Chipeo.net

Bing pings Facebook

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:11:08 +0000

In today’s show, we’re Binging our friends, casting spells in Kindle’s library, and bracing ourselves for the return of the browser wars:

Microsoft’s Bing search engine now includes Facebook integration. when you search for something on Bing, a side panel will pop up and show which of your friends might help you with your search. so for example, if you search for hotels in Chicago, Bing will point out which of your friends live in Chicago.

Microsoft is also in the news today for stirring up the browser wars again. According to Mozilla, Microsoft is preventingFirefox and Chrome to run on Windows RT. (Windows RT is the light version of Windows 8 that you’ll see on sometablets and smartphones. It’s a version of Windows designed for devices powered by ARM processors.) Mozilla (Firefox) and Google (Chrome) are crying foul.

Facebook now has its own app store. Facebook is launching App Center, a hub that features various apps. Users will be directed to download the apps off the app stores from Apple or Google. Developers can create a device-agnostic app with HTML5 and post it in the App Center, to which Facebook will take a 30% cut of the sales.

Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to access the whole Harry Potter series through the Kindle owner’s lending library, starting June 19. it costs about $80 a year to access the lending library and all the perks of Amazon Prime.

Nintendo dropped the prices of the DSi to $100 and the DSi XL to $130. Prices take effect may 20.

Dish Network announced its new Hopper DVR system will be able to skip commercials with a feature called Auto Hop. (Get it? Hop? Hopper? Dish has a kangaroo thing going, if you haven’t yet noticed.) But it only skips commercials recorded during prime time shows, in HD, from the four major networks. and only when you watch it the day after it originally aired.

And the app we’re buzzing about today is Google+ for iOS. The app just got a major update and design overhaul, putting a big focus around user photos. and get this: Google released this update to Apple users beforeAndroid. How scandalous. But Android users should be getting this update — plus a few more perks — in the coming weeks.

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Bing pings Facebook

Giveaway: IRON MAIDEN – EN VIVO! DVD and CD!

Sun, 06 May 2012 20:27:10 +0000

James Zahn

About James: a work-from-home Dad with a 2 ½-year old daughter (as of April 2012) and another “new release” on the way, James Zahn is the Rock Father™. recent 2012 projects for James have included direction and editing on music videos, lyric videos, and album trailers for FEAR FACTORY, DIRGE WITHIN, PRODUCT OF HATE, and others.

He’s appeared as an actor in feature films and commercials, he’s written comic books, performed in bands, and even appeared as a music expert on AC360 on CNN in 2008.

James and/or his work have been featured in/on CNN, NBC, G4, the Chicago Tribune, Blogcritics, Kik Axe Music, Fangoria, Starlog, the River Cities’ Reader. Slowfish, Oil, and more.Learn more here.

Connect with James on Facebook or Twitter.

Website: facebook.com/therockfather

Giveaway: IRON MAIDEN – EN VIVO! DVD and CD!

How to Stop Your Social Networks From Distracting You

Fri, 04 May 2012 07:16:11 +0000

Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and other social networks help you stay connected with friends and family, but it’s easy to overdo the connecting and end up distracted and unproductive. Worse, many social networks notify you every time someone tries to interact with you, making it even harder to concentrate on productive tasks. Turning these helpful reminders off can be tricky in some instances, but setting up a way to tune out mobile and e-mail notifications is well worthwhile. Here’s how to stop your social networks from distracting you, so you can get your working life back on track. And don’t worry–you can still peek at your Twitter page once in a while.

The most disruptive and intrusive notifications in my life are the push notifications that my smartphone reports from various apps and social networks. Though I was initially excited to have access to push notifications, I quickly turned them off for almost all of my apps so that I could avoid being pestered by updates that tended to be pretty trivial. The process for turning off mobile notifications varies slightly from OS to OS, but it’s usually not too complicated.

Your best bet with an Android phone is to open the offending app, press the Menu key, locate the messaging settings under that menu, and select the apps that you’d like to turn off notifications for. Unfortunately, if you want to kill all of your push notifications, you’ll have to do it manually in each app.

Silencing your notifications on an iOS 5 device is both easier and more obtuse, as you’ll need to navigate to Settings, Notifications to make the modifications. from there, select an app and set the ‘Alert Style’ to None. once again, you’ll need to go app by app to turn off all alerts; but they’re all in one menu, so it shouldn’t take much time–and blocking incessant alerts will help you avoid hours of lost productivity.

Once you’ve muffled your mobile devices’ alerts, you can turn your attention to removing annoying auto-updates from your email account. Turning off email notifications from Facebook and Twitter is a simple (albeit somewhat time-consuming) matter of finding and editing your notification settings in each service.

To eliminate Facebook email notifications, select Account Settings in the drop-down menu on the upper right side of your Facebook page, and then select Notifications from the menu on the left side of the page, to bring up your notification preferences. Manually select each part of your Facebook account, and unclick each checked box to turn off the corresponding notification e-mail. Facebook’s incredibly granular approach to settings means you’ll have to uncheck a lot of boxes on this screen, but the arrangement does let you control the email notifications you receive (so you can find out when someone posts pictures of you, but skip all the game invites), and it should reduce the amount of time you spend checking your email.

To turn off Twitter’s email notifications about new followers, retweets, and so on, first log in to your Twitter account and select Settings from the upper right drop-down menu; then select Notifications from the new menu on the left. Twitter has far fewer settings here than Facebook has in its modification options area. Simply turn off the six notification options, and you’ll be ready to go on your way.

Is the bright red Google+ notification icon in the top-right corner of your GMail account distracting you? Regrettably, the notification toolbar in Google+ is impossible to kill from your Google settings, and if you’re a GMail user you’ll often find your eyes drawn to that bright red reminder. If you want to continue to use Google services without having to endure the Google+ notification bar, download Google Chrome and install the Hide Google+ Notification extension.

If you’ve turned off all of your notifications but find that you still waste most of your day on Facebook and Twitter, it’s time to accept that the problem might rest with you as much as with the sites themselves. If you can’t help yourself, install a browser extension that blocks distracting sites automatically. as a Chrome user I prefer StayFocusd–a useful extension that completely blocks unwanted sites except during a limited time (the default duration is 10 minutes) each day. that way you can ensure that you don’t miss out on important updates, without wasting your whole day on the Web.

Firefox users should check out the similar Leechblock. Internet Explorer users are out of luck, and Safari doesn’t have a real alternative either. but Mac users can try SelfControl, an OS X application that lets you create a blacklist of sites you don’t want to visit and then blocks access to those sites across all browsers. Congratulations! By adopting these simple measures, you’ve taken a big step toward shutting out distraction and becoming more productive.

How to Stop Your Social Networks From Distracting You

Banjo Hits 1 Million Users, Signaling Mainstream Interest in Social Location Apps

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:16:10 +0000

The mobile app Banjo hit a million users this week, suggesting that a new crop of location-based social apps may become popular with mainstream users despite their privacy concerns.

Banjo pools shared information from several social networks — including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and FourSquare — and sorts it by location. Users of the app receive push alerts when a friend from any of their social networks is nearby. They can also access the specific content shared by those friends.

In the past year, many location-based social applications have launched. these include the much-touted Highlight, Glancee, Sonar and Zaarly.

Banjo reached the million-user mark in just nine months, outpacing big social networking players including Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare. Of course, the number of users of a free app doesn’t guarantee the app’s long-term success. but Banjo’s million users do suggest that at least some social discovery apps appeal to average users.

Banjo founder Damien Patton attributes his app’s success to its inclusion of numerous social networks (though not Google+) and to what Patton says is a greater respect for users’ privacy than other location-based apps have shown.

Banjo obtains location information from content that users have shared on social networks. it publishes the information only in ways that are consistent with the expectations users had when they shared it, according to Patton. for example, if a Facebook user shares a status update that includes a location identifier with his or her friends on Facebook, only those same friends will be able to see where that user is through Banjo. If the user allows friends of friends to see the status update on Facebook, then friends of friends will see his or her location in Banjo.

But Banjo can sometimes reveal a user’s location to people who don’t know him or her. Users of Facebook and FourSquare whose information Banjo picks up may not be aware that they have enabled public sharing, for example. and while most Twitter users understand that their tweets are public, they are used to other people finding them by hashtag or username, not by their current location.

Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum, found that potentially troubling.

“I downloaded [Banjo], and it was great that I could see easily across my multiple social networks what my friends are doing and whether they’re near me. but I also could see other people near me, and their pictures and information about them,” he said.

“The idea that because I share my information, people I don’t know can monitor whether I’m near them, is a bit disconcerting,” he said.

But Polonetsky said he would go back to using Banjo because it was fun.

Polonetsky’s behavior is not unusual, experts say. Many users express concerns about privacy without avoiding the products that trouble them, said Annette Zimmermann, an analyst at Gartner.

“Our experience is that consumers like to talk about being wary of privacy issues in those apps, but in the end they actually act differently,” she said in an email interview.

Cameron Scott covers search, web services and privacy for the IDG News Service. Follow Cameron on Twitter at CScott_IDG.

Banjo Hits 1 Million Users, Signaling Mainstream Interest in Social Location Apps

Afrihost First ISP to Launch CM4all Sites in South Africa

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:27:15 +0000

COLOGNE, Germany & BOSTON–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–Content Management AG (CM-AG), a leading developer of web-based applications, is proud to announce that Afrihost has successfully launched an English-language version of CM4all Sites. Founded in 2000, Afrihost is the third largest ADSL provider in South Africa and currently serves over 50,000+ hosting as well as 80,000+ ADSL accounts. just last October, the company was awarded South African ISP of the Year by mybroadband.co.za. part of Afrihost’s success is a portfolio of value-added services which is included in all hosting and ADSL packages.

“Thanks to its superior functionality and outstanding usability, CM4all Sites perfectly supports our strategy of providing each of our clients with the right tool to make the most of their online presence. the application’s unrivaled flexibility in customization as well as its very robust and tested APIs for integration and product configuration enabled us to blend CM4all Sites into our existing product range to ideally serve all of our user groups,” explains Brendan Armstrong, Technical Director of Afrihost.

CM4all Sites’ Instant Setup Page gets users up and running in the blink of an eye by providing them with a complete pre-configured website. they also benefit from CM-AG’s innovative widget technology, which allows for convenient drag & drop, configuration, and arrangement of all website elements. Built-in widgets range from contact forms through photo animations to social media connectivity with Twitter® and Facebook®. Users interested in e-commerce can leverage the shop widget to set up their own online shop and integrate it into their website. To guarantee an always up-to-date range of features, CM4all Sites comes with an open widget API that enables the integration of third-party services and allows for continuous development of widgets by CM-AG, OEM partners, and external software engineers.

For improved usability, a unique WYSIWYG editor provides full drag & drop functionality and allows for direct editing without any pop-ups. the improved template model enables users to fully individualize the included set of CSS templates by editing all colors and fonts as well as adding their own logos and images. A comprehensive file browser with an interactive drop zone accelerates uploading to the user’s webspace and greatly simplifies file management.

“We are excited to see our new OEM partner Afrihost rolling out our premium website building solution. Leveraging our latest technology, both novice and advanced users will be able to realize their very own vision of a professional website faster and easier than ever before. both of our companies began doing business at about the same time and, by combining our respective expertise, we have now created a very valuable and innovative solution for the South African market,” states Robert Schovenberg, CEO of CM-AG.

as usual with CM4all VAS products, the user interface of CM4all Sites was adapted to Afrihost’s corporate design. CM-AG safeguards the software’s availability with 24/7 support and continuously updates both the operating system and the software application.

3,327 characters, reproduction free of charge, copy requested.

About CM4all:

Robert Schovenberg and Cornel Schnietz founded Content Management AG in 1999. Headquartered in Cologne, Germany, CM-AG develops and distributes software and infrastructure solutions based on CM4all’s highly scalable technology, which enables the creation, maintenance and easy updating of websites, while also providing highly effective online file storage, management and sharing solutions.

with over three million paying customers worldwide, CM4all is a leading developer of web-based applications. the company’s core products are the website building solutions CM4all Sites and CM4all WebsiteCreator which are available in 20+ languages. CM4all software is adapted for and licensed to leading telcos, MSOs, ISPs and web hosting companies, like 1&1 Internet AG, Deutsche Telekom AG, Endurance International Group Inc., Hostway, NTT Communications, Swisscom AG, Telefónica de España S.A.U, Terra Networks S.A., UK2 Group, Unitymedia GmbH and Verio Inc.

More information is available at cm4all.com.

Afrihost First ISP to Launch CM4all Sites in South Africa

LinkedIn IPO Demand: Possible Irrational Valuation

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:27:10 +0000

LinkedIn IPO demand could be very strong tomorrow, but a possible irrational valuation of $45 per share could stall things a little. this would value the social networking company at $4 billion, that’s an increase of $10 a share. however, the early signs show that investors will pay that price.

WSJ say that this is one of the most anticipated initial public offerings in years, but they cannot help but think how much interest would be generated if Facebook had already had their IPO? LinkedIn only had a revenue of $243 million in 2010, but only managed to make a profit of $15.4 million.

The worrying thing that investors will have to take into consideration is the fact that LinkedIn is not expected to make much of a profit this year, as they have already made plans to invest heavily into the technology to help its growth. we can be certain that the likes of Facebook and Groupon will be watching tomorrows IPO very carefully, just to see if investors are prepared to buy into such a business. What makes LinkedIn different to other social networking services is the fact that most of their subscribers are somewhat wealthy, as they are mostly business types. this means that they will be more beneficial to the advertisers – something that investors will consider.

Do you think that LinkedIn is worth $4 billion? Will the IPO prove popular?

LinkedIn IPO Demand: Possible Irrational Valuation

LinkedIn’s Social-Ad Misstep

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:11:11 +0000

Move over Facebook. It’s time to pay attention to privacy on LinkedIn.

That was is the message of last week’s mini controversy over LinkedIn’s quiet effort to introduce a new type of advertising on the site that would commandeer users’ names and pictures for product endorsements.

LinkedIn first announced the new “social ads” in an upbeat blog post in late June. the ads would include the names and photos of people’s LinkedIn contacts if they were connected to the advertiser in some way and the company had changed its privacy policy. at the end, it mentioned that users may opt-out of the ads.

The controversial version of LinkedIn’s “social ads”, left, and the updated version.

The social network said it believed people would find job ads more interesting if they were reminded that they know a few people at the company. And they might find an ad for, say, VistaPrint business cards more “relevant” if they were made aware that someone in their network cares enough to “follow” VistaPrint. No doubt, the newly public company also calculated that advertisers would pay more money for such ads.

But LinkedIn might have guessed that putting people’s photos in ads would be a red line. After all, Facebook had to douse a user firestorm two years ago when a third-party app maker, acting against Facebook policy, used people’s profile pictures in ads it showed on the site. Facebook also displays “social ads” that include names — but not photos — of friends who “like” the advertiser.

Still, the line crossing went largely unnoticed until last week, when people who saw the new ads grew alarmed and the emotional Richter scale of the online Universe ticked up as bloggers took up their cause. Branding consultant Steve Woodruff, writing last Wednesday, said he was alerted to the ads by a friend, urged readers to opt-out and groaned about a “Facebook déjà vu.”

Rik Ferguson of security firm Trend Micro said Thursday on his Countermeasures blog that he was “angry” about the change, which he came across during a periodic settings check. LinkedIn “opted all their 120 million users in without any form of notification,” he said. He called the U.K. Information Commissioner to ask if LinkedIn had crossed a legal line, and was told yes. meanwhile, Dutch members of Parliament were asking similar questions in their country.

LinkedIn said it did notify users by showing everyone a banner message alerting them that its privacy policy had changed. the message included nary a word about social ads or a new use for member’s photos. I’m betting click-through rate was rock bottom.

The drums soon beat louder1, and by Friday LinkedIn was backpedling. In a new blog post it said would alter the ads so they showed only a link to contacts with advertiser connections, rather than display their names and photos. “We hear you loud and clear,” wrote Ryan Roslansky, director of product management at LinkedIn.

If you are not assuaged by the ads’ new design, it’s on you to opt out. Get your mouse ready: First, hover it over your name in blue in the top right corner of any page and click “Settings.” then click “Account” at the bottom left. look for “Privacy Controls” and click the first choice, “Manage Social Advertising.” In the pop-up window that appears, uncheck the box beside “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising” and hit “Save.”

Likewise, if you don’t want to participate in Facebook’s version of social ads, click the “Account” drop-down menu at the top right of any page, then click “Facebook Ads” in the menu on the left, and then “Edit social ads settings.” You’ll see a line in bold reading “Pair my social actions with ads for” and a drop-down menu where you can select “No one.” then click “Save changes.”

LinkedIn’s Social-Ad Misstep

Facebook Is Sharing Your Warped Reading Tastes With Your Friends

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:11:11 +0000

I first noticed it a week or so ago, appearing unbidden at the top of my feed: a list of articles that people in my Facebook network had apparently been reading. “Jane Smith and 4 other friends recently read articles,” the text said, and below that, a collection of surprisingly unsavory-sounding web links. Shortly after that, I saw that a friend had posted the following status:Dear friends, do you know that when you use those Facebook plugins, I can see you’re reading stories about rape, porn stars, and child murder?It’s true that the articles themselves seemed unusually … provocative, to say the least. if you’ve ever approved a Facebook app intended to facilitate “frictionless sharing,” you might want to think twice about your surfing habits—and whether your intent is to encourage your friends to read articles about dead babies.

On the surface, this new concept of seamless sharing is a decent enough idea: once you approve an app (like from The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, or Yahoo), you don’t have to bother with that time-consuming step of actually posting an article to share it with others. you just read it as you normally would, and Facebook takes care of the behind-the-scenes effort of posting the headline on your Facebook activity stream. Mind you, that’s for every single article you read through that service from there on out. So whether or not you really wanted to share “Man Decapitates Toddler With Butter Knife, Claims Devil made him Do it,” or “Seventeen Plastic Toy Figurines Found In one Man’s Anus”—too bad, there it is on your feed. As a clickable link for your friends, who then get the opportunity to approve the app for themselves, and on it goes. The problem with the feature is that you’re not really sharing content in any sort of deliberate way when an app automatically publishes what you just read. Maybe you just clicked it and didn’t read the whole thing, maybe you thought it was a terrible article. when you take the time to post a link to a social media site along with some commentary, that’s a purposeful action that has meaning behind it. That’s you saying, hey, check this out. Installing something that not only tracks your every move, but broadcasts it to others is something else altogether. it devalues the experience of sharing.

Not only do I not want to click your link because I don’t want to be asked to authorize a service I’m not interested in, I don’t want to click it because I have no faith you actually recommend it. As Molly Wood of CNET writes,

Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. it should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing–we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. (Frictionless sharing) will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.

Also, frankly, you’re creeping me out with your beheaded-children reading habits. Don’t share that shit with me, friend. What do you think about Facebook’s article sharing apps? Do you use them? Image via Facebook

Facebook Is Sharing Your Warped Reading Tastes With Your Friends

Mobile app helps clean up your Facebook image

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:11:33 +0000

Programmer Michael Devine was looking for a job earlier this year and realized that not all potential employers would appreciate his Facebook posts as much as his friends do. so he wrote a mobile app that allowed him to clean up his potentially off-color and political posts and comments.

“I’m an impulsive guy,” Devine said in a recent phone interview with CNET. “I like making people laugh and I also have strong political views. Given that, you can imagine the kinds of things I post on Facebook. so I wanted to clean up my own profile and thought others might want this as well.”

Devine’sAndroid app, called Exfoliate, allows you to delete batches of posts based on how long they’ve been up. for instance, you can have it remove posts that are older than three months and various time periods up to three years. You can clean just your Wall, or also remove posts from friends’ Walls. and the kind of content you can select for removal includes your posts, comments and likes.

Facebook wants us to keep all of our content up on the site and is even planning to launch a Timeline feature that will serve as a digital version of “This is your Life.” but Devine says many people don’t necessarily want an archive of their spontaneous day-to-day musings, which can ultimately come back to haunt them.

“When you really think about it, it becomes clear that there’s actually no reason to leave anything (on Facebook) after a certain point in time because no one sees it or they rarely see it,” he said. “It just sits there waiting for someone to see it out of context and then it can cause you trouble.”

Devine said more advanced filtering is coming, so people can be more selective about what they choose to remove or keep. for instance, soon you will be able to select specific friends’ profiles to include or exclude from a purge.

“So you could run Exfoliate from a friend’s page to remove your comments on their Wall right before de-friending them,” he said with a fiendish giggle. “It’s the ultimate break-up tool!”

but what about removing items based on subject, like “Tea Party” or “drugs”?

“Handling keywords is a tough problem because if I put a comment in the middle of a thread, computationally it would overburden a mobile device to do an analysis of all the content in that thread,” Devine said.

Exfoliate users will eventually be able to keep their friends from leaking their comments to the outside world. Devine said he is adding the ability to delete items based on how visible it is. “If you post on a friend’s Wall you are at the mercy of their Wall (privacy) settings,” he said. “So, if they make comments on their posts visible to the world your comment becomes public.”

AniPhone version is expected in a few weeks, according to Devine. the app costs $2.99.

There are a couple of things to remember about Exfoliate. It’s a bandwidth hog, so you would want to let it run for a few hours when it is plugged in at home on your Wi-Fi network.

and the actions are permanent. There’s no changing your mind and restoring the data. so, think before you purge.

Update Nov. 15 at 12:58 p.m. PTHere is CNET’s How-to article on using Exfoliate.

Mobile app helps clean up your Facebook image

10 Company Leaders Who Sparked Hiring

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:16:17 +0000

BOSTON (TheStreet) — CEOs often take the heat for hindering job growth.

With every downsizing, they are held accountable and suffer the ire of the unemployed. but what about those company leaders who have added consistently to the nation’s employment base, even amid frustrating economic times?

The following are 10 company leaders with a record of bolstering their pool of employees.

These are not necessarily the biggest employers, nor those paying the most. Some of the CEOs and companies listed here benefit as much from industry trends, market cycles and seasonal spending as leadership moves. while some have championed creative ways to bring in employees, others have done so out of necessity and demand.

The people and companies listed here, at the very least, are among those who have done their part to add to the national payroll, not subtract from it:

•Facebook; CEO mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is hardly the sort of conglomerate that will single-handedly fuel an economic recovery.

Nevertheless, its own hiring pace is brisk. With a new headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., the former 57-acre home of Sun Microsystems(Java), Facebook has announced plans to boost its workforce by 9,400 by 2017 — from its current 2,000 employees, all but a couple of hundred based in the U.S.

Facebook’s contribution to the workforce goes far beyond those on-site workers. With more than 750 million users globally, it has had a multiplier effect that has proved a catalyst for business.

A research paper released in September by economists at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland looked at what it called the “Facebook App Economy.”

It points out that more than 2.5 million Web sites have integrated with Facebook, and people on Facebook install 20 million apps every day. These apps range from “games like Zynga’s Farmville to music apps like Spotify to charity-oriented apps like Causes.”

The Facebook ecosystem also includes components such as the “like” button, the comments plug-in and an activity feed that enable developers to integrate with it.

“Each of these components of the Facebook Platform creates jobs, and each of those jobs contributes value to the economy,” the researchers wrote. “For example, the existence of the ‘Like’ button creates economic value by enabling people to share their experiences online with their friends. These friends provide increased referral traffic for companies’ Web sites, which in turn creates value for those companies, which in turn results in hiring new employees and retaining existing ones, which in turn results in those employees making purchases and paying rent or making mortgage payments.”

“Likewise, anyone can build an app on Facebook and begin earning revenue. if the app becomes popular, a developer may hire additional developers to add new features,” they added. “If the app becomes even more successful, the founder may hire even more developers to build a second or third or fourth app. And if that single developer becomes a blossoming company, then it must hire financial managers, a legal team, a public relations team and clerical staff. Ultimately, many jobs are created, and the company contributes significant value to the economy.”

Their conservative estimate of the employment impact of developers building apps on the Facebook Platform in the United States this year 182,744 full-time jobs, an economic impact of $12.2 billion.

“Using more aggressive estimates, the Facebook App Economy created 235,644 jobs, adding a value of $15.71 billion dollars to the U.S. economy,” they added.

•Starbucks; CEO Howard Schultz

Starbucks(SBUX) isn’t really on every street corner — it just feels that way. The chain of coffee shops has 6,500 stores across the country and globe.

Beyond its own formidable footprint and ever-expanding team of baristas, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has positioned himself as a champion of job creation.

The bombastic executive has helped launch the create Jobs for USA initiative. The partnership with the Opportunity Finance Network — a national network of private Community Development Financial Institutions — will facilitate loans to local, small businesses that might otherwise have a hard time securing the financing needed for expansion.

This week, as part of the initiative, Starbucks locations will be selling red, white and blue bracelets bearing the one-word message “Indivisible.” With matching funds from other sources, the $5 cost of the bracelets will leverage $35 in lending, says Schultz, who has ponied up $5 million to get the program off to a start.

For every $3,000 in bracelets sold by Starbucks, the accompanying loans will help hire, on average, one person, organizers say.

“The more we stimulate demand and increase the purchasing power of middle class consumers, the faster we will recover,” Schultz said, announcing the initiative. “We hope this is a galvanizing moment as Americans come together to be catalysts for change by giving community businesses access to the credit they need to hire, to grow and to contribute to creating thriving communities.”

As for Starbucks itself, the company employs more than 170,000 people, about 116,000 of them in the U.S.

•McDonald’s; CEO James Skinner

McDonald’s(MCD), under the leadership of CEO James Skinner, is such an important employer in the U.S. that it can single-handedly affect the economy.

That’s exactly what happened April 19, when a nationwide hiring spree was launched to add 50,000 employees to the fast food giant’s payroll to help run the chain’s more than 14,000 locations.

The available jobs ranged from part-time help to $50,000-a-year management positions. In total, McDonald’s expected the hires would boost its payroll by $518 million.

Before the event, McDonald’s had 650,000 employees, 13,000 of whom joined the company during a similar job hunt last year.

In total, McDonald’s got about 938,000 job applications, which broke down to about 1/12th of the nation’s unemployed workforce.

Analysts at Morgan Stanley(MS) estimated that among the hires from the April event, those who went to work in may accounted for almost half of job creation that month.

•Home Depot; Co-founder Bernie Marcus

In a CNBC interview last September, Home Depot(HD) co-founder Bernie Marcus took umbrage with President Barack Obama, blaming his tax policies and regulatory environment for the lack of business growth. He sarcastically “apologized” for having created more than 320,000 jobs throughout his leadership of the company.

No real apologies need to come from current CEO Frank Blake. This week alone, his company announced 691 jobs would be available in Utah, added to a base of 321,000 employees.

Whereas retailers gear up for a Christmas season rush with temporary workers, Home Depot looks to springtime — a time many pursue home improvements — for expansion. This past spring, the company gave 60,000 employees seasonal jobs.

•Wal-Mart; CEO Mike Duke

Wal-Mart(WMT) isn’t just a driving force for the U.S. economy, but a global source of jobs.

In the U.S., the downsizing and frugality sparked by the recession has led to an increase in its customer base.

While many have blamed the company as a job-killer for squeezing out small, local businesses and relying more on foreign imports than domestic-made products, the company can still take credit for increasing its payroll steadily (albeit at what critics deride as low wages and with sub-par benefits).

Since 2007, the year the great Recession took hold, Wal-Mart has added approximately 40,000 jobs in the U.S. its 9,700 retail units employ more than 2.1 million people worldwide and nearly 1.4 million in the U.S.

•Amazon;CEO Jeff Bezos

Like Facebook, Amazon(AMZN) — led by CEO Jeff Bezos — has been creating jobs on its own as well as fueling them at other companies.

Amazon has been increasing the size of its workforce steadily. At the beginning of its 2010 fiscal year it had just over 26,000 employees. With a current level of 43,200 full-time and part-time employees, its workforce has grown more than 60 percent.

Its subsidiary, the online shoe and fashion retailer Zappos.com, is also expanding. It has plans to add 5,000 employees, as well as boosting its staff by 2,000 temporary workers for the holiday season.

While Amazon certainly can’t hog all the credit, its role in normalizing e-commerce has been a boon for shipping companies.

UPS(UPS) and FedEx(FDX) have been among the handful of companies expanding their workforce alongside the retailer.

UPS has approximately 400,600 employees (as of Dec. 31), of which 330,600 are in the U.S. (Some 2,800 are pilots.)

With the holiday shopping season upon us, FedEx projects an uptick in business. between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it forecasts more than 260 million shipments to move through its global shipping networks — a 12 percent increase for the holiday season over last year.

In a statement, CEO Fred Smith credited the fact that “e-commerce continues to grow and demand increases with more customers shopping and conducting their business online.”

The company has announced that its 290,000-person workforce will be increased by 20,000 employees to meet holiday demands.

•Microsoft; CEO Steve Ballmer

Over the years, Microsoft(MSFT) was on a hiring spree that boosted its workforce to 95,000 employees.

More recently, however, the company has bled positions by the thousands. a low point for the company was 2009, when it announced nearly 6,000 layoffs.

The good news, if one is looking to trek to Washington State to ply a trade (although the company is now far more global than domestic), is that Microsoft, in part because of its success in the search engine space and the sales of its Window 7 operating system, is hiring again.

CEO Steve Ballmer may never be the go-to boss Bill Gates once was (and perhaps he barely deserves to make this list), but he has at least brought the company back up above the 90,000-employee level, adding 500 employees in the most recent quarter.

•Google; CEO Larry Page

Google(GOOG) is often cited as one of the nation’s great places to work — a distinction fueled by amenities ranging from in-house massages and gourmet meals to paid time off for pursuing personal projects.

It may never replace the vast numbers once employed by American steel companies and automakers, but it has upped the ante for tech companies.

The dominance of its online search and advertising services, combined with its successful foray into mobile technology, has empowered CEO Larry Page — as well as predecessor Eric Schmidt — to allow a steady hiring pace.

Just nine years ago, the company had a mere 500 employees. In 2007, it added more than 6,000 to its workforce; last year, 4,500 “Googlers” were brought in to fill needs in engineering and sales. as of Sept. 30, the company employs 31,353 full-time employees, up from 28,768 on June 30.

•Intel; CEO Paul Otellini

Overcoming a scary lull in the PC market, chip maker Intel(INTC) has been expanding its reach with technology needed for laptops, netbooks and all manner of mobile gadgets.

Earlier this year, CEO Paul Otellini announced that the company would create up to 4,000 jobs in the U.S., as well as invest in a $5 billion manufacturing plant in Arizona. Expansion in that state was also expected to create as many as 8,000 temporary construction jobs.

The company, with 100,000 employees, has slowed the pace of what has been steady hiring during the past several years. Nevertheless, it has postings for more than 1,000 unfilled jobs.

•Macy’s; CEO Terry Lundgren

It may be only temporary work, but Macy’s(M) is among the retailers boosting its seasonal workforce.

The company has announced plans to hire approximately 78,000 employees seasonal associates for its Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s stores, call centers, distribution centers and online fulfillment centers nationwide. The hiring plan represents an increase of about 4 percent from last year.

“We expect additional hiring this year given the continued sales growth in our business — both in-store and online,” CEO Terry J. Lundgren said in a statement.

Macy’s is not alone in boosting its workforce for the holidays.

On Sept. 27, Best Buy(BBY) announced that it will add 15,000 blue-shirted associates. It has also added more than 3,000 employees to provide customer support and manage inventory for its stores and Web site. The seasonal hires are in addition to 200 permanent full-time employees just added to its IT team.

Also notable is of Toys R us, which plans to hire more than 40,000 people for the shopping rush.

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