Facebook’s “favor” to you is that it has enabled a new feature that allows Facebook ads to be shown to people outside the age range you specifically set for your campaigns.

Facebook writes:

You can now get more clicks and impressions outside your target age range, and we’ll make sure you get a good deal! Previously, if you chose to target people aged 24 – 35, your ad would only be shown to people aged precisely 24 – 35. But isn’t someone who’s 36 and is interested in your ad just as valuable as someone who is 35? After extensive testing, we found that by allowing the system to increase delivery of your ads slightly outside your target age range, you can receive additional discounted impressions and clicks that are nearly as valuable as the impressions and clicks within your target age. As a result, you see more value from your ads on Facebook and a better return on your investment…

Shall we compare exact age vs. broad age? We shall! This morning I logged into the Facebook ads dashboard to see how many more people I could target if I turned off “exact age match.”

Exact Age Match:

Broad Age Match:

If I choose broad age match, I’ll have 31,540 more Facebook users to target. Sounds appealing, right?

Before you jump to any conclusions, it’s imperative to do A:B testing with this new feature. If you manage your own Facebook ads, or an agency or in-house employee does it for you, suggest that they conduct an A:B test to see if you really do “see more value from your ads on Facebook and a better return on your investment.”

Interested in Facebook advertising? Give Oneupweb a call—we’d be happy to conduct those A:B tests for you.

But eventually I needed something that wouldn’t shake violently when travelling faster than 45 mph. Something that would indicate how much gas I had left in the tank. Something that was more dependable. So I said goodbye to the Corsica—but it will always have a special place in my heart. And much the same way, MySpace, too, will always have a special place in my heart.

Most of us have moved on from MySpace to Facebook. Even though MySpace allowed us to customize our profiles, we found out that not everyone should be given that ability. Let’s just say not everyone is a graphic designer…

MySpace may be down, but don’t count it out yet. It still has a strong groups of musicians (and their fans) that use the service. And just yesterday, MySpace introduced a new feature called Sync with Facebook.

MySpace said in its blog:

“Today we’re introducing Sync with Facebook, www.myspace.com/guide/sync, which allows MySpace users, musicians, and celebrities around the world to sync their status updates with their Facebook profile or Page, while also offering them the ability to share content such as game activity, music, videos, links and photos with their friends on Facebook.

Sync with Facebook allows users to keep their friends on Facebook up to date on everything, including: sharing songs, latest photos, fun game apps, and more.”

This will be a nice feature for those who still use MySpace and want to keep their friends on Facebook updated. What do you think? Is this new feature enough to bring MySpace back into focus? Let us know in the comments below.

My first impression of Facebook Places is that it is actually pretty handy. Say you think you have a roller derby meeting, but you get to the assigned meeting spot a little early and decide to quickly check your Facebook. Then, you notice one of your teammates checks-in to another building all the way across town. Odds are that you don’t have a meeting, even if you didn’t get the phone call from the assigned phone tree (or bothered to sign up for the new forum where all announcements are made, but that’s another story…). As you can probably guess, this happened to me last night. By seeing my teammate check-in elsewhere, it prompted me to call her to see if we did have a meeting (we did not). In the end, it saved me time.

But what do Facebook Places mean for business? Currently, if you are an official representative of a business, you can apply to “take ownership” of the Place where your business is located. To do so, you first have to locate your Place (here’s Oneupweb’s Place). Once you’ve done that, you just follow the link that says “Is this your business?” Facebook asks for serious documentation, meaning you must provide them with Articles of Certificate of Incorporation, Certificate of Formation, Local Business License, or Better Business Bureau Accreditation.

Once you claim your Place, you can advertise it using Facebook PPC ads. You can also manage your company’s address, contact info., hours of business, profile pic, admins and more.

What do you think of Facebook Places? Will you be claiming your company’s Place? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

From my Google search, ironically, Yahoo! Answers will be the first or second search result for my specific query. Et voilà, my answer is ALT+0153 ™.

Yahoo! Answers has been around since December 2005, and with such an extensive history, its results rank high in search engines.

Enter Facebook Questions.

Officially introduced last July, Facebook Questions “helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook. For example, if you’re vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts. Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you’ll receive answers that are more personalized to you,” as stated in a recent Facebook blog post.

In other words, the social media giant is leveraging the success of user-generated information like Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, but with a twist—answers will be more personalized because of your social network.

Below is a list of features that allow you to have more personalized answers in Facebook Questions:

* Add photos or polls. Curious to learn the breed of your beloved mutt? Add a photo of the pooch along with your question. Unsure what hybrid car to buy? Include a poll for users to submit their opinions.

* Tag themes related to your query. If you are interested in playing roller derby but you’re not sure which skates to buy, simply tag @roller derby in your question so more targeted Facebook users see your query.

*Ask questions to your friends or a specific group of people. Simply ask your question as a status update targeted to the specific group of people you’d like to ask. Please note: all questions and answers posted using the Facebook Questions application are public to everyone on the Internet, not just people on Facebook.

* Follow Topics. If you are interested in a certain Facebook Questions topic, you can follow the question so you are notified when users post new answers.

Is Facebook Questions available for your profile yet? If so, what do you think of it?

Being absolutely honest with him, I told him that at the time I thought the best place for him to focus his extremely limited resources was on Facebook (that’s not to say you shouldn’t use Foursquare or Gowalla. It just wasn’t the best option for him at the time). I made an off-hand comment (more like a joke) that if Foursquare and Gowalla got big enough, I was sure Facebook would find a way to add check-ins as well.

Welcome to Facebook Places. With your trusty iPhone in hand, you can check-in to places you visit, sharing your whereabouts with your Facebook friends. Currently when I try to use the feature, I’m greeted by a friendly note letting me know that the feature will be available in my region soon. Until then, I’ll have to settle for videos of other people using Facebook Places. And with that, here’s a video from the AP about the new feature:

So what do you think of Facebook places? Are you concerned about privacy? How do you think this bodes for Foursquare?

If this is true of certain countries, maybe it’s true of certain businesses. Is it possible that companies have secret agents spying on their competitors? Well, paranoid conspiracy theories aside, today Foursquare announced some new privacy settings, just before Facebook’s location based service is expected to launch. Coincidence? I think not! Is it possible that Foursquare knows something that we don’t? Could Facebook launch its location based service tomorrow? Unfortunately, we don’t have any spies at Facebook (or do we). But one thing is for certain—we will keep our eye on this one.

Maybe we have spies, maybe we don’t… but from this video I think you would agree… we are equipped for espionage (oh, and the dates listed were from 2009).

The story goes that Steven Slater was dealing with an unruly passenger as a flight attendant for Jet Blue. Apparently the passenger was trying to stuff a bag into the overhead container. It was too big. And really, who hasn’t been on a plane, waiting for it to take off, while your co-passengers try to shove large bags into the overhead containers that just won’t fit? Or how about getting to your seat with your small, regulation-sized carry on, opening the overhead container that should be yours, only to find it full? It’s frustrating, to say the least. But I digress.

Anyway, Slater alleges that he suffered a gash on the head and was later insulted by another passenger. All of this caused him to share some choice words with the customer over the intercom, grab two beers and activate the inflatable evacuation slide to make a grand exit. And with it, he made a grand entrance into the world of social media.

According to FayObserver.com,”Slater has consistently ranked as one of the most popular topics on Twitter and has birthed a small cottage industry of Facebook pages, with titles such as ‘Free Steven Slater’ and ‘I Support Steven Slater.’” At the time of this posting, the Free Steven Slater page had 37,413 fans.

But what about JetBlue? The company boasts more than 300,000 fans on their Facebook page—a large audience that they could reach out to in the midst of all this drama. But instead, the company released one blog post mentioning the event and thanking their 2,300 “fantastic, awesome and professional Inflight Crewmembers for delivering the JetBlue Experience you’ve come to expect of us”. In essence, they downplayed the situation, perhaps in hopes to avoid bringing up all those old, nasty thoughts about flying—long lines, baggage issues, rude airport and airline workers, etc.

So what do you think? Should JetBlue have done more about this situation in the social media realm, or was their blog response just enough?

Photo Credit: Neil Conway, Flickr

Speculation regarding geolocation features started earlier this year when many were certain that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was going to announce them at the F8 conference in April , however, Open Graph was introduced instead.

(Side Note: Oneupweb released its newest whitepaper titled The Facebook Fallacy: Open Graph = Google Killer. You should read it.)

According to CNET, Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said, “We are working on location features and product integrations, which we’ll be launching in the coming months, and we’ll share more details when appropriate.”

So what does this mean for other services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and the like?

Facebook has been busy wheelin’ and dealin’ with some of them.

According to Mashable.com, Facebook has partnered with Localeze, which is the company that Twitter uses for Twitter Places. Furthermore, the social networking giant now owns Hot Potato, and once offered Foursquare $120 million but ended negotiations when Foursquare countered by asking for 25 percent more.

Once Facebook begins rolling out its geolocation features, will you abandon the SS Foursquare or SS Gowalla ship and search for greener pastures with Facebook?

What do you think will happen to geolocation services? Leave us your thoughts in the comments below.

“We want YouTube to be the best place to upload video. Without question, the number one requested feature by our creators is to upload videos longer than 10 minutes. We’ve heard you, and today we’re pleased to announce that we’ve increased the upload limit to 15 minutes.”

As YouTube explains, one of the main reasons they’ve decided to extend the video time limit is that they feel they have tools in place (aka ContentID) to protect against people illegally uploading lengthy copyrighted videos.

“Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube.”

What do you think of the new time limit? Will we just see longer videos of cats doing ridiculous things (which we all seem to love), or something more?

What are you going to post with your 15 minutes?

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano

One of the first apps that I will undoubtedly download will be for Facebook. I was a user back when it was still called “The Facebook” and you had to have a college email to even setup a profile. Over the years I’ve used it to stay connected with college friends across the nation, stalk ex-boyfriends (only a little), view pictures of my family to help me feel close to them even though they live hundreds of miles away (really, who moves to Alaksa?!), and a lot more. And now, with my new iPhone, it can be my trusty companion whenever I so choose.

It’s really perfect timing. Just this week, Facebook announced that all of their privacy controls are now available “from any browser-enabled mobile device”. Phew! According to Facebook, I can use the social network on my phone and still:

- Select who can see the content I post by setting the simple control for sharing on Facebook to friends, friends of friends or everyone,

- Fully customize my granular settings, if I want, and have them take effect instantly, and

- Read through Facebook’s comprehensive privacy guide, formatted for mobile devices.

I think the first bullet point is the most important. Say I want to spread the news that the Traverse City Toxic Cherries roller derby team will be in a bout in November. I can simply type the message on my phone, and choose to send the news to everyone. But say I want to confess to Yoko Oh-no-you-didn’t and the rest of my friends that last night’s derby training session has resulted in a distinct muscle pain in my thighs—yet, it’s probably not news I want to broadcast to our opposing teams. I just have to choose to send it to friends only.

Having unlimited access to Facebook privacy controls is important to me, no matter which device I’m using to access the internet. What do you think about Facebook’s new privacy controls for smartphones?