College + Wiki + Facebook Connect = Regroup

I remember college email lists. Even though they weren’t inbox friendly, they were all the rage back in my days at UCLA. CollegeWikis, a wiki-style service for college groups looking to take back their email, is transforming its image, but not its purpose.

The site, which is now going by the new moniker Regroup, still aims to make college email groups a thing of past, but now it’s hoping to be even more relevant by sprucing up its name, look, and features.

CollegeWikis, which originally required members to have a .edu email address to join (much like FacebookFacebook reviews used to), has gone under the knife and emerged with a hipper name and a facelift on a few policies as well. Now anyone with a .edu address or Facebook account can join, create, and participate in groups.

Regroup still maintains the college-like flair of CollegeWikis by requiring new members to associate themselves with the umbrella college groups that are reminiscient of the college Facebook networks. Members can then either post to their college group or create offshoot public or private groups within the larger college groups. Of course, given the connection with Facebook, all activity - like creating a new group - can be posted to Facebook with the click of button.

Now that Facebook has become mainstream, Regroup is targeting the niche college audience that Facebook ditched for bluer oceans.

For a quick overview of how to get started on Regroup, watch this short tutorial:

What Happened on Friday, May 30th of 2008?

Ever tried out Facebook Lexicon? It’s a nifty tool that looks for occurrences of certain terms on FacebookFacebook reviews users’ walls and creates a graph that shows how often the term is mentioned over time.

The Lexicon has been around for quite a while now, but while playing with it today I noticed an interesting occurence, which you can see in the image below. Terms like “happy birthday,” obviously, are mentioned pretty much all the time, while “Obama” has had a huge spike during the presidential elections and the subsequent victory of Barack Obama.

However, the term “sex” has an unexplainable spike on Friday, May 30th of 2008. Perhaps it’s just a glitch, or maybe I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t for the life of me remember why people would mention this word more on that particular day than any other day.

Any ideas that can solve the mistery?

20+ Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience

FacebookFacebook reviews is the social network of choice for millions of people, but like any site out there, we all have our own list of improvements we’d like to see. Luckily the Greasemonkey script community feels the same way and has come up with hundreds of scripts to improve your user experience.

The scripts allow you to change colors, remove ads, automate repetitive tasks in applications and a whole slew of other improvements. Try out these more than 20 great scripts to use Facebook the way you want to.

What are some of your favorite Greasemonkey based Facebook enhancements?

Auto-Colorizer - An interesting script that analyzes the default image for any profile you visit and adjusts the color scheme of the page to match it. Also works on photos, events & group pages.

Autopoke - Allows you to automatically poke those users that have poked you.

Customize Word “Friend” - While probably not a burning problem for most people, this script will allow you to change every instance of the word “friend” to whatever your heart desires.

Facebook: Cleaner - Unlike other ad removal scripts that remove everything, Facebook: Cleaner will let you pick and choose areas you want left untouched.

Facebook App Faviconizer - If you open your apps in separate tabs, this will replace the Facebook favicon with the one used by each application so you can more quickly identify what is in each window.

Facebook Colour Changer - Not only can you set the Facebook colors to anything you desire, but you may also change the logo image in the top left corner to whatever you want.

Facebook Fixer - Instead of loading several scripts, you can load Facebook Fixer and get larger profile images, video download links, Google Calendar integration and several other features.

Facebook Highlight Birthdays - With all of the info on your homepage, it can be easy to overlook the birthday notices. This script will highlight them for easier spotting.

Facebook Image Download Helper - This script will allow you to use a FirefoxFirefox reviews extension like DownThemAll! to download all of the images on a page in Facebook.

Facebook News Feed Sanitiser - Cleans up your news feed by removing application stories, sponsored stories, sponsored polls, and social ads.

Facebook Refresh 2 - Still in Alpha, Facebook Refresh 2 will automatically reload your news feed, home sidebar status updates and number of messages in the navigation bar every 30 seconds. Eventually it will also do this for wall posts and messages.

Facebook to Google Calendar - Allows you to add Facebook events to whatever Google Calendar you happen to be logged into at the time.

Facebook Remaker - Allows you to do things such as remove ads, take out the “People You May Know” section, remove the “Home” link, add a “Reload” link, and several other tweaks.

Facebook Video - This script will not only give you the ability to download videos hosted on Facebook and convert them, but it will also provide you with the option of embedding the videos on other sites. It is also available as a stand-alone Firefox extension.

Facebook View All Photos - Since the redesign of the Facebook profiles, it seems the only function left for this script is viewing photos from private profiles.

Facebook View Photo in Album - A powerful script that allows you to view the photo albums of people you aren’t friends with, and it also gives you the ability to see a person’s pictures no matter who took them.

Friend Quick Remove - Streamlines the usual three steps to remove a friend down to just one easy step.

inYOf4ceBook - Tired of squinting at thumbnail images of people in search, thinking they kinda look like the person you meant to find? inYOf4ceBook will let you place your mouse over the image and see a large view of it so you can actually tell who you are looking at.

MobWars Helper - The popular game of MobWars gets some help in the form of a script that will automate tasks such as depositing money in the bank, healing you at the hospital, giving you investment advice and more.

New Facebook Layout Adjuster - Allows you to remove ads, sidebar and more to make a smoother looking version of the new Facebook.

Remove All Facebook Ads - As the name implies, this script removes all of the various ads that show up around Facebook such as banner ads, sponsored news items and so on.

You Might Not Love the New Facebook, But Brands Should

Earlier this week, we posed the question “Where has the old Facebook gone?” to address the frustrating experience that many users are having with the latest homepage design. The post attracted tons of feedback, most of which agreed with the sentiment that the new homepage is less personal, less informative, and less attractive to application users and developers.

Users aside though, there is one audience that appears to be benefitting greatly from Facebook’s new design: brands. Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity Twitter () users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands.

The Numbers

At Mashable, we’ve been using our page to share our articles, post photos from our journey to SXSW, and engage users in conversation. And the results so far have been rather stunning. Comparing traffic to Mashable ().com referred by Facebook from 3/5-3/11 to 3/12-3/18 (the 7-day period before and after the new homepage rolled out), we’ve seen a 75% increase in visitors. Moreover, our Facebook Page itself is seeing 2-3x more visitors on a daily basis than it did in the previous iteration of Facebook’s homepage.

Reality Check

Now, to be fair, we have been actively promoting our Facebook Page to users on our blog and Twitter, which has helped grow our fan base on Facebook by around 1,800 people for the period we’re reporting on here. But, while we reach far fewer users on Facebook than on Twitter or via RSS, the ratio of users that click-thru to stories appears to be higher. And, in any event the growth in traffic we’ve seen is far outpacing the growth of our Facebook () fan base, leading us to conclude that Pages are, for the moment, a highly effective marketing tool in the new Facebook.

Is It Good For Users?

Much like Twitter, Facebook Pages are opt-in. If a brand becomes too loud on your homepage, you can simply stop being their Fan, or in Facebook’s case, hide their updates. As brands catch onto the benefits of Facebook Pages, we’re likely to see a lot more of them, and likely to see our user homepages get more and more noisy. But, that seems to be what Facebook wants as it attempts to emulate Twitter and the so-called real-time Web.

Is It Good for Facebook?

So far, Facebook has not only survived but prospered after every controversial change, going all the way back to the original News Feed. The homepage changes in and of themselves, though currently unpopular with some, aren’t likely to do much to slow down Facebook’s ascent. Meanwhile, they may have just unlocked the business model that moves them from a successful social network to a highly profitable business.

Sure, you could already buy ads on Facebook to promote your Page. But now, the incentive to do so is far greater, because each Fan you gain can be marketed to for free via the Facebook homepage feed. Even if it costs $5-10 to acquire a Fan (PPC ads seem to run about 50 cents for Pages, assume 5-10 percent conversion), it seems like a small price to pay to have lifetime access to engage that user. We’re already seeing Twitter users take out ads to gain more followers – this trend is likely to accelerate on Facebook too.

Suddenly, Facebook’s homepage re-design makes a lot more sense, not just from a “copy Twitter because it’s so hot!” perspective, but from the “let’s make a ton of money” angle too.

Facebook Integration Arrives on TweetDeck

Over the weekend, Seesmic () announced their own desktop application for Facebook, as well as plans to integrate Status Updates into their own Twitter () client - Twhirl (). Today, popular Twitter client TweetDeck () is beginning testing on a new version of its software that includes integration with Facebook as well.

In a blog post, TweetDeck describes the functionality offered in what for now is an optional test version of the software: “You can click on the Facebook icon at the top and, once you have signed into Facebook and given TweetDeck authorization, this will add a new column full of each of your friends most recent status update which updates automatically once a minute.

From here you can email the update out to anyone, tweet it out over twitter, view the users online status and if they are online right now click on their name (or the green online status indicator) to open Facebook chat right within TweetDeck.”

Essentially, this means that your friends’ Facebook () Status Updates will appear much like the columns you’ve setup for seeing tweets from the people you follow on Twitter. However, the integration of Facebook Chat within TweetDeck is an interesting twist, as it turns the software into an IM client, in addition to all of its other functionality.

The option to more or less “retweet” your Facebook friends’ status updates could be controversial, since unlike Twitter, where updates are mostly public and hoping to reach as large an audience as possible, your friends don’t necessarily want their Facebook messages re-broadcast to all of your Twitter followers. This is perhaps one reason the Facebook Connect enabled version of TweetDeck is optional for now, so these issues can be sorted out.

Meanwhile, Facebook has to be thrilled to see the two most popular Twitter clients integrating Connect, as it means a likely increase in the volume of status updates, making the social network’s new real-time features more active and worthwhile.

Facebook’s Clinically Precise Advertising

No matter what you think about Facebook (), I think that nearly everything they’ve done can be described with one word: precision.

In contrast to MySpace ()’s messy profile pages, Facebook looks like an interior of a Swiss bank. Their privacy options are very precise: you can choose exactly which users can see which parts of your profile. Their ads are very well targeted (especially for users out of the US; Google AdSense ads I’m seeing pale in comparison).

Now, they’ve introduced some very interesting options that I haven’t seen elsewhere: language and radius-based ad targeting for advertisers.

Sure, you were able to target your ads by country before; but in some countries, several different languages are spoken. Now you can choose a certain language withing a country; for example, you can focus your ads on Spanish-speaking users in the United States.

Furthermore, you can target users by radius, which means that you can select a city and include all other city within a 10, 24 or 50 mile radius. This is perfect if you’re advertising an event or anything that’s related to a certain location and its surroundings. Unfortunately, the feature currently only works for citites in the US, UK, and Canada; hopefully, Facebook will add support for other regions.

This is a very clever move from Facebook which puts them ahead of most other advertising systems as far as precision goes; however, as of yesterday, Google offers interest-based advertising, and Facebook does not. The epic battle of online advertising continues.

Facebook Rolling Out New Homepage to Users Today

FacebookFacebook reviews made some big announcements last week, including new Facebook Pages perfect for social media marketers, but it looks like users will now be able to reap the rewards of the much talked about real-time homepage features.

Facebook’s confirming that, starting today, users will start to see the new homepage, which is designed to make it faster and easier to create multimedia updates and receive instantaneous feed items from your network.

So what’s new for you? Apart from the tweaked look and feel of the page, there are quite a few updates that are going to change the way you interact with your Facebook home page, but most notably is the real-time stream of information and “The Publisher.”

As we’ve noted previously, the news feed stream will now consist of all real-time items being shared by your friends, so you can get instant glimpse of the social activity happening in you and your friends’ worlds. Also, Facebook’s increasingly popular status update box is getting refreshed, so The Publisher will ask users, “What’s on your mind?” and give them the ability to not just update their status but also attach links, photos, and videos to their updates.

The Highlights boxes in the right hand column have also been redesigned to show the most important activity happening over longer period of times, based on Comments, Likes, and other metadata. Think of Highlights as the counterparts to the real-time items flying by.

Facebook has also enhanced stream filters so members can use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to filter the updates for the people and content they want to read the most. The News Feed is the main filter, but users can add new filters based on Friends Lists and applications.

The new home page update is being rolled out to users starting today, so some of you can probably take advantage of the new features already, while others of you can continue to hit F5 and wait to see the change.

We’re excited about the updates to the user home page, but as we’ve mentioned before, Facebook is clearly making its content more digestible in real-time format which pits it directly against sites like TwitterTwitter reviews and FriendFeedFriendFeed reviews. With all the instant news items, commenting, and liking features, Facebook’s positioned nicely to keep members active and engaged on their site for the time being.