It has indeed took a while, and 4,000 is actually quite a small number, comparing to ~65k-70k unique visitors on OzBargain each day. The Facebook page has been staggering for a while and only recently we have automated the posting there. For now OzBargain will post on Facebook

• Top/most voted deal of the day at ~9PM AEST (that has not yet expired)
• Deals that have reached 50 votes

Please Like them and bring all the savings to your friends at Facebook :)

September 2007. OzBargain released its Facebook application to let you see the latest deals posted on OzBargain from inside Facebook. In August 2008 I created the OzBargain page on Facebook and ran our birthday competition pretty much on Facebook…

May 3^rd 2009. We have finally reached 500 fans! Yes it took a while, but thank you for all the supports! And congratulations to Stacey Miller in Melbourne who became our 500^th fan!

June 2007, OzBargain started sending out new deal notifications to Twitter. Yes I know it was less than a year since Twitter was launched. It was way before Obama and McCain were on Twitter. It was way before Ashton Kutcher and CNN’s competition to reach 1 million followers. Way before Jason Scott’s cat. And of course OzBargain was here before Oprah.

Sadly OzBargain did not have the massive number of Twitter followers like the celebrities. In fact we have just reached 500 followers last week on the May 14^th 2009. Congratulations to @tdm911 for becoming our 500^th followers on Twitter!

Small milestones — but significant number nevertheless. It’s difficult to predict that what will be the hottest social network next year, but I’ll make sure OzBargain is there :)

• 6,200+ deals
• 600+ forum discussion threads
• 26,000+ comments

Thank you all who have participated! Last week I have also posted in the OzBargain forums — OzBargain Birthday Competition, where I am giving away a Nintendo Wii and 10x $25 Deals Direct Gift Vouchers!

To win, you need to:

1. Prepare a happy birthday message for OzBargain
2. Publish your message on our Facebook Page, on your blogs or on any social media websites

Please check the forum post for more details on the rules, and the deadline for submission is 28^thth of November 2008 — so don’t miss out! It has only been live for a few days and we have already received quite a few messages on our Facebook wall (and some rude ones too! but I am not going to delete them, just yet). Thanks to Sonja who submitted an OzBargain game!

Have fun!

Another way to share a good bargain with your friends on Facebook is by using the “Share” button on the deal pages (it will be right below the main content).

See you on Facebook!

I have been a user of various social networking sites over the past years, but have never managed to be active on anyone of them. Too busy I guess, and none of my friends use them. I guess it is an issue with those social networking sites — they are pretty useless until they have reached the critical mass, when you can actually find your RealLife^TM friends on there. When Facebook opened up to the world everything changed — for me at least. Due to the church I go to, most friends I have are actually university students and new graduates who are pretty much natives on Facebook. I ended up using this platform more and more to catch up friends who have since graduated and are scattered all over the world.

I think one big different between Facebook and, say MySpace, is the ways you can pimp your profile page. With MySpace you can modify your cascading style sheet, insert your own Javascript, etc to make it look very different from your friends’ profile pages. However not everyone is artistic inclined, and many MySpace profile pages are simply site for sore eyes. On Facebook however, customisations are provided via independently developed applications that need to conform to standard set of APIs and style guide. There is a limit on what you can do so everyone’s profile will look different yet consistent.

Okay. Sorry about the long introduction. Let me just introduce the OzBargain App on Facebook.

What can you do with it?

• Display front-page, recent and popular deals and coupons from OzBargain.
• Share bargains with your friends on Facebook.
• Display the deals that have voted (login required).
• Vote on the deals (login required).
• Display recently voted deals on your profile (login required).

For those that requires login, you need to log into OzBargain (using your OzBargain username/password) from inside Facebook so I can match up two IDs to properly register votes.

Yes I know that the functionality is quite limited. The speed is pretty bad too because all pages have to travel from Sydney where my server is, to Palo Alto where Facebook’s servers are, and then back to Australia where most of our users are. However it is a beta product (beta: an excuse for half-baked software :) so feel free to test it out and tell me what you would like to see in this OzBargain + Facebook integration.