Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of Engineering, announced today that Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation’s board as a sustaining corporate member.

The move is a big bolster to the OpenID movement, which hopes to create an “open, decentralized, free” framework for user identity across the web. The OpenID Foundation was formed in 2007 to help promote the OpenID technologies and community, and is currently governed by 7 community elected board members and 7 corporate board members. Facebook engineer Luke Shephard, a “huge internal advocate for OpenID,” will serve as Facebook’s representative.

Facebook has been participating in OpenID discussions throughout the development of Facebook Connect. Facebook’s Julie Zhou presented at the UX Summit held at Yahoo last October. Facebook will host a similar OpenID design summit at its Palo Alto headquarters next week, which will include designers from “Facebook, the DiSo Project, Google, JanRain, MySpace, Six Apart and Yahoo!, focusing on how existing OpenID implementations could support an experience similar to Facebook Connect.”

“Facebook’s financial contribution along with its membership on the board signals the company’s enthusiasm to work more closely with the OpenID community, building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard,” David Recordon and Chris Messsina said on the OpenID blog.

“We see great opportunities to increase our contributions across the open stack, and to continue our work with the open source community to evolve existing projects like memcached and new technologies like Thrift, which is now being used by companies such as Powerset, iMeem, Rapleaf, Amie Street, last.fm and reCAPTCHA. The future of an open and social Web will be measured not by protocols, but by how much we collectively improve the standards and technologies that enable us and others to give people more powerful ways to share and connect,” Facebook’s Shroepfer said today.

By putting its weight and financial support behind OpenID, it’s clear that Facebook is pretty serious about furthering the OpenID movement. However, it will likely take a lot of collaboration between Facebook and OpenID to hammer out details on multiple issues (like user experience and security) before Facebook would become a full OpenID relying party (i.e. start accepting OpenIDs from other providers on Facebook), Chris Messina told Inside Facebook.

According to Google Trends, Facebook has just surpassed MySpace in US search volume for the first time ever.

This time last year, MySpace was seeing over 4x the search volume of Facebook, and as recently as October 2008 MySpace was seeing over twice the US search volume as Facebook, according to Google. While search volume does not offer insight on user behavior after the click, it is a good general indicator of relative growth and retention trends.

For further context on the changing landscape of US social networking behavior, here’s the 5 year chart on search volume. While MySpace held a commanding lead for several years, 2008 was clearly a banner year for Facebook’s growth.

The battle between Facebook and MySpace for US users has been getting much more tight lately. In December, web metrics firm Compete said Facebook had more US unique visits than MySpace for the first time, though data from Hitwise showed MySpace with a strong lead.

Facebook surpassed MySpace in global search volume back in spring of 2008. Since then, Facebook’s lead has only continued to increase. December data from Comscore showed Facebook reaching 220 million unique users worldwide, compared to 125 million for MySpace.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage with David Kirkpatrick, who is writing a book on the company, last week at the DLD Conference in Germany. During the 37 minute Q&A session (which is worth watching), Zuckerberg discusses various product decisions the company has made, and touches on a number of other issues from privacy to the Platform.

Some interesting tidbits:

• Facebook is working on granular privacy controls around Status Updates (currently, Facebook’s privacy controls allow you to choose whether or not a friend can see a) all or b) none of your Status Updates)
• Facebook now has 2 million users in Germany, compared to 1.2 million in October (the company is currently suing German competitor StudiVZ for copyright infringement)
• Zuckerberg mentioned that “standardization” of the social graph on one platform would make communication easier in the future
• Zuckerberg again highlighted the trend of more people sharing smaller bits of information in higher frequency
• When asked if comparisons to MySpace are fair, Zuckerberg said that Facebook sees itself as primarily a technology company, while MySpace sees itself primarily as a media company.

For those who can’t see the video here in your feed reader, click here to view.

Facebook, as is readily obvious by now, has an inordinate amount of data about its 150 million users: who they are, where they live, what they like, who they know, and what they say. But could new research the company is conducting on user-generated data let the company know how they feel?

In a conversation last week with prominent blogger Robert Scoble in Davos, Switzerland, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg described work Facebook is doing on “sentiment” research, and what that could mean for the future of Facebook. According to Scoble,

Facebook is, he told me, studying “sentiment” behavior. It hasn’t yet used that research in its public service yet, but is looking to figure out if people are having a good day or bad day. He said that already his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is underway. He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of “going out” kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of “hungover” messages on Saturday morning. He’s not sure where that research will lead. We talked about how sentiment analysis might lead to a new kind of news display in Facebook. Knowing whether a story is positive or negative would let Facebook pick a good selection of both kinds of news, or maybe even let you choose whether you want to see only “happy” news.

Sentiment Targeted Facebook Ads?

While Facebook’s advertising solutions already let marketers reach Facebook users in a profile-targeted way (age, sex, location, relationship status, interests, education), imagine the possibilities if Facebook let marketers target users according to their mood in real time.

• Users in a celebratory mood could be shown ads for champagne or fine restaurants.
• Those in a sad mood about the stock market could be shown ads for financial services firms (or Cash4Gold).

In brief, mood targeting could improve Facebook’s advertising performance in a number of verticals, from discretionary spending categories like cars and dining to traditional CPA categories like finance and dating.

Below: What might the advertiser mood targeting dashboard look like?

The Privacy Angle

“With great power comes great responsibility,” and changing the user experience based on inferred mood in real time certainly has some spook potential. It’s a major challenge, but Facebook has a lot of experience navigating complicated privacy questions.

Facebook’s Director of Monetization Tim Kendall told us recently, “We’ve done pretty well with privacy on [Social Ads] because we stick to what the user provides to us.” Applying that framework to a mood targeting system may be more complex – determining a user’s mood would likely often require inference, unlike profile targeting done today against information explicitly declared by users.

Conclusion

Given the potential for sentiment-targeted ads to substantially improve social network advertising performance, Facebook will rest assured thoroughly examine building such a system as it develops its sentiment engine technology further. Whether Facebook’s “mood detector” ever makes it to the live site – either in News Feed or advertisement form – is anybody’s guess.

It was 5 years ago tomorrow that Mark Zuckerberg founded Thefacebook.com along with fellow Harvard classmates Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskovitz, and Eduardo Saverin. 1,800 days and 150,000,000 users later, Facebook has become one of the most heavily used and trusted websites in the world.

Facebook’s accomplishments to date are truly impressive. Not only has the company built a social utility accepted across global cultures, but it has also established unprecedented trust with users who are comfortable sharing more and more personal information every day.

In fact, Facebook also released updated stats on information shared by Facebook users today:

• 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• 850 million photos are uploaded to the site each month
• 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
• 3.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
• The average user has 120 Facebook friends

Reflecting on the company’s 5 year anniversary, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said:

The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn’t consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.

Why is it important to us to keep building better ways for people to share information? Enabling efficient sharing is important because it makes the world more open, and this gives everyone a voice to express ideas and initiate change.

In order to celebrate the milestone, Facebook will be offering users a free “Thank You” virtual gift in the Facebook Gift Shop which they can send to their Facebook friends. “In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook,” Zuckerberg said.

Can’t remember how Facebook has changed along the way? Here’s a quick retrospective on the changing Facebook profile page through the years, from 2005 to 2009:

Once again this week, a new app sits atop AppData’s fastest growing mid-sized apps list. While Mardi Gras and You Are Gorgeous led the charts each of the last two weeks, My Tattoo Wall comes in as the fastest growing application this week. (You Are Gorgeous has actually been removed from the Facebook Platform, likely for forcing invites to use the app.)

In addition, Interview, made by the same developers as the popular Quizzes application, and Social Wizards’ Friendship Day Wishes added the most new users amongst mid-sized apps this week.

Here’s the full Top 20 fastest-growing mid-sized applications on Facebook from AppData for today. These are the top apps in the 100K-1M monthly user range with the highest MAU growth in the last week.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		My Tattoo Wall	119,715	+62,409	+108.9	Make The Web Better
2.		What every mom needs	172,084	+81,416	+89.8	—
3.		Water Gun Fight!	276,795	+130,227	+88.9	—
4.		School Vandals	241,611	+89,165	+58.5	Player Axis, Inc.
5.		Mobties	218,741	+78,757	+56.3	Hive7
6.		Send Prosperity	462,159	+150,111	+48.1	Martin Wee
7.		Are you spoiled?	265,987	+85,715	+47.6	—
8.		Mardi Gras	384,902	+122,829	+46.9	—
9.		Arizona Cardinals Fans	136,637	+42,362	+44.9	Watercooler
10.		Kisses	207,665	+63,619	+44.2	—
11.		Interview	762,528	+232,220	+43.8	Eric Diep
12.		Love GIFTS	109,084	+32,382	+42.2	Platform Software
13.		Team Australia Fans	217,529	+63,029	+40.8	Watercooler
14.		Send Cute Hearts	190,172	+49,159	+34.9	—
15.		App Broker	248,973	+62,197	+33.3	—
16.		Australia Cricket Fans	123,282	+30,341	+32.7	Watercooler
17.		Friendship Day Wishes	930,063	+225,336	+32.0	Social Wizards
18.		Beer Mail	101,486	+24,230	+31.4	Bea Pestano
19.		Toast	325,438	+76,456	+30.7	—
20.		incredible mom	195,648	+45,281	+30.1	Ayu Ws

AppData Traffic Charts

My Tattoo Wall – a gifting and personal expression app, similar to Pieces of Flair.

Interview – a fun app that lets you answer personality quiz questions and see others’ responses.

Friendship Day Wishes – as you might expect, a virtual gifting application.

This is a guest post by Jesse Pickard, Social Media Specialist at Razorfish. You can find Jesse on his blog or Twitter.

After spending the last few months digging into the intricacies of Facebook Connect, I’m here to go on the record: Facebook Connect is much more than the latest bright and shiny object. It has the potential to transform the way we interact with the web and the way agencies like Razorfish for which I work to build online experiences.

At Razorfish, I’m tasked with helping our clients integrate community into their web experiences, to make their sites more “social” for lack of a better term and also to deploy marketing programs across the web that foster two way conversations between brands and their customers. In order to be successful, it’s imperative that I constantly question a brand experience’s ability to make people care enough to do things like write comments or build profiles.

When you’re in the thick of a project, there’s a temptation to overestimate how much people actually care about your site. And that’s what’s so exciting to me about Facebook Connect: because users are able to bypass building profiles and a social graph all over again with just one click, building sophisticated social features is now possible for many more brands. Let’s dive into the reasons why.

Higher value user generated content

With a one-click login to Facebook Connect, websites have access to an unprecedented amount of user data. Using this data, sites now have the ability to redefine the way they display user generated content.  Gone are the days where all you will see is content from random avatars. Now sites can surface UGC from actual friends. If your friends haven’t made any actions on the site, then we can surface UGC from people like you – maybe fellow alumni or co-workers.  Say I’m shopping for a TV on Amazon, the 400+ reviews from people I don’t know have limited value to me compared to a review from my friend or even someone I don’t know who is similar to me.

Get brand content in Facebook without advertising

The strategy of fishing where the fish are is timeless. When time spent online was dominated by the big portals, our media dollars went to buying up ads and unique sponsorships on Yahoo and the like. Although Facebook Connect isn’t an advertising buy, it can accomplish the same goals as one (and in an unintrusive manner).  Brands can get their content into Facebook’s viral channels by letting visitors post news feed stories, status messages, photos, events, and more without leaving the website.

Smart brands and agencies will learn that the key to getting content into Facebook is about providing a meaningful value exchange for each Facebook Connect interaction, not prompting their user to post to Facebook at every turn. If a site is successful at giving users a good reason to post content to Facebook, it can make a world of difference to reach and visibility. The strong impact is only partly due to Facebook’s traffic. When brands appear in Facebook via Connect, the impressions interpreted as an individual’s endorsement of a particular product and are not subject to ad tune-out, making the impression far more valuable.

Faster logins, instant profiles, and individually relevant services

Facebook Connect and the like are going to make “social network fatigue” a very short-lived buzzword. With Connect, the social network fatigue-inducing process of registering for site, creating a profile and connecting with friends can be completely bypassed with one click. The value of this cannot be understated. While other Facebook Connect benefits can be slightly unclear, skipping registration is something any mainstream web user can appreciate.

Upon logging in, the Facebook-powered profile can inform a much more relevant, targeted experience. A retailer can feature merchandise based on profile details like location, age, relationship status or even brands that the user has “fanned.”  Another option is for a company to offer special promotions to influencers, or those who have a high amount of friends, tagged photos and wall posts. It’s not exact science, but I’m willing to guess that these people are more influential and vocal than their counterparts and would be a good type of person to convert into a brand advocate.

Enhanced competitions and ranking

Whether it’s through a contest or reputation system, incentives like earning rewards, raising levels, and winning prizes can help create much-needed energy around websites and marketing programs. Facebook Connect can enhance all forms of competition by creating an experience that’s far more relevant and localized to each individual user. By surfacing where a user ranks among their friends and networks, rather than among unknown peers, a user stronger drive to compete is generated. This is one of the key reasons why social games dominate Facebook’s application platform.

So what’s holding us up? Where are the Facebook Connect implementations for big brands?

Reason #1: There’s a valid concern out there that Facebook will change the rules of Connect just as they have with their application platform.

Reason #2: Implementing Facebook Connect into existing sites is not a walk in the park (depending on your platform). This is one of the reasons many of the big launch partners (Digg, Hulu, etc.) are yet to go live.

Reason #3: The Beacon privacy fiasco has spooked some brands into being very cautious with Facebook. It’s one of the main reasons for the “wait and see” attitude out there.

Looking ahead

Facebook Connect will likely get much more powerful as Facebook does two things in 2009. First, they will likely make more profile data available through Facebook Connect as the year progresses. Second, and more important, Facebook is expected to allow users to more easily segment their friends into groups and apply granular privacy settings to each group. Facebook Connect sites will respect these settings and users will feel more confident with logging into Facebook Connect.

Major brands should become familiar with the capabilities of all portable social graph technologies, including Google Friend Connect and the unreleased MySpaceID, along with Facebook Connect. It’s also a helpful exercise to imagine what your online destinations would look like on Facebook Connect as we did in our presentation, Portable Social Graphs – Imagining Their Potential.

Barring any privacy debacles, or big advancements from Friend Connect, there should be a strong adoption of Facebook Connect coming in 2009 – especially as major implementations from the likes of Digg and Hulu go live and set an example for brands that are on the fence.

RockYou, a leading developer of applications for Facebook and other social networks – as well as one of the leading ad networks for applications on the Facebook Platform and other social networking platforms – is launching support for video ads today.

RockYou’s video ad network offering will allow advertisers to distribute ad videos across multiple social platforms. The company says it can deliver 10 million video views per day in standard IAB units across its popular applications like Super Wall, Pieces of Flair, and Hug Me, as well as other applications in the RockYou ad network. And when users view the video, they will be able to share it with friends via Super Wall. Here’s how it looks:

Collectively, RockYou’s applications reach over 32 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData. RockYou says it reaches over 130 million monthly unique users on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster overall.

We have the latest demographic data on US Facebook user as of February 1, 2009. Before jumping into the details below, here are the highlights.

Key Highlights

• Facebook reporting nearly 45.3 million active US users in the last 30 days
• Facebook growing in every age/gender demographic. Fastest growing segment: Women over 55, up 175.3% in the last 120 days.
• Facebook growing faster with women than men in almost every age group. Women comprise 56.2% of Facebook’s audience, up from 54.3% late last year.
• 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.

Facebook US Audience Growth by Age and Gender

Facebook’s US audience has continued to grow in recent months, fueled by expansion primarily in users 26 and older. Facebook has been growing particularly rapidly amongst people over 45 in the US, as the charts show below: over 165% amongst both men and women 45-54 over the last 4 months.

While the fastest growing age group by total users is still 26-34, the number of women over 55 on Facebook grew by an astounding 175.3% since the end of September.  Their male counterparts, however, weren’t able to keep up – growing by only 137.8%.  The number of women over 55 on Facebook almost double the number of men over 55 on Facebook today.

Facebook US Audience by Age and Gender

Overall, women now outnumber men in every age group on Facebook. In total, women now make up about 56.2% of Facebook’s US audience, up from 54.3% late last year. Women most outnumber men in the 18-25 and 26-34 age groups, where there are 1.4 females for every 1 male on Facebook.

Facebook US Audience by Age

Overall, 45% of Facebook’s 45.3 million active users in the US is now 26 years old or older. Nearly a quarter of all Facebook users are over 35 today – quite a change from Facebook’s roots as a social networking tool for college students just a few years ago.

Teenagers now make up about 12% of the overall Facebook audience. Facebook does not publish any data on users under 13, because the terms of service requires all users be at least 13 years old to join.

For more information on Facebook’s international growth in 95 countries around the world, check out the Facebook Global Monitor.

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor – Current Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Global Monitor: Tracking Facebook in Global Markets – February 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Global Monitor is a premium service and newsletter produced by Inside Facebook that provides vital data and insight to media industry executives, global marketing and communications firms, analysts, and developers for whom Facebook’s rapid international expansion poses significant opportunities or threats.

Facebook’s growth continued at a torrid pace in February. 73% of Facebook’s growth came internationally, and there were well over 100 million users active on Facebook in the last month from outside the US. For further background, take a look at how Facebook grew in some countries around the world last year like Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland, Argentina, and Indonesia.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $99 per issue, or $395 for a six month subscription. Future monthly updates will be delivered directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic. (Custom reports are also available.) You can reach us at mail AT insidefacebook DOT com with questions at any time.

Each month, the Facebook Global Monitor provides the latest comprehensive data on the expansion of Facebook’s audience in nearly 100 global markets. In addition, the Monitor provides alerts on breakout and cooling markets, as well as our latest in-house projections on Facebook’s growth in each country 30 days, 90 days, and 12 months into the future.

See the full table of contents of the first newsletter below. All reports are based on primary research by Inside Facebook using data from Facebook, and each section is designed to elucidate key actionable trends.

We believe big opportunities exist for developers and marketers to reach and engage the Facebook audience in these rapidly emerging and expanding markets. Cheers to continued growth in 2009!

The Facebook Global Monitor

Tracking Facebook in Global Markets

February 2009

Contents

I. Introduction: 2008 – The Year That Facebook Went Global

II. Global Market Report

1. Audience Size Today

2. Fastest Growing Audience

• Last 12 months
• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

3. Market Penetration Today

4. Largest Market Penetration Increases

• Last 12 months
• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

III. Emerging Market Analysis

1. Growth Projections

• Next 30 days
• Next 90 days
• Next 12 months

2. Technical Alerts

• Breakout Markets: Last 90 Days
• Cooling Markets: Last 90 Days

IV. Regional Summaries

1. Africa
2. Asia / Pacific
3. Europe
4. North America
5. South America

V. Country Updates

1. Argentina
2. Australia
3. Austria
4. Bahamas
5. Bahrain
6. Bangladesh
7. Belgium
8. Bolivia
9. Bosnia & Herzegovina
10. Brazil
11. Bulgaria
12. Canada
13. Chile
14. China
15. Colombia
16. Costa Rica
17. Croatia
18. Cyprus
19. Czech Republic
20. Denmark
21. Dominican Republic
22. Ecuador
23. Egypt
24. El Salvador
25. Finland
26. France
27. Germany
28. Ghana
29. Greece
30. Guatemala
31. Honduras
32. Hong Kong
33. Hungary
34. Iceland
35. India
36. Indonesia
37. Ireland
38. Israel
39. Italy
40. Jamaica
41. Japan
42. Jordan
43. Kenya
44. Kuwait
45. Lebanon
46. Lithuania
47. Luxembourg
48. Macedonia
49. Malaysia
50. Maldives
51. Malta
52. Mauritius
53. Mexico
54. Morocco
55. Netherlands
56. New Zealand
57. Nicaragua
58. Nigeria
59. Norway
60. Oman
61. Pakistan
62. Palestine
63. Panama
64. Paraguay
65. Peru
66. Philippines
67. Poland
68. Portugal
69. Puerto Rico
70. Qatar
71. Romania
72. Russia
73. Saudi Arabia
74. Serbia
75. Singapore
76. Slovakia
77. Slovenia

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor – Current Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

78. South Africa
79. South Korea
80. Spain
81. Sri Lanka
82. Sweden
83. Switzerland
84. Taiwan
85. Thailand
86. Trinidad and Tobago
87. Tunisia
88. Turkey
89. Ukraine
90. United Arab Emirates
91. United Kingdom
92. United States
93. Uruguay
94. Venezuela
95. Vietnam

Footnotes & Methodology