We’re bringing together a select number of the most passionate and collaborative viewers to share their opinions and ideas about their favorite shows. As a member of this exclusive panel, you’ll be given access to real behind-the-scenes material and opportunity to interact with the people in charge. We consider our advisors an important part of our creative team so your opinions and feedback will greatly impact our current and upcoming shows. To see if you qualify please click continue.

As an advisor, I viewed the pilot to a new show called Happy Town and provided my feedback on the story, characters, and actors.  Since the show is not due to air until 2010, this kind of viewer feedback can help the creators and show runners make small adjustments to the show before it even airs.  This is much like a test screening that is done for movies to get a sense of how the audience likes or dislikes the product except the viewing can be done at home via the internet.

The Advisory Panel also includes show specific discussion boards, online polls, and real-time interactive sessions with other users and site moderators.  By taking a big step forward, ABC Studios is able to reach passionate viewers and get honest feedback that is typically hard [or expensive] to get.  I look forward to more inside information on upcoming ABC Studio productions as well as providing my own feedback on their currently broadcast shows.

UPDATE:  Currently the @Mentions only function in status updates and wall postings but not in replies.  Hopefully they will add the @Mentions to replies soon to create the more a powerful conversation-like tool.

The New York Times has been at the forefront of the online news world with efforts to find the right mix of free and pay content to keep printed material on viable business in the 21 century.   Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the Times, called Fast Flip “a modest R&D project” designed as an experiment to gauge click-through rates and traffic, rather than any sort of money-making venture.

This new product, which is currently a partner-only service, may help both Google and the newspaper worlds find a new way to work together instead continually competing in a world where giants like Google are light years ahead.

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.

Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We’re rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.

In the next few weeks you should begin to see the new @mention feature in your status update dialog box to which you can apply friends, groups or fan pages. This should be a great enhancement to Facebook and should draw more companies and brands to the platform just as they have invaded Twitter for open communication.  Thank you to @Twitter.

You have been selected as a beta tester for Facebook Lite!

We are building a faster, simpler version of Facebook that we call Facebook Lite. It’s not finished yet and we have plenty of kinks to work out, but we would love to get your feedback on what we have built so far.

It appears the Twitteresque thin version of Facebook is now widely available online here in the US [and maybe other parts of the world].  This stripped down version of the social media site removes some of the add-on like visual elements the sidebar highlights, ads and birthdays and gives you only what most users really want – the news feed. By focusing on the news feed, users can now use the platform for more of a conversational tool than an all out media forum.  Also for those with slow connections or users who find the current layout a bit overwhelming at times, the new Lite page maybe just what you are looking for.

Plus I heard Facebook now has less calories and still tastes great!

5,000 targeted Facebook friends in 30 days for $654.30 sounds pretty good.  Or 5,000 Twitter followers in 21 days for $229.60 would help jump start your audience.  But how long will they remain friends and followers or are they really an active audience?  Since these are not earned customers, this service might just be as good as all those credit card offers I get weekly from my postman each day.  I see them, I open them and then I discard them – all without giving the message any thought.

Certainly companies are continuing to find ways to reach their target market and this type of gorilla marketing could be a quick and dirty jump start to a real marketing plan or it just might be a 600 dollar credit card offer throw into the weekly recycling bin.  Buyer Beware.

Television was truly revolutionary and within 4 years 50 million people had become viewers.  Not with standing that each one of those users had to purchase new equipment but adding over 100 million users in less than 9 months, Facebook has become not only a network but a new way to communicate beyond phone, fax, text, and e-mail.  Are you communicating with all those users?