Starting at just £0.99, one of the more interesting things to sell has hit eBay – an advertisement on a Facebook group with 60,000 members. Advantages for this currently include “get your messages heard by 60,000 people!” and “My page is growing by thousands per day!”.

The advertisement will be placed on ‘i lold when i saw this fish’’s page. Seems a little fishy, excuse the pun. But bidding is already up to £2.00, and it has a ‘Buy it Now’ price of £10. Seems like a clever way to generate money.

[eBay link]

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Secret London, from Facebook Group to Startup.

Secret London is something rather interesting that’s caught my attention. From having #secretlondon as a trending topic on Twitter briefly, and deciding to check out what all the fuss was about, I’m pleasantly surprised. Secret London, as it stands, may be a bit niche – it only concerns London – but it’s something useful to Londoners, that with a proper structure could be similar to the next foursquare or something. I mean yeah, hell, it has it’s flaws – so does Facebook and Twitter, and (oh god) Google Buzz, but it’s really decent where it goes.

Either way how you see it, it’s a snap cleverer than most things you can think of. Tiffany Philippou, aged 21, was asked in a “challenge” to create a Facebook group with as many members as possible. And she did well in that aim – the group, started in January 2010, with over 190,000 members, has done a little more than just be a group – she’s turning it into a startup with high hopes, similarly named Secret London.

What’s Secret London?

Yeah, hard to spot.

Secret London is, in the simplest form, a way of uncovering hidden gems in the seemingly straightforward city. Believe me, there’s gems to be found (hell, I didn’t even know Monument existed until I was walking and just happened to look over). But in that sense, the website is far better for the site than a Facebook group – the group steadily dissolved from people wishing to share gems of information, to other people just wanting to promote their Facebook groups.

Secret London’s website offers a way to view recent tips, although it lacks proper categorization features and a little description of what the hell these locations it has are would also be useful in functionality. However, the site packs a punch of a design and relatively simple functionality, and will most likely keep evolving, hopefully.

It’s been 2 months since Tiffany decided to enroll for a summer internship at Saatchi & Saatchi, an advertising firm. She sought a job where she ‘gets to be creative’, but Secret London has changed things, perhaps permanently.

This is definitely something I will be watching, and you probably should too.

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The Pope wants God's presence more noteable on the web.

Pope Benedict XVI has a message for the priests of the Catholic Church: ‘We must blog’, the Pope says that they must proclaim the gospel by not just only webcasting, but by blogging and making use of new web communication tools.

The 265th Pope of the Catholic Church is unpredictably a solid advocate of social media. The pope now has a YouTube channel, and six months ago created a Facebook account and created iPhone Apps to expand the reach of the Church’s message.

In his message, the Pope concedes that priests face new challenges due to cultural shifts that have brought the conversation online. Consequently, priests must do more than just take the Word of the Gospel to the web – doing this by creating Facebook and Twitter accounts, and even as much as regular blogging and setting up blog websites for the Church.

Here’s a small passage from the whole message from the Pope:

‘The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.’

We have to give the Pope brownie points for his effort to make the Church more effective in the cyber realm. Even though the Pope is not on twitter, his Pope2You scheme is definitely a step in the right direction. He clearly knows that reaching young believers requires going to the places where they spend most of their time and chat.

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Before anyone argues the point, it’s clear that Twitter is popular now for its news-sharing capabilities. People love to find out information and news via Twitter. Not only that, but news companies like @Mashable, @TIME and @Engadget use Twitter to broadcast and share their news. It’s an innovative and useful way to make sure that your content is spread around.

And because of that it’s become increasingly popular for not only businesses to spread the news around but it’s also a way for users to find out about information – Twitter’s trending topics, a bit like Facebook’s ‘News feed’ (sigh) has been a classic way to see what’s going on since Twitter started. For example, on the day Apple released the Magic Mouse, ‘Magic Mouse’ was a trending topic. That’s how I found out about the release, anyhow.

Facebook, however, is famous for connecting friends – but it’d seem that’s not what it wants to do. Facebook have been criticized for trying to grab a slice of Twitter’s fame for a long time, most recently for it’s ‘@mentions’, exactly the same concept as @mentions on Twitter. And even more recently, have you noticed the recent attempt at pushing your Status Updates to ‘Everyone’? That doesn’t mean everyone on your friends list. That means the whole world. And that’s what makes it kinda obvious what Facebook is wanting to do.

An example of what Facebook are aiming to do.

Because of Twitter’s growing popularity, I guess Facebook could be jealous. Twitter is stealing users away from it. But under no circumstances do I feel it is appropriate to slyly allow users to give away all their data, in an attempt to become a news-sharing site. Images like the one to the right are just classic examples of the changes Facebook is making to try and emphasize news.

People on Facebook don’t wanna share news though – they want to connect with friends and chat. And that’s all I really use it for. That’s all most people use it for. A few businesses encourage users to subscribe to information and share with friends, but nowhere near as much as Twitter.

Facebook, you’re not a news-sharing site. Don’t try to steal Twitter’s spotlight, either.

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Twitter have completely redesigned their web-page for World AIDS Day. Well, they've colorized it red and it looks nice. Sadly, this only affects the homepage – however, appending the twitter hashtag '#red' to your tweets colorizes them red aswell. How cool!

There's also a campaign for World AIDS Day on Facebook, and Google have inserted a link on their homepage.

However, Twitter appears to be the only major website completely changing its theme. Oh well, next year TekCube will.

World AIDS Day is in support of supplying medicine to people affected with AIDS in Africa. With only 27% of the world's population yet 83% of its AIDS cases., help is needed.

@joinRED on Twitter
Join (RED) on Facebook
Google.com

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Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Myspace, Google Wave, Flickr… they’re all social media networks. They all are for the connection of people and the sharing of information from one person to the next. And luckily for us, people keep making programs to allow us to share the information brilliantly, without needing to go to the web page of the social network which is often too cluttered. Even better, some applications allow us to cover multiple networks in one program. In this issue, we’ll be looking at the various examples of great social media programs and what to do with them. But let’s start with the best, this time.

Socialite

If there had to be a single application for keeping up to date with everything, I’d pick Socialite. I love it, even if it is only in beta. Socialite covers virtually everything you can imagine – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, RSS, Flickr and Google Reader. They plan to add even more, soon, but for the moment they cover enough. Socialite is currently a beta-stage program, but they plan a proper release at the end of November. Socialite is everything I want to see in a program of this type, and I hope to see more from it – especially integration with loads of other services (Live, LinkedIn, FriendFeed, anyone?)

Socialite is currently in beta. If you wish to download the proper version, keep checking their full release page. Else, if you really wanna download the pre-release software, read this forum page. The link to the Beta (Socialite 1.0 Beta 3) will be included in the text.

Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5+
Price: Free
URL: http://realmacsoftware.com/socialite/

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is another force to be reckoned with, as similarly to Socialite, it supports a variety of platforms for its service – Twitter, Facebook and Myspace. Tweetdeck is already regarded as one of the most useful Twitter platforms, and while being a tad useless for Facebook and Myspace, it’s still a great platform for multicapable social media sharing. allowing users to not only share from one account but to select all the accounts they wish to share a single message with, it’s a powerful tool for telling many people something from many accounts.

Tweetdeck works on Mac, Windows and Linux through the use of Adobe AIR.

Operating System: Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.3+, Linux Ubuntu
Price: Free
URL: http://tweetdeck.com

Seesmic Desktop

We seem to be dropping a feature each time, but Seesmic is still a great tool, and recently releasing a special version of its software for Windows. Similarly to Tweetdeck, it operates on all 3 major OS, through Adobe AIR.

Seesmic recently supported their new ideas by releasing a Windows program that makes full use of the Windows 7 interface. They also created a version that works well on Android smartphones.

The main thing for Seesmic is brand tracking, which it is great for.

Operating System: Windows XP+, Mac OS X 10.3+, Linux Ubuntu
Price: Free
URL: http://seesmic.com

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Zynga, a company that may perhaps be known for the fast releases of its Facebook games, has another one lined up. As each little bit in the Facebook game business grows, Zynga take away from it with another game. Rapidly expanding from just 2 games a year ago, Zynga now has a host of about 15 – 4 of which added in the past 5 months.

With such quick development time and such great income, this could become a steady challenge for other online game developers – especially seeming as console game sales are plummeting faster than anything else. Zynga seems to have cracked the formula for enjoyable simple-minded social media games – but the real question is, who actually pays for their content?

People have many times criticised Farmville and Café World for their remarkably expensive costs on some items – there’s two currencies in each game, dollars/coins/credits and ‘cash’. The coins are earned in-game and can be used to buy a variety of goods. The cash can be acquired with medals, or bought.

Still, it seems pretty difficult for any other game companies to match the development rate of Zynga – which have now been dubbed ‘The most annoying things on Facebook’ – presumably because of the mass amount of notifications, something which they are trying to fix. Apparently.

PetVille could be a stab at another popular Facebook game, Playdom’s Pet Society.

The online game market seems to be steadily growing with EA’s acquirement of the social game company Playfish. No Facebook or social media games have ever come close to shaking Sulake’s hold on the online game market, with their incredibly successful title worldwide, ‘Habbo Hotel’, and their chat client for Finland, IRC Galleria.

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Click to Read More.

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A web site, claiming that the Scrubs star Zach Braff is indeed dead, resurfaced on social media sites Twitter and Facebook over the past 2 days. Zach Braff has responded to this with an amusing YouTube video.

No; says Zach. “I’m still alive”. He laughs at the fact that “I’m alive” didn’t receive many likes on Facebook. He also pokes fun at many things, such as “32,000 feet? That’s… that’s like Oprah huge.”

Click to Read More.

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In a move that today shocked the Social Media crowd, the popular web service Facebook announced plans to implement the feature commonly associated with Twitter – @mentions.

Click to Read More.

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In a remarkably strange ‘study’ by a rather eccentrically strange woman; she believes that Facebook is better for your intelligence than Twitter. 

Dr. Tracey Alloway of Scotland believes in radical various methods of recording a child’s intelligence by the means of their ‘working memories’ – that is; the memory that is stored for later use, and that this is far more important than recording a child’s intelligence quota.

Click to Read More.

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Next month sees the release of a new movie… one like we’ve never seen before.

The Social Network is set to star no less than Justin Timberlake, and Jesse Eisenberg. God knows why.

Timberlake will play the role of the former president of Facebook, Sean Parker. (Incidently this author just found out he co-founded Napster; learn something new every day). The current CEO (Mark Zuckerberg) will be played by Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland). Do they rhyme for a reason?

While it may sound dire it might not be as bad as it sounds; the film is based on the book The Accidental Billionaires.

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