fan

On Thursday night, Facebook announced that it's launched its first official Twitter app--sort of. In a post on the company blog, Facebook announced that updates to "fan pages," public profiles for celebrities, brands, organizations, and what-have-you, can now be sent out through Twitter.

"Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who've created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible," the post by Facebook employee Michael Gummelt read. "Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities … Read more

Sports Card Organizer Deluxe is a database program that allows users to keep track of the contents of their sports card collections. Although the program works fine, there are likely more sophisticated options to accomplish this task.

The program's interface looks very dated and is reminiscent of Windows 95. Not surprisingly, it's not particularly intuitive, and in general its layout feels somewhat cluttered and clunky. To its credit, the program does open with a brief explanation of its features, allowing users to get started without too much trouble. The program offers three different database templates for users to … Read more

I've been checking out a new social-networking site called SuperFan, and I think it could eventually become an interesting resource for music fans. But only if they make it easier to post and share content about favorite bands.

If you've used Facebook, MySpace, Imeem, or any of the other countless social-networking sites out there, the drill will be familiar: enter your information to create a profile (here's mine), invite your friends, then engage in various activities like updating your status and uploading video and photos.

The key difference is that SuperFan is organized around the stuff you … Read more

Here's something new from Facebook: the "fan box," which is a new tool for celebrities, brands, products, companies, and other entities with Facebook "fan pages" to effectively embed their Facebook presence into their Web sites.

That means that if you go to the Web site of a participating brand, like Coca-Cola or Lance Armstrong's Livestrong nonprofit, you'll see a widget that lets you add that brand as a "fan" on Facebook, which subscribes you to its updates, as well as a feed of updates and an array of profile photos from … Read more

My kitchen is tiny: if I'm cooking, no one else will fit in the room. It gets stuffy very fast, especially when I'm baking, but there's really no room to add a fan on the floor or even on the counter.

There is one fan I can squeeze in, though. Vornado's Undercabinet Air Circulator mounts underneath a cabinet and over the counter. I don't have to give up any of my counter space to get a breeze going in my kitchen. It even folds under the cabinet it's attached to when I'm not … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--I've blogged about Topspin Media in the past--it's the company that handled the staggered direct-to-fan release for the recent David Byrne-Brian Eno album, "Everything That Happens Will Happen Today." At the South by Southwest festival here this week, Topspin announced that it has taken a lot of the lessons it learned from the Byrne-Eno release and applied it to their platform.

Under the Byrne-Eno program, the artists first asked listeners to enter their e-mail address in exchange for a free song download. A few weeks later, they released a streaming version of the entire record, … Read more

David Nelson, the 15-year-old co-founder of the free site Muziic, idealizes Napster creator Shawn Fanning. But that doesn't mean he's going to run his business the same way.

Muziic, which launched two weeks ago, is a music service that piggybacks on YouTube. Nelson's software rounds up YouTube's music videos and enables users to sort and add them to playlists as if they were MP3s. There's no messing around with YouTube's search engine, videos, or advertisements.

There's little about Muziic that compares to Napster, the peer-to-peer service that helped demolish the traditional music business … Read more

Facebook's all set to make a product development announcement of sorts on Wednesday in the form of what it calls an "Open Door" event featuring CEO Mark Zuckerberg and several other executives. The most notable portion of it--according to an e-mail from the company's press corps--is that it'll unveil "the next evolution of Facebook Pages."

Facebook Pages, as you may recall, are the free profiles that brands can set up to establish a presence on the social network, which now has over 175 million members worldwide. Members can sign onto the pages as &… Read more

Research firm Nielsen Online announced the results of a study that found 20 percent more people visited career development sites in January than in the same month last year and unique visitors grew from 41.5 million to 49.7 million in the same span.

According to the firm, CareerBuilder was the top career development destination in January with 20.8 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo HotJobs and Monster, which captured 11.7 million and 9.5 million unique visitors, respectively. Ironically, the number of unique visitors aged 65 and older who used career sites grew 41 percent year-over-year … Read more