Inside Facebook

Live streaming on Facebook is now more affordable for smal businesses and individuals thanks to StreamAPI, a new product from live-streaming company Stickam. StreamAPI is built around Facebook’s Live Stream widget, which was recently opened up to anyone wanting to add a dynamic stream of Facebook status updates around live events on their website.

StreamAPI is slightly different from the currently available service from Ustream, which has been used in many of the live streaming events to date but has setup costs as high as $15,000. With StreamAPI, there is no set up or monthly fee; instead, users pay 45 cents per gigabyte. There’s support for HD video as well. Stickam has plenty of experience with live online video, providing its service to stream content for MTV, CBS Radio, and G4TV, amongst others.

New services like StreamAPI reflect the increasing interest amongst web video publishers for the social context that Facebook Connect brings around live events. New products and pricing models like this one are opening up the market to a larger variety of long tail publishers.

As Inside Facebook reported last month, Facebook is in the process of migrating away from regional networks on the site (they were only ever used by 50% of users anyway, and created some unintended privacy confusion). As a result, network affiliations are being migrated to the Info tab on user profiles as users’ current locations.

For developers, Facebook says that these changes will eventually be reflected in their API. If your application currently makes use of regional networks, you have until September 30, 2009, to make the official change to use the current_location field instead of network affiliations.

This process isn’t without its quirks, however. As pointed out on the Developer’s Forums, the new user-defined city field could be less useful than regional networks as it will likely actually create more segmentation. Any attempt to group like cities together would be at the expense of the application developer.

A couple of months ago, Facebook released the Open Stream API, a new set of Facebook Platform APIs that enable developers to access and publish to the Facebook stream from anywhere. Since then, we’ve seen a number of interesting desktop client integrations, like the recent updates from Seesmic and TweetDeck.

However, a simple new website built on Facebook Connect, Flutteerr, illustrates ways developers could build websites that integrate the stream as well. Developed by Facebook employee Naitik Shah using the standard APIs in his personal time, Flutteerr currently only contains the Facebook stream (and resembles Twitter quite a bit), but it could be enhanced with a variety of features to make publishing to or reading your Facebook stream more powerful.

On Flutteerr, users can filter the News Feed the same way they can inside Facebook, including by Friend List, Network, Page, and particular applications. Status updates, comments, and likes are automatically posted to Facebook. However, you can’t share links, photos, etc. in the media-rich way that the Facebook.com Publisher allows you to.

Since the site is a personal project, it’s unclear what will happen with it going forward (though the name is reminiscent of this parody video from Slate called Flutter: The New Twitter). Nevertheless, the site does go to show what’s possible with the API.

Each month, it seems like there are a few surprises in store on the Facebook gaming charts. Back at the start of June, we saw a number of new titles appear within the Top 25. One in particular, Farm Town, debuted at #4 with nearly 8 million monthly active users. It just goes to show that even today, with Facebook’s viral channel allocation limits in place, new games can still become popular once word starts to spread.

Of course, distribution has always been an issue for new companies with no marketing budget, but Farm Town shows that things can still grow without a lot of initial spend. This month, Zynga is hot on the heels of Farm Town with its own new farming release, FarmVille…

>> Read more at Inside Social Games

It’s been just under 90 days since Facebook announced it has crossed the 200 million active user mark. Today, that number is somewhere around 240 million, perhaps even close to 250 million. If Facebook were a country, it would now have the 4th largest population in the world.

While Facebook has been growing at around 300,00 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the last three quarters, its growth rate seems to have again significantly increased in recent weeks to around 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day based on data we are tracking from Facebook’s advertising tools.

If Facebook continues at this rate, it could reach 300 million active users by November. Keep in mind, however, that as has been the case for most of the last year, about 70% of that growth is happening outside the United States. Nevertheless, Facebook still grew at an 8% monthly clip in the US in May, up to nearly 70 million active users today.

In addition, Facebook has recently released updated engagement stats about the way users interact with different features on the site. Some highlights:

• 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day (13 million did per month at the beginning of the year)
• 8 million users become fans of Pages each day (up from 2.5 million per day at the beginning of the year)
• 10 million videos are uploaded each month (up from 4 million)
• 900 million photos are uploaded to the site each month (up from 700 million)
• 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week (up from 15 million per month)
• 35 million active groups exist on the site (up from 19 million)
• 2.5 million notes created each month
• 30 million users access Facebook each month through a mobile device

In other words, Facebook’s growth does not appear to be slowing down yet, and engagement is still on the rise.

We’ll of course continue tracking all the latest Facebook stats for you here on Inside Facebook. To dive deeper on how you can engage Facebook’s 240 million users through Facebook Pages, Facebook advertising solutions, Facebook Platform applications, or Facebook Connect for your website, check out Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook’s iPhone application is one of the most popular iPhone apps overall - nearly 25% of all iPhone owners use it according to Joe Hewitt, lead engineer for Facebook’s iPhone application. Today, Hewitt shared some more details on the upcoming version 3.0 of the Facebook iPhone app.

What will be coming in the new version?

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

The new home screen will definitely make for a friendlier user experience, especially with the addition of Events, Notes, Pages, and photo albums. The addition of the Pages feature means that brands with Facebook Pages will have increased visibility when users are on the go.

While Hewitt said he didn’t know when the app will be submitted to Apple, it is about “98% done.” However, Push Notifications, which are in high demand, will be included in Version 3.1 later this summer, Hewitt says.

On the first official day of Q3 2009, which established apps are still growing the most quickly? Here are the numbers from AppData on today’s fastest growing applications on Facebook in the 1 million to 10 million MAU category.

Currently taking the #1 spot is FARKLE, an addictive dice game developed by Facebook app shop Viral, s.r.o. For each game, users roll dice 10 times and try to maximize their scores by following the game’s scoring rules. As you play, chips are earned along the way. They can also be earned by inviting your Facebook friends to play the game, sending your friends who are also users of the app a gift, and/or completing offers on the app’s offer wall.

		Name	MAU	Gain	%	Developer
1.		FARKLE	2,096,924	+197,165	+10.4	Viral, s.r.o.
2.		Barn Buddy	3,188,649	+167,087	+5.5	TheBroth, Inc.
3.		Waka-Waka	3,109,541	+120,994	+4.1	Metrogames
4.		Restaurant City	5,861,728	+106,605	+1.9	Playfish
5.		Biotronic	3,398,277	+101,750	+3.1	Metrogames
6.		UNO™ BETA	1,858,228	+100,639	+5.7	GameHouse
7.		Do you really know me?	1,865,635	+57,851	+3.2	How well do you know me
8.		Know-It-All Trivia	3,707,469	+57,736	+1.6	CrowdStar
9.		YoVille	7,857,944	+44,582	+0.6	Zynga
10.		Street Racing	2,904,532	+43,082	+1.5	Zynga
11.		Bejeweled Blitz	4,404,078	+35,434	+0.8	Popcap Games
12.		Fortune Products	3,504,943	+31,957	+0.9	QuoteMountain.com
13.		Daily Horoscope	4,152,067	+28,981	+0.7	6 waves
14.		Tattoodle	1,262,829	+25,777	+2.1	Make The Web Better
15.		Are YOU Interested?	2,640,198	+23,095	+0.9	SNAP Interactive (Ticker: STVI)
16.		Is Cool by cafe.com	2,221,961	+19,652	+0.9	Cafe.com
17.		Geo Challenge	3,695,910	+19,336	+0.5	Playfish
18.		All About Me	1,436,420	+18,857	+1.3	Lih Chen
19.		SuperPoke! Pets	1,348,700	+17,474	+1.3	Slide, Inc.
20.		Rock Legends!	1,061,607	+17,192	+1.7	Serious Business

FARKLE’s approach to incentivizing friends with the app pushes the boundaries of Facebook’s platform incentivization rules. About a year ago, the Facebook Platform team prohibited incentivized invites within apps - a policy designed to increase the quality of messages sent to users via apps.

Also in the Top 5 are Barn Buddy (TheBroth, Inc.), and verified apps Waka-Waka (Metrogames), Restaurant City (Playfish), and  Biotronic (Metrogames again). The top five spots are all taken by social games, and it’s notable that three out of the five apps are verified apps - one indication that apps in the Application Verification Program are enjoying the benefits of increased prominence.

Do you really know me? and All About Me have also earned places in the Top 20, consistent with numbers from last month showing that simple quizzing apps are continuing to see some pretty viral growth.

Although Facebook is publishing some of its own Facebook Connect widgets like the Live Stream widget and the Comments Box widget to help websites be more social, major widget platforms themselves are starting to integrate Facebook Connect in their own more specialized products.

Just a few days ago, widget platform Widgetbox soft launched Facebook Connect in a compelling integration that allows users to publish widgets to the News Feed. Widgetbox’s VP Marketing & Business Development Ryan Spoon says the company’s widgets reach 100 million uniques every month, but only 1% of those come through Facebook. With the recent release of Connect, the company is making efforts to change that.

Here’s an example of what the integration looks like:

1. You can sign in to Widgetbox.com using your Facebook account.

2. When you add a widget or rate and comment on a widget, you can publish these stories to your Wall and the News Feed.

3. If the widget you share is Flash-based, it should be functional within the Facebook News Feed. Most widgets come with a play button expands and plays the widget in-line in the stream. If the widget is written in Javascript, it appears in the Feed as a regular story. Widgetbox is trying to consolidate these types of stories - a challenge with the evolving Connect API’s.

The next step for Widgetbox is to enhance its Connect integration by bringing Facebook’s social graph to the site and make widget recommendations to its users based on what their friends have added. While the company is focusing its Connect efforts on the News Feed, the technology is also there to add Widgetbox widgets inside applications, especially in the context of games, Spoon explained.

Conclusion

Typically, widgets are added to sites like blogs that are more static, and so users can count on the widget being there the next time they need it. With Widgetbox’s Facebook integration, there seems to be a higher risk of users publishing content that flows off the first page of the stream in a matter of hours.

Nevertheless, widget makers are still trying to get distribution wherever they can inside Facebook since Facebook more or less booted widget-like profile boxes off user profile pages with the redesign last year (however, users can still add small application boxes and tabs to their profile). We’re looking forward to watching Widgetbox iterate on its Facebook Connect integration in the months ahead.

Facebook is holding a press call this morning on the future of privacy. Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer, and Leah Perlman, Product manager, are going to be sharing updates on upcoming Facebook privacy enhancements. The new updates, which simplify the privacy controls on Facebook, will be rolling out in the next few weeks. Here are detailed notes and screenshots from this morning’s preview:

- Chris Kelly: We want to make sure we don’t create too many settings and too much complexity, to give people the power to share information as broadly or privately as they want over time. There was a rumor a while ago that Facebook is going to start charging for Facebook, and this is not the case. This also doesn’t have anything to do with advertising - as I testified before the house recently, we’re giving people control over the information that they’re choosing to share.

- Leah Perlman: Currently, the publisher privacy tests that we started running last week are proving quite effective. The new publisher allows for different types of sharing that we haven’t been able to support before. Sometimes you want to share more privately or in a more targeted way - for example, posting something just for my family to see.

- Leah Perlman: We’re also planning to remove regional networks. When Facebook started, networks were the bedrock for privacy. But when we expanded past college and work networks to regional networks to fit everyone, it actually created some confusion around privacy controls as it relates to regional networks. 50% of users don’t even join regional networks.

- Leah Perlman: Now, users will have the same privacy control to put on any piece of content on the site. The same 4 or 5 options:

1. Everyone
2. Friends and Networks (good for sharing photos of friends, so their friends can see them)
3. Friends of Friends
4. Friends Only
5. Custom (can choose a combination of networks and friend lists, and exclude particular people)

- Leah Perlman: Here’s what the new unified privacy page will look like. The lock icon will behave the same everywhere it appears.

- Leah Perlman: We’re going to be offering people a transition tool. It has 2 purposes: 1) To make sure everyone understands the changes that are going to be happening on the site. 2) To make it clear that if you open up access to content that you share it can make your experience of finding and interacting with friends richer. We’re testing different versions of this tool now. There will be 3 main options:

1. Open - people like bloggers or photographers who really want to be open.
2. Limited - those who only want to share with a limited number of people.
3. Recommended - this strikes a balance to help people make the appropriate information shared openly and privately.

Transition Tool 1:

Transition Tool 2:

- Leah Perlman: No matter what options people choose, everyone will see this privacy confirmation screen. We want to make sure that everyone is setting things exactly as they want them.

- Chris Kelly: The transition tool offers a powerful opt-in to let users make their choices. We think this degree of control is where the web is going.

- Question: if I set content to public, will it be indexable my major search engines?

- Leah Perlman: Not at this time, no.

- Elliot Schrage: We are not providing it in the broadest possible way at rollout, but we want people to be sensitive to that possibility, so we are rolling it out in this way to see what feedback we get.

While Facebook has over 230 million active users and has been rapidly growing around the world in the last 24 months, Orkut, the social network run by Google, has remained dominant in Brazil and India. Although Facebook has grown slowly in those two countries, it’s never been able to turn the corner - until now.

Starting about 60 days ago, Facebook’s growth began accelerating rapidly in both Brazil and India, growing several times faster in May and June than it did in March and April.

In fact, Facebook nearly doubled in Brazil during May alone. Its growth has continued in June, and today Facebook has just crossed the 1 million active user mark in Brazil for the first time ever - up 100% in the last 45 days.

Granted, Orkut still claims well over 20 million monthly visitors in Brazil, but we’ve seen this kind of pattern before. Facebook has the potential to double in new countries every 2-3 months several times over as it spreads through new populations, but it is probably still too early to claim that this is the canary in the coal mine for Orkut.

Curiously, however, just as Facebook started exploding in Brazil, the same thing was happening in India, the other major country where Orkut is the leading social network with 13 million monthly active users.

While Facebook has been growing slowly and steadily in India for the last couple of years, Facebook exploded in May and June, doubling from 1.6 million to 3.2 million monthly active users in the country in the last 60 days.

Do these trends correlate? Time will tell, but it certainly looks like Facebook is gaining significant steam in Orkut’s biggest strongholds.

Brazil and India are far from the only countries where Facebook is fighting to claw its way to the top spot. Nevertheless, Facebook continues to grow in almost every country we’re tracking the company in - and in most countries, by double digit percentages in total reach every month. Facebook is clearly a global phenomenon - it will be very interesting to see where things stand in another year.

Note: All data from Facebook’s advertiser tools.