Facebook has been slowly rolling out tests to select developers that want to integrate with the Facebook gift shop. As of today there are approximately 5 companies that have been participating in tests: American Greetings, RealGifts, JibJab, GreetBeatz, and someecards. The latter three only recently began showing up in the gift shop. However Facebook has been testing out the gift shop as a platform for developers to sell virtual gifts over the past few months.

Back in August, the company also announced the addition of a number of non-profit companies that have begun using the Facebook gift shop as a…

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The loans market may be recovering, it has been claimed, after a major loan provider reduced the interest rates it charges on personal loans. Nationwide is now offering personal loans at 7.7% APR, leading Tim Moss, head of loans at moneysupermarket.com, to say: “Loan rates have been going up since the start of the credit crunch – in April 2008 best buy loans were around 7.34 per cent, but have now risen to closer to 9 per cent.” He went on to say that Nationwide`s cut in interest rates is the first suggestion that the worst in the loan market…

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Earlier this month Tweetdeck announced that they would begin integrating the full Facebook stream into their widely used desktop application. The new version of the application has now gone live and you can view your entire news feed and then implement filters which limit the content to status updates, wall posts, photos, videos, and custom groups of friends. That means your Facebook feed will now sit right next to your Twitter feed … talk about content overload!

Rather than having to log in to Facebook to find out what’s going on with your friends you can quickly filter through TweetDeck…

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If you’re a large brand that’s running an online ad campaign are you just going to direct consumers to a pretty landing page? That’s what most companies have been doing consistently although a few brands have begun choosing to promote their Facebook and Twitter accounts over landing pages for the opportunity to “remarket” to their fans. Macy’s is the latest brand to promote their Facebook Page through display advertising campaigns around the web.

The strategy appears to be working. Over the past month, the Macy’s Facebook page has grown from 28,000 to 67,000 fans. While the fan base is growing…

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As a result of a new privacy agreement with Canada, Facebook has issued statements suggesting that there could be major platform changes ahead for developers. In a blog post this morning, Ethan Beard suggests that users may have to explicitly opt-in to granting profile information. This news comes as Facebook is under increasing scrutiny from privacy advocates including the California ACLU chapter which has released a new quiz application to inform users of what data applications have access to.

In a blog post on the Facebook developers blog today, Ethan Beard writes:

When users authorize an application, they will have…

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Earlier yesterday while stumbling across an article on the CNN Money site, I noticed that the comments were now exclusively powered through Facebook Connect. While there are no signs that this will become a broader trend for all of CNN, this is definitely a major move for one of the worlds largest global news organizations. One interesting thing to note is that this is for articles that previously didn’t have an embedded commenting feature.

While CNN’s blogs are not currently powered by Facebook Connect, it’s a big shift for any section of CNN to add commenting to news articles which…

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[Shachar Geiger] sent in an interesting project that he worked on with [Tal Avivi] at the Bezalel academy in Jerusalem. They were given the task of designing a 1-person electrical urban vehicle. They took some cues from MIT’s Transology and designed the OmniDirectional Research Platform (ODRi). There’s a video of it embedded above. It can be driven using three different input styles: an accelerometer joystick, a traditional gamepad, or body mass shift. They started with an Arduino, but needed more I/O and had to switch to a Wiring board (this was before the Mega). The platform is built mostly…

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Recently, analog displays have come back in vogue. This is partially due to the common steam punk theme that is popular right now. [Cristiano] has done an analog display, but instead of brass and polished wood, he’s gone automotive themed with it. He purchased a cheap tachometer from ebay.  A circuit had to be designed to give the tach the signals needed for it to operate, and you can download the schematic from his site. As you can see in the video above, it works well. We think that “shift” light might get annoying pretty quickly.

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