The famous Dunbar number, or “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”, is generally accepted to be about 150. However, in a recent interview with The Economist, Cameron Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, shared some interesting stats on Facebook users’ social behavior patterns.

His findings: while many people have hundreds friends on Facebook, they still only actively communicate with a small few. Or to quote the author of the article, “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

Here’s the data from Marlow:

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

• Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

• Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
• Messages or chats with 16 friends

In other words, Facebook users comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends. And as has been shown by many other studies, women communicate with more people in all cases than men.

“People who are members of online social networks are not so much ‘networking’ as they are ‘broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,’” Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, says.

Three months after being awarded $873 million in a lawsuit against Atlantis Blue Capital for violating the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, Facebook earlier this week filed a federal complaint against “Spam King” Sanford Wallace in San Jose District Court. Las Vegas night club manager Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw are also named as defendants in the suit.

This is not the first time Wallace or Arzoomanian have been accused of malicious marketing practices on social networks. In May of 2008, MySpace won a $234 million judgment against Wallace and business partner Walter Rines for illegal spam and phishing attacks against MySpace users. In fact, Wallace has been building his “Spam King” reputation since 1997, having been charged with various federal crimes over the last decade.

Arzoomanian (or someone using his identity) seems to have appeared on the spamming scene more recently. In November 2008, a careful Facebook user blogged about a password harvesting scam he discovered by someone using domains registered to Arzoomanian’s name. Here’s how it worked:

1. Facebook users received messages that read: “did you know your profile pic is all over [spammysitehere].com”

2. When the user visited the site, the following page appeared:

3. And then:

In other words, a classic email harvesting scheme.

This is exactly the type of malicious attack that is pursuable under CAN-SPAM, and it appears Facebook is doing just that against Wallace and Arzoomanian.

Facebook has not responded to our request for comment about the suit.

Yahoo Search has launched a new feature that automatically shows Facebook profile photos in its search results. Now, when someone searches for your name on Yahoo, they can see your Faceook profile photo in the search listings.

Here’s an example of how the Facebook integration looks:

The integration is made possible by a Yahoo SearchMonkey application that reads structured data published by Facebook. Yahoo’s SearchMonkey platform allows developers to use structured data to make their Yahoo Search results more visually interesting and useful. In this case, Facebook is showing links to certain features (Add friend, Poke, Send message, View friends) and displaying a profile photo.

The new feature only works for people who have their “public search listing” privacy settings turned on. To see what your public search listing privacy settings are, click here.

The Facebook integration is one of only a few that have been turned on for all Yahoo Search users to date. Others include LinkedIn, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Citysearch, Zagat, and Wikipedia.

Facebook has announced a new approach to the development of the site’s policies and terms of service that gives users a voice at the table.

Under the new system, Facebook has created two new documents: the Principles of the Facebook Service and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that will effectively supercede all previous Terms of Service for users, developers, and advertisers.

In addition, Facebook has created a new process of “notice and comment” on changes to the documents. Proposed changes to these documents that elicit a large volume of feedback will proceed into a new user voting process.

Drafts of the two documents are available for input in two Facebook Groups: Facebook Town Hall: Facebook Proposed Principles and Facebook Town Hall: Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Facebook made an announcement to all users on the Facebook home page this morning, and thousands of people have already joined both groups.

Today’s announcement marks a big step in Facebook’s process to open the terms and rules of the site to user input and feedback. Last week, Facebook reverted changes made to its Terms of Service earlier this month after complaints from some users and privacy advocates.

“We are one of the only services on the web where people are sharing pretty personal and intimate information,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier today. “We thought it made sense that instead of having a traditional terms of service, developing new governing documents was a pretty important thing to do here.”

As part of the announcement, Facebook announced that all changes to the governing documents will be posted publicly inside the “Town Hall” groups for a period of review and comment by users. Those changes that receive a lot of user comments will be put to a user vote.

“Ultimately we have a lot of trust in our users, and listening to user input is very important. We’re making it so that we can’t just put in a new terms of service without everyone’s permission. We think these changes will increase the bonding and trust users place in the service,” Zuckerberg said.

While the exact format of the voting process was not announced, Facebook said the votes may not necessary be “up or down,” but that it may propose alternatives to users.

“Because these new documents are so fundamental and important, changes to these will definitely be subject to a vote of users. It’s not necessarily going to be an up or down vote – there may be alternatives. We trust our users, and we think they are going to respond positively to this. We underestimated the amount of ownership Facebook users feel on the site,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP of Communications and Public Policy.

“The silver lining over the last couple weeks is that people feel a visceral connection to their rights and responsibilities on the service,” Zuckerberg said.

The move is a pretty big step toward helping users feel like they have ownership over the direction of Facebook’s rules. While Facebook will still inevitably have to manage differences between its business strategy and user preferences, today’s announcement should go a long way toward helping concerned users feel like they have a more constructive way to affect the policy creation process as opposed to starting protest rallies.

We’ll be following the new process closely – and how it goes with users, developers, and advertisers – over the next several weeks.

Below, we’ve reprinted Facebook’s proposed principles. The proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities goes into more detail on safety, security, developer issues, advertiser issues, mobile, and payments.

The Facebook Principles

We are building Facebook to make the world more open and transparent, which we believe will create greater understanding and connection. Facebook promotes openness and transparency by giving individuals greater power to share and connect, and certain principles guide Facebook in pursuing these goals. Achieving these principles should be constrained only by limitations of law, technology, and evolving social norms. We therefore establish these Principles as the foundation of the rights and responsibilities of those within the Facebook Service.

1. Freedom to Share and Connect

People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

2. Ownership and Control of Information

People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

3. Free Flow of Information

People should have the freedom to access all of the information made available to them by others. People should also have practical tools that make it easy, quick, and efficient to share and access this information.

4. Fundamental Equality

Every Person – whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity – should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person’s primary activity. There should be a single set of principles, rights, and responsibilities that should apply to all People using the Facebook Service.

5. Social Value

People should have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence on the Facebook Service removed for reasons other than those described in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

6. Open Platforms and Standards

People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone.

7. Fundamental Service

People should be able to use Facebook for free to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution.

8. Common Welfare

The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles.

9. Transparent Process

Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities.

10. One World

The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is announcing the next steps Facebook is taking “to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service,” this morning.

11:10am Operator – On the call are Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Elliot Schrage, and Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s General Counsel.

11:10am Mark Zuckerberg – Today we’re going to talk about a set of documents we’ve built that are going to be the governing documents of Facebook from here on… They are really the framework of how we want to move forward. Last week, we put up an old set of terms. But what we’re discussing today are values we’ve held at Facebook for a very long time. We took last week as a really strong signal of how much people care about these principles. What we’re talking about today are policies, not products. There will be hundreds of products changes, but these are the policies we want to put in place for how we govern the site.

11:15am Mark Zuckerberg – We are rolling out new forms of participation and control. The principles are the aspirational goals we have for Facebook and how we want to craft the service going forward. The rights and responsibilities are going to be the operating rules for the site. It’s a two sided thing, for us and users, and we’ve made a lot of progress on clear language. We’ve rolled out a process so that going forward when we change it, we will have a process of notice and comment. There will be a period of time for people who are interested to get notified and comment on the changes. If there are a lot of comments, we’ll even put the documents up for a vote. That’s a pretty big step, but we think that having an open process around this is ultimately the only way to do that. We’re also putting together a council of people who are going to help us think about future changes.

11:18am Mark Zuckerberg – The silver lining over the last couple weeks is that people feel a visceral connection to their rights and responsibilities on the service.

Question: Internal process?

Mark Zuckerberg: Ironically, the change that we made a couple weeks ago was a change that shortened the document from 15 to 5 pages. We also made some mistakes, and a lot of the feedback we received is fair. Previously, we notified people of changes, but now we’re writing that into the governing documents.

Question: Who gets to vote?

Mark Zuckerberg: We will notify on everything, but when there are comments, based on the amount of comments, there will either be a vote or not.  In the event that a certain threshold of people are commenting, there will be a vote.

Schrage: Because these new documents are so fundamental and important, changes to these will definitely be subject to a vote of users. It’s not necessarily going to be an up or down vote – there may be alternatives. We trust our users, and we think they are going to respond positively to this. We underestimated the amount of ownership Facebook users feel on the site. We feel pretty confident that users will make good decisions.

Question: Didn’t you know people would get upset?

11:25am Mark Zuckerberg: One of the things that we felt was that this was a pretty foundational question for us. We are one of the only services on the web where people are sharing pretty personal and intimate information. We thought it made sense that instead of having a traditional terms of service, developing new governing documents was a pretty important thing to do here. We thought thought this was a good opportunity to roll this out.

Schrage: What was proposed as an alternative solution to the terms of service was similar to terms used by other sites, but we felt this comparison was not appropriate.

Zuckerberg: It doesn’t matter what the industry standard is, Facebook is such a different type of service, it warrants a governing document like this. We expect a lot of good dialogue about this.

Question: To what extent are you considering international laws in this?

Ullyot: We will of course comply with whatever laws are applicable to us wherever those requirements come from.

Question: What could you have learned from the News Feed experience, and how do you manage expectations?

11:30am Zuckerberg: This announcement is about policy and not products. We believe that the right way to govern the site is to have principles, and within that framework, we’re going to go about building the product the best we can. What all these things have in common like News Feed and Beacon, and we should have been communicating about them more broadly. What we’ve learned is that being as transparent as possible is a really valuable thing. There will be many more product changes, including some in the next few weeks.

Question: Everyone has diverse ideas about how it should go, and you have a lot of business upside. How do you manage this tension?

11:35am Zuckerberg: You hit it on the head. Ultimately we have a lot of trust in our users, and listening to user input is very important. We’re making it so that we can’t just put in a new terms of service without everyone’s permission. We think these changes will increase the bonding and trust users place in the service.

Question: This is a fairly ambitious undertaking – to aggregate all these documents in plain English language. How do you feel this will work out?

Zuckeberg: We felt this was pretty important to do, because it’s a governing document for the site, and it needs to encompass what everyone does on the site. There are a lot of users who are also developing on the Facebook Platform, for example. We think it’s a big step forward.

Ullyot: I encourage you to take a look at the statement of rights and responsibilities – it’s not just for users, but also advertisers and developers. Our old document used to be about 44 pages, it’s now down to about 5 pages with these documents.

For more background on the response to recent changes in Facebook’s Terms of Service, check out:

• Facebook Reverts Terms of Service After Complaints (February 18th, 2009)
• Zuckerberg Responds to Concerns About Facebook’s Updated Terms of Service (February 16th, 2009)

Following up on the hugely successful CNN.com/Live with Facebook integration during President Obama’s inauguration last month, Facebook and CNN partnered again on Tuesday for a similar “Live Feed” integration during President Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress.

The results? According to Facebook, over 150,000 status updates were made during the speech. At the beginning of the speech Facebook users were updating their status messages over 1,600 times per minute on CNN.com.

In addition to the Facebook Connect integration on CNN.com, Facebook also ran research polls during the speech inside the Facebook News Feed. Users were asked, “After listening to the President’s address, are you more a) Hopeful, b) Fearful, c) No Change?” The results were discussed by Randi Zuckerberg on CNN.com’s broadcast after Obama’s address.

The CNN integration during Obama’s address is the latest in a series of Live Feed integrations that Facebook has run in the last few weeks. This weekend, Facebook partnered with several entertainment sites to integrate the Live Feed during the Oscars, and last weekend, it partnered with Turner’s TNT around the NBA All Star Game.

Since its launch early last year, Toronto-based AdParlor has been primarily focused on building out its banner ad network for social networking applications. Now, however, the company is expanding to provide offer-based monetization of virtual currency systems inside social apps.

The company says its platform is in use by 30 applications on the Facebook Platform today, including Kickmania, Bingo, and Premier Football, and is now available on MySpace and Bebo too.

Conceptually similar to other virtual currency monetization solutions from Offerpal Media, Super Rewards, and Peanut Labs Media, AdParlor’s system allows developers to make money by letting their users earn virtual currency by participating in CPA-based offers, like filling out a survey or signing up for a trial subscription. When a user participates in the offer, they get virtual currency – and the developer gets paid.

Incentivized virtual currency is proving to be an increasingly successful monetization model for app developers on Facebook, MySpace, other social networks, and now even the iPhone. The model has been particularly successful inside social games, where players take offers to progress through game play. Increasing competition in the space is a good thing for developers, advertisers, and users!

Note: AdParlor is a sponsor of this blog.

There’s been a lot of change on the breakout app radar this week, and a diverse set of apps are growing quickly on the Facebook Platform.

Here’s the current list of Top 20 fastest-growing mid-sized applications on Facebook from AppData. These are the top apps in the 100K-1M monthly active user range with the most growth in the last week.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		ExitReality 3D Apartment	284,969	+282,026	+9 582.9	—
2.		2009 Bracket Challenge	146,674	+143,705	+4 840.2	Watercooler
3.		Cheers!	186,331	+161,757	+658.2	—
4.		Deal or No Deal	290,579	+225,698	+347.9	Tyrone Walker
5.		Super Mario World	102,206	+70,638	+223.8	Ankur Nagpal
6.		Jeu de Seduction	457,971	+213,375	+87.2	6 waves
7.		Praise Party	102,192	+40,088	+64.6	—
8.		DogWorld	146,126	+55,009	+60.4	—
9.		I’d Have To Be Drunk	118,118	+43,614	+58.5	Colin Kierans
10.		Sei Affascinante	267,307	+97,788	+57.7	6 waves
11.		ViP Club$	154,763	+55,433	+55.8	Arnaud Gufflet
12.		Send “Willow Tree” Angels	187,263	+61,550	+49.0	—
13.		Eres Atractivo	394,042	+117,605	+42.5	6 waves
14.		u00c7ekici Misiniz?	251,766	+69,534	+38.2	6 waves
15.		Which mighty woman of the Bible are you most like?	130,302	+30,633	+30.7	Lara Melinda Jones-Leger
16.		Tiddy Bear for Cancer	233,513	+52,698	+29.1	—
17.		Send Good Karma	136,649	+30,428	+28.7	—
18.		型男vs索女	138,456	+30,376	+28.1	6 waves
19.		80′s Memories Gifts	287,104	+62,339	+27.7	—
20.		Say Something	271,055	+57,629	+27.0	Offline

As you can see, an application called ExitReality 3D Apartment has absolutely skyrocketed in the past 2 days from 0 to 300k active users. However, the application appears to only prompt users to visit an external website which contains a cryptic message about “gathering data.” Smells fishy to us, and we’re sure Facebook’s policy folks will be taking a closer look at this one soon.

Coming in at #2 this week is Watercooler’s 2009 Bracket Challenge. 150,000 college basketball fans are gearing up for the tourney already, even though Selection Sunday is still a few weeks away. Last year, Facebook promoted a bracket application created by CBSSports.com on its home page and through Inbox messages. It will be interesting to see if Facebook does a similar special promotion this year.

Filling 4 spots this week is an internationally templated application by 6 waves called Jeu de Seduction / Eres Atractivo / 型男vs索女 / etc. 6 waves has been gaining traction on the Facebook Platform by serving international audiences, and is one of the largest developers on the Platform by total MAU.

Other interesting apps on this week’s list are Ankur Nagpal’s Super Marion World, Tyrone Walker’s Deal or No Deal, and Tiddy Bear for Cancer. As always, you can find out more details on these apps and nearly 50,000 others at AppData!

Until recently, owners of Facebook groups had to email Facebook customer support in order to change their Group’s name. However, Facebook announced today that Group owners can now change Group names any time. This change will certainly decrease the amount of customer service Facebook had to deal with from users who simply wanted to make spelling corrections or update their Groups’ names.

Why does this matter to marketers?

Facebook likely made it hard to change Group names in order to prevent aggressive marketers from pulling a “bait and switch” on Facebook users. For example, some marketers have been known to create Groups under the guise of non-commercial purposes with the intent of spamming the Groups later on. In order to prevent this from happening with the new change, all group members will receive a notification whenever a Group’s name changes, so Facebook is advising users to “be sure to check your notifications box for group name changes.”

Groups vs. Pages: Which is better?

A classic question asked by marketers is whether Groups or Pages are a better fit for their marketing needs. If your company or organization is looking to engage large numbers of users over time, Facebook Pages are the better product for you. Facebook is committed to continuing to develop its Pages product for businesses, brands, and artists, and is planning a major redesign of Pages in the near future. By contrast, Groups are less fully featured in terms of promotional and engagement tools. For more detailed information on the specific features available to marketers through Groups and Pages, click here.

While most Facebook Connect apps we’ve seen have been built for use on websites and iPhones, Virgin is reportedly working on an in-flight Facebook Connect application for their planes.

“What if you could send a drink from the Virgin website to your friend on the plane using Facebook Connect?” hinted Virgin’s Alex Hunter today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. Hunter is the Head of Online Marketing for the Virgin Group.

Virgin also announced today the launch of a new website, coming in a few weeks, that will feature a virtual currency based loyalty system as well as content from WineLibrary’s Gary Vaynerchuk, Richard Branson, and Ryan Carson.

“We are launching the new Virgin website with Facebook Connect on day one,” Hunter said.

While integrating with real time flight data would seem quite difficult to pull off at a time when major carriers are still experimenting with getting basic WiFi service up and running, finding your Facebook friends in flight would take connectedness to a whole new level.

Theoretically, Facebook Connect integration could allow all kinds of social experiences around flying:

• People could find their friends on Virgin flights and send them virtual gifts in real time
• Travelers could find their friends on the same flight and try to get seats next to them when checking in
• Virgin could provide a myriad of deeper travel application experiences for its customers

It will be interesting to see how exactly Virgin launches Facebook Connect in flight!

Photo Credit: seanosh