It's always nice to see a fairly common concept executed properly (think about all of those old web apps that let you put photos of you on billboards in Times Square) - that's what Intel is doing with its new "The Museum of Me" Facebook app, but with a quite brilliant and dare-I-say upscale twist... Apparently it's a (non-intrusive) advertisement for their Core i5 processors. At the time of this posting it had amassed over 290K likes in about 44 hours.

I got the 'messages' update this morning, here are some first thoughts about it:

• they give you an email address that matches your username - so I have the (quite awesome) mihnea at facebook dot com
• the single conversation thread is nice - but they should also provide an update for the mobile apps
• you can invite friends to upgrade - no idea on how long it takes before it becomes available to them, though

• 
  the best feature I've just noticed (I'm assuming it's activated along with the new messaging system) is a box that now lives in the upper right-hand corner of your profile and only shows updates from pages - needless to say this is great news for any page manager...

I use Facebook's 'business offerings' quite a lot these days and here are some problems I think they need to solve quite quickly. Before I go mad trying to dodge them.

• Enable activity alerts for page admins (the usual notification system would probably do the trick but then again something hardcore would be much nicer, like being able to split your own Facebook account into 'personal' and 'professional' and get the relevant notifications for each one) - until then I'll have to live with NutshellMail and/or the more basic yet functional Hyper Alerts
• Now that they're phasing out the old page insights (apparently it's just not recording any data from 2011 so that's that), they should probably fix the timeframe bug I keep seeing - if I set a timeframe to cover, let's say, the past 3 months of activity, it just returns a big fat error saying "Data Source did not complete: There was an error reading the data source. VisionQuest++ failed to start"
• I'm soon planning to merge a handful of place pages with a proper business page for a client - however, there seem to be all kinds of risks (the most alarming of which is that some people have been losing all their data in the merging process). When Facebook announced the 'merging' feature, it mentioned that it's not reversible - however people are reporting that the 'unmerge' feature has been quietly enabled. Maybe it's a sign to just stay away for now?

Episodes is a new BBC Two show from David Crane (who once created a little show called Friends), who seems to have brought Matt LeBlanc along for the ride. Again. First episode airs tonight.

Update: It's being aired in the US by Showtime who have developed quite the interesting Facebook campaign (with a nice game and all) - 20,000 fans before a series premiere isn't bad at all!

Social gaming taken to a new level? All within Facebook? Sure looks promising. Found it on Harry's Posterous.

I must say I was quite excited to get my hands on RockMelt, the 'social media savvy browser' - here are some first impressions:

• essentially it's Chromium with some very good add-ons
• its best integration is clearly with Facebook - I especially like the shiny Facebook Chat API
• it's stable enough for a beta, although it does seem to slow up my machine quite a bit
• I am quite fond of this approach to a browser, however it needs serious touching up if it's ever going to compete with the big boys
• I am going to keep playing with it, just because it makes Facebook Chat so much better

Is it a winner? Who knows. But it is something slightly different and at least it's giving the other guys one of those "why didn't I think of that" looks on their faces.

The campaign's a few months old, but still quite nice and cheeky! Here are a few more executions: Somebody wrote on your wall, Awaiting friend confirmation, Sign out.

It's usually a bit tricky to try to explain Romanian campaigns, but this one should be fairly easy to relate to due to its, erm, rather international nature (though I am going to try my best to cover as much of the context as possible).

Two weeks ago, my former colleagues from McCann Romania launched a quite contentious campaign for ROM, a very traditional Romanian chocolate bar and one of the only brands to have survived the communist era (it's been around for over 45 years). Check out one of the ads:

And here's the other one. This was backed by print & outdoor ads, in-store promotions and all of that offline bit - but most of the activity came from the website and the campaign's Facebook page. Obviously, people went crazy over the fact that a brand was telling them it's 'cool' and 'refreshing' to replace the Romanian flag on the label with the Star-Spangled Banner. So they channeled their disappointment through home-made videos, the campaign website's comments box and through hate pages and causes on Facebook (apparently there have been over 10.000 reactions so far just across Facebook, according to a preliminary estimate). Here's my favourite.

Then people found out that it was all meant to more-or-less trigger a show of hands on who loves the old ROM - check out the updated website for the reveal - and to brilliantly support the brand's tagline (which I will roughly try to translate): 'strong Romanian sensations since 1964'.

One of the best campaigns I've seen in a while... Congrats to the team!

Twitter isn't the only network you should search through when you're tracking your brands, but then again Twitter does have the upper hand in making it all much easier by having scores of third-party apps to help you do just that.

Not anymore - check out Booshaka, a new Facebook search tool. "There's already Facebook search" you say? Well, I ran some comparative tests over the last few days and surprisingly enough, Booshaka did catch a few more posts. It needs more work but it's definitely worth checking out...