According to PageData, the folks at Coca-Cola seem to have accomplished something pretty amazing on Facebook – the Coca-Cola fan page is the 2nd most popular Page on all of Facebook with over 3.3 million fans, second only to Barack Obama.

The only catch? The page wasn’t created by Coke, but by two Coke fans in Los Angeles, Dusty Sorg and Michael Jedrzejewski. In a recent AdAge story, the two tell of how they were recently contacted by Coca-Cola and asked to partner with Coke to manage the Page in a move that showed a graceful approach to social media by the company.

It’s an increasingly common question for brands interesting in building their Facebook presence: What do I do if someone has already created a Facebook Page for my brand? Or in the case of big brands like Coke – hundreds of Pages?

There are a variety of options at your disposal, and how you choose to proceed is really up to you.

1. Ask Facebook to transfer control of the Page to you. Most brand managers who plan to actively invest in Facebook promotions want to control the destination Page, and Facebook’s policy on Pages is that they may only be controlled by the rightful brand owner. If you’ve found a Page for a brand that  you’re the rightful owner of, contact Facebook and they can transfer it to you once they can confirm your identity. However, of course, you’ll need to consider whether and how this should be communicated to the Page’s fan base – especially if there’s already a strong community in place.

2. Ask the Page owners to transfer control to you. For those brands concerned about alienating the fans that have invested their time in creating and building a Page – sometimes over a period of years – talking with the Page owners directly may be a more appropriate approach to try first. Facebook doesn’t make the contact information of Page owners publicly available, so you’ll have to either just post a message on the Page’s wall or ask Facebook for their contact info. From there, you can have a conversation with the Page creator about how to proceed.

3. Ask the Page owner to share control with you. In cases where the fan community has become very large and the brand isn’t incredibly perturbed by the way the Page owner is running things, a more innovative approach to sharing administrative responsibilities can work. In the Coca-Cola case, “Facebook made the decision to either close the page or let Coca-Cola take it over. Coca-Cola instead proposed an alternative: Let the creators keep the page but share it with a few of Coca-Cola’s senior interactive folks… Coke instead flew the guys down to Atlanta for a few days of meetings, a tour of the World of Coke museum and a visit to the company’s legendary archives.”

4. Ask Facebook to shut the Page down. If for some reason you just don’t want this Page to exist any more, brands can ask Facebook to shut it down. Facebook can either simply delete it or roll over the fans of that Page into another Page that you own. However, in this case especially, you should be careful to communicate this in such a way that it does not create a jarring or otherwise poor experience for the Page’s community.

5. Let the Page continue to exist, and start an “official” Page of your own. For those that don’t mind having “unofficial” Pages around, you’re always free to do nothing and let it ride. However, fans searching for your page may find the unofficial ones instead, which could be confusing and/or splinter your community. Facebook itself may notice that there are duplicate Pages and ask you if you’d like to consolidate them at some point.

On Facebook, it’s become an annual tradition to “fill out your bracket” each March with friends to see who can make the most correct predictions in the annual NCAA men’s college basketball tournament in the US. Facebook created the first brackets application in house in 2006, but since the Facebook Platform opened many bracket applications have been created by Facebook developers. This year, three are standing out above the rest.

According to AppData, 3 of the 10 fastest growing applications on the Facebook Platform this week are bracket applications made by Watercooler, CBSSports.com, and Citizen Sports. With over 900,000 monthly active users, Watercooler’s bracket application is currently the largest bracket application on Facebook (disclosure: I am an advisor to Watercooler), and the bracket apps by Citizen Sports (nearly 400k MAU) and CBSSports.com (nearly 300k MAU) are growing very quickly as well. These apps are very social, and are great examples of friends and family connecting through sports on Facebook.

Each of these top “March Madness” applications have all doubled or tripled in size over the last week, as the tournament teams were announced on Sunday and the first games start Thursday morning. With over 1.6 million total players so far as of today, we’ll be watching closely to see how fast these apps grow before the tournament begins!

Top 2009 Facebook Bracket Applications

• 2009 Bracket Challenge by Watercooler
• 2009 Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports
• CBSSports.com Brackets by CBS Sports

In a special series on ways to use new tools to share and distribute content on Facebook, Inside Facebook recently wrote about how to import your blog into Facebook.

For all of you that have already taken this step, it has likely been a great step in sharing and marketing your blog, especially among your extended network within the Facebook community.

If the “Import Your Blog” utility on Facebook has been helpful but not quite robust enough, a new Facebook app called NetworkedBlogs might be the solution for you. Describing itself as a “community of bloggers and blog lovers,” NetworkedBlogs offers Facebook users a more fully-featured way to follow and share blogs, all from within Facebook.

Of course, NetworkedBlogs takes advantage of the power of the social graph — when your friends add the NetworkedBlogs application, you not only get to see what they’re writing and reading, but you get to share with them in kind. Some useful features of the app include:

• The ability to choose from a list of popular blogs or add your own (the basic feature that Facebook’s blog importer also offers).
• Real-time news feed and news wall features that display the most recent posts from the blogs that you’re following.
• The ability to view the highest voted posts across all blogs, including the upvoting offered by popular news aggregators like Digg and Reddit.
• A “profile” separate from your Facebook profile, that allows you to add a personal touch when marketing your blogs to the growing numbers of NetworkedBlogs users.

By offering this valuable utility to bloggers, NetworkedBlogs is gaining traction within Facebook.  It now has almost 500,000 monthly active users.

Whether you’re interested in more successfully marketing your blog online, getting a stronger hold of all your social media needs, or building profitable and popular Facebook applications, NetworkedBlogs is a tool that will offer you some insights — let us know what you think!

The amount of interest in Facebook Pages (also now known as “public profiles”) from both brands and publishers has increased dramatically in recent weeks since Facebook released a major redesign aimed at making Pages much more powerful for brands and advertisers. As a result, many brands, agencies, artists, and media companies have begun investigating what others are doing to make their Pages successful.

Page owners are asking,

What’s really working well, and not so well, in the post-redesign Facebook Page world?

Today, Inside Facebook is excited to announce the launch of a new service called PageData, a new resource for tracking what’s hot – and what’s not – inside Facebook. PageData is the easiest way to track Facebook Page growth in the post-redesign “public profile” world.

With PageData, you can:

• See which Pages are gaining and losing the most fans – every day and every week
  
• See the leading pages in any size category
• View historical growth charts for hundreds of thousands of Facebook Pages

PageData was designed to be an easy to use resource for anyone interested in tracking Page metrics on Facebook. That being said, the site has a lot of room for growth and improvement, and we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for features and functionality that you’d like to see added. Please send your thoughts, suggestions, and feedback to mail AT insidefacebook DOT com. PageData is still in very early beta, and (as long as Facebook lets us) we look forward to making the site increasingly valuable to you in the future.

Here’s a look at what you’ll find on PageData:

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FML	371,922	+338,454	+1,011.28
2.	Comic Relief: Red Nose Day 2009	218,046	+198,126	+994.61
3.	The Oprah Winfrey Show	317,609	+158,947	+100.18
4.	Des douches à 2.	134,024	+117,400	+706.21
5.	Quelli che sono cresciuti con il 3310…	179,596	+105,487	+142.34
6.	French Connection	106,025	+103,343	+3,853.21
7.	tirare fuori il cellulare, metterlo via e dire “..no aspetta che ore sono?”	173,900	+94,634	+119.39
8.	Yo también le doy la vuelta a la almohada para poner el lado frío	138,027	+89,184	+182.59
9.	anche tu prima di ascoltare l ipod\mp3 ci metti un ora a snodare le cuffie	112,681	+87,158	+341.49
10.	Tais toi et embrasse moi!	345,640	+87,145	+33.71

That’s it for now! We look forward to hearing your thoughts. See more at PageData.

Facebook added a new feature to its profile privacy settings today, now allowing users to open up part or all of their Facebook profile for anyone on Facebook to see.

In order to open up their profile, users can now go to the profile privacy settings page and change any of the following settings to “Everyone”:

• Profile
• Status Updates
• Links
• Wall Posts
• Basic Info
• Personal Info
• Education Info
• Work Info
• Photos of You
• Videos of You

It’s another step in Facebook’s increasing movement toward openness for those users who want to share with more people. However, profiles opened to everyone will not be visible for search engines – viewers must be logged into Facebook in order to access the open profiles.

“One of the top priorities at Facebook is offering privacy controls that let you choose exactly what you share with whom. We have largely focused on enabling you to give access to your profile to people you confirmed as friends and people in your networks. While these controls remain important and a priority for us, many of you have explained that you also want to open parts of your profile to a wider audience,” Facebook’s Mark Slee said in a blog post.

None of the existing privacy settings have changed, and Facebook says special privacy rules are still in place for minors.

TweetDeck, one of the most popular desktop clients for Twitter, today launched a new beta version that integrates Facebook status updates directly alongside the Twitter stream. Now you can post updates to Twitter, Facebook, or both simultaneously. This makes it really easy to monitor and participate in conversations on both Facebook and Twitter all from one place.

Facebook friends online also have a green button icon which you can use to initiate Facebook chats directly from within TweetDeck.

The new integration is made possible by Facebook Connect, Facebook’s way of letting developers access the Facebook social graph and publish information back to the Facebook stream from third party websites or applications. The new TweetDeck is the latest in a spate of Facebook Connect launches in recent days – this weekend, several iPhone app developers launched Facebook Connect integration as part of the launch of Facebook Connect for iPhone, and Seesmic launched a brand new Facebook status update desktop client the same day.

TweetDeck with Facebook Connect shows the power of status update APIs. It’s likely that we’re going to see more Facebook Connect-enabled desktop clients in the weeks and months ahead!

This weekend at SXSW in Austin, Facebook’s Dave Morin announced the launch of Facebook Connect for iPhone. Now, iPhone app developers can integrate Facebook Connect natively into their apps so users can easily connect and share game content with their Facebook friends from inside the app. Facebook Connect for iPhone is a big step forward in the advancement of the social web because it bridges the social graph, identity, and privacy of Facebook with the rich, mobile application platform of the iPhone for the first time.

However, unlike some may think, Connect for iPhone doesn’t just create new opportunities for Facebook application developers to expand their reach to the iPhone (though it certainly does that too – companies that were large on Facebook before the iPhone like Flixster, SGN, Zynga, and Playfish are already showing the power of a cross platform mobile and social app ecosystem with the strategies behind their iPhone Facebook Connect integrations they launched this weekend).

Rather, it also offers significant new opportunities for iPhone app developers to create new kinds of engaging social interactions and powerful viral growth by connecting their applications to Facebook’s social graph and feed system for the first time. We’re going to see lots of interesting new and improved applications coming from iPhone app developers in the upcoming weeks and months that take advantage of both the social graph to create more compelling experiences and the power of the News Feed and invitations to create more powerful viral loops.

Take Urbanspoon for example, of the highest rated restaurant review applications on the iPhone that announced Facebook Connect integration this weekend. Urbanspoon has already added a “Friends” feature that lets users share their ratings with Facebook friends and see what their friends have done on Urbanspoon lately. The potential for this type of interaction to become very engaging and viral is quite high – especially as Facebook adds more support for all the communication channels on the iPhone that Facebook Platform application developers have been using for some time.

We’re only at the beginning, but Facebook has opened the door for iPhone app developers to create some seriously social mobile applications. Which iPhone developers take advantage of these opportunities most quickly will be interesting to see.

In addition to announcing the official launch of Facebook Connect for the iPhone this weekend, Facebook has also announced a new round of the fbFund competition for developers building apps on the web, iPhone, desktop, or any platform with Facebook Connect.

Facebook’s Josh Elman announced at the Facebook Developers Garage in Austin that up to 50 developers will be selected as first round winners in May. From there, several finalists will be awarded up to $100,000 in the form of equity investments. The finalists will also be invited to spend the summer in a new incubator program being run by Dave McClure of Founders Fund, where they will also receive mentorship from Facebook engineers and executives.

Last year, there were over 600 applicants for the first year of the fbFund competition. fbFund finalist Weddingbook was acquired by TheKnot in January, and we recently profiled all finalists from last year – Wildfire, Kontagent, GroupCard, and MouseHunt – here on Inside Facebook as well.

We expect that many (if not most) of the Facebook Connect applications entered in the new fbFund competition will be built on the iPhone. For developers interested in learning more, click here for info on the SDK, or check out Facebook’s new video “How To Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 Minutes” below.

Seesmic, the company behind the Seesmic video commenting/conversation service and Twhirl desktop client for Twitter and FriendFeed, announced the launch of a new Facebook status update desktop client called Seesmic for Facebook yesterday at SXSW. Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur made the announcement during Dave Morin’s talk announcing the launch of Facebook Connect on the iPhone as well.

Seesmic for Facebook is an Adobe AIR application (meaning it runs on both PCs and Macs with the AIR libraries installed) that uses Facebook Connect to let users update their status and view their friends’ updates. It’s conceptually very similar to a variety of Twitter applications like Twhirl or TweetDeck, albeit in simplified form for now. The app makes it really easy to stay connected with friends’ updates and quickly post your own updates while you’re not on the Facebook site.

Here’s how it works:

1) After installing Seesmic for Facebook, you authenticate with Facebook Connect inside the desktop app.

2) You’re then sent to Facebook to authorize the app to make status updates on your behalf.

3. The Seesmic client then shows you your latest stream of updates from your Facebook friends.

4) Status updates also display in a 3 second popup as they come in.

Seesmic’s Le Meur hinted that the company would soon consolidate its products under a single brand name – but for now, Twhirl, Seesmic for Facebook, and the Seesmic video service remain separate products. You can download the app here!

Last summer, Facebook originally announced that it was bringing Facebook Connect to the iPhone. This morning it’s launching, and several popular iPhone apps are live with Facebook Connect integration in the iPhone app store, including apps and games from Playfish, SGN, Flixster, Urbanspoon, Tapulous, Whrrl, Zynga, and Binary Game.

Facebook Connect makes it easy for iPhone app and game developers to authenticate users through their Facebook accounts and share content from the app with their friends through Facebook’s News Feed. Facebook says Connect has been implemented by over 6,000 websites since it was announced last May.

The iPhone is the first mobile platform to get full Facebook Connect support – and we think it’s going to be big. (iPhone apps also work on the iPod Touch, which some app developers report higher traffic on than the iPhone itself.) While a couple iPhone apps from SGN and Zynga have authenticated through Facebook Connect via the web, this is the first native iPhone app support we’ve seen. Now, users will be able to easily connect with Facebook friends through iPhone apps & games.

Here’s how the first apps with Facebook Connect for iPhone live look:

Binary Game (as first spotted by KRAPPS)

Who Has the Biggest Brain for iPhone (Playfish)

Who Has the Biggest Brain for iPhone, users can connect through their Facebook account and continue playing Playfish’s classic game on their iPhone anywhere there’s an internet connection.

Whrrl (as first spotted by Kevin Foreman)

Agency Wars (SGN)

SGN’s new Agency Wars lets players see when their friends are live online and interact with them in real time.

This morning, Facebook’s Dave Morin takes to the stage at SXSW to discuss “The Search for a More Social Web.” Perhaps he will be discussing Facebook Connect for iPhone in more detail!

Update: Dave Morin just confirmed, Facebook Connect for the iPhone is launching today. “Now you can share and play games on the iPhone with friends and family…” The story has been updated with this information.