RIA Journal

We are opening registration today for f8, Facebook’s conference where developers and entrepreneurs collaborate on the future of personalized and social technologies.

We hope you will join us on April 21st, 2010, at the Concourse at San Francisco Design Center for a day of learning about the latest Facebook technologies and connecting with other developers. To get your ticket for the event, please visit the f8 Facebook Page and click the “Register” tab.

Members of the Facebook team and the developer community will explore a variety of topics across these areas:

• New Tools: Everything you need to know about our new tools
• Techniques: Best practices for building fast, scalable, and engaging products
• Industry: Engineers, VCs, and entrepreneurs share strategies for growing a business and making technologies social
• Open Technologies: Facebook’s open source projects

We expect f8 to sell out quickly, so register soon to guarantee your spot. Check back to the f8 Page regularly for the latest updates. Tickets are $325 now and will be $425 after March 21st, 2010, if tickets are still available.

You can find more information on our FAQ on the f8 Page. If you are a member of the press who covers topics related to f8, please contact us through the f8 Page.

We hope to see you there and connect with you in person.

*f8 registration is powered by Eventbrite.

Two years ago customer support startup Get Satisfaction turned its ear to Twitter to help its clients monitor Twitter for mentions of brands. Get Satisfaction makes a network of customer support forums where customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product. Companies can also claim their board and put their own employees on to moderate the boards. Tapping into the conversations taking place Twitter and other social media sites is now integral to brands and customer support, as we’ve recently seen with Southwest Airlines. Get Satisfaction is extending its social media coverage today by rolling out the ability to add a support tab to Facebook Fan pages.

As companies turn to Facebook Fan Pages to connect with customers, consumers are increasingly voicing their issues with a particular product or brand on the brand’s Facebook page. But often these complaints or opinions can get lost in the stream. That’s where Get Satisfaction comes in. The startup now allows brands to create a tab on their fan pages, which can be a portal for consumers to express their opinions, complaints or issues with the brand or product.

Yesterday, MySpace announced a revamped games homepage, available at www.myspace.com/games, which helps users discover and share games virally. The new Games section also improves application engagement and analytics tools for game developers. In addition, MySpace introduced the “MySpace Neon iPhone” application that gives users access to their MySpace games on the iPhone.

According to MySpace, “nearly a third of MySpace users engage daily in games and there are more than 28 million active app users on the site”. The site is attempting to focus on games as its primary source of entertainment, just as they have for music in the past. Reading the blog post announcing the new upgrade, we can see that in addition to the release, there are nine social games were released as well. The games are not developed by MySpace, but seem to be highlighted to identify that developers are still creating unique experiences on the platform. Although it hasn’t been stated as such, with the recent shakeup of management at MySpace, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are now dedicating a significant portion of resources to developing the games section of the site. I wonder (complete speculation) if they may consider making games themselves.

Four in five adults believe access to the Internet is a fundamental right — with those feelings particularly strong in South Korea and China — and half believe it should never be regulated, according to a global survey.

A poll of 27,000 adults in 26 countries for the BBC World Service showed 78 percent of Internet users believed the Web gave them greater freedom, while nine in 10 said it was a good place to learn.

Respondents in the United States were above the average in believing the Internet was a source for greater freedom and they were also more confident than most in expressing their opinions online.

However, others felt concern about spending time online, with 65 percent of respondents in Japan saying they did not feel they could express their opinions safely online, a sentiment that was also felt in South Korea, France, Germany and China.

The issue of Internet freedoms hit the headlines earlier this year after the world’s largest search engine Google Inc threatened to quit China, the world’s biggest Internet market, over strict censorship rules.

Of the 27,000 surveyed, more than half agreed that the “Internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere.”

That belief was particularly strong in South Korea, Nigeria and Mexico while residents in Pakistan, Turkey and China were the least likely to agree, with only 12 percent, 13 percent and 16 percent respectively strongly agreeing.