Slate's list of 50 companies that use Facebook well includes Apple, Louis Vuitton, and Gatorade

We all use Facebook well. We did put up pictures of the dumb pie we baked, or the loser concert we attended … not to mention cutesy pictures of us at various parties to prove our popularity. We update our statuses religiously, add friends, spy on people’s babies and smirk at dormant walls.

Of course, we are all aces at maximizing Facebook’s potential to kill time. But what about companies? Large one, small ones, ones that barely have any money or employees – How are they using God’s gift to nosey parkers a.k.a FB?

Slate’s Big Money compiled Big Money Facebook 50, a ranking of all the companies making the best use of Facebook.

Winners on the list include

Taco Bell – Yum Brands’ (YUM) fast food chain Taco Bell is responsive to fan comments and generates strong positive feedback when it posts promotions. (Big Money)

Gatorade: PepsiCo.’s (PEP) Gatorade set up an app that encouraged users to vote for their favorite moment from Michael Jordan’s career. More than 8,000 votes were cast on the sports drink’s page.

Apple Students: Apple (AAPL) started “Apple Students” as a sponsored group when the Facebook community was almost exclusively college kids. Even though Facebook has since grown, the electronics retailer’s page is a good place to deliver targeted messages to this audience.

Check out the whole list here.

Big Money points out that most of the companies that made the list are very large, very well known firms.  It also notes, that ExxonMobil seems to have no official presence on Facebook (GASP!) and Bank of America has little more than 600 fans (C’mon fellas, lets some ‘em banks a ‘lil more lovin! After all they have our MONEY!).

The piece says Facebook pages are also a great way for the  company to announce giveaways, communicate promotions to fans across the world and serve as a forum to creatively generate ideas to support the product in question (eg.Design ideas from fans for a car manufacturer)

You can read the rest of Slate Big Money’s Facebook 50 here.

While we were all scratching our heads wondering how to make our batteries lost longer, he called up Isidor Buchmann, the Ceo of Cadex Electronics, a Canadian company that makes battery-testing equipment to get a few tips on how to make sure your battery goes on and on and on and …

Laptops:

Manjoo writes that the typical lifespan of a lithium-ion laptop battery ranges from 18 months to 2 years.

The main culprits for killing off your laptop battery include undercharging, overcharging and HEAT.  So try and keep your laptop as cool as possible.

The best technique here is to charge up your battery when the computer is turned off.

When your laptop is turned on and plugged in, you should pull the battery out of your computer. Yes, pull it out. “I know that’s inconvenient,” Buchmann says, “but keeping your laptop plugged in when the battery’s fully charged—that combination is bad for your battery.”

Phones, cameras, and other gadgets:

To make sure that your battery lasts long, try and keep your cells in the 20-80% range and keep them cool.

Manjoo writes the best way to store batteries that you won’t be using for a long time—as in a camera, though this also applies to laptop batteries—is to charge them to the 40 percent level first.

Charging the battery a little bit before you put it away ensures that it doesn’t get down to dangerously low levels while in storage.

The memory effect: Will your battery lose capacity if you don’t let it go down to zero every once in a while? Not likely, writes Manjoo.

Read the rest of the piece at Slate.com

Dayo Olapade writes in The Root that when the first lady wants to jet to Copenhagen, Denmark, with Oprah Winfrey, transform the East Room into a Stevie Wonder concert or import 650 pounds of Hawaiian pork butt to the south lawn of the White House for a luau, Jarvis and 25 others are right there to make it happen.

The 28-year old graduate of Spelman College was a staffer for then- Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, when her political world collapsed that November when her boss was bounced from Congress and George W. Bush won reelection. That’s when Pete Rouse, Daschle’s chief of staff and now a senior White House adviser, brought her into the office of a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.

In those days, “We always knew,” she says now. “We always believed that if there was going to be a first African-American president, he was going to do it.”

So what is it like working for the Obamas? Michelle, in particular – is she high or low maintainence?  Find out more,  here.

Just last week, The New York Times announced that they were cutting 100 newsroom positions because they just weren’t making enough money. Readers wrote in that they were willing to pay for digital content if that means that jobs can be saved. Nobel thought indeed, but execution of that warm fuzzy intention can be dodgy!

Matlin writes in his piece that for years, the web has been a freeloader’s paradise. Content was free as websites were supported by ads. As ads dry up due to cutbacks, there’s only so much money sites can make. So if we want Hulu to be the best it can be, we need it to make the most money it can make. And the only way to do that is start charging for its content.

“It’s time we grow up and understand we’re going to have to pay for things we really love once they become successful,” says Matlin. “We’re getting too old to expect to crash on our friends’ couches without paying rent.”

Matlin also points out startups are monetizing earlier, content sites are reinventing their business models by sticking ads in cracks and crevices, and news sites are toying with the idea of pay walls. So the fact that Hulu may start charging for content both legitimizes the site’s business model and provides a test-case for other Internet companies moving away from the ad-supported revenue. “It’s time we grow up and understand we’re going to have to pay for things we really love once they become successful,” says Matlin. “We’re getting too old to expect to crash on our friends’ couches without paying rent.”