Facebook recently announced the Live Stream Box, which lets webmasters integrate a real-time social viewing experience on their site. A spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews, "Yesterday, CNN.com, MTV.com and other major networks implemented the technology for Michael Jackson’s Memorial, where about 1 million users posted approximately 800,000 status updates in just a few hours."

Today Facebook has announced another social widget that webmasters can use to bring the Facebook experience to their site. It's called the Fanbox. "Facebook Page owners can now add the Fan Box, a Facebook Connect-enabled widget, to their website with a few lines of code to bring content from their Facebook Page into their site and convert visitors into fans on Facebook," the spokesperson says.

To include the Fan box, you only need to grab a few lines of javascript from your Facebook page. Simply click "Add Fan Box to your site," which is located underneath your page's profile picture. Once you click it, you can choose whether or not you want to include the stream and fans. Further customization options can be found here.

This could be a great way to increase your number of fans on Facebook. In turn, this can of course increase traffic to your site, and theoretically, it can continue in that fashion.

Keep in mind, the Fan Box comes equipped with a  "Become a Fan" button, which might look nice on your site. You can see how this can easily lead to a nice boost in Facebook fans. More info on the box here.

Back in March, WebProNews looked at how Facebook was driving more traffic to some websites than even Google was. While, that was certainly not the case for everybody, it was still fascinating to see.

We also looked at how the lines between Facebook and Google were getting closer together in terms of unique visitors. Well, it's July now, and they have gotten even closer. The latest data from Compete shows the numbers up until June 20. Compete has Google.com at 145,948,025 and Facebook.com at 122,559,672 on that date.

Luckily for Google, the lines getting closer together is not so much a product of people going to Google.com less. They're just going to Facebook.com more. It looks like Google use has remained relatively flat, as Facebook use just continues to grow tremendously.

For most sites, a lack of significant growth wouldn't be looked upon as incredibly favorable, but how much further can Google really go up in terms of search market share. Google is already so far ahead of the game, the company should be happy that it's not losing an incredible amount. Bing has edged up a bit since its launch, but it has a long way to go before it crowds Google.

The competition is there, and Google knows it, but even overlap between Google and Bing use has remained relatively steady since the initial Bing hype wore down.

But back to Google and Facebook. Google.com and Facebook.com serve very different purposes. People go to Google to find information. They go to Facebook to hang out. The threat to Google here is really more about what people are spending their online time doing. As it stands right now, it appears that people are just spending more time online in general (especially kids). This leaves plenty of room for Google searches and Facebook socializing.

Of course there are plenty of variables to consider as well. These are just two homepages. This doesn’t include search boxes in web browsers, things like Facebook Connect, or any other products from either company.

Google is part of the "PointSmart ClickSafe Task Force," which is an organization that was set up to help keep kids safe online. This week, the task force released its Recommendations for Best Practices for Online Safety and Literacy, which it has been working on for nearly a year.

"The most important and timely recommendation from the report (which previous online safety task forces all agree upon) is the need for digital media literacy and safety education that empowers kids, parents, and educators," says Google Policy Analyst Jennifer Marsh. "It's important that kids of all ages learn what it mean to be a digital citizen and how to navigate the online world safely, and it's equally important that parents and educators have the resources and online tools to help kids make the right choices online."

The guidelines discussed in the Task Force's document cover things like:

1. Education and information
2. Registration/creation of user profiles
3. Identify authentication and age verification
4. Content screening
5. Safe searching.

Google views its own role in the online safety as children as consisting of three primary elements.

"First, we empower families with powerful and innovative tools to create a safe experience online, like SafeSearch, community flagging tools, and granular privacy controls for our products," says Marsh. "Second, we partner with law enforcement and industry partners to stop illegal content and activity online -- we're especially proud of our work with NCMEC and the technology we provided them to fight child exploitation online. Third, we support educational efforts -- both Google and YouTube have developed online safety resources for parents and kids, including a Online Family Safety Guide, and we continue to work and support many of the non-profit organizations doing great work in this space including FOSI, NCMEC, Common Sense Media, and iKeepSafe."

 

Marsh says Google supports the SAFE Internet Act, which would establish a $175 million competitive grant program for state and local education agencies and nonprofit organizations to promote Internet safety education.

Google provides tips for online safety here. Of course there is more information at the Task Force's site.

The initial announcement about Google Chrome OS was, while exciting, extremely lacking in details.  Now, Google's decided to share a bit more info, and the facts paint an interesting picture about the state of the operating system's development. 

Is it nearly finished?  Not even started?  Here's the evidence supporting that first idea: according to a FAQ post on the Google Chrome Blog, the Google Chrome OS team is working with an impressive list of computer products corporations including Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.

So it might be that the operating system's already getting stuck in various ready-to-buy boxes.

On the other hand, the post states, "If you are interested in a full time position as a software engineer please visit the jobs pages for the following offices and indicate that you are interested in Chrome."  Then the cities of Aarhus, Kirkland, London, Montreal, Mountain View, Reston, San Francisco, Santa Monica, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo are named.

So apparently the Google Chrome OS team is far shy of full strength.

Both pieces of information point to an intensive, global effort, however, which is worth recognizing.

Also, with regards to the FAQ, the Google Chrome Blog post promised, "We'll be sure to add more to this list as popular questions come in," so even more details may soon be shared.

Popular video streaming site Justin.tv has launched a new Facebook app that allows users to watch live video right from Facebook. The app is simply called "Live."

This is not the first Facebook app to do this, but this one is free for anyone to use and does not require any registration or approval.

"There have been a couple of live video apps launched on Facebook since they added the capabilities in their API, but we didn't think they were really a good fit for the majority of users," Evan Solomon, Justin.tv VP Marketing tells WebProNews. "Ustream requires a signup and approval process, so when the urge to broadcast live on Facebook strikes, you better hope it lasts.  We think speed of setup is a killer feature on an app like this, so we made it open for anyone to use instantly."

Justin.tv's app comes with two main functions: Watching and broadcasting. While watching, you can also chat with other viewers and post status updates to your Facebook profile. The app shows live channels, and if you have Facebook friends that are broadcasting, they will show up first in the line-up. After friends, the app looks for anyone in your networks, and fills the rest in with content from the Justin.tv site.

You can also broadcast live from within Facebook and let your friends know at your convenience. You can see the live chat along with the broadcast window, and talk with viewers.

"Stickam charges users $0.45/gig of bandwidth for an ad-free version," says Solomon. "The truth is that almost no one cares about having ads on their content these days."

For those that do care, however, they still offer a solution. "Ustream offered a customized, ad-free app for a $15,000 signup fee and over $800/month," says Solomon. "We think that is nuts.  If anyone wants a customized version of the app to include branding/remove ads, they can contact Justin.tv here."

Here is an example of a customized app:

"What people do care a ton about is paying for things they think should be free," says Solomon. "Especially when they have to pay based on something [like] bandwidth, that very few people have a good understanding of.  We don't charge anyone to broadcast on Justin.tv, so we're not charging anyone to broadcast with our Facebook app either." 

I would imagine that Justin.tv's Facebook app will be nearly as popular as Justin.tv itself, if not more so. Facebook is growing tremendously (it's almost catching Google in unique visitors). The app could open up Justin.tv to a lot of people that weren't already familiar with it.

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