, then give it your Twitter handle and password. In the app, there’s a 140-character counter and tabs to post or clear your entry. You can also create a profile box on your wall or Boxes tab which shows your Twitter avatar, name and latest Tweet on your home page.

Social Twitter offers users a way to selectively post their Facebook status updates to their Twitter feeds, sort of like Facebook’s new in-house app for posting from pages to Twitter. Facebook, however, doesn’t currently let you selectively post status updates from your personal profile to Twitter (something MySpace has notably recently turned on). Most of Twitter-Facebook applications already available, including Twitter’s own Facebook app, third-party apps like TweetFace, Selective Twitter Status and desktop app Tweetdeck, are built around Twitter, then let you selectively post tweets into Facebook.

Social Twitter is also a little different in that it also allows users to create a Twitter tab on their Facebook pages where they can access their Twitter account and track all of their own Tweets.

Social Revitalizer offers a range of other Facebook applications and services for individuals and businesses, and it seems that it has done a good job of addressing some of the concerns that arose with similar programs. The convenience of posting directly to Twitter while seeing your feed from Facebook is a nice touch, but it could be even better if there was the ability to view the feed of those your following, or at least those that are also using Facebook or the service. This is still a rather new application, so it will be interesting to see how it develops as more people beginning using and commenting on the app.

The Facebook Global Monitor – October 2009 Edition is Now Available

Today, Inside Facebook has released the October 2009 edition of the Facebook Global Monitor, tracking Facebook’s growth in detail around the world. The Facebook Global Monitor tracks Facebook’s international metrics for marketers, developers, and analysts to spot trends and opportunities. A few highlights from the report’s findings:

- Facebook’s growth in Asia continued to grow by leaps and bounds in September…

- Facebook is also experiencing an increase in growth in Eastern Europe…

- Facebook also hit milestones in Austria, Germany, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia in the last month…

The Facebook Global Monitor is a premium service and newsletter produced by Inside
Facebook that provides vital data and insight to media industry executives, global marketing and communications firms, analysts, and developers for whom Facebook’s rapid international expansion poses significant opportunities or threats.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $99 per issue, or $395 for a six month subscription. Future monthly updates will be delivered directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic. (Custom reports are also available.) You can reach us at mail AT insidefacebook DOT com with questions at any time.

Each month, the Facebook Global Monitor provides the latest comprehensive data on the expansion of Facebook’s audience in nearly 100 global markets. In addition, the Monitor provides alerts on breakout and cooling markets, as well as our latest in-house projections on Facebook’s growth in each country 30 days, 90 days, and 12 months into the future.

See the full table of contents of the first newsletter below. All reports are based on primary research by Inside Facebook using data from Facebook, and each section is designed to elucidate key actionable trends.

We believe big opportunities exist for developers and marketers to reach and engage the Facebook audience in these rapidly emerging and expanding markets. Cheers to continued growth in 2009!

The Top 25 Facebook Games for October 2009

Wow. There’s really no other words to describe what an interesting month it has been for games on the Facebook Platform. From uncanny growth to an invasion of international game developers, all sorts of precedents are being set.
Last month, records were set by the astounding growth of Zynga’s FarmVille. However, those records have been broken again this month, and more new faces are appearing on the list — and most of them from other parts of the world. Meanwhile, older games are beginning to drop off, which begs the question: are social gamers flocking to higher quality apps?


source: insidefacebook.com