The game is an imaginative journey through the minds of 11 giants that is somewhat fun to play, but will probably require a little explanation. We spoke with Butterfield about Glitch.

Butterfield told us he wants to flip the model for online games by creating a gaming environment that is more about creating culture and less about the game.

So far, 27,000 people have played the game, accumulating around 34 million minutes of testing. Glitch challenges multi-player online games like World of Warcraft on one end of the spectrum and virtual reality plays on the other.

But not by much. Glitch is using a similar gaming model and a business model that has worked for "games" like Second Life, which makes $100 milion a year by selling virtual goods.

Players can create add-ons and virtual goods for others in the game; it's got in-game advertising only for the sale of virtual items. TinySpeck will release an app for the iPhone, which Butterfield says will take players out of the game. He said that they are making the API available to developers so that players in Glitch can play in other games, which sounds compelling.

Butterfield pitches it as culture building. "We provide raw materials and a stimulating environment, but it's the players who bring the infinite world alive, shaping it with their imagination," he says.

Glitch is actually the offspring of an idea that Ludicorp - the company that created Flickr - thought of at the very early days of that photo-sharing community. In fact, says Butterfield, he took the most important piece of the Glitch model from his experience at Flickr.

"Flickr was unique and different," says Butterfield. But there are similarities. "Chief among them is the importance of communication, and creating a space where people can build relationships. that can be more powerful than any individual feature we could offer them."

Glitch definitely sets the stage for that. Inside this non-violent interface are multiple areas for chatting. Characters encounter other characters, usually dressed and looking like alien wood sprites on acid, and engage in dialogue in real-time. There are dozens of prompts that gear you to interact with other players and elements in the game. You can talk to trees, and you can pet pigs.

I've only played the game for a couple of hours, but I have enjoyed it. There was a significant amount of downtime before they launch this afternoon, but I saw how someone sitting in an office cubicle would be enticed to don an artificial personality and entertain and amuse his friends. I see its similarities to a community built around sharing.

You can play a TV show for other characters, and you can give people beans, planting tools, and other things, like a special magical purple fruit that makes you see purple for about a minute.

The actions create points, and the game is set up so that a character must interact in order to keep is mood at high levels. Points are necessary to buy items needed to create opportunities for building community and for success in the game.

Conversations flow very easily when the world is purple and you are dressed like a nymph, while chickens walk by asking to be "rubbed."

If there is great fun in this game, it will be in how everything flows and changes in a way that a normal life may not. And if Butterfield's philosophy holds true, maybe that experience can create culture, in the same way that Flickr created a community around photo-sharing.

You can see for yourself by visiting the game when it opens later today.

Screen shots come from images given by Glitch and from capture of real-time play.

The launch is focused on the growing health & lifestyle app channel in the Apple app store and in the Android market.

The app is a Q&A platform that helps users find health information written by local physicians. The company says it has 5,000 physicians signed up for "virtual practices."

The app has one interface for doctors and a separate interface for patients. Patients can ask questions for free, and answers are delivered pretty fast, as I found out.

Warning: privacy advocates beware -- this app requires personal identity information, like name, age and location at registration.The app also asks if you want to share with Facebook, and it gives you a choice. That was good. I said no.

The app lists "trending" questions.

The questions most similar to yours scroll automatically to the top as you type. Doctors endure much in order to help the sick. One of the easier questions to print: "Can my co-workers catch my eczema?"

Many questions ask for advice about general themes: like baby care, and what to do with a fever.

I asked a purposely vague question, completely made up: "I have a rash on my foot, what is it?" A doctor, who was apparently real, provided an answer in about a minute through a push notification that sent me to the answer page.

The answer? "See a doctor." Thank you, doctor.

I asked another more serious question: "How many times should I change the gauze on my burnt hand?" No doctor had answered that question at the time of posting.

What is really interesting about this is that the catalyst for the app is the same catalyst that launched the blended learning movement in education. In order to free up time in the day, some portion of the teaching hours is devoted to online learning. This app does the same thing. The app works totally free of advertising and sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies so as to maintain trust and the feeling of objectivity.

Screenshot comes from iPhone image capture

A report released by Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney does not take into account last week's sharing changes, or the Thursday Timeline announcement.

The chart is still impressive. It suggests that social is more important to people on the Internet, something that Google was trying to harness with the launch of Google+ and Circles only a few months ago.

it shows that in the third quarter of this year, Facebook crossed the line occupied by Google to become the site visited for the longest period of time. We have asked Facebook for relevant data from after the Subscriber and Smart List launches, and from the weekend. We will let you know if they get back to us.

Here is the chart:

Image comes courtesy of Comscore data included in Citigroup report

The social networking site will give at least $50 to up to 200,000 small business in a partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business.

This signals a push by Facebook to steer small businesses towards using social as their main advertising category. It also indicates that Facebook is ready to use changes to how Facebook operates to bulk up advertising inventory and its revenue streams.

Facebook already makes an estimated $4.05 billion in global advertising revenue.

Facebook will start the advertising push with a roadshow and a series of webinars that teach small business owners how to use the site and social media. Facebook has set up a page for more information.

Currently, brands and business are not be able to operate like a person when the Timeline feature rolls out on Thursday. But the site is making changes to how businesses represent themselves.

Contextual advertising on the site has been increasing in quality. It used to be spotty, but the amount of social sharing going on is making it easier for people to pinpoint how to deliver ads,improving conversion rates.

This trend may have moved Facebook to change how it allows consumers to interact with brands. Right before the launch, Facebook took away the "Like" requirement for brands. Fans no longer had to "Like" a brand page in order to comment on it. This news came in the wake of an infographic that showed over 40% of fans don't care about the page or interacting with the brand, if they are not given a reason to do so.

As social sharing becomes more prevalent, it's likely that display advertising will continue to be the most efficient source of revenue for the company.

The announcement comes two days before Amazon is expected to launch one of two Kindle tablets to compete with the iPad.

Currently, the iPad has a lock on the tablet marketplace with apps like Netflix, Crackle, and Hulu+. When, or if, Amazon launches a tablet on September 28, that primacy may be challenged. Amazon will have a whole new channel open for Prime subscribers, who pay $79 per year for streaming content.

A new tablet also opens up channels for the 100,000 non-Prime titles Amazon already has in its queues.
We expect that the device will provide network channels to all sorts of content beyond movies and TV, and that it will run an Android system skinned to the Kindle theme. It should dramatically lower the entry cost for users of a tablet to around $250.

FOX titles available to Prime members will include contemporary movies such as, "Speed," "Mrs. Doubtfire," "Doctor Dolittle," "Last of the Mohicans," as well as classics like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." FOX will also stream TV series including "24," "The X-Files," "NYPD Blue," "Arrested Development" and "The Wonder Years."

The company is holding an invite-only event in New York on September 28 but they are not saying what the event is about.

It could be about the two Kindle e-readers that we have reported on before.

We have also written before on whether Amazon could scale this effort.

We will let you know more when we dig up some info from our sources.

If you believe the F8 conference hype, on Sept. 29 when Timeline opens to the public, Facebook is the place where every single inch of your life can be displayed, from the time you were born, to the time you die. It's also going to be the place where every single piece of media you share and consume will be distributed to everyone you know.

Here's a wrap-up of how they are doing that.

First, timeline will be like your live-streaming baby album, stretched from your birth until whenever you kick it. It will basically allow you to reach back in time, before Facebook, and post those pictures and information. Dust off that scanner.

Media will be the main engine of developer growth. Basically, app distribution will run on the backbone of the meaningful and colorful media you typically enjoy on TV, at the movies, or on other sites like Hulu or Netflix.

We're talking apps that stream music, movies, tv shows and any kind of media known to man, which will spur people to share and connect with people. That's 800 million people streaming media to, potentially, each of their friends.

But wait, there's more! There will be no app store for Facebook, according to Bret Taylor, the network's CTO.

The apps will basically run on people's profiles, as if they are channel, only sourced from non-proprietary third party platforms.

Taylor also said the Open Graph API is strongly leaning towards mobile.

Analysts also say that these apps are increasing in price during a period of rising healthcare costs and a significant rise in the number of professional-aged people without health insurance.

The average cost of a health app has risen from $2.77 this February to $3.21 in June, about the same price as a gallon of gasoline in some places. There are also significantly fewer health apps than are listed as such in Apple's Health and Fitness category. Of the 9,000 apps available now, say analysts, many are novelties.

These are items that are billed as being for the health and wellbeing of the sick and suffering but are really no more than gimmicks that play into fears about our health and our bodies.

We reported a few weeks ago about the FTC levying fines against two app makers that claimed users could erase their acne using colored lights from the iPHone.

This predication comes on the day of the F8 conference in San Francisco, where many Facebook developers are being encouraged to make "meaningful" apps for the rollout of Timeline on September 29.

"Every single user who is on Facebook should have some relationship with some developer that creates distribution," said Lee.

Lee said that the focus of Facebook's growth with the new Open Graph interface will in be in distribution focused on developer-user relationships. Development must be centered on understanding identity and the process users are going to be undergoing in understanding their identity in the new system.

In other words, developers should be focused on creating apps that help people know themselves better, which might have a profound effect on how apps are traditionally developed. In a way, apps are the new brands and developers are the new brand managers.

Lee explained how apps should be talking about "the intention of what the user wants to share." This is completely about the media, like music shared in Spotify, where people find meaning in their lives.

"You are an extension of something they want to already share, but they just want to do it in a more structured and interesting way," said Lee.

Li said that he didn't think it was an "ilegitimate goal" to make sure that all 800 million people on the social network will have a fundamentally human and "healthy" relationship with the work being done by developers.

"You can go all the way back to when you were born," says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg while unveiling the new profile features.

Zuckerberg stressed that the feature works very well on mobile devices. Facebook has an entire page devoted to this change here, complete with screenshots and video.

What makes this significant is that prior to the update people were just talking and posting in real-time the things they wanted to share with their friends.

This new format allows you to go back in time to periods in your life that happened before there was a Facebook, making your Facebook profile into a graphically-intense version of your entire life.

It's now not only a recent history tool, it's the chronology of significant events over the course of your life.

This is a step in a direction that might make advertisers, brand managers and marketing people feel a little uneasy, because it means they may have to start thinking deeply for their brand rather than just counting hits.

One of the main benchmarks for tracking brand awareness was in being able to track how many "fans" or followers to a brand page managed by the company or agency.

Facebook pages are now like a revolving door. That means they allow many more people to come into the page and write on it, creating a catalyst for building a brand culture on the social networking site.

People can come in and leave a comment and can never be seen again. But the move could mean greater things for marketing, and one social media manager told us that the emphasis on "Likes" has really hampered proper brand interaction and conversation on the web.

"If a social media manager is using likes to measure the impact of a Facebook page or brand, they are measuring the wrong thing," says Stuart Tracte, Social Media Strategist at Definition 6. "They should be measuring conversions. How is Facebook impacting you overall business goals? THAT'S what I want to know."

We had already reported that just over 41% of people who Like a brand drop that brand page by "disliking" it after any type of marketing or advertising campaign ends. Facebook seems to be putting a crimp in the assumption that sites like Facebook make it easier to run marketing campaigns because they are social and that numbers alone actually mean something.

They do not. Semantics mean something, obviously.

Facebooking for, and engaging with, a brand is now about meaning and resolving issues. It's about quality of posts, tone and managing the creativity of the brand's image and its engagement style.

"A comment requires some level of thought and engagement. Measuring likes is a simple way to measure potential reach, but means very little when it comes to the bottom line of any brand," says Tracte.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker announced the grants on his Facebook page this morning, signaling what the city hopes is beginning of a long-running process to build a Web tech presence, and improve teaching into the city's school system.

The grants will come from a $600,000 two year program created from the $100 million matching gift campaign Zuckerberg announced last year on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Newark is one of many urban centers plagued by high dropout rates, but peppered with promising charter school networks and education upstarts that are trying to fix the problem.

Companies that make mobile apps, social networks dedicated just to teachers and students, as well as live video teaching platforms are just a few of the thousands of startup ideas being incubated by venture capitalists or fueled by angel investors.

Facebook image comes from Douglas Crets' news feed

Voluntary attempts to conform to government demands while maintaining the freedom of speech found in their originating culture, have proven unsuccessful for companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo, who have made the push into China and other rigidly-policed tech environments. The analysts say the problem is getting worse.

The report also signals concern over Facebook's curiosity about the China market and notes its 750 million person data set should be considered with caution.

In the report, members of think tank SecDev Group come down hardest on search engines for bending to rules imposed on them in order to maintain the security of the Chinese state.

These practices include surveilling and monitoring Web use and acquiescing to demands to remove content that "offends" the sensibilities of the 450 million Chinese using the Web.

Here is a map from the report that shows the connectivity of control.

Google, the world's largest search engine, tried to put up a fight against the nanny tactics of China, but even that company renewed its license recently. It now operates its servers in Hong Kong and routes Chinese search traffic through them.

Reports like these have been coming out for many years. In 2005, for instance, Yahoo was taken to task for letting local subsidiary Alibaba turn over the name and email credentials of a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, after the government there demanded answers. Each new report gives the impression that Western companies must give away much of the cultural standards and ethical codes of conduct they practice in other parts of the world, as soon as they set up camp in authoritarian regimes.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN journalist and well-known free Internet advocate cautions that while the urge to slide into China is strong, social networking companies may not be doing this kind of thing just to obey Chinese rulers. The recent changes, she says, are likely just an attempt to mimic the success of Google+ Circles.

"Facebook does a lot of things that are not the best thing for free speech or dissent, because their success as a business is more important to the company than being a platform for free speech or political activism," she says. MacKinnon , who just wrote a book on Internet censorship called "Consent of the Networked", and has a Ted Talk about the topic featured at the book's site.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment sent to their press department.

Map image of Asia connectivity comes from the SecDev Group report

In essence, these first 11,000 local libraries just became a chain of local bookstores for Amazon's catalog of virtual books.

The move will create a twist in the already highly competitive book-selling landscape, pitting the Kindle against devices like the Nook, which allows users to download books, for a fee, when they visit their local bookstore.

It's an extension of the lending library idea we wrote about earlier.

Kindle users will be able to sync a borrowed book's margin notes with Facebook or Twitter for a little literary graffiti.

"Normally, making margin notes in library books is a big no-no," says Jay Marine, director, Amazon Kindle. "But we're fixing this by extending our Whispersync technology to library books, so your notes, highlights and bookmarks are always backed up and available the next time you check out the book or if you decide to buy the book."

Customers use a local library's website to search for and select a book to borrow. Once they choose a book, customers can choose to "Send to Kindle" and will be redirected to Amazon.com to login to their Amazon.com account and the book will be delivered to the device they select via Wi-Fi, or can be transferred via USB, the company said in an announcement.

Customers can check out a Kindle book from their local library and start reading on any generation Kindle device or free Kindle app for Android, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac, BlackBerry or Windows Phone, as well as in their web browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.

To start checking out Kindle library books, device owners can visit their local library's website, or for more information, they can visit a page Amazon has set up for library lending.

Ad revenue for the site, which has over 750 million registered users, will miss the expected $4.05 billion mark, according to analysts, but the slowdown in growth is explained as a diversification into other revenue streams like Facebook Credits.

The diversification into different streams is really important, because it suggest that Web content consumption as a revenue driver is not going to be solely focused on display advertising.

The numbers suggest that attempts to drive consumption and spending across games, credits and other Facebook add-ons is fleshing out the bigger ad revenue picture.

When all streams are taken into consideration, total revenues at Facebook should reach $4.27 billion this year, eMarketer estimates. That more than doubles the $2 billion Facebook is estimated to have earned in 2010. Ad revenues will make up 89% of the total this year, down from 95% in 2009, says the site.

The $4.27 billion should beat FB's internal estimates, which were about $4 billion. Based on earlier reports, Facebook has been moving at a fast clip, doubling its first half revenues. An earlier report showed that it had doubled its half-yearly revenues.

Revenues in US territory will do just as well. Ad revenues here are expected to pass $2 billion in 2011, making for over half of the company's total revenue. Overseas ad revenue will continue to eat away at the US chunk of the market as mobile penetration and broadband to the home increases across developing nations, especially in Asia.

Overseas ad dollars is predicted to represent 50% of the pie next year and a slight majority by 2013.

The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.

Facebook released two formats for receiving updates while on the social network. This was at a time when the release of other key features was beginning to create information overload.

One format is an updates ticker that allows for joining real-time conversations based on customized selection options. The other is a news aggregator, which functions as a newspaper, to keep users informed of the most important events and posts they have missed while they have been away.

The ticker is the most simple and straightforward feature. It makes it very easy for you to select whom you want to receive news from, and how often you want to hear from them.

When those people post updates - and they are selected as someone you want to hear from more frequently - you will immediately be alerted to join the conversation. Less relevant people will not signal as often or immediately.

It's kind of like being able to predict frequency and then assign a value to the number of times your annoying Aunt Betty calls you to tell you again about the neighbor's cats. In this way, you are judging just how close you want to be to Aunt Betty - and her cats - regardless of how close Aunt Betty wants to be to you. It's a subtle move by the engineers at Facebook.

Facebook is also changing its news feed, moving away from the rather clumsy "Most Recent" and "Top News" tags.

Facebook has made it so that if you are one of those people who spends a few weeks away from Facebook at a time, the next time you log on, you will see all the most important things you missed while you were away, arranged like it was a magazine or newspaper, with big pictures and easy to navigate buttons.

The rollouts today bring some solutions that calm the information storm fired up after the company rolled out Subscriptions recently.

Once it became possible to follow anyone (if they enabled the feature), the noise to signal ratio went haywire. Suddenly, it was Aunt Betty updates to the nth power. With this new feature, I can pretty much customize my feed so that everything makes sense, and I am not overwhelmed by noise.

Finally, it appears that a social network with over 750 million users has finally figured out how to act socially.

Image via Facebook.

The study by DDB reveals that two in five brand followers surveyed are not interested in engaging with Facebook pages after a marketing engagement ends.

Image from Allfacebook.com

The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.

The commenting features mimic those already used internally by bigger publishers, who evaluate a user's influence by assigning badges to confirm to the network and community some measure of a commenter's significance.

Community managers who don't have their own custom-made evaluation systems will love this, because it provides them an easy-to-use social ranking system in plug-n-play format. Once the beta is released, it will show up in the interface as another feature in the menu list.

The site owner or manager can use a preferences list to calibrate from "most important" to "least important" the weight that each of a certain type of interaction has on the network or the blog.

Then, he can create custom titles for each of those qualifications and assign them to users. At Fred Wilson's blog, AVC, for example, Wilson is going with a bar theme and assigning himself the title of bartender. He assigns different types of users other titles, like regular, or semi-regular, depending on how often they visit the site and how often they leave a comment.

The new features would be an improvement over straight-up commenting, especially since social search and discovery seems to be a huge trend developing Web communities. It's no longer enough for a site manager or a publisher to make commenting available to build the community. The new move seems to be towards being able to identify experts within the blog or the network.

Screenshot comes from Fred Wilson's AVC blog

Using statistical evidence provided by Facebook and apps developers, researchers at the Smith School Center for Digital Innovation, Technology and Strategy show that the boom in games like Farmville and the creation of productivity apps are boosting at least one corner of the economy.

They say that the "Facebook App Economy" created 53,000 jobs just in software companies alone. The study does not cover digital agencies that have launched internal departments to create apps for corporations and brands.

Il-Horn Hann and Siva Viswanathan, co-directors of the center and associate professors of information systems, measured the number of people employed to build, develop and consult on Facebook applications and correlated it to data about apps made available by the company. Using conservative estimates of the data, Hann and Viswanathan judge between 129,000 to more than 182,000 people are employed in jobs supported by the app economy. The more aggressive approach to the data tips the jobs creation number over 230,000.

If the more aggressive number is true and, as we have said before, the app economy is not fully developed, the potential for economic uplift is staggering.

The results of the study are available in a white paper.

The bid for Connections, which has been growing at 30% year-over-year, shows that online learning is being driven by the private sector.

Decisions about what type of education a child receives are traditionally made by state legislation, but the acquisition of a strong player like this by a very large publishing company will put pressure on states to make online learning more widely available.

Connection Education's online learning business, Connections Academy, serves 40,000 students in 21 states. The acquisition will also make for more competition and put pressure on Connections' biggest rival, K12, to innovate and grow. K12 Inc. considering buying Connections at one point.

Education watchers say that the private enterprise push for K12 education that blends online learning with a traditional classroom approach is going to become the trend for growth. Typically, it has been small, non-profit charter school operators that have pushed online learning efforts.