Facebook isn’t just messing around with a few European language translations any more. They’re using their new user-powered translation engine to get Facebook into 22 more languages, on top of English, French, German and Spanish.

It will take some time for users to translate the sites, and Facebook likes to stagger launches to maximize PR. If you want to help out with the project, the application is here.

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What’s another $40 million to a billionaire? Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, chairman of telecom giant Hutchison Whampoa, revealed during a conference call that he has raised his stake in Facebook by another $40 million or more. This is on top of the $60 million he previously invested.

That brings his total personal investment in the U.S. social networking site to at least $100 million. No word on whether Facebook’s $15 billion valuation has changed from when Ka-shing first joined Microsoft in putting money into the company. We’re guessing not.

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Filed under: Design, Internet, Photo, Features, Web services, Adobe, web 2.0

Digital photography has become a way of life for lots and lots of web users and there is no shortage of services out there to host your digital pictures (Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, Windows Live Spaces, not to mention social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace). As more and more day-to-day computing tasks move to the cloud, the market really needs a solid, web-based editing suite. With Adobe Photoshop Express, which launched its beta today, we get just that.

We look at a lot of web software and services, but have to say that Photoshop Express one of the slickest web-based applications for photos that we have ever used. Although services in the past like Picasa or Picnik have offered some basic photo editing capabilities, what Photoshop Express is doing is in a completely different league. Like many other photo services, Photoshop Express will let you share and display your online photos; each user account is given 2 GB of space to store and share photos (this is free, additional space and extra features will be available in the future, pricing TBD) and you can embed links to the Photoshop Express hosted galleries or direct-embed individual images.

Continue reading Adobe Photoshop Express Beta launches

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Photo, Video, Social Software

We’ve covered Animoto before. It’s a rocking web app that allows you to create a music video with your own photos or video in about 5 minutes or less. Now, Animoto has recently won the Film/TV Web award at the 2008 SXSW conference and has some new features we thought deserved a revisit.

For starters, Animoto has a new Facebook app which allows you to produce unlimited free 30 seconds spots using your Facebook photos. If any of your photos are tagged with your Facebook friends’ names, they too will get an alert in their News Feed informing them.

If you’re not too excited by that, (is it possible to get excited by Facebook apps anymore?), you can also now export any of your Animoto videos directly to YouTube by clicking a little button. The beauty here is there’s no video camera or video editing software required to produce professional results.

And there’s the ability to post your videos to most every social network around, like: MySpace, Friendster, Blogger, TypePad, Freewebs, Webwag, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Windows Live.com, iGoogle, Orkut, Hi5, LiveJournal, Xanga, myYearbook, LiveSpaces, Tagged, Multiply, BlackPlanet, Eons, Piczo, and Vox.

In our previous post, we said we wanted the ability to add text to the photos. Apparently that idea has registered with Animoto but it is not live yet. A work around is to add your text to a photo and save it as a JPG or GIF and upload it like your other photos. They are also still working on the ability to send videos to cellphones and downloading videos to your computer.

No word yet on a Lessig Method video tool. Now, wouldn’t that be something?

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, web 2.0

Facebook just launched a new feature called People You May Know, which suggests — get ready for the surprise — people that you may now. Wow.

It finds these people based on “your existing connections”, but we don’t know how it decides the order of the list. Our guess: the more people you both know, the higher on the list the person gets placed.

We didn’t recognize any of our first four suggestions (pictured above), but the profile we used to test the feature is not heavily used. In contrast, Harrison Hoffman at CNet seems to know or have met most of his suggestions. It would make sense that Facebook profiles used more heavily will produce better results.

[via CNet]

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We’ve had two separate reader reports of a Phishing Scam targeting Facebook users.

The scam involves a notice appearing on the wall of user profiles as a message from a friend, saying “Hey, I got a new facebook account. Im going to delete this one, so add my new profile” then with a link that appears to be a link to the new profile. The actual link goes to a URL on view-facebookprofiles.com, a domain registered (and whois protected) on Namecheap and hosted at Softlayer that looks identical to the Facebook login page:

Users fooled into resubmitting their Facebook details on this page then have their Facebook accounts hijacked and all of their contacts receive a similar message, propagating the phishing scam.

It’s not clear yet exactly what the phishing scammers are planning on using the compromised accounts for, or how far it has spread. One tipper claimed that many of his friends had been caught as well.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen phishing on Facebook, but certainly it could be the most well co-ordinated and widespread attack so far.

Obviously if you see a message in Facebook similar to this, it’s a trap! If you’ve been caught or have shots of this thing in action, send us an email or leave a comment.

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A local search engine just launched on Facebook. It is called Loladex and you can’t do searches on its Website, only on Facebook. That is because it taps into your friends’ recommendations to rank results.

The underlying search engine is based on 16 million local business listings, and is licensed from Localeze. It also brings in restaurant information from OpenTable. Loladex adds a voting and notification layer on top of that, allowing you and your social network to vote results up and down or ask each other for advice.

Founder and CEO Laurence Hooper, an AOL refugee who worked in the Yellow Pages, search, and digital city group there, explains how Loladex works when you search for a local business:

If your friends have been there before, you will see recommendations they have made. If they have not, you can request recommendations from your friends. It sends a notification via Facebook. Then that recommendation will be available to all their friends.

In this way, Loladex hopes to create a customized search engine for just you and your friends. For each result, it tells you if your friends have rated it up or down, if anyone two degrees away from you have rated it (friends of friends, aka “My Other Sources”) , or if anyone in Loladex at all has rated it (aka, “Other Loladex Sources”). Anytime someone rates something, they can also leave a comment. It is a more refined Yelp, in that people you know have more influence on results than people you don’t.

Like all Facebook apps, Loladex will only become useful once a lot of people adopt it and start rating things. It only works the way it is intended if all your friends add the application (otherwise it just gives the default Localeze results). Given all the other local search engines and rating sites out there, it is going to be an uphill battle. But if social search is going to work, it has a better chance as an app inside an already existing social network where people’s friends are already hanging out. (Loladex will release apps for more social networks besides Facebook in the summer).

Loladex has two employees: Hooper and another ex-AOLer, Dan Goodman. It is funded with $350,000 of Hooper’s own money.

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Filed under: Photo, Security, Social Software

Add this to the list of things we think probably shouldn’t be downloaded: your private Facebook photos. Earlier this week, Facebook patched an exploit discovered by the Associated Press. Reporters were apparently even able to gain access to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s 2005 vacation photos.

Although this particular hack, which was reportedly done by making a slight change to the URL, is now fixed, the lesson is not to assume that the privacy settings on sites like Facebook and MySpace will totally protect your photos. The good news is that Zuckerberg has said in interviews that privacy is going to be Facebook’s major focus as social network data becomes more portable, and additional privacy settings were introduced last week. In spite of all that hard work, though, this incident suggests Facebook still has a lot of work to do.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin gave the afternoon keynote talk today at the Snap Summit in San Francisco.

He revealed (or in some cased confirmed speculation around) a number of interesting tidbits about the Facebook business and upcoming products:

1. Morin said Facebook Chat will launch next week. When the chat product was confirmed on March 18, Facebook would only say it would be launched “in the coming weeks.” Morin would not give a more specific launch date, so until we hear otherwise, the outside date is Saturday, April 5. See a video demo of chat here.
2. Morin answered a question about whether Facebook would continue to give preferential treatment and bend rules designed to improve the user experience to revenue partners, as they did with the CBS March Madness application. Despite heavy user and developer backlash, Morin’s answer was “I can’t say it won’t happen again.”
3. Morin said that the $10 million fbFund, set up by Facebook, Accel and Founders Fund, has now gone through two rounds of reviews with application developers and has made some investments (he wouldn’t say how many). He said that investments were between $25,000 and $250,000, with the average at $200,000.
4. Someone asked if Facebook has any intention of supporting the OpenSocial standard for developers. He said they might in the future “if it becomes interesting.”
5. Morin confirmed rumors that Facebook would be rolling out a payment system to allow developers to collect payments directly from users, sometime in the next 180 days. No additional details were given.

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If you are the director of Social Media at Google, wouldn’t you rather be working at Facebook? That is what Ethan Beard decided to do. The Google executive turned in his resignation last week and will be joining Facebook. There he will join other ex-Googlers, such as Facebook’s new COO Sheryl Sandberg, CFO Gideon Yu (formerly YouTube’s CFO) and a slew of others. Both at the top ranks and at the bottom, Facebook is finding that the best place to recruit is Google. (It is doing to Google what Google once did to Microsoft).

As for Beard, maybe he just doesn”t think that Google is going to figure out how to sell ads effectively on social networks (even if it is trying new approaches).

Update: Beard is joining Facebook as a director of Business Development, a role he once had at Google He tells me (via a message on Facebook):

Yes, I can confirm that I have resigned from Google and will be going to work for Facebook.

I think Facebook is great for a variety of reasons: the company has an innovative product with amazing growth, the team they have assembled is first rate, and the business is at a very exciting time in its development. I am excited to join Facebook at a time and in a role where I can have a significant impact on its core business and bottom line.

The pre-IPO stock options must be nice too.

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