FlowingData points to a very interesting Facebook application called Nexus that maps the network of your friends. It’ll also indicate how similar your friends’ interests are based on their preferences about movies, music etc (if they’ve bothered to enter that data into FB).

Here’s the network of my friends:

Don’t hassle me about not having many friends. I go for quality, not quantity :)

Facebook’s “walled garden” strategy is sometimes annoying. I was thinking it would be nice to have a little social aspect to my blog. I can create a group related to my blog on Facebook, but to join the group or see who’s a member etc, you actually have to go to the Facebook site. I doubt that many people will be bothered to do that. Instead I’d like to have a little widget on my own site where people can sign up to the group and easily view the members and any other data related to the group. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be possible, as Facebook wants to keep people coming back to facebook.com.

I agree with The Economist that this is going to backfire for Facebook. There’s nothing special about social networking that means it must be embedded only in facebook.com. The same idea could be set free, “widgetized” and embedded anywhere. A more open and “sociable” platform could easily become more attractive than Facebook’s garden. Such a platform would probably be a lot harder to monetise than a garden that generates a lot of traffic, but it would certainly be a lot more useful.

Check out the latest Facebook application: Cake Investment Club. Share your portfolio with your friends. See who’s outperforming who.

All I can say is, for goodness sake, don’t use this. It’ll only lead you to make more costly trades in fits of jealousy over friends who’ve gotten lucky. It’s highly unlikely that any of your Facebook friends have any better information than the market already does.

A possible exception is if your friends are trading on inside information. Maybe you should watch the trades of friends who are trading shares in the companies that they work for. Would this make you also liable as an insider-trader?

(HT: Mashable)

Facebook has many job vacancies at the moment. As well as 10 vacancies for software engineers and 21 for other IT-type engineering jobs, they’re after a marketing manager, 17 sales and account managers, an accountant, a tax director, an executive chef, an IP lawyer, a litigation attorney, a monetisation data analyst, four business development managers, three product managers, two web designers, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Once they’ve got their accountants, lawyers and executive chef, it’s surely only a matter of time before they need an economist …

On its developers wiki, Facebook has a page about Monetization Best Practices, suggesting ways for Facebook applications developers to make money out of their apps. Along with the usual advertising and subscription fees, Facebook suggests external investment:

External investment: And, of course, there’s investment from third parties, whether seed funding or full venture capital funding. The funding market is starting to heat up, and we’re excited to see Facebook applications successfully receive investments from external sources.

I’d just like to point out that venture capital is not a monetization strategy … Investors will give you money, but eventually they want to be paid a return.

(HT: Inside Facebook)