"facebook" news and stories

If Facebook is, at its essence, a high school popularity contest all over again, then Starbucks has just blown your homecoming queen, starting quarterback and former student body president out of the water.

As the independent online marketing newsletter Inside Facebook reported this week, the coffee giant became the first brand on the social networking site to hit 10 million fans. Earlier this month, Lady Gaga became the first actual person to reach that mark (which makes it sort of like the weird drama-club chick and one of the guys from the Science Olympiad team being elected prom king and queen).

Starbucks's success on Facebook is hardly a fluke. Rather, it's the result of an over-caffeinated campaign. Starbucks regularly plies its 10 million online BFFs with offers for free stuff, like ice cream and pastries, as well as invitations to attend things like "Frappuccino Happy Hours."

As for the rest of us who still have, say, 9,999,900 friends to go before we can catch up with America's favorite coffeehouse, we can always content ourselves by asking, "Yeah, but how many of those are really Starbucks's friends?" (Perhaps more like frenemies...)

It's time to pack away your romantic image of farmers clad in overalls, perched atop a tractor. Today's agricultural workers and landowners are a modern bunch, and nowhere is that more evident than online, where they're cropping up on Facebook and Twitter in record numbers. These days, farm equipment includes computers, and, by using status updates and clever one-liners, farmers are educating a whole new community about what life is really like on the farm.

A recent example shows the power of their online presence. After an animal rights group released a video on YouTube of dairy cows being punched and prodded with pitchforks, responses were understandably outraged. But farmers fought back, blogging, tweeting, uploading their own videos and defending the industry on Facebook.

"There is so much negative publicity out there, and no one was getting our message out," Ray Prock Jr., a second-generation Central California dairy farmer, told the Associated Press. Prock halted a family vacation to log on and respond to the cow abuse video.

Using Facebook and Youtube, Greenpeace stared down Nestle, and Nestle blinked.

According to the London Independent newspaper, Nestle -- the giant, Swiss-based food conglomerate that operates in 86 countries around the world and employs hundreds of thousands of people -- had been under virtual fire for three months for its use of palm oil in many of its products, especially KitKat, Aero and Quality Street.

Greenpeace asserted that the palm oil was harvested unethically, at the expense of indigenous forests and the wildlife (like Orangutans) that live in them.

The palm oil controversy was not originally aimed solely at Nestle. Many food companies use it, of course, including Cadbury and Mars, competing confectioners to Nestle. But when certain methods of palm oil farming were exposed as unethical, those companies vowed to stick to sustainable farming practices.

But Nestle dragged its feet, promising only to meet the latest acceptable date of 2015 set by the World Wildlife Fund, reports the Independent, so Greenpeace grew impatient and waged a media campaign that some might term virtual guerrilla warfare (or gorilla warfare, as the case may be).

TechNewsWorld reports that McDonald's is one of the early partners in Facebook's location-based feature that's in development.

What's a "location-based feature"? Facebook is essentially mirroring popular social-network platforms such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which allow you to share your current location via Geo-tagging (a GPS-like function). The idea behind Foursquare is rather simple: when you're out and about, you can "check in" at each location you go to, letting your social networks know where you are and what you're doing there. But you don't just walk into a spot and automatically update yourself-- one has to physically run the Foursquare program to "check in."

Facebook is hoping to catch this recent wave of "I'm right here, right now" through their status updates -- and McDonald's would use your location to create an advertisement for a McRib (or whatever), in an attempt to divert your body into the nearest Golden Arches location.

Logos courtesy of Facebook and Twitter

With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, everyone's a critic. Both social-networking sites are littered with "Just ate this -- amazing!" and "Just drank that -- delicious!"

Spreading opinions across the globe is easier than ever nowadays. But those posting bold proclamations in status updates -- such as declaring Heineken "quite possibly the best-tasting beer ever" -- shouldn't be surprised if they draw the (to our minds, hilarious) ire of a raging foodie, as this poor Facebook user did.

Although entering a "best beer" battle with a Heineken in hand may be the culinary equivalent of attempting to slice up a sirloin steak with a plastic knife, social-networking sites certainly do offer up a great new forum to wage culinary warfare. Just be careful what you type: This ain't your grandmother's dinner table.

Nowadays, the whole world could be watching. What if that cute girl from the laundromat Googles you and finds your deepest, bubbliest, Heineken-filled thoughts? We shudder at the notion. Still, the debate is half the fun. What's the one beer you'd go to battle for? Comment if we missed it.

[via Reddit]