More than 70% of British businesses have supposedly restricted or banned Facebook and similar social networks, including Credit Suisse, Dresdner Kleinwort, The Metropolitan Police, British Gas and Lloyds TSB. The Facebook angle is spin to some extent, since the software also blocks MySpace, Bebo and Hotmail. British Facebook users spend an average of 191 minutes a month of the site, says the Telegraph, among its other findings.

Aside from blocking porn and spyware, these bans seem to be the result of businesses failing to recognize that home and work life have begun to merge. Really, people need to be rewarded based on the amount of work they get done, rather than the number of hours they spend chained to a desk. And yes, that means major pay cuts for those pretending to work.

Others, meanwhile, are voluntarily leaving Facebook.

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How many Facebook applications is too many? With people adding unnecessary apps to their profiles at a blistering pace, we wondered just how far you could push the limits; from the Abe Vigoda dead or alive indicator to Ploppy, the app for sharing the current state of your poop, we added hundreds of ‘em.

This screen capture shows what happens when you add over 200 Facebook apps: a huge mess. It takes about 40 seconds to load, which is arguably faster than many MySpace profiles. Those on the New York network (or those who want to join for a few minutes) can check out the profile here. And here’s a link to a downsized image, just in case the one below fails to load. (more…)

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There’s a Stickam Facebook application that’s been launched, and it’s a bit more social than the application released by the other live webcam tool, UStream.

With the Stickam app you can display your player on your Facebook profile, start up a chat from your profile page, find other Stickam friends on Facebook, and sync the two accounts, to some extent. Chatting supports up to 40 people at one time. As there’s no officially supported API for this, stability is an obvious concern.

In other Stickam news, the webcam company has partnered with fix8 for some real live-streaming fun.

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UPDATE: Note the addition of information about 3rd parties on the RockYou ad network - they are indeed selling ads for other developers.

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Slideshow tool RockYou, previously depend on MySpace for much of its traffic, is attempting to solidify its position as one of the top Facebook apps providers by helping out those with less popular apps. They’ve just unveiled two new tricks: an API for one of their most popular apps, and the ability to buy ads on RockYou’s applications.

Super Wall API

This is very meta: an API for a Facebook application. RockYou is releasing an API for Super Wall, its popular Facebook app that puts videos, audio, pictures and Flash embeds on the Facebook wall. (Facebook may have just rendered the product useless, however - while RockYou replaces your wall with an entirely new one and makes you remove the original in your settings, Facebook just added the ability for developers to put rich media on the original wall itself. File host Divshare has already taken advantage of this.).

Either way, Super Wall is thriving, with 2.5M active users and 100,000 new users per day. That might be to due to the fact that it aggressively tries to invite your friends to use your wall, making it hard to opt out. RockYou described the specifics of the API in an email:

1. Developer adds a “Share with Friends” button (image attached) to their app - this can be placed on the user profile box, the application canvas page, and even outside Facebook
2. The “Share with Friends” button is linked to a RockYou URL with parameters specifying the attached media content, title, description, and url (developers will want this to point back to their application)
3. When users click the “Share with Friends” button they are taken to a “Post to Super Wall” page where they can choose multiple friends to send the post to. They can also leave a personal comment for the post. One important note: users are not required to have either Super Wall or the 3rd party app installed to post content to their friend’s Super Walls.
4. Content is posted to Super Wall with link back to 3rd party application.

You can see a horoscope app with the Share with Friends button in the screenshot below. There’s currently no web page for the API: contact the developers AT rockyou email address for more info.

Ad Network

Probably even bigger news than an API-within-a-platform: RockYou wants to take on Lookery and fbexchange. RockYou has one thing those companies lack (until they sign up enough app owners, of course) - RockYou apps are already hugely popular on Facebook. Since RockYou can’t monetize its MySpace widgets at all, save for the traffic driven back to RockYou.com, they desperately need to convert this presence to cash.

As a result, they’re now allowing the owners of smaller Facebook apps to advertise on RockYou’s applications: add the aforementioned Super Wall to your Facebook profile, and you may see an offer to install the My Greeting Card app. The ads are sold at the equivalent of a $20 CPM, a massively high rate in the social media space.

Meanwhile, RockYou is also selling ads for 3rd parties, giving developers a 70% share of the ad revenue when ads are bought on their apps. Oodle, MyLot/Interests+, Trendhunter and others have already signed up, they say. Initially, they’ll be focused on Pay Per Install (PPI) - getting paid by advertisers when a user installs that app. They have 200K worth of ad inventory to push out: 60K has already been fulfilled, they say, and they just completed a fulfillment of 15K in 8 hours. Not bad going at all.

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CoComment, the comments tracking site, has officially launched its service today. There’s a clear focus on coComment becoming more social.

The company has been working on the version 2.0 coComment service for some time now. Read our review of the private beta coComment community here. With its official launch, there are some tweaks and new features worth mentioning. The new user interface is in the form of a sidebar enabling you to browse items that friends have commented on. Users can share in groups, the social web, or with other individuals. There’s also direct access to social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us.

Reports indicate that coComment is gearing up for a Facebook application, and adding an instant messenger service to its suite of offerings.

[via]

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Profile Builder is a new tool that lets you create an online profile and provide access to it pretty much anywhere on the web.

The profiles you create with this service combine all of the pertinent info about you. There’s an about me section, a place for your blog, other sections for your photos and videos, a Jukebox music player, and a page for contact information, which unfortunately doesn’t look like it can be used as a profile aggregator. Once you’ve created your profile, you can insert your Profile Builder icon on your personal website or blog, or in existing social networks including MySpace, Flickr, Facebook and LinkedIn. Anyone that clicks on the icon will get a pop up window that displays all of your information neatly in this centralized tool.

There are several actions that viewers can take while checking out your profile. They can send you coffee by purchasing a Starbuck’s gift card, or send cash through PayPal. They can also send your profile to a friend, print the current screen, perform a Google web search for you, or add to your favorites. This portable profile is a handy little tool that helps you control your personal online presence, and enables you to provide the necessary information to anybody, just about anywhere on the web.

From what I can see, it doesn’t look as though you’ll be able to add more than one blog to the blog section, and I’m curious to see what kind of importing tools Profile Builder will support to enable automatic photo and video updates from sites like Flickr and YouTube. As Profile Builder will display if a user is online, I’m also anxious to see what options you’ll have for other users’ whose profiles you’ve added to your own favorites list in terms of updates and contact options.

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