Family History site arcalife is pretty tickled about their new technology “Life Cube”… so much so that to encourage you to check it out, they are holding a contest until December 1st and giving away $500 to the grand winner, AND $50 each to the first 5 people who comment on the winner’s brilliance (via Facebook or Twitter). Sounds like I’m entering a contest.

And it’s pretty easy to sign up, put together something fabulous in a Life Cube and share and post your creation: 1. Sign up to a free basic membership with arcalife. 2. Import and upload your favourite photos and a video (text over top is optional). 3. Share your link on either Twitter or Facebook (and let arcalife know you’ve done so). You can also sign in and build your Cube via Facebook.

Read arcalife’s post with the more official and precise contest details and to check out other examples of published Life Cubes.

This week Joyent announced their new Facebook developers program, Joyent Accelerators. Kinzin is well acquainted with Joyent’s infrastructure – it’s what has made the scalability of the “Are You Normal?” Facebook application manageable and successful. The app has jumped to half a million users in a month, has been one of the top apps on the “Recently Popular” Facebook list (more than once), and continues to add tens of thousands new users every day. Joyent’s full case study and more details on the app can be found here.

Joyent Accelerators is “free, fast and scalable hosting”, as quoted by Facebook Senior Platform Manager, Dave Morin.

Joyent has partnered with Facebook and Dell to deliver this sophisticated, scalable, on-demand infrastructure. For developers, it means a quick and efficient launch of Facebook applications that are capable of scaling to millions of users – FOR FREE.

You can read plenty more about this announcement and partnership on a number of our technologist friends’ tech news sites: Read/Write Web, Innovation Creators, Rootly, Social media today, Information Week.

xposted from Kinzin’s Blog.

Last night was all about the app.

Vancouver, or more recently referred to as “Techcouver”, held its’ first Facebook Developer Garage event downtown at the Vancouver Film School. The event was completely “sold-out” by over double the capacity of the space, so there wasn’t a seat to be had. Once the Nazi-tech guy made his way from the floor back to the booth for the main event to commence, people began to fill the isles and find space wherever they could. It was a packed house.

There were about 9 Facebook applications in all that were on display over the 3 hours. Each developer, or team of developers, grabbed the spotlight for a 10-minute overview of their respective app and covered any technical aspects worth mentioning and sharing, followed by a brief Q and A for each. David Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook (nice title buddy) was meant to be joining us in the flesh for our inaugural evening, but had to cancel 48 hours in advance due to some “big meeting” at HQ. But he was kind enough to take a few minutes out to appear via Skype Video, as he said a few nice words, opened it up to the floor for some questions, when sadly, the connection was lost.

Paul Prescod, ‘DAD’ at Kinzin, shared the “Are You Normal?” app with the crowd. When he gave the current-users statistics (now over 114K in 3 short weeks), there was a gasp as a hush fell over the room. Well, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch. But nonetheless, impressive stuff! Johnny Bufu and Boris Mann wrapped the night with a few words on the open web. Facebook? Open??

There is a complete breakdown of each presentation on the live blog post from Miss 604, and on Roland Tanglao’s Jaiku Channel.

So I’ve been hit by the Facebook Nazis. “No Facebook foh YOO!”

And I got the boot with pretty minimal activity. I’ve heard about other people who have had similar experiences, but I was under the impression it was to do with blasting your whole contact list at once, hence the rule to invite only 10 friends a day into an application.

I was ‘facebooking’ a detailed note, work related, to about 15 people. Yes, I understand the “share on facebook” method, and yes I get you can forward one note to a lot of people. But I wanted my note to be BCC’ed. Something I don’t think Facebook has the capabilities of just yet. And if they do, boy did I miss that day at school. I’m assuming that they do have some sort of “make this private”, but I never dreamed a handful of notes would cause such a ruckus.

I threw open a bunch of tabs in Firefox, copied the note into all contacts and started hitting send rapid fire. Unbeknown to me, as each tab closed and the next note was sent, one after the other, I was quickly raising the red flag, agents were racing to their stations and bells were sounding all throughout FB HQ. After about the 11th shot, a big red box appeared with big red text and screamed at me: “You Have Been Kicked Off Of Facebook!!” Or, at least that’s what I saw. I think it read something like, “Your account has been terminated” or “Your life is over”. Something to that effect. (Should have grabbed that screen shot.)

Anyhow, I fired an email off to the support people and got a lovely note back saying my situation is being reviewed, with a case number and all. And so I wait. Feeling like a criminal. Perhaps now I can get back to those things I turfed aside due to my 2007 addiction.

Ok all you weirdos and freaks out there on Facebook – get out there and take the Are You Normal? survey so I can at least seem a *tad* more normal! Please?

Here’s a cool Facebook Application, just launched today, released to the masses, that you should most certainly add and play with. I’ll tell you why you should:

• It’s good, clean fun that’s entertaining and all about connecting with those people online you love (and love to poke fun at) the most: your close friends and family.

I’ve had a really great last several weeks. I’ve been working with the Kinzin team here in Vancouver to help market and promote this application, and you know what? It’s an easy thing to talk positively about because of what is at the heart of this App: a company that truly believes in working towards finding positive ways for families to connect online. This application is a quirky and whacky way of doing just that.

I had zero to do with building it, designing it, or even conceptualizing it; wish I had. But I do have a thing or two to do with the tail end of tweaking it, looking at what’s down the road, and spreading it out to the masses… and this is part of that.

Sign Up! Add the App! Add your friends! Let the quibbling begin!

And please, if you run into *ANY* issues, bugs, concerns: feedback is very much appreciated and welcomed anytime!!