The latest Comscore US social networking numbers are in for February, and here’s how Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are stacking up.

Note: While these numbers may appear like growth has significantly slowed since previous months, Comscore does not normalize for the number of days in the month – February was 3 days shorter than January.

Facebook was basically flat for February at 57.4 million uniques (up 77% from a year ago), while MySpace fell 7% to 70.3 million uniques (up 3% from a year ago). If February weren’t 3 days shorter than January, uniques for all sites measured would have been about 10% higher.

At the same time, however, Twitter grew by an astounding 55% in February from 2.6 million to 4.0 million US uniques. The service continues to explode and was the fastest growing site by a longshot, according to Comscore.

Source: Comscore

Facebook’s recent comments that it is planning on opening up the service more and more may accelerate Facebook’s growth in the coming weeks and months. Facebook crossed 175 million global active users last month, and should be crossing 200 million active worldwide members very shortly.

The Yahoo Fire Eagle team has just released a new Facebook application that lets users share their location information with their friends.

The new app, called Friends on Fire, lets users update their location in a variety of ways – any website or mobile app that supports the Fire Eagle API – and also post brief “Signals” (status updates). The signup process drives users through a Yahoo registration form, which makes for a somewhat jolting user experience. However, once you’re through, friends’ information is visualized on a Yahoo Map inside Facebook.

While location sharing is a tough nut to crack, it’s great to see Yahoo’s Fire Eagle team building a powerful cross-platform service. We’ll be watching to see if it catches on with large numbers of users.

Related coverage:

• Mobile Social Network Brightkite Launches Facebook Connect Integration

While Inside Facebook has always been published on the web, now you can also follow us through  Inside Facebook’s new Facebook public profile.

Facebook has completely redesigned the way what used to be called “Pages” work – the new public profiles make it much easier for brands, artists, and politicians to share information with fans – so we thought we’d start sharing more information through our public profile too.

The Inside Facebook public profile will be a great way for you to stay up to date with what’s going on inside our heads, as not everything we come across makes it into a blog post.

Of course, if you’d like to stay up to date with everything published here on Inside Facebook, you can always:

1. Subscribe to Inside Facebook via RSS
   
2. Subscribe to Inside Facebook via Email
3. Follow Inside Facebook on Twitter.

Look forward to seeing you inside Facebook soon!

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking with Logan Green, Founder & CEO, and Larry Yang, Lead Developer, of Zimride on how the company is integrating with Facebook Connect. Launched in 2007, Zimride is a carpool community that combines Google Maps, the Facebook social graph, and a proprietary ride-matching algorithm that allows users to efficiently organize carpool rides – and save money in a sustainable way. Zimride’s product started around Facebook with its Carpool application, which was the winner of Facebook’s 2007 fbFund competition.

When did Zimride launch Facebook Connect integration?

In November 2008, although at that time Connect wasn’t live yet. Facebook has built a “virtual” community that mirrors the real world. Now the real world is pretty well represented, and Zimride uses this reality-based virtual world to establish trust so that users can take it offline if they wish.

How does Connect deliver value to Zimride specifically?

It’s providing a ton of value. Being a rideshare system, Zimride is centered around trusted identities. When we were at the Facebook Developer Garage for Facebook Connect, we had high hopes for Connect acting as a driver’s license for the Internet. It’s hard to build up a trusted identity on any site, so Connect is the kind of feature we need that enables users to trust each other and use shared information to make educated choices. Before Connect, the process of authenticating users was complicated. The first thing I thought of when Connect was announced was that it could create a better user experience for authentication.

Please discuss Zimride’s implementation of Connect.

The transition to Facebook Connect was a more natural one for us, since the majority of our users came from our application, Carpool.

We worked off the Facebook Developer Wiki and sample code, and it took a few days to get the basic login function working. Generating News Feed stories took another day. It was pretty straightforward, but there’s more we want to do with Connect now. Development-wise, there are a handful of quirks. Connect is stable, but not as well-documented as PHP or MySQL, which is typical in the Net business. Years ago, this was also the case with NSAPI (Netscape Server Application Programming Interface).

Have you noticed any interesting user trends since launching Connect?

In general, we’re seeing that Feed stories are driving more traffic to our site, resulting in people being more likely to sign-up for Zimride. We’ve heard that some sites are seeing two to three times as many users, and we’re also experiencing much higher registration and engagement rates. Before, applications caused so much spam, and very few app stories made it to the News Feed. With Connect, users can indicate which stories they want to publish, ensuring that meaningful app stories are given more weight.

What is the effect of Connect on Zimride’s Carpool application? Are fewer users interacting with the app now?

No, I’d say it hasn’t had a negative effect on our application. Overall, we get the most traffic on the Carpool app because it’s been around and we’ve promoted it the longest. But Connect is now at a level where you get most of the benefits of a Facebook application, besides the recently used applications menu.

I think Facebook simply wants to provide developers with options and the best tools to integrate however they see fit. Whether developers want to build applications within Facebook or drive users to external sites depends on a variety of considerations, including user base and style of marketing, etc.

Any closing thoughts?

Connect is going to be a massively popular product for Facebook. It’s changing user engagement, and there’s a big opportunity for enterprise applications like Carpool. Zimride is the first company in the ridesharing space to integrate with Connect. The enterprise market should pay more attention to what Connect is doing.

Thank you Logan and Larry!

On Monday, Inside Facebook detailed 8 key ways Facebook’s new home page redesign will affect application virality. Now, Facebook has released details on updated feed APIs for developers interested in taking advantage of the new Stream.

According to Facebook:

• The showFeedDialog functions now take two extra optional parameters for the comment prompt message and default comment text. You’ll want to take advantage of these since they affect what shows up in the stream for your application’s feed stories.
• Facebook says it “no longer aggregates Feed stories, so you don’t need to create an array of templates of a given size or call Feed.registerTemplateBundle.”
• The “full” story size no longer supported. One line stories will only appear in the “recent activity” section on the profile – never in the Stream.
• Finally, the publisher width is becoming slightly narrower, so you may need to adjust your publisher implementation.

Applications will automatically work with the new stream – however, Facebook is “encouraging” developers to change their feed structure to take advantage of the latest features in the updated version of the Feed Form specs.

It’s going to be an action-packed few days at SXSW in Austin, Texas, starting tomorrow. For those interested in connecting with Facebook, the company is hosting a Developer Garage on Sunday and participating in at least 6 panels throughout the conference.

The Facebook Developer Garage Austin – SWSW Edition is being held Sunday, March 15, from 1-4pm at Pangaea in downtown Austin. Presentations will include:

• Digital Collectibles and the Social Web – Josh Williams (Alamofire, CEO)
• Making your websites social with Facebook Connect – Josh Elman (Facebook, Platform Program Manager)
• Careability – Chris Chan (Causes, Product Manager)
• How a ‘non-social’ application works with the world’s largest social & identity provider, 1 year later – Sam Lessin (Drop.io, CEO)
• Social games, anytime, anywhere – Sebastien de Halleux (Playfish, COO & Co-Founder)
• Sports with your friends – Brian Mead (Citizen Sports, Product Manager)

So far, almost 500 people have RSVP’d for the event. In addition, for those interested in attending sessions on Facebook related topics, here’s a complete list of all the panels people from Facebook are participating in:

• Friday 3:30-4:30 PM: “Games by the People, For the People,” with Gareth Davis (Room C)
• Saturday 11:30 AM-12:30 PM: “The Search for a More Social Web,” with Dave Morin (Room 8 )
• Saturday  3:30-4:30 PM – “Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet,” with Ari Steinberg (Room B)
• Monday 10:00-11:00 AM – “Scaling Synchronous Web Apps,” with Serkan Piantino (Room Hilton B)
• Monday 11:30 AM – 2:00 PM: Brunch with Randi Zuckerberg, “Social Media for Social Good” (Stubb’s BBQ, 801 Red River Street)
• Monday  7:00-9:30 PM – 20×2 Q&A Panel with Josh Elman, “What’s It Gonna Take?” (The Parish Room, 214 E Sixth Street, Austin, Texas)

Look forward to seeing you in Austin this weekend!

As expected, Facebook has launched the redesigned Facebook home page this afternoon. Here’s how it looks:

A few thoughts and first impressions:

• The default “filter” is “News Feed,” which appears to be all shared items by friends. You can filter your stream by network, public profiles, friend list, or application.
• The prompt on the publisher now reads “What’s on your mind?”
• Application feed stories seem a lot more prominent. For example, in the screenshot above, a feed story from the Easter Egg Hunt application is being shown.
• The stream emphasizes status updates, like Twitter.
• Every stream item has a “comment” and “like” link on it. It’s not hard to find feed story action links.
• There is now a “send a gift” link next to every person listed in the expanded birthdays section.
• The sponsored home page engagement ad hasn’t changed much – though it’s now higher in the page.
• My “Highlights” currently contains items of the following types: links, video, pages/public profiles, photos, notes.

Update: Facebook also made a few subtle changes to the profile change with this release. Mainly, one-line feed stories are now grouped into clusters of 3 or 4, and these “Recent Activity” clusters alternate with explicitly shared items throughout the feed.

Facebook, now live in over 40 languages with over 60 more in the process of user translation, today officially launched in Arabic and Hebrew – two languages in which writing begins on the right side of the page and ends on the left.

It’s an impressive technical accomplishment, because many elements of the Facebook site had to be reworked to account for all the linguistic differences. As Facebook’s Ghassan Haddad writes,

For example, with right-to-left languages some of the characters, mainly punctuation marks and numbers, are the same as those used in left-to-right languages like English. The mix of characters between languages written in different directions makes it difficult at times for Web applications to determine the correct direction in which to display the language. Design is another challenge, since a Web page laid out from right to left looks like a mirror image of an equivalent English page. All components on the page must be changed, including text alignment, ordering of tabs on pages, different fields on forms, labels, buttons and much more.

For more details on the challenges of translating into Arabic Hebrew, read the read of Haddad’s blog post.

Facebook released two new targeting features for its performance advertising platform: radius targeting and language targeting.

The new radius targeting feature will make it easier for local advertisers to reach people living in the greater vicinity of target markets. For example, an advertiser wanting to reach people over 18 in San Francisco previously could target Facebook users only in San Francisco proper – about 300,000 people. Now, advertisers can target people within 10, 20, or 50 miles of San Francisco, expanding the possible reach of the campaign 300% to nearly 1.2 million people. This should be a great help to local and regional advertisers interested in using Facebook’s performance solutions.

In addition, advertisers are also now able to target their ads by language. This means advertisers only wanting to reach the Spanish speaking population in the United States on Facebook (about 1.1 million people), they can now do so directly through Facebook’s ad campaign management tools.

The new features should make Facebook’s performance ads and enhanced Social Ads more powerful tools for marketers.

Playdom, the developer of the #1 game on MySpace and 8 of the top 25, is coming out of stealth mode tonight. The company has 37 employees – with plans to be at 100 by the end of the year – and is already profitable. They’ve raised no money, and co-founders Dan Yue, Rick Thompson, Chris Wang, and Ling Xiao say they don’t have plans to do so, due to a successful monetization strategy through a mix of virtual goods.

However, the company says it is now turning its sights to the Facebook Platform.

Collectively, the company claims 5.2 million daily active users and 21.8 million monthly active users on MySpace between its Mobsters (13.4 million users), Bumper Stickers (10 million), Own Your Friends (9.5 million), Kiss Me (2.8 million) Poker Palace (2.7 million), Heroes (2.1 million), Sorority Life (1.6 million), and Rockstars titles.

Now, CEO and co-founder Dan Yue says Playdom is now splitting its design efforts 50/50 between MySpace and Facebook. Poker Palace and Sorority Life are already live on Facebook, and more are coming soon. Poker Palace is currently the #15 game on Facebook with nearly 2.7 monthly active players.

Yue says that while Playdom is bringing many titles over to Facebook, it’s not simply porting them, but is going to “put them in the Facebook context.”

Just as Playdom’s titles span multiple genres on MySpace, expect them to on Facebook as well, Yue adds.

Welcoming Playdom to the Facebook Platform are a bevy of game developers including Playfish, Zynga, SGN, Serious Business, 6 waves, Green Patch, RockYou, and hundreds of independent developers who have been building on Facebook since the Platform launched nearly two years ago.

Zynga and SGN have been building their most popular titles for the iPhone as well, and Playdom says it plans to do the same – an iPhone Mobsters game is already in the works. Yue says that, like other titles from SGN and Zynga, Playdom’s Mobsters for the iPhone will connect game play across platforms so that players can log in from their home computer or anywhere with a mobile internet connection.

Will Playdom experience the same success on Facebook as it has on MySpace? We’ll be following closely.