MyMai.tv Dev Blog / Social-Web News Feed

TypePad users who installed the Facebook “Like” widgets on their blog sidebars have experienced a 50% increase in referral traffic from Facebook collectively, TypePad revealed in a blog post. Facebook unveiled the “Like” feature at its F8 Developer Conference in late April. Readers can click the “Like” button on an article to share it with their Facebook friends without leaving a publisher’s website. Approximately 1,500 TypePad bloggers have installed the “Like” buttons on their blogs since the widget became available on the platform in early May. Shortly after releasing the sidebar widget, TypePad released a second feature that enables users to attach a Facebook “Like” button to the bottom of each blog post. 2,400 bloggers have added the feature, and have enjoyed a 200% growth in referral traffic from Facebook as a whole, according to TypePad. Have you experienced a spike in referral traffic from Facebook after adding “Like” buttons to your blog? If so, by how much?

According to the analysts at Hitwise, social networks in general are more popular than search engines in some parts of the world. In fact, networks such as Facebook (Facebook) have been pushing hard against the biggest names in web search, including Google (Google), for several months now. As Hitwise reported recently, Facebook’s overall web traffic pulled ahead of Google’s for the first time in the U.S. in March of this year. Now, we’ve learned that in the UK, people are visiting social networks more than they’re visiting search engines. Facebook dominates the current crop of social networks, accounting for the majority (55%) of all social site visits. When compared to the wider web, Google gets around 9.3% of all web traffic, while Facebook captures just over 7%.

Facebook is increasingly becoming a hub for online video viewing, with more than 20 million videos being uploaded to the social network each month — and more than 2 billion videos being watched. Those two stats, given exclusively to NewTeeVee by a Facebook spokesperson, underscore the growing importance of video as a communications medium on the social networking site. The number of uploads, in particular, has grown pretty substantially over the past year. Last March, Facebook said that it received on average 415,000 video uploads a day, or about 12 million a month, 40 percent of which came directly from webcams. And as more mobile devices that are video-ready enter the market, we can expect the number of mobile videos to increase. Last summer, for instance, Facebook released an update to its iPhone app enabling users to directly upload video to the site.

Face.com — makers of facial detection and recognition products for Facebook photos — aims to extend photo tagging across the web. The service has released its API, which developers can now use to build photo-tagging capabilities on their own websites. The idea is that developers can take Face.com’s technology and apply photo tags for various purposes. Facebook (Facebook) users would essentially be able to tag images as they browse the web and personalize their experience on any website.

FarmVille game developer and publisher Zynga is issuing shares at prices that place the total value of the company at around $4 billion, according to Business Insider — a somewhat surprising valuation given that the number of monthly active users on FarmVille has recently declined, according to the blog. Who could have predicted 20 years ago (or even 10) that virtual farming would be one of the most lucrative businesses on the Internet?

Transactional advertising network provider Adgregate Markets, a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference, is extending its e-commerce technology to Facebook today, with the launch of ShopFans, a social shopping applications.

ShopFans is an e-commerce application on Facebook that allows retailers to set up a storefront on the social network. Similar to Payvment, the app allows consumers to purchase goods and make secure purchase transactions directly in Facebook.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/adgregate-markets-shopfans-brings-social-retail-storefronts-to-facebook/#ixzz0leammS8l

In order to understand the value of a Facebook ad impression, Nielsen analyzed over six months of survey data from 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 different brand advertisers. The study — after analyzing reach via impressions and effectiveness of impressions — concluded that earned media and social advocacy contributed to Facebookers being much more likely to notice ads, absorb their content and make purchases.

Are you yearning for greater Facebook integration with your iPhone? Your prayers might be answered when iPhone OS 4.0 arrives on end users’ devices this summer.