We’ve written before that it’s a no-brainer for Facebook to enable commenting within the Mini Feed. Well, Facebook has confirmed that it will launch in-line Mini Feed comments later today.

Why are feed comments interesting? The feed is a perfect place for semi-personal, semi-public conversation, exactly the type of communication that fuels important dynamics within social networks. Updates on friends’ status, application engagement, and new friend connections are compelling contexts for in-feed conversations. The update makes the profile page more like a “room” where conversation occurs, instead of just a classified listing.

Facebook, however, will not be turning on comments in the News Feed yet. Fast-growing Silicon Valley startup FriendFeed has gotten a lot of press lately for enabling new kinds of semi-private friend feed aggregation and conversation. “We will consider adding comments in News Feed if it makes sense for our users,” Facebook says.

Update: Here’s a first screenshot. When commenting, Facebook also sends an email to you with the comment text. However, comment text does not appear in the Mini Feed by default. Visitors must click the “bubble” to expand the comments.

Rupesh Mandal is such an avid fan of the Opera Mini web browser that he set up a Page on Facebook totally devoted to celebrating it, and then recruited others to join. That’s why he was surprised last week when he discovered that his page had been deleted and all the fans of his page had been migrated to the “official” Opera browser Page on Facebook.

In response, Mandal contacted to Opera to learn what happened. Lawrence Eng, an Opera employee, responded by writing in the comments on Mandal’s blog:

Hi Rupesh,

This is Lawrence Eng.

I’m not in the department at Opera that handles our Facebook presence, but I’ve helped some of my colleagues with that. Over the last several months, we have been working on creating our official Opera fan page(s) on Facebook. Since Facebook does not check who creates fan pages, several unofficial Opera-related fan pages have been created in the past, and we’ve sent messages to the page admins asking if those pages could be removed.

In the process of setting up our new pages recently, some of my colleagues have been in contact with Facebook, and should have been in contact with you as well, but apparently that didn’t happen. I apologize on their behalf. I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that the goal was to have Opera Mini fans on your page transferred over to an official “Opera Mini” page that was recently created (and not the Opera Browser page), effectly transferring admin privileges over to Opera. I’m not sure, but I believe Facebook made an error there, which we will work to rectify.

The Facebook terms of service are pretty straightforward in terms of who is supposed to create and maintain “Fan pages”, but I also agree that they are bit confusingly named, which may have led to some misunderstandings. Facebook also allows anyone to create Groups on any topic, and Opera users have and are certainly free to create Opera-related groups.

Anyhow, we should have contacted you about our new page superceding yours, and we apologize again for failing to do that. Let me thank you personally for your support of Opera and taking the initiative to spread the word about Opera Mini.

Sincerely,
Lawrence

Facebook Pages are Facebook’s product intended for brand owners to make a corporate home on Facebook. However, because anyone can create a Page, cases like Mandel’s are sure to arise, and otherwise well-intentioned “fans” may feel left with a bad taste in their mouth.

Facebook should be more proactive in communicating with those from whom Page ownership is being revoked, both to inform users more on what is happening with their creations and to preserve their goodwill with the brands.

While Facebook has passed MySpace in global visits as of last month, what does it really mean for the company’s ad business?

Making use of Google Trends’ recently updated service for websites in combination with some data on international ad markets shared by Jeremy Liew, Andrew Chen recently came to the conclusion that Facebook has surpassed MySpace in several of the world’s top international ad markets as of Q4 2007.

(Chart by Andrew Chen)

While the US remains the largest ad market by far (in fact, it’s bigger than all others combined), Facebook is demonstrating that social networks can gain ground against an incumbent in meaningful markets after all. Whether Facebook can maintain that lead tomorrow remains to be seen.

Today, Visa and Facebook announced the launch of a major campaign targeted at getting small businesses engaged on Facebook called Visa Business Network. As part of the launch (see the video from Visa’s CMO Antonio Lucio and Facebook’s VP of Biz Dev Dan Rose), Visa is giving away $100 in Facebook Social Ads credit to the first 20,000 small businesses that register for the Visa Business Network – $2 million in all.

So, what is the Visa Business Network? It’s an application designed to facilitate content sharing amongst small business owners and help small business owners grow their network. Visa earns high marks for having the courage to be the first to launch a serious small business initiative on Facebook. What is still only viewed by many as a place to stalk sorority girls is being recognized by Visa as an extremely powerful platform on which structural changes to big industries are beginning to happen. This move will surely encourage others to follow.

But let’s take a closer look at the actual campaign application itself. What is the Visa Business Network application? Fundamentally, it’s a social-network-within-a-social-network.

Upon adding the app, users must register their business with VBN. Visa calls it editing your “Back Office Info,” and it feels a lot like filling out your profile page after joining a social network.

After joining, Visa Business Network provides four main features:

1. Content dashboard with articles from the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, and AllBusiness.com.
2. Search tool to find others registered for the service.
3. Messaging tool for sending and receiving messages to/from others registered for the service.
4. Activity stream to view updates from your “associates” (VBN friends).

While there’s a lot to be excited about here, I must admit I am a little confused by the product Visa has created. Visa asks users to create a small business profile page that only exists to other users searching within the Visa Business Network. Not only is this page effectively totally separate from small business owners’ Facebook Pages, but it is almost inaccessible. In addition, all of the communication tools in the app are disjoint from the communication infrastructure Facebook has already built.

Visa hopes small business owners will create and maintain a second Facebook profile for their business, message other businesses, and track others’ activity all within the VBN application. It’s a powerful idea, but one that I personally would “adjust,” given how difficult it is to reach critical mass when trying to effectively create a social networking platform.

Congratulations to Visa and Facebook on launching this big initiative that is sure to accelerate the pace at which businesses think about engaging their customers on the Facebook Platform. I look forward to tracking their progress!

Playfish is one of the most exciting companies you haven’t heard of. Founded just last year, the company has already opened studios in Europe, Asia, and (soon) North America, and is the developer of 3 of the top 10 games on Facebook today.

We spent some time with Kristian Segerstråle, CEO of Playfish, to learn more about his vision for the company, the emerging “social gaming” space, and how social networks compare to other gaming platforms.

>> Read the entire interview at Inside Social Games

Selected excerpt:

What lessons have you learned so far?

Designing social games is totally different than designing video games for other platforms. On the surface they look quite similar, but actually you have to think about them quite differently. When you design a game on a standalone platform, you try to draw players in quickly and keep them motivated over time. You do things like visual and audio rewards and achievements, and give ways for people who are into it to keep going. But when you design for social platforms, you do those things in the beginning because you want to get players started in the game, but then you want to get the users to take a step out of the game and use it as a way to communicate with friends.

In addition, the sheer amount of user feedback you get allows you to, in a sense, outsource a part of your design. You have the luxury to update your game, you can listen to your users and give them what they want. It creates a great emotional relationship between a publisher and a player.

How do you see risks in developing for the Facebook platform?

If you compare the rules of publishing on Facebook to the rules of publishing on any other platform (like cell phones), you’re talking about orders of magnitudes of difference. On mobile platforms, you have to get approved, certified, sometimes there are age ratings, and typically you even pay a share of your income to the platform holder. Compared to that kind of environment, Facebook is an amazing place to publish games. It’s a great thing to see them take their role of managing the platform seriously. The more consumers want to hang out on social networks the better it is for us in the long run… if social networks don’t moderate the environment, consumers will.

Read More >>

Although “Facebook” is unfortunately a near-homonym for “doomed to die” in Chinese, the company officially launched a Chinese language version of the site today, taking another step into the complex China market. Facebook faces tough local competition in China – both from entrenched leaders like QQ and massively-funded Xiaonei.

Facebook, with the help of new VP of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage, is reportedly still crafting its formal China strategy, as navigating the various political issues has proven challenging for even the largest of tech companies.

In addition, Facebook announced today that it has added 55 new languages to its crowd-sourced translation efforts. Facebook’s Chad Little says,

Now native speakers can use our Translations application to translate Facebook into additional Asian languages (Malaysian, Vietnamese), African dialects (Zulu, Xhosa), regional varieties (British English, Canadian French) and even rarely spoken languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

Facebook continues to grow internationally, recently surpassing MySpace in global visitors for May 2008. Facebook’s Translations efforts are definitely accelerating its international growth.

As Facebook continues to scale its service at every layer, the company faces many technical challenges to keep performance high. Now with over 80 million active users and 10,000 servers, Facebook is considering building its own data centers around the world.

CNET’s Editor in Chief spoke with Facebook’s VP of Technical Operations about the Facebook infrastructure and plans for future (and international) expansion – check out the video below:

Good news this week for those using Facebook Groups to manage and communicate with your customer community or otherwise for marketing purposes on Facebook: Facebook has just increased the group size message blast limit from 1,200 to 5,000.

The increase makes Facebook a more usable tool for those managing large user groups. However, for those with large groups, converting your group to a Facebook Page is the right move. (Those wanting to migrate their group to a Page can fill out this request form and Facebook should do it for you automatically.)

Facebook is reportedly working on significant enhancements to Pages that will make them a more robust product for businesses hoping to engage Facebook users. While there is no limit to the number of fans Page admins can message, many businesses are finding the standard Page features insufficient for more sophisticated Facebook campaigns. Those looking to achieve deeper engagement are turning to firms like Buddy Media, Context Optional, and Kremsa Design (all sponsors of this blog) to build custom applications for their brand.

As we approach the looming Facebook Profile Redesign, Inside Facebook has listed the top 50 Facebook applications by daily active user count, roughly categorizing them by type and, in cases like Bumper Sticker and Owned, listing the parent company.

Some interesting observations:

• Professional network LinkedIn has the 4th biggest app on Facebook. (I wonder if that affected their recent $1 billion valuation?)
• 5 of the top 10 and 21 of the top 50 apps are games.
• Social network MyYearbook has the most popular game on Facebook, Owned. It is a copy cat of Serious Business‘s Friends For Sale, which is only slightly behind at #2.
• 3 of the 4 apps with over 1 million daily active users are quite similar (FunWall, Super Wall, Bumper Stickers).
• Playfish is a rising star with 3 out of the top 10 games. Their engagement rate as a company is also at 13%, the highest of any large app developer on Facebook.
• Zynga has 6 apps on this list, and is the 3rd largest developer overall in terms of DAU, behind Slide and RockYou.
• Even though SGN has only 1 app in the top 50, it is the 7th largest developer overall in terms of DAU.
• Even though Watercooler has no apps in the top 50, its network of applications is the 19th largest overall in terms of DAU.

A couple notes:

• All DAU are not created equal.
• These numbers were measured on a Sunday, which is generally lower than other days.
• The “general” category encompasses applications used for both “flirting” and “content-sharing” messaging purposes (or that generally don’t fit one category or the other cleanly)

As announced last week, Facebook has just turned on 7 and 30 day stats for developers on the Developer Stats page and via a new API (admin.getMetrics). Now, in addition to getting stats and graphs for the last day, developers can get the following stats for the past week and month:

• active_users — The number of active users.
• api_calls — The number of API calls made by your application.
• unique_api_calls — The number of users on whose behalf your application made API calls.
• canvas_page_views — The number of canvas page views.
• unique_canvas_page_views — The number of users who viewed your application’s canvas page.
• canvas_http_request_time_avg — The average time to fulfill an HTTP request to your application’s canvas page.
• canvas_fbml_render_time_avg — The average time to render FBML on your application’s canvas page.
• unique_adds — The number of users who added your application. 1-day only.
• unique_removes — The number of users who removed your application. 1-day only.
• unique_blocks — The number of users who blocked your application. 1-day only.
• unique_unblocks — The number of users who unblocked your application. 1-day only.

This is a nice touch for developers, who can always use more data to triangulate reality. Here’s a screenshot from a friend’s application: