192,000 people have donated to 26,000 causes. It’s quite heartwarming, don’t you think? If you feel like donating, or just raising the profile of your chosen charity, click here.

Studying US audience statistics, it’s clear that there’s been a slight shift over the last month in Facebook’s demographic.  Facebook’s usage between 18-25 year olds reduced by 3% last month, whereas users between the age of 35-65 have skyrocketed.

The amount of users over the age of 55 has grown by 513.7%!  This takes Facebook’s grey-haired, buspass wielding count up to nearly 6 million ‘active’ monthly users (although, unsurprisingly, not all of them are particularly active, enjoying plentiful naps, watching a lot of daytime television and staring out of the same window for hours).

Over here in the UK the trend is similar, with a big leap towards older internet users logging on.  45-54 year old brits have increased from (approximately) 1,180,000 up to 1,430,000.  The golden oldies, 55-64 year olds have increased their numbers from 416,000 up to 605,000

This is an impressive oldie presence for the web, and brings our elders into genuine marketable consideration.  It’s the biggest continuing shift in Facebook’s demographic at the moment, and while it’s surely partly down to teenage kids working and socialising in the brief sunshine, it’s also no doubt the start of a shift in the age of the site’s user base.

There’s another interesting shift going on, as the popular platform picks up more pace in countries that have otherwise been dominated by other social networking platforms.  There’s been a big rise in India and Brazil, both previously ruled by Google’s Orkut.

India jumped from 1.6 million active users per month to 3.2 in May and June.  Brazil’s just broken the 1 million mark.  While Orkut is still some way ahead (totaling over 30 million users between the two territories), Facebook is slowly catching.

It’s increasing in other places, too. In the month of June alone, Facebook managed to increase its presence in the Philippines by 50%, 42% in Indonesia and 25% in Mexico.

Within Europe there’ve been big increases as well.  76% increases in the Netherlands, 144% in the Czech Republic and 22% in Italy.  These are big jumps in South America, Asia and Europe.

This is down to a few different factors.  Firstly, there’s Facebook’s nifty ‘crowd sourced’ translations making the platform more and more user friendly for non-English speakers.  Secondly, Facebook’s intelligent mobile distribution makes it a popular option for those who spend their social time browsing on their phone.  Thirdly, Facebook is becoming the hot option as a ‘second social site’, grabbing users who want a more international offering to accompany the time they spend on their local versions of the model.

Our latest application, the Tango Head Masher 3000 has been launched on Facebook.  To promote Britvic’s launch of their new, larger-canned Tango with Added Tango, we’ve made them a spiffing application that facilitates the mockery of your friends and relatives, in a pleasant and rather silly manner.  It’s all very funny.  Click here to get mashing!

This level of popularity has spawned Facebook: The Movie. Without wanting to veer too much into the territory of Perez Hilton or Harry Knowles, The Social Network is set to be an adaptation of the Ben Mezrich’s sleazy Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, which itself has not even been released yet.  There’s some big-name talent behind the production, with a script by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing, Studio 60 and A Few Good Men fame.  David Fincher, director of Se7en, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Zodiac is set to direct.  Keep your eyes peeled!

Facebook Connect, the ability to bring your friends and Facebook details with you to any web site, is growing in popularity. Facebook recently announced that 10,000 web sites have implemented it and the use of the plug in slowly grows on community platforms such as Drupal.

But what is a great Facebook Connect implementation?

In January for Obama’s inauguration, CNN used Facebook Connect so viewers could update their Facebook status so friends also watching at the same time could see how each other felt. Several of my friends mentioned the tears welling up in their eyes. 1 million Facebook updates meant this was the first great example of social tv.

Facebook Connect seems to improve conversions and usage too. Gawker, the popular blogging network, saw login rates increase by 40 percent and Joost noted that Facebook Connect users stayed on site longer to watch 30 percent more videos than non-connect users.

But my current favourite is the awesome Prototype Experience trailer that sucks in your Facebook photos to make this scarily realistic game trailer…

Those friend-hungry folks out there can now aggressively up their friend count with ease. It’s all being done with security and copyright in mind, however, as Facebook are attempting to ensure no abuse of their system and usernames are set in stone once they’ve been chosen. Pick wisely, as LadyGaGaLover2009 might not sound so cool in 6 months!

It’s now much easier to increase your businesses exposure, too, with a tidier and more memorable web address providing an easier path for Facebook users (and Google searches) to reach your content and brand. Whereas prior to this launch the address of your company’s Facebook page would’ve been a garbled mess of letters and numbers (unless you had a nice large ad-spend, in which case vanity URL’s were specially available), it’ll now be the more business-card friendly facebook.com/yourcompanynamehere. The myriad of benefits this offers are obvious, and it’s another big step towards making Facebook the unifying outlet for social networking and brand exposure. Expect to see Facebook URLs springing up on billboards, the side of busses, film trailers and magazines over the next few months.

On a somewhat similar note, Twitter now offer ‘Verified Accounts’, in essence ensuring users that the tweets they are reading are the real deal, from the horses mouth, and adding another level of confidence and security to those 140 characters.

When 1 in 8 british minutes online are now spent on Facebook (Source: Nielsen ) it’s natural for advertisers to ask why.

The answer lies in the stream, the new real time feed of everything happening amongst my friends in their online time. It’s the virtuous circle of sharing – the more they share, the more I see what they do and then share myself.

At Nudge we’re working on new approaches to let brands harness and engage with users at the streams edge.  It’s not about providing ways to create content, it’s about remixing what’s already there and combining a social filtering approach, to create an awesome branded engagement experience.

Vic Gundotra at Google IO keynote yesterday declared that the web had won. It is the dominant programming system. He then went on to introduce a host of new technologies. What does this mean for us in the real world of app development?

1. Mobile apps will eventually be web apps. (no more developing separately for Symbian, Iphone and Blackberry). Mobile browsers will soon be able to talk to native mobile features like the accelerometer, GPS and calling.
2. Web apps will be faster (browsers are getting faster through processing javascript quicker, allowing local data storage) and will compete head on with heavier and heavier desktop apps (think Google Photo Editor, Google Project and so on)
3. Geolocation is coming –  we’ve filtered information now by its popularity (Google / Digg), and by what our friends think (Facebook) and next we’ll filter by its proximity to us (Geolocation).

Obviously I care more about a friend or celebrity popping into a bar in the next road to me than I do about someone on the other side of the planet. Accurate, reliable geolocation services (see Firefox 3.5) are just around the corner for the mass market and will see a new way of filtering information.

For the techies out there here are a few links and notes to get you excited:

1.  HTML 5 will be in Firefox 3.5 and Chrome soon – looks cool – allows tag and enbaling pixel based layouts (draw a diagonal line). They showed a cool demo of rotating a playing video with a javascript transform.
2. 3D engine will be in browser natively so you can access with javascript
3.  Web Elements allows you to drop code snippets (like a comment wall) onto your web page really easily
4. App engine now supports Java – Manuel Lemos has managed to get PHP running on app engine as well
5.  Geolocation is going to be in and working in Firefox 3.5

If you haven’t had a go yet, the value index has been designed as a way of benchmarking your activity, popularity and influence amongst your friends and contacts on Facebook - basically how much presence you have in your own network.

Behind the scenes we’ve broken down user-behaviour into three areas:

• Activity:
  • Amount of status updates (last 30 days)
  • Amount of uploaded photos (last 30 days)
  • Amount of links posted (last 30 days)
• Social:
  • Amount of groups you’re part of (ever)
  • Amount of events you’ve been invited to (last four months)
  • Amount of photos you’ve been tagged in (last 30 days)
• Popularity:
  • How many friends you currently have
  • Percentage of your friends that have the value index app installed

We give each of these three main areas a weighting, then add them up, which gives you your final value (can be recalculated once a day).

So not voodoo then, and not just random. We’ve tried to take into account as many aspects of activity and friend-participation as possible and not just gone for a popularity contest. Would be great to hear your feedback - think it’s well balanced? Maybe we should be taking something else into account? Or just not happy with your ranking? At the time of writing I’m 4776th so you’re not the only one…