Facebook has been using a Java-based photo uploader for quite some time, but I have not been a fan of it since I started using a Mac. My Facebook photo uploader on my Mac Mozilla Firefox browser struggled a lot. Whenever I wanted to upload photos on Facebook, I either had to use Safari or the manual photo uploader. This is why I am feeling ecstatic that Facebook is changing their photo uploading service.

The new Facebook photo uploader can be activated [here]

The new uploader works with Mac OS, Ubuntu Linux, and Windows. The plugin installs within the browser or will need to be downloaded and installed. Below is a screenshot of how the new uploader works. Browsing folders are in a tree format. First you select the top folder, then you select the subfolder within the top folder in the next box, etc. After that thumbnails of the photos you would like to upload appear at the bottom. Select those and click upload. Voila!

Facebook and JP Morgan Chase are partnering on a charity initiative that will allow any of the 300 million Facebook users to donate across 500,000 local charities.

Facebook users vote for a charity of their choice and the number one choice will receive $1 million. The five runner ups will receive $100,000 and 100 finalists will receive $25,000 each. A special advisory board will be formed that includes actress Eva Longoria, former pro basketball player David Robinson, and Do Something founder Nancy Lublin.

Facebook did not have a native iPhone application until now for the webOS. This is great news for those who have a Palm Pre and for those who plan to get a Pixi. Facebook already has an app for Android and iPhone, but the primary developer of the Facebook app for the iPhone decided to quit the project and pass it to other engineers. The problem with the application is that you cannot search information or view events. WebOS 1.3.1 is required for the application.

Joe Hewitt was the main developer of the Facebook iPhone application, but he recently decided to give up on that project. A couple of days ago, he wrote “Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project,” tweeted Hewitt. The main reason why he decided to give up on the App Store is because of Apple’s policies.

In an e-mail to TechCrunch, Hewitt said that he is philosophically opposed to the existence of the App Store review process and believes that they are setting a bad precedent for other software platforms. He said that he would rather be known for making the best platform available rather than being seen as a developer that has to go through a middleman in order to showcase software.

Joe Hewitt is best known for his contributions to the development of the Firefox web browser. In 2000-2003, Hewitt did a lot of the UI programming for the Netscape browser as well. Personally I applaud Hewitt’s contributions to the Facebook iPhone App and the Firefox browser. I hate to see him leaving the App Store developer community, but I’m not surprised he left because Apple’s review process has been highly criticized since the beginning.

Facebook Board Director and founder of social networking company Ning.com Marc Andreessen has decided to relocate his company to the old Facebook offices in Palo Alto, California. Above is a slideshow of Ning.com’s new offices. Ning is currently valuated at $750 million based on their previous round of funding at $15 million. Ning has about 37 million registered users and created about 1.7 million social networks.

At 11:49AM on Saturday October 17, Rodney Bradford updated his Facebook status from his father’s apartment in Harlem, New York. He wrote “where’s my pancakes” which is probably an inside joke that Bradford and some of his friends would understand. While Bradford was updating his Facebook status, a robbery was taking place near-by.

Bradford was arrested as being a suspect and it turns out that his Facebook status is what proved that he was innocent. Bradford’s attorney Robert Reuland told the Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Lindsay Gerdes about the status update on Facebook. Gerdes sent a subpoena to Facebook about the status update and the social networking company in California replied that the status update was in fact written from his father’s home at 71 West 118th Street in Harlem, New York.

Bradford was thrilled that Facebook had proven that he was innocent. One of his latest Facebook status updates was “CALL ME FACEBOOK KID…” This is another way that social media has benefited the lives of people. For those of you who think updating Twitter or Facebook is a waste of time, I’d highly recommend reconsidering.

Jesse Eisenberg is the actor that will be playing Mark Zuckerberg in a movie called The Social Network. The Social Network is a movie based on the founding of online social network Facebook. Facebook was founded by Zuckerberg in a dorm room when he was attending Harvard University. However the movie will not be filmed at Harvard. It will be filmed at The John Hopkins University.

“It feels degrading somehow,” stated John Hopkins student Diego Ardila while he watched movie scene workers remove the words “Latrobe Hall” from an engineering building and replace it with “Kirkland House.” The reason why Harvard would not allow The Social Network to be filmed there is because they have a policy that no commercial filming can be made on campus.

As the BaltimoreSun.com put it, John Hopkins felt like a “safety school” by the film because they could not get Harvard. Just like John Hopkins is considered a safety school for kids that also applied to Harvard. This is why many students that walked around the set made sure to wear John Hopkins shirts and hoodies hoping that it would end up being seen on the final cut of the movie.

Eisenberg recently starred in Zombieland with Woody Harrelson. The ironic part of Zombieland is that one of the lines stated by Eisenberg’s character is that one nice thing about everyone being zombies is that you no longer have to read Facebook status updates from friends.

ValleyWag posted the following screenshots of the movie set:

Back in March Facebook filed a lawsuit against Sanford “Spamford” Wallace, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw over spam messages being sent on their social network. The claim was made under the CAN-SPAM Act which bans false and misleading marketing e-mails. The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of Facebook.

Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that Wallace “willfully violated” a restraining order and a preliminary injunction that was issued in the case. “The record demonstrates that Wallace willfully violated the statutes in question with blatant disregard for the rights of Facebook and the thousands of Facebook users whose accounts were compromised by his conduct,” stated Fogel. The statement also ruled that Wallace no longer has the right to create a Facebook account.

Facebook’s lead counsel said that the social network does not expect to receive a majority of the reward, but the verdict of the case may serve as a deterrent for others who plan to spam the social network.

Back in May Wallace had to pay $234 million in a trial against MySpace. Wallace failed to turn over documents or show up in court on several counts when that case was taking place. Two years before that, Wallace had to pay $4 million as part of a lawsuit by the FTC and several other companies such as AOL. Last year Facebook was awarded $873 million from a Canadian man that was spamming the social network too.

MySpace and Facebook are rumored to be working in conjunction with each other on a new project. The new project involves MySpace users having the ability to share content on Facebook using Facebook Connect. The rumor was started by The Telegraph UK.

This deal is probably being set up by current MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. Natta was the previous Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations at Facebook. This means that you may start seeing MySpace Videos and music being embedded on the Facebook News Feed. Last week Natta even said that he does not consider Facebook to be a competitor any more.

I think that this would be a good deal all around for both parties. Facebook users would see more artistic expression provided by MySpace users. Artists on MySpace would have a bigger audience.

Josh Elman was the former platform manager at Facebook. But now Elman is joining another California based social networking slash micro-blogging firm Twitter.com. Elman is joining Twitter at a time where the micro-blogging company is receiving a lot of interest from third party developers.

TweetDeck is one of the most used Adobe AIR applications and Tweetie is one of the most downloaded applications on the iPhone. When Elman worked at Facebook, he was responsible for Facebook Connect. Elman was also responsible for cleaning up the design of the social network after applications made Facebook look very cluttered.

Elman has also previously worked for LinkedIn, Zazzle, and RealNetworks. Louis Gray broke the news of Elman’s hire after spotting the Twitter official list of employees. Twitter has about 113 employees.

Last night I was sitting at the Good Time Charley’s bar watching the Michigan State vs. Iowa University football game in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All of a sudden I notice that a large crowd started gathering outside of the bar. When I walked out I saw smoke and fire spewing from the top of a building about one block down from where everyone was standing. The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire of a building that used to be known as Pinball Pete’s.

While the firefighters were battling the heat, students were busy taking pictures and updating their Twitter accounts. A couple of people next to me sent out some TwitPics immediately. Shortly after the pictures were taken, a video was uploaded on YouTube [embedded above] and Flickr user moto1986 uploaded a stream of pictures from the event.

When I was standing there watching all of the students sending out tweets and updating Facebook statuses while the firefighters were battling the fire, I couldn’t help but think about how far technology has brought us. Just imagine if this event took place about 10 years ago. Our friends would rely on how well we could describe the fire rather than having the ability to see our pictures on Twitter and our videos on YouTube.

Some of the tweets that were sent out are displayed below [click the image to enlarge]:

[Photo credit: Emma Bumstead]

[Photo credit: Kristen Oltersdorf]

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made a deal with Twitter and Facebook. The deal is non-exclusive. Facebook and Twitter will both integrate real-time feeds of status updates and tweets into the Bing search engine service. Twitter hit about 5 billion tweets yesterday and Facebook has the most number of status updates than any other service. Facebook sends out an estimated 40 million status updates per day.

Microsoft Bing’s market share will benefit from this deal as real-time news is becoming a preference for people. Traditional news agencies are suffering from this and are cutting staff and newspaper circulation. Google will have to step it up if they want to retain their customer base.

Facebook users will be allowed to decide whether they want their status updates to be public or not. The financial details of the deal are undisclosed, but it is expected that the Redmond-based software company will be paying both Facebook and Twitter millions of dollars along with revenue-sharing deals. Microsoft owns about 1.7% of Facebook through a venture capital deal and has an exclusive advertising partnership with the social network.

About 20,000 people have signed a petition to have the Indian flag added to Zynga’s Farmville game. Farmville is a popular game on social networks that allows users to manage and build a farm in a similar fashion as Sim City. After building a farm, players will be able to mark their farm by adding a flag. The United Kingdom and United States have flags available for planting, but nothing for India yet.

Indian people on forums and blogs said that they were disappointed that their flag was not available. One user said that they were even willing to pay to have the option. The petition even inspired people of different origins to start their own petitions to have their own flags added.

Farmville has about 56 million users. By adding a link to another Zynga game called Café World, about 10 million people have joined that game in a week.

Shannon Jackson of Hendersonville, TN was arrested for poking another woman (Dana M. Hannah) on Facebook. The poke apparently violated a restraining order the other woman had against Jackson.

Hannah printed a screenshot of the poke notification and called the police. The screen-shot was enough proof to get Jackson arrested. Jackson’s lawyer is trying to get confirmation from Facebook that the poke was in fact from her account. The possibility that someone broke into her account has not been ruled out by her lawyer.

The charge against Jackson is a Class A misdemeanor. She could be punished with up to one year in jail.

Source

Many people believe that Facebook applications are losing appeal, but games made by Zynga are a major exception. Zynga has already banked on games such as Texas Hold’Em, Mafia Wars, and FarmVille. Now the social gaming company has another hit on their hands called Café World. Café World hit 10 million users in just one week.

How did Zynga do it? Cross-promotion. They linked Café World through FarmVille, a game that already has 56 million users according to AppData. Zynga has been making money by selling virtual goods in their games. Zynga will be making about $200 million in revenues this year alone according to Eric Eldon of Inside Social Games.

While Zynga is making a lot of revenues, one of the ways that they are making games is by taking ideas from others. FarmVille is considered to be a replica of FarmTown and Cafe World appears to be similar to Playfish’s Restaurant City.

Zynga is currently in a legal battle against another social gaming company called Playdom over company secrets. Four former Zynga employees are being accused for giving secrets to Playdom.