Facebook Page owners have been able to target “Updates” – Facebook’s term for message blasts that Page owners can send to fans that show up in a secondary tab in the Inbox – by age, sex, and location for a long time. Now, Facebook has added a new way for Page owners to target news feed stories to fans by location and language as well.

Here’s how it works. First, Page owners will notice a new targeting button to the left of the Share button on their Page. Clicking the targeting button gives Page owners two options: “Everyone” or “Customize.”

When “Customize” is chosen, Page owners can then specify language and/or city, state, or country targeting parameters for the News Feed story:

Overall, it’s a nice new way for Facebook to let Page administrators share the most relevant content into the stream. The new features will be especially useful for Pages with geographically diverse fan bases, like major celebrities and global brands, as well as local businesses. Now, Barack Obama can publish updates to fans around the world in their native language, Coca-Cola can target messages to users only in the appropriate regions, and chain stores can let fans in one particular city know about upcoming events or promotions.

Performance advertising conglomerate Adknowledge is adding more banner advertising to its inventory, starting on Friday when it absorbs SocialMedia’s ad network on Facebook. The latter company is moving away from that business completely as it focuses on “social ads” — interactive ads where can do things like see others’ tweets about a product and send their own responses back to Twitter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. This is Adknowledge’s fourth acquisition in social network advertising, following its purchase of application ad network Cubics in December of 2007, then the addition of Lookery’s network in November of 2008, and most prominently the acquisition of a top advertising offers provider, Super Rewards, in July.

Starting on Friday, developers using SocialMedia will be moving on to the Cubics platform, according to Chris Smutny, Adknowledge’s vice president of social applications and online gaming. While many of the largest app developers, especially in social gaming, have moved to virtual currency monetization, he sees a range of apps still making money primarily through ads. The ubiquitous simple quiz apps, for example.

SocialMedia was one of the first social application ad networks, but it’s been focused elsewhere for quite a while. So when Smutny told us that the purchase would broaden the company’s banner-ad footprint, we asked him by how much. He said it would be “decently material,” but didn’t provide specifics. He and others at the company also are notably emphasizing something else with this news, which is that Adknowledge is not building applications to compete with developers while serving ads for them at the same time. RockYou, in some sense, does both.

Super Rewards is one of the many offer companies that has been running some deceptive offer ads, but like others, it says it has been busy cleaning things up. In the context of this news, Smutny adds that the company has started making direct ad sales so high-quality advertisers can reach across its banner network and its offers in a single buy. Readers in Western Europe and Australia can see the company doing this, with T-Mobile, Mastercard and UNICEF currently running campaigns.

The purchase cements Adknowledge’s long-evolving strategy — give developers ways to make money through banner ads as well as through direct payments and offers within offer walls, then package this inventory and sell it to its existing base of advertisers.

While Facebook has let Facebook Page administrators target Page updates to fans for a while now, the company just extended targeting to stream updates. The service mimics the functionality provided by the new status update privacy settings first demoed by Facebook back in July. While the new privacy settings have yet to go live almost 5 months later, it appears that Facebook wants to enable granular stream publishing filters for page administrators as well.



By clicking on a new stream filter toggle that shows up next to the “Publish” button, Page administrators can select which fans they’d like to make stories visible to based on their country and language. For international brands, this is extremely valuable. We even have a French version of our site however non-French speaking users probably won’t find the content on the site valuable. With this new feature we can target our French readers.

While we have not confirmed whether or not this is a site-wide rollout, I’d expect this feature to be available for all Page administrators in a short amount of time. We’ll reach out to Facebook for more information but considering that it’s almost midnight on the west coast, I doubt we’ll hear back until tomorrow.

Update

As Jim Burnell points out in the comments, the feature has been rolled out to all Page administrators as announced via the Facebook Pages notes.

While Facebook is the largest photo platform on the web, the company only recently became a dominant force in the video streaming space. In the past month, the company doubled the number of video streams from 110.418 million streams to 216.765 million streams according to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers. That’s a dramatic increase, making the site the third largest video site on the web, behind YouTube and Hulu.



The fact that Facebook can remain profitable while scaling the largest photo service on the web and one of the fastest growing video services is incredible. At this rate, Facebook could surpass Hulu to become the second largest video platform in a couple months and could eventually be contenting with YouTube, the most dominant video site on the web with over 6.6 billion streams a month.

With over 14 million videos shared on the site each month, each video would need to be watched 16 times in order to hit Nielsen’s estimates. Given that each user has 130 friends on average, it’s easy to understand how video views on Facebook continue to grow. As video becomes a standard feature of mobile devices, I would only expect the number of videos shared on Facebook to continue to grow overtime.

If the numbers continue to grow as fast as they are right now, Facebook could be larger than YouTube in 6 months. It’s a bold statement, but Facebook continues to experience unmatched growth.

This evening Chris Putnam of Facebook announced that the company is launching an upgraded version of their photo uploader, immediately available for testing as on of Facebook’s Prototype applications. Over time Facebook has had issues with their automated uploading tool, and as such they’ve been working on developing an improved version. If you want to test it out yourself, you can go install the “New Photo Uploader” immediately.



There are a number of upgrades with this new service on the technical side. The most significant is that uploading takes place in the background, which means you can navigate to anywhere on Facebook while your images are being uploaded. The entire user interface is built using HTML and CSS, and the background upload thread takes advantage of JSONP (something you’ve probably used if you’ve played around with JQuery or other JavaScript libraries extensively).

The new service should increase reliability and remove the previous dependance on Java, which was a problem for many users. For the most part, Chris Putnam’s post discusses the technical accomplishments of this new project (which makes sense considering it was posted to the Facebook Engineering page). If you’ve ever come back from a trip and want to upload a bunch of photos, you have no doubt experienced problems with the Facebook photo uploader breaking.

This new tools should resolve most of the previous problems, making uploading much more efficient. To learn more about the new tool view Chris Putnam’s note from this evening or just install the New Photo Uploader application.

A few weeks ago, Facebook launched a new “widgets center” for businesses and users to create Facebook widgets for their websites or blogs. Originally in the widgets center were the Profile Badge, Photo Badge, Fan Box, Live Stream Box, and Page Badge. Now, Facebook is promoting a Fan Badge widget both in the widget center and on Pages that users are a fan of.

It works just like you’d think, promoting the Facebook Page the user is a fan of. Here’s how the tool to generate the Fan Badge widget looks:

Page owners can drive users to the wizard with their Page preselected in step 1 by choosing their Page from the drop down and copying and pasting the URL.

With Fan Badge widgets, Page owners have another way to encourage users to promote their page and drive more traffic (and fans) to it. Of course, this is good for Facebook as well – all the Facebook widgets out on the web act as a giant funnel bringing people in to the Facebook ecosystem.

Facebook took a big leap up the video streaming ladder last month. It is now sitting pretty in the number 3 slot behind YouTube and Hulu in number of total streams. In addition, the social networking site clocked up over double the unique viewers of Hulu, although in total streams Hulu eclipsed Facebook almost 4 to 1.

That’s a significant gain for Facebook, who just squeaked into the Top 10 the month before. While YouTube is still way out in front of both sites, execs at Hulu might want to take notice of the sheer viral power of the Facebook network to socialize video in ways that Hulu, with its spartan social features by comparison, simply can’t as easily leverage on its own (in fact, it seems they have noticed).

The picture for online video overall seems somewhat plateaued, with a Nielson reported 11.2 billion total stream in October — which is only enough to match the numbers from the hot summer video season this past July. Still, total views are up slightly from September’s 11 billion, although uniques have fallen very modestly to 138.6 million from 139.3 million the previous month.

What do you think: will Facebook’s inherent virality be enough to propel it past the premium content from major networks aggregated by Hulu? Do you find yourself watching and/or sharing more videos on Facebook?

[via NewTeeVee]

Tags: facebook, hulu, nielson, ONLINE VIDEO, video streaming, viral video, youtube

Last night, Facebook announced that after a week-long “notice and comment” period, it has decided to adopt the updated privacy policy it initially proposed in late October.

Because the proposed policy did not receive over 7,000 comments — the threshold Facebook laid out in its latest Statement of Rights and Responsibilities — the new policy did not go to site-wide user voting as happened earlier this year. In fact, the English version of the draft only got about 1,000 comments total.

What changes does the new policy bring about? As we detailed when the new policy was proposed, part of the intent with this draft was to provide a “clearer and more comprehensive” description of what the policies actually mean.

Facebook also added a blurb on “location” in which Facebook says it will treat your location as subject to your overall privacy settings (share with “everyone,” just “friends,” etc.). So Facebook is preparing, at least legally, for more location-based services:

Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.

In terms of advertising, Facebook has included language that allows it to provide general statistics about users who interact with ads, but not personally identifiable information. Facebook also says:

We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:

• We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.


• We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.

Other notable reiterations of previous policies include what Facebook has to say to developers. “We do not guarantee that Platform will always be free,” according to the document.

Overall, the new policy does not represent any major shift in Facebook’s privacy philosophy, but is a part of its overall effort to simplify its privacy and legal documentation.

More politicians and watchdog organizations are paying attention to Facebook’s privacy policies too. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has pushed the company to adopt more detailed rules about a number of practices, including better informing users what data they are sharing, and with whom.

And just today, Jim Gamble of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, criticized Facebook for not placing the CEOP “report” button on its website. Facebook responded, “We are confident that the Ceop button is an excellent solution for sites that have not invested in as robust a reporting infrastructure as Facebook has in place and one we continue to improve.”

Facebook’s recently-redesigned home page features a top stories view of the most interesting items that your friends are sharing, plus a live feed view of the most recent items. And both views just got a seemingly small new update: A simplified interface for hiding whoever is sharing stories that you don’t want to see.

Here’s how it works. Drag your mouse over a feed story item. You’ll see the word “hide” appear. Then mouse over it and you’ll see it turn into a button. Click on the button and you’ll get a minimized view of whatever you just hid — a person, page or application.

There’ll be a link to “edit options” within that view. If you click on it, you’ll see a pop-up window showing a list of the people, pages and apps you’ve already hidden, including whichever one you just did. You’ll have the option to add any of them back in within this window. You can also find the “edit options” button at the bottom of either feed.

Previously, the “hide” button gave you a drop-down menu showing a variety of options for hiding friends and apps.

Also, this is just how the new features works for the top stories view. In the live feed, meanwhile, you have the new hide option, but “edit options” shows you the same interface as the live feed had already: the number of friends who will show up in your live stream, the people you’ve blocked, but no options for hiding or unhiding pages and apps.

So let’s say you hide an app, then want to add it back? This is a use case near and dear to many developers hearts — as you might imagine from this Facebook help center thread titled “How do I unhide Farmville notifications?”

Right now, if you hide an app within the live feed, then go to the news feed and click on “edit options” at the bottom of the page, you’ll also see the same old window as on the live feed. However, if you reload the page on the top stories view, you’ll see the regular news feed interface of everything you’ve hidden — including the app you hid while in the live feed. So, there is a way that a user could bring an app back that they hid within the live stream. It’s just not very obvious.

Note: We don’t mean to pick on NetworkedBlogs in the screenshots — in fact, it’s the app we use to publish Inside Facebook’s stories on to Facebook.

We’ve just started publishing leaderboards of the Facebook applications with the most daily active users over on AppData. Just as we have been doing posts looking at which apps have gained the most monthly active users each week, we’re going to start doing posts looking at which apps have gained the most daily active users over the course of each week.

Understanding the Numbers

Before we get in to our first daily actives post, a more thorough explanation is needed for what it means versus monthly actives. Growth in monthly actives shows the longer-term health of an app. Even the fastest-growing ones, like Zynga’s FarmVille and Café World, and CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium, take multiple weeks to get to tens of millions of users. You have to zoom out to the monthly measure to really see these trends unfolding. By looking at weekly changes to this number, you can get a sense for where the app is headed. Also, of course, some apps don’t actually want or need a lot of daily actives to be successful.

But daily actives is generally a better metric of engagement, and so monetization. The daily active rate can vary widely based on users getting tired of some features, or getting excited about new ones, or just being more exposed to an app through Facebook advertising or cross-promotion from other apps. In other words, the changes in daily active users may fluctuate, even if an apps month-to-month trajectory is relatively smooth.

The daily actives metric matters, especially for games that offer virtual goods, because people who play every day are more likely to be spending money on virtual items – like crops in a virtual farming game, fish in a virtual aquarium game, etc. – whereas those that check out the game once or twice are much less likely to monetize. Having a lot of monthly actives but relatively few daily actives may mean the app isn’t getting many users to pay. On this last point, you can get a sense for how well an app is monetizing by also looking at its ratio of daily active users to monthly active users (DAU/MAU), which is a decent signal of an application’s retention of new users.

So monthly actives shows the overall arc of an app, daily actives shows how engaging it is, and the sticky factor shows you how well the app is maintaining if not growing its user base.

Now, let’s have a look at which apps have gained the most daily actives in the past week.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	5,153,768	+4,766,740	+92.49
2.	FarmVille	26,677,865	+1,819,073	+6.82
3.	Happy Pets	816,071	+805,762	+98.74
4.	Café World	9,887,995	+714,276	+7.22
5.	friend.ly	805,887	+587,676	+72.92
6.	Happy Aquarium	7,719,213	+559,529	+7.25
7.	Facebook for iPhone	8,624,108	+308,881	+3.58
8.	Translations	308,755	+308,691	+99.98
9.	Daily Sex Chance	257,713	+257,712	+100.00
10.	Snowball Fight	227,801	+187,145	+82.15
11.	Mobile	4,908,381	+170,467	+3.47
12.	Island Paradise	1,835,362	+165,499	+9.02
13.	Movies	548,549	+156,337	+28.50
14.	Diva Life	249,154	+147,639	+59.26
15.	Honesty Box	389,144	+122,011	+31.35
16.	Daily Horoscope	539,206	+118,242	+21.93
17.	Know-It-All Trivia	168,643	+112,379	+66.64
18.	Fish Life	487,029	+111,321	+22.86
19.	Fish World	2,382,371	+93,054	+3.91
20.	Bueno & Demonio ?	88,748	+87,854	+98.99

As you can see, most of the leading apps are games. Some of the top gainers are, unsurprisingly, games that have just launched — FishVille and Happy Pets have only been out for a week or two. Still, in both cases, you can see the games sticky factors dropping as they grow larger. FishVille currently has a sticky factor of 45% while Happy Pets has a sticky factor of 53%. In other words, the more time passes, relatively fewer people are playing the game every day.

It is very hard to keep engagement up on a game (as it is with anything else), which is why it’s especially impressive to see the daily actives so high for games with tens of millions of users. FarmVille has an amazing 26.7 million daily active users, or 41 percent of its total user base — it is by far the most engaging app on Facebook, that we know of. And it’s still growing, with an increase of 1.82 million daily actives in the past week.

Same goes for Café World, which is seeing its monthly actives rate level off, relatively speaking, while its daily actives (and so, its sticky factor) have taken a recent upswing, climbing to 34% since the beginning of the month. This suggests Zynga may have recently introduced another engagement-driving feature or two, or pumped in more ads, or did some new cross-promotion.

Happy Aquarium also continues to surge, although its daily actives appear to be tracking its monthly actives at a pretty consistent 28% since last month.

In the non-game category, we’re also seeing an unsurprising mix of simple apps, like quizzes, and others, like some of Facebook’s own mobile apps. All of these typically show up in our weekly posts on the apps gaining the most monthly active users.