Companies put best Facebook forward

Companies are increasingly leaning on the popular social network, which claims a half billion users, to market their products and services. They are going beyond standard display ads and stale fan pages, creating Facebook-specific applications and integrating themselves into games such as FarmVille. Last month, Englewood-based Pixorial launched a free program that allows Facebook users to edit and upload videos to their profiles. The application offers more features than Facebook’s standard video uploading program, such as the ability to add background music. “Instead of spending all of these marketing dollars trying to get people to come to Pixorial, it would be easier for us to take Pixorial to them,” said Andres Espiñeira, who founded the company in 2007. Pixorial provides services that allow people to share videos online, regardless of format. With about 50,000 active users, the startup is able to target millions more with an app that cost just a few months worth of man-hours to develop