This will be a great weekend building on the experience gained in Startup Weekend Toronto and Facebook Weekend - check it out - IT

photo credit: Shanghai Sky

AS anyone who has ever received a virtual Jagerbomb or fought off intergalactic cyber chickens knows, social-networking sites are designed to be entertaining. If there wasn’t so much fun to be had, there wouldn’t be so many articles warning that what you post on your profile — i.e., photos of you in a beer helmet and a tequila bandolier — could one day cost you a job.

Yet sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace are evolving beyond their reputations as procrastinators’ Xanadus.

With American consumer confidence at a 26-year low and one in seven workers telling the Pew Research Center that they fear they will be laid off, social-networking sites are becoming, for some users, platforms from which to network for job leads, to forge professional contacts or even to announce to friends that you are out of work.

Landing a job through a social network not designed for that purpose appears to be a rarity. But savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and all-around business networking. Even human resource professionals are encouraging people to log on.

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announced Friday

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.   Read more .  .  .

So far, though, the applications fall mainly into two categories: the silly and the annoying (and sometimes, both). Users can throw virtual sheep at each other or take part in zombie attacks on their friends. Recently, many users received a message entreating them to “click ‘forward’ to see what happens.” After clicking, users discovered that nothing happened except that they had annoyed their friends with a pointless message.

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DataPortability Workgroup

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They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo, an advertising network that sells ads onto people’s blogs and social networking profile pages.

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Facebook Weekend BETA was very productive and a number of different teams made significant progress on their projects. All groups were able to access a Joyent Accelerator account with 12 months of free hosting for their Facebook Applications

• The Pet Food Testing team, including Refresh Partners, Ron Smith, and Lanny Geffen were able to establish their business goal, create the branding and logo and get a functional Facebook Application working. Their Facebook Application is live and you can use it: http://apps.facebook.com/petfood
• Martin West was able to form a great team around his collaborative educational Facebook application and they were able to complete the initial business case/plan, user scenarios, and build the base for their technology platform. They are moving full-steam ahead to try to turn this application into a business.
• The Tippsee team also made progress on their business plan and are moving into the market validation phase of their project. They’re still looking for developers to join the team, if anyone is interested.
• Liban Pan continued to refine and develop the ideveloper application, which provides developer support inside Facebook.
• Alex Sirota was able to refine his Healthbook concept and benefited from great feedback from a number of people who dropped by.

Finally, we also had a lot of interest and encouragement from the investor community including Keith Bates from Cinnabar Ventures, Bryan Watson from the National Angel Organization and Robert Koturbash from the Maple Leaf Angels.

We’re looking forward to working closely with these groups and the investor community to ensure their success. We already have an open invitation from the Maple Leaf Angels to allow one of the teams to pitch angels directly.

We’re looking forward to more great initiatives in 2008 around entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship. Stay tuned!

A special personal thanks to Colin & Roy at Refresh Partners for their huge effort to make Facebook Weekend BETA the great fun and success that all of us there enjoyed.

Wrinklebook.Com

Pet Project(s)

Charity Link

Energy footprint challenge

FB Application - Educational Publishing Space

Healthbook: An FB app for Personal Health Information and Services

Currently, 68 people are ready to help make your idea a reality! Submit your idea now at:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6900744045

If you have an idea that you would like to see successfully built or would like to be part of the team that builds and promotes them please go to the FBW BETA group at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6900744045

Let’s have fun and build some great projects!