FB IPO ZOMG!!! In case you've been living under a rock, or holed up playing Diablo 3, Facebook is going public on Friday. For some people that means becoming instant millionaires, for the rest of us it means more ads (probably). What's everyone saying about how this IPO is going to affect the future of Facebook and the Internet at large? Here's a quick round up of the word on the Web:

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Hot damn! A new Facebook change that was met with equal parts resistance and praise! It’s not like that’s ever happened before...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Facebook rolled out Timeline for Pages a few weeks ago (it will become mandatory for all brands at the end of March). Like most changes on Facebook, it was met with immediate disdain and calls for heads to roll. I too found myself caught up in the angry mob mentality of, “It wasn’t broke, why’d you fix it!”

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Every year Studiobanks creates a Christmas card to share with clients and friends. Seeing as we’re an interactive based agency, our Christmas cards live on the Web. In years past we’ve created tech heavy interactive experiences. This year, we wanted to stretch our creative legs a bit and come up with an engaging experience that didn’t rely on flashy tech but rather on a story and social media.

We decided we wanted to present our Occupy North Pole concept in the same way Occupy Wall Street was connecting with the masses: through blog posts, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. For the YouTube videos we decided to represent the world of the North Pole using the iconic Rankin/Bass stop-motion television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We quickly realized that the videos would need elf protestors. Of course, being a feel-good family movie, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer didn’t include a single elf waving a protest sign, let alone a whole group of them occupying Santa’s front yard. So to make our vision come to life, we decided to create the missing elements ourselves to supplement the edited Rudolf footage. Since I tend to look for pretty much any excuse to work in 3D, the job of creating the protesting elves fell to me.

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Occupy-NorthPole.com is now live and fighting the good fight against cookie inequality! Learn more about the movement on their site and then check ‘em out on Facebook and stay up to date about all the news by following the movement on Twitter:

@ChandlerWobble: Head spokes-elf for the ONP movement.

@Occupy_NP: The official twitter account of the ONP movement.

@Red_NoseRudolph: Santa’s 9th reindeer and proud member of the Reindeer Union for over 72 years.

@Sam_theSnowman: Lead reporter covering the movement for the North Pole News Network.

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Social media management: it isn’t just for the neighborhood kid down the street who fixes your computer anymore. With the seemingly endless parade of social networks gaining and waning in popularity, it’s basically a full time job to stay engaged with customers or clients through social media. Which can be a problem for some people who, you know, have an actual full-time job that happens to be the whole reason they need to be on multiple social networks to begin with. That’s where a social media manager comes in.

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I like G+ and I cannot lie! You other bloggers can’t deny. When a social network shows up with an itty-bitty user base and some circles in your face you get sprung…from Facebook.

Oh my god, Becky. The hype about G+ is so big. Everyone’s all like ‘It’s the Facebook killer! No wait, it’s the Twitter killer! It’s super cool! No wait, it’s lame and it’s going to fail.’ Wrong! G+ is the best blog aggregator you aren’t using. Let’s rewind, shall we, to early July. Once the initial euphoria of having scored a G+ invite wore off, I realized my Stream was not unlike the crowd at Spinal Tap’s Jazz Odyssey concert. After a few days of little to no new content, I did something I’d never done before: I circled a stranger.

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Fasten your safety belts boys and girls, Facebook is poised to announce a new feature at the f8 developer conference and this time it’s not something they ripped off from Google+! TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook will be introducing some new buttons into your life. Beyond their ubiquitous Like button, you’ll soon be able to note that you have Read, Listened, Watched, and Want various parts of the Internet. Still conspicuously absent is the long sought after Dislike button, but whatever. Big news! TechCrunch has some interesting ideas about this upcoming rollout—namely, why Facebook would want even more data from you (guess, just guess). Check out the full article here.

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Nielsen, which is solely responsible for getting your favorite TV show cancelled because they let the networks know how few people were watching, have increasingly focused their hard-hitting data collection on social networking. Check out their State of the Media: Social Media Report for Q3 2011 for the latest research confirming everything you suspected all along. It's both eye opening and informative, though it will do nothing to bring back Arrested Development.

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