TechGuruHere

The Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco has just started, but the conference has already brought some heavy hitters on stage, including Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Paypal CEO Scott Thompson.

Just moments ago, Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Evan Williams took the stage with Federated Media CEO John Batelle to discuss revenue models, Facebook, potential acquisitions, and Twitter’s (potentially stagnating) growth.

Here are some of the highlights:

- On revenue models: They’ve done a lot of thinking about it, but they’re spending “approximately 97% of their efforts” on perfecting and growing the Twitter platform. Basically, he was coy about the company’s revenue strategy. John brought up the idea of “TweetSense” and “TweetWords” (a play on the popular Google AdSense and AdWords platforms), but Evan didn’t admit to anything.

However, he did say that they are optimistic on revenue, with so many brand advertisers and “theoretically monetizable information” available on the Twitter platform, the Twitter CEO isn’t worried about generating significant revenue in the near future.

- On Twitter’s growth: Evan admitted that Twitter’s U.S. traffic has stalled the last few months, but that some new features (such as Twitter Lists) should help solve this problem. He also pointed to international and mobile growth.

- On user retention: He stated that they have never been very good at finding that “killer application” for using Twitter for individuals, but that is now their focus. Twitter Lists is a big way to address this problem, Evan quickly added. They see it as a problem, but one that they can fix with some focus.

- On potential acquisition: Twitter is going for a long-term strategy rather than a “grow and be acquired” strategy. Part of it is that Twitter has potential, and part of it is that Evan Williams doesn’t feel the same pressure other entrepreneurs have to sell, since he’s already cashed out once before with the sale of Blogger to Google. He doesn’t believe Twitter’s interests align with being part of a bigger company.

- On Facebook: Evan discussed the increasing role of Facebook as a competitor to Twitter, but summed it up with this: “The world is big enough for Facebook and Twitter.”

- On Google Wave: He thinks Google Wave is awesome. He doesn’t know what Google Wave will become, though.

- On developers and revenue: Evan made it clear that developers can reliably invest in their platform. He believes developers are crucial to the Twitter experience.

- On international growth: The top five countries in terms of users: U.S., UK, Brazil, Japan, Indonesia (surprising!).

- On Twitter Lists and the suggested user list: “It’s time to retire the suggested user list.” He thinks they need to do something better and that it has indeed created a distortion in terms of influence.

Without a doubt, social gaming is on the rise — and big business for some. With the Facebook application platform, game developers have an unprecedented opportunity to tap into existing social connections for both compelling gameplay and viral promotions for their titles. And they’re taking advantage of it in droves. Luckily for Facebook users, many of these games are mighty fun. Take a look at our 10 top picks for getting your Facebook game on.

10. Biotronic

Offering a biotechnological twist on the puzzle game genre, Biotronic features easy mouse controls, exploding combos and artful animations.

9. Restaurant City

From popular casual games developer Playfish Games, Restaurant City continues in the venerable tradition of casual games like Diner Dash. Combining elements of time management games and virtual sims, in Restaurant City you start your own food joint, customize it, and vie against other restaurants to become the talk of the town.

8. MindJolt Games

Actually a collection of various titles, MindJolt Games includes a number of arcade, puzzle, strategy and sports games to play solo or in challenges with friends.

7. Know-It-All Trivia

This one’s for trivia buffs: Know-It-All Trivia pits you against your Facebook friends to test your knowledge and show off the size of that big brain of yours.

6. Zynga Poker

It’s hard to argue with at current count over 18 million active monthly players. If you’re already a Texas HoldEm fan, Zynga Poker is probably a no-brainer. If you’re a card enthusiast looking for something fun to pick up on Facebook, you’re in good company here.

5. Bejeweled Blitz

Insanely addictive on almost any platform, this gem-swapping puzzle title comes from the highly regarded house of PopCap Games.

4. YoVille

Zynga’s YoVille () is a Sims-like virtual world on Facebook. You start off with your own apartment and do virtual “work” to get the money to decorate it. You can visit your friends’ virtual homes and chat with them in real-time.

3. Mafia Wars

Priding itself on being the “#1 Crime game for Facebook,” Mafia Wars has over 25 million Facebook users doing crime jobs for cash, vying for respect and fighting to be the ruling family in fictional New York.

2. Word Challenge

Here’s one for the wordsmiths and language lovers out there. In Word Challenge, you’re given 6 letters and need to generate as many 3-6 letter words from them as quickly as possible. If you like word games like Boggle or Wordle, you’ll love Word Challenge.

1. Farmville

With 11 million daily players and counting, Farmville is a virtual force to be reckoned with. If you like management-type games where you build and monitor assets — or if you just love farm animals — this could be the Facebook game for you.

With several gazillion other Facebook game options out there, we’re sure we’ve omitted some of your favorites. Be sure to let us know what you play in the comments, and why others should play it too!

Now open in wide theatrical release is a film that remakes one of the formative books of many a childhood. Typically that’s cause for fear that a special and rare experience hasn’t been done justice.

But in this case, Where the Wild Things Are has world class director Spike Jonze going for it as well as the explicit blessing and accolades of the author Maurice Sendak. It also has a very plugged-in and intelligent social media campaign going on to promote the film.

Case in point, a creative iPhone app (warning: iTunes link) and Facebook page that’s seen impressive growth up to at current count over 1.6 million fans.

In the iPhone app you can watch trailers and view photos of the film as well as hear the soundtrack. But most notably, the creative and delightful part of the app sees the Carol monster as a creature kids (and adults!) can interact with. If put to sleep at night he’ll gobble up your contacts’ photos from your phone — a playful and yet appropriately modern element that’s true to the spirit of the Where the Wild Things Are universe.

The Facebook page is also done well, with a continuous stream of updates featuring behind the scenes information, videos, media coverage, interviews and more. It also features a custom app where users can upload images of themselves to be inserted in place of Max’s face in one of the film’s promotional images.

It’s certainly not the first example of a mainstream film taking advantage of social media promotion tools, but it’s definitely an example of one done well. Did you hear about the film via its social media promotions or its more mainstream publicity campaigns?

Between search engines and social media, there are a lot of different ways that people can get to your website. But which of these sources provides loyal users that come back to your site multiple times?

That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.

According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.

In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.

The finding that social sites provide stickier traffic isn’t surprising, but what implications do the loyalty rankings for Facebook, Digg, and Twitter have, if any? Perhaps that in the long-run, encouraging your visitors to share on Facebook might have the most value, even if it doesn’t provide the most short-term traffic.

That said, it’s easy enough to provide sharing options for a multitude of social media sites (case in point, this post!), so you can probably file this under the “nice to know” category of statistics and use your own analytics to gauge what is and isn’t working.

Facebook includes an awesome chat feature that lets you instantly start conversations with your Facebook buddies without installing any IM software but the only small issue is that you need to be on the Facebook.com website in order to use Facebook chat.

If you find this a bit inconvenient, here are some good workarounds that will let you chat on Facebook from anywhere without even having to open the Facebook site in your browser.

Facebook Chat Inside the Web Browser

If you have Google Chrome or Prism for Firefox, you can open this address in your browser address bar and then create an application shortcut to Facebook chat on your desktop.

If you an IE user or hate to use Facebook chat from the sidebar, try Gabtastik – this is a minimal desktop client for Facebook that looks exactly like the web version of Facebook chat but will also send you notifications of new messages and chat requests from the system tray.

Meebo, the very awesome web based instant messaging service, now supports Facebook chat as well. You can connect your Facebook account with meebo via the Facebook Connect service (so there’s no need to share your Facebook credentials with anyone) and instantly chat with your online buddies inside the web browser.

There are two advantages here – you can use Facebook chat even if the main Facebook.com site is blocked in your office and two, you can simultaneously connect with friends on other IM networks from the same website.

Facebook Chat Clients for your Desktop

ChitChat – If Facebook were to develop a standalone messenger on the lines of Yahoo! or Google Talk, it might look something like ChitChat.

ChitChat is a Windows-only desktop client for Facebook that provides a tabbed window to make it easy for you to talk to may friends at once. It will also show notifications in the tray when your friends go online or when they have signed out. The application is in RC stage so expect a few bugs.

Digsby – This is again a very useful all-in-one app that helps you stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and other online accounts.

If you have multiple accounts on Facebook (like you and your spouse), you can associate all of them with your Disgsby messenger and chat with the combined buddy list simultaneously. Facebook doesn’t allow audio or video calls but Digsby indirectly brings that feature to Facebook Chat via tokbox.

There were reports (1,2,3) that Digsby’s installer can add some crapware to your computer but that should not hold you back as there’s an alternate installer (direct link) that will bypass the non-essential stuff.

Adium – If you are on Mac, Adium is probably the best choice for you to chat with Facebook friends from the desktop.

Like Pidgin and Digsby, Adium too supports multiple IM networks, including Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AOL AIM, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, Twitter and Jabber (XMPP). And it uses the same Facebook Chat plugin that is available for Pidgin users on Google Code.

Pidgin – While Facebook Chat is not officially supported in Pidgin, there’s a free plug-in that lets you connect to the Facebook chat server from Pidgin. And like Digsby, Pidgin too would let you chat with buddies on multiple Facebook accounts from the same interface.

Pidgin vs Digsby – Pidgin is purely for instant messaging while Digsby will also display notifications like when a friends sends you a message using Facebook email or if he or she writes something on your Facebook wall. Some people in the comments say that even Pidgin displays notifications but at least that doesn’t work in Windows 7.

Pidgin will show all your Facebook contacts in one giant list (see update) while Digsby will group contacts under logical “Friends list” just the way you have them on the main facebook.com site. Update: The new version of Facebook Chat plugin for Pidgin displays your online friends under groups just like Pidgin.