IanSchafer.com

Deep Focus and The FWA Bring Halloween to Your Desktop.

Happy Halloween from Deep Focus & The FWA.

Get yer desktop wallpaper here!

Silicon Alley Insider Names its Top 100.

Today, Silicon Alley Insider unveils its top 100 "entrepreneurs, investors, executives, and technologists who made waves in the New York community this year."

It's an impressive list, and one that finally more adequately recognizes and represents the agency world (David Kenny, Peter Hershberg, Joshua Stylman, Laura Desmond).

The top ten includes folks I'm happy to cavort with on occasion, so special shout outs go to Nick Denton, Ken Lerer, and Scott (my former boss) Heiferman.

The top ten are:

1. Fred Wilson

2. Quincy Smith

3. Nick Denton

4. Barry Diller

5. Alan Patricof

6. Ken Lerer

7. Tim Armstrong

8. Bob Pittman

9. Randy Falco

10. Scott Heiferman

Check out the rest of the 100 here.

Special props go to my friends, Ben Lerer (41), Randall Rothenberg (51), Peter Hershberg & Joshua Stylman (54), Gary Vaynerchuk (60),Dina Kaplan (82), and Rufus Griscom (93). Congrats!

Personally, I'm proud to have made their "up-and-comers" list and to be included -- even tangentially -- in a list that features some of the brightest and most innovative people I've ever met.

How to Get Free Wi-Fi on Your iPhone at Starbucks.

It's about time.

If you've got an iPhone, you can now get free WiFi from AT&T at Starbucks. You also need to be able to follow these instructions:

**Activate Wi-Fi from the settings icon on your iPhone

**Select "attwifi" from the list of available networks

**Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap 'continue'.

**You will receive a text message from AT&T with a secure link to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot. You will not be charged for the text message.

**The SMS link will only be valid for 24 hours at the location it was requested. Another request must be submitted when using another hotspot location.

**Open the text message and tap on the link for 24-hour access to the AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot

Get An Inside Look at the Making of DEAD SPACE: No Known Survivors.

In the spirit of all hallow's eve, and all things freaking disgusting, be sure to check out Fangoria's inside look at the making of NoKnownSurvivors, an epic 3-D immersive prologue for the release of Electronic Arts' highly rated, highly anticipated game, DEAD SPACE.

Kudos to the entire team @ Deep Focus for developing my favorite website of the year

Google Earth Comes to the iPhone.

Google has officially released the Google Earth app for the iPhone, available now in the iTunes store, and it's beautiful.

Here's a video walkthrough from Peter Birch, Google Earth's project manager.

Click here to download the app for your iPhone from the iTunes App Store.

YouTube Lets You Link Deep.

I gotta tell you. I'm a big fan of news that involves the word 'deep'.

And the latest bit of 'deep' news is that YouTube is now allowing you to deep-link within its video content. This means that instead of linking to the beginning of a video on YouTube, you can link directly to a point within that video.

This is important because as YouTube increases the length of content available on the site, it's going to become increasingly helpful to be able to point people to specific points within that content. This is just another utility (that YouTube has not yet made 'official' -- it's only possible to do this now by manually altering the URL) to be used when distributing content, or blogging about it.

For example, if I wanted to link you right to where I receive my Commodore 64 on my birthday, rather than make you sit through the setup, you can do that by appending '#t=0m12s' to the end of the YouTube URL.

If you're in the business of getting people to link to your content, this could be a good tool for you.

See it in action here.

Social Media for Social Good at the Ad Council.

I spoke today at the Ad Council's Partner Conference, where many of the causes the Ad Council supports get together to discuss the burning issues around raising awareness of their very important initiatives.

At this event, the focus was squarely, 100% on social media, and understandably so.

In doing my part to set the table for the day's discussion, I gave the following presentation where I talked about some significant research findings, best practices, and case studies including our recent major effort with the Ad Council, SHARE YOUR VOICE.

Enjoy!

Social Media for Social Good

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

Things I Learned During the Biden/Palin Debate.

I, like millions of others, watched the Biden/Palin debate tonight.

I come away from it learning lots of things, most of which I will share with you now:

1) Knowing that your Tweets will make it to television still doesn't stop people from mentioning that they're waiting for their pizza delivery.

2) Facebook's status/comment threading is the new FriendFeed.

3) Even though Current was cool for saying "hash tags" they were uncool for doing a Max Headroom-style Biden/Palin megamix video.

4) For the second consecutive debate, the Obama/Biden ticket mentioned the internet (Obama: 'broadband', Biden: 'joebiden.com'), and the McCain/Palin ticket did not.

5) Tweeters lean left.

6) It took less than an hour from the beginning of the debate for footage to show up on YouTube.

7) My personal twitterstream (read: others' tweets) was higher in volume following the debate than during it.

8) CurrentTV's debate coverage featuring tweets innovative, entertaining, but aesthetically a bit annoying. Whey the crazy word-flying dissolve?

9) Not every tweet made the Current debate coverage. Mine didn't, but @MTLB and @Mikearauz's did. Kudos for being part of history, guys.

10) Facebook's status/comment threading is not only the new FriendFeed, it will be one of Facebook's most popular features -- if not THE most popular feature -- within weeks. It's the new newsfeed, and marketers will shift strategy to influence those status updates. This is especially true now that they can actually facilitate conversations. Because of the redesign, applications are somewhat less effective at affecting the newsfeed...

BONUS) CNN's use of Microsoft Surface on TV is pretty darn cool.