Facebook and Microsoft have partnered to create a standalone Facebook client powered by the new Silverlight 4 Beta technology.  The client allows you to browse and interact with Facebook with a completely different interface, and a glossy one at that.  To be completely honesty, the client is gorgeous, and the complete integration with Facebook legitimately makes this a better way to browse Facebook than Facebook.com itself, in my opinion.

Starting up the Silverlight client, you’re first bombarded with a series of permissions dialogs, asking whether you are are willing to allow the application to have access to every aspect of Facebook: News Feeds, Wall, Messages and more.  The process isn’t overly annoying, because frankly, as Facebook users, we’ve come to expect the permissions requests before utilizng applications.  The Facebook Connect permissions dialogs are pretty standard across sites, and lend a bit of authenticity to applications.

After this process, you arrive at the heart of the client, and it is quite striking in a complete black finish.  Silverlight really demonstrates its strength here, with lots of available space and big fonts.  Browsing is quite easy, and my various friends lists are listed along the left side of the client.  The most impressive element of the new interface is the photo album on the right side, it’s a unique way of showing the recent photos within my network.  The events tab is also a completely superior alternative to the way that the Facebook Events calendar can be viewed.

One glaring omission is in the system is Facebook Chat, but I imagine this is part of future releases.  Another problem was the lack of search anywhere on the client:  At least give me a Bing or something.  Finally, I had a real problem when trying to look at some specific photos from my friends  feed, I kept getting this error:  ”the owner of this album did not make this available to this application”.    Applications themselves are not available on the client, understandably.

Definitely check out the Silverlight Client and try browsing Facebook in a different way.

Great news today for Facebook page administrators—NutshellMail, a service that allows users to track updates from several social networking sites through an email aggregate, has added an automated newsletter feature that will assist administrators in keeping fans up to date on the latest fan page updates.

NutShellMail’s web site claims that creating and adding an email newsletter to your page can be completed in under a minute. After adding the application to a fan page, the administrator can simply add an additional tab (”Email Newsletter”) and start promoting away. The application’s interface is basic enough for almost any fan page administrator to implement the service.

There’s little doubt that NutshellMail’s newest feature will increase the potential for fan engagement. Casual Facebook users may not visit all of their pages everyday or keep track of the latest updates, so aggregates of the updates will help almost any Facebook user stay in the loop.

What are your thoughts on NutshellMail’s newest functionality? If you’re a fan page administrator, do you plan on implementing it into your fan page? Below is a screenshot of NutshellMail’s newsletter functionality as published by Techcrunch.

Apparently Facebook users can’t help themselves from watching the train wreck which is MTV’s “Jersey Shore”. To be honest, I can’t either. Despite killing brain cells every time you turn on the show, it’s pretty entertaining. The Jersey Shore Facebook Page has almost quadrupled in the past month to over 475,000 fans and now there’s also a Facebook application in honor of the show.

The “What Is Your Jersey Shore Nickname?” application has grown to over 2 million monthly active users. The application does exactly what you think it would and that’s it! I installed the app and found out that my Jersey Shore name is “The Tan-talizer”. Oh yeah! So no, there is absolutely no value in any of this however it is most definitely entertaining! Best of all, you can watch all the episodes of the Jersey Shore online for free via MTV.

For example you can watch episode 7 and watch one roommate hook up with the other’s sister. All that the roommates in the show accomplish is go out to drink every night. Then they end up punching each other in the face or getting punched in the face as Snooki does. I honestly can’t say that I’ve watched all the episodes but you can just about guarantee that every episode has another great quote in it.

Are you one of the millions of Facebook users who are fans of the Jersey Shore?

Have you ever been walking down the street and suddenly a song comes on that resonates with you? Suddenly you’re dancing in the middle of the street or on the subway and all you want to do is tell your friends about the song that you’re listening to right then. Thanks to Social Player, a new iPhone application, you’ll be able to keep your friends up to date with all the music you’re listening to. While you could theoretically publish every song you’re listening to, it makes much more sense to only share your favorites.

Social Player does one simple thing: let’s you share with your friends on Facebook any song you’re listening to. Currently featured on the homepage of the iTunes app store, Social Player does nothing more than keep your friends up to date about your latest listening habits. While I would have expected Apple to integrate similar functionality directly into their iPod application, Social Player is a layer directly on top of the existing iPod application.

That means Social Player will function in the background, letting you open it up anytime you want to share the song you’re currently listening to with your Facebook friends. The idea is so simple that I think it could become a pretty big application. Developed by Andreas Doll and Sven Geisler, Social Player is the first application to launch out of the duo’s new startup project.me. If you like sharing your music listening habits with friends, the Social Player is the best application I’ve seen to do so.

While I’m not sure how the developers intend to expand this application, it appears that the company is collecting data about each song a user listens to. Perhaps the company is looking to develop a new version of last.fm, one of the largest social music products on the internet. Whatever their keeping the information for, providing users with the ability to share their music on Facebook is a simple yet useful feature. You can download the application in the app store right now for $0.99.

One downside of the application is that when you publish a story to your Facebook Page, the story doesn’t link to the actual song. The result is that your friends are notified of the song title, artist, and album, as well as the album cover. With a few added upgrades, I think this application could really take off.

Universal Studios has launched a Facebook app for the new year, giving away 2,010 Blu-ray movies. Cute, right? The weekly sweepstakes includes 25 prize packages, with films such as Wanted, Knocked Up and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The hope is that the new Facebook app will gain a good amount of traction and help Universal to get a stronger foothold in the social media space.

Several movie releases have been accompanied by Facebook apps in the past year. The Watchmen and Avatar are some of the more notable titles to emerge with high-end Facebook apps. Combining the two aspects of media consumption is a sometimes tricky feat, with opportunities to engage Facebook users through creatively developed applications.

For Universal, the emergence of Blu-ray films is an opportunity for the film studios to re-introduce a plethora of titles to a new and existing audience, taking up Facebook as a point of transmission for information regarding the films available.

While Universal has been one of the more wary companies to take advantage of social media when compared to other brands in general, the launching of a Facebook app means that the movie studio house is looking to a new age of advertising and marketing. Direct communications with consumers is of course a major goal for brands that offer Facebook apps, though we’re seeing that a great deal more can be done through socially integrated applications.

A sweepstakes such as this one could get a lot of users to join Universal’s new Facebook app rather quickly, giving Universal a wide range of users to access in the future. While the giveaway is operating on a weekly basis for only the month of January, having a captivating audience for the next few months could be an ultimate goal for Universal.

There are several directions Universal could take from there, possibly offering up movies for sale directly through the app or through Facebook gifts. Finding a way to become more integrated with media discovery and recommendation apps would be another way in which Universal could take advantage of its Blu-ray products with a Facebook slant. Incorporating trailers and virtual-to-direct sales could also be an option for Universal in cooperation with virtual world apps on Facebook and beyond.

The idea of major brands marketing in this manner on a platform such as Facebook adds validation to Facebook as an adverising option, and the mere addition of an app to your profile could become part of your consumer data that gets parsed by other applications.

With Facebook’s ongoing move to make profile content more public, closer relationships with brands and advertisers is imminent for Facebook. As a results, more brands are finding themselves increasingly willing to invest money and research into interactive marketing campaigns such as Facebook apps.

All of this is still a ways in the future, but it is the direction in which socially-oriented marketing is headed. Consumers will determine the effectiveness of such ads when it’s all said and done, but for the time being brands are finding all sorts of new ways to appeal to their customers directly through social networks.