A couple of weeks back, I wrote about a cool card game based on Computer processes, in hindsight the only thing that post proved was that I’m a geek. The card game was funded through a crowdfunded initiative, and that was really what made it cool.

The instagram camera is cool on its own, and the fact that it’s currently  being crowdsourced through Indiegogo (a website similar to Kickstarter) makes the cool factor– cucumber cool.

In fact, as of now, it’s already reached $6,000 dollars from it’s $50,000 target in just one day. I’m willing to bet that this project will eventually reach it’s pretty low target of just $50,000 – easily.

There are however, some copyright concerns surrounding the camera, particularly since Facebook now own Instagram and they don’t even like wordpress developers building themes that ’look’ like facebook, much less an entire camera that is based on a trademark they own.

If you choose to fund the project, you’re promised a discount on the final item, which the creator hopes to price at under $350 (that’s in US Dollars). However, based on the specs, that may be a bit difficult, we’re talking about a:

The big FB goes public today, making a lot of people very happy and few people very very rich, including one Eduardo Saverin – who will probably be barred from ever entering the US –EVER AGAIN!

However, that’s a story for another day, today Facebook is the hottest bit of tech news you can get your hands on, the last time an IPO this exciting occurred it was for a search engine named Google. Google IPO-ed at around $80, today it shares hover between $550 - $650. Just saying.

So it’s really awe inspiring to look at the numbers, 845 million active users (just slightly smaller than India) 2.7 Billion likes/comments everday, 250 million photos every single day and 100 Billion friendship. You my dear readers could own a small –make that VERY small- part of the company for the $38 share price tag people are talking about.

So how does the $38 price tag for Facebook Shares compare to Malaysian companies?A quick calculation puts Facebooks market cap at USD100 Billion, or roughly RM300 Billion. Malaysia doesn’t have a RM300 Billion dollar company  (or at least one that is public listed), so in order to give you an idea of the magnitude of Facebook, I had to combine a few Malaysian companies to reach Rm300 Billion. With the Rm300 Billion Facebook is worth, you could buy outright:

A rather interesting take on Social Media courtesy of douglaswray via instagram.

Check out more cool stuff from Douglas [here]

According to a New York Times article today, the world has apparently shrunk beyond our imagination. The latest study uses facebook as the base for their study, and used it to study the separation of people.  Previously I blogged about the amazing study conducting by (even more amazing) Stanley Milgram and how he came up with the concept of 6 degrees of separation. The latest study not only re-inforces the original study, but goes further to explain that the number is now only 4.74.

It really is a great opportunity we have now with facebook being the Hyper-Social network, with little competition. What this means is, at least for now, everybody online has a facebook account. That would certainly change in the nest 2-5 years, but what’s really interesting is that with facebooks great popularity, we have now have a wonderful chance to perform these kinds of research, and kudos to facebook for actually initiating it. The data from the research can be found on facebooks data page. Now onto the research:

wpCandy reports that Facebook recently sued an Indonesian blogger who created a wordpress theme that could turn your wordpress site to look like Facebook, and the similarities were really striking. For one your post look exactly like status updates on your Facebook profile and comments on those post look exactly like your friends commenting on your status updates in Facebook.

Similarly, TechCrunch reports that Google has gone after a couple of rather confusing typo domains that look remarkably similar to Youtube. Although not so similarly, Google is making a request for control of the domain rather than suing the pants of those cybersquatters (which it probably should), and not so similarly Google has a much stronger case.

Sometimes life throws you surprising ironies that you can’t help but just bury your head in sorrow, like an ex-girlfriend becoming your boss or the office jerk winning the lottery.

Google aspires to overcome facebook as the number 1 social networking site by launching things like +1 and Google+, however in a surprising twist of fate the number 1 user on Google+ was none other than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. You almost hear the collective ‘DOH!’ from the googleplex echo through silicon valley. Homer Simpson would be proud.

The situation is made even worse by the fact that the 2nd most popular user on the social networking site is Google co-founder Larry Page, missing out on the  number 1 spot by more than 20,000 followers. Marks probably thinking to himself, If Google can’t even beat me in their own back yard how do they intend to beat me when facebook really starts competing?

Pick&Zip is an amazing app that allows you to copy over your entire Facebook photo albums all at once in one zip file. The application even allows you to view ALL the photos you’re tagged in and download those as well, especially apt if you’re looking to migrate this stuff to Google+. It also act as a great picture viewer for all your photos on Facebook.

While Facebook and Google wage holy war for the soul of the internet, the front line of the battle it seems is the login credential area. Facebook with it’s 100’s of millions of users are really making headway in this category. The premise is simple, for new and existing website designers, you can have your users log in with their Facebook credentials rather than your own unique credentials. What this means is that you as a web designer don’t need to worry about keeping a separate module for username and passwords. The extra advantage is even better, users don’t have to fill up crummy web forms to register for your website before actively participating in them. This has proven to improve the user uptake of your service, because it removes an extra step from your web design, users no longer have to register, they can do a simple 1-click login that immediately pulls data of the social network and then populates that into your website DB.

Facebook has a 5000 Friend limit, meaning you can’t have more than 5000 facebook friends, and once you hit this limit Facebook won’t let you have any more friends.

Being an excel guru, I knew that older versions of excel had a 65,536 row limit per worksheet. That meant you couldn’t store more than 65,536 rows in excel, the geeks among us would recognize 65,536 as a 2 raised to the 16th power, so the number itself suggest it’s a system limitation that prevented excel from exceeded 65,536 rows. Facebook on the other hand has a very nice round number of 5000. That suggests that is was  a very careful design consideration to limit the number of friends you have rather than some database limitation. Personally I don’t even have 1,000 friends so it’s unlikely to bother me, but it did bother quite a number of people who now have turned to fan pages to broadcast their message on facebook.

Wonderfully Unique and fun Facebook icons. For a long time people have been bugging Facebook to give us some more flexibility is the quick comment sections rather than just ’like’, but these beautiful icons from Leonard Savage really take the cake. [via Designer Daily]