Facebook today is rolling out updates to its Friends page that makes importing your webmail contacts and creating friend lists for filtering your home page feed easier. It’s a much needed brushup to the Friends page.

Facebook is putting contact list importing and friend suggestions up front to further encourage the site’s growth. Although Facebook is still adding over half a million new users per day, finding ways to increase the site’s viral growth is still a high priority. With the latest home page redesign, Facebook put its contact list importer upsell on the bottom of the right column, so increasing its priority on the Friends tab will help make sure it’s not missed.

In addition, Facebook has tweaked the Friend List creation flow on the Friends tab so that it’s now easier to make Friend List. Friend Lists are private groupings of your Facebook friends, which you can then use to filter the home page stream and make privacy settings for different groups of friends. Because Friend Lists are relatively hard to make, Facebook is trying to help make it easier. The more Friend Lists people have, the more usable the home page stream becomes.

Check out this video demoing from Facebook the changes:

Travel site Ruba has just launched, and it’s taking advantage of Facebook Connect to build its user-generated content library.

Ruba features user-generated reviews and articles on travel centering in Western Europe and Asia, with plans to expand as the user base grows. The company is using Facebook Connect to give user guides the ability to quickly share reviews or gather information on potential destinations.

Ruba is a very visual site, and most of the reviews consist of photos with some brief descriptions. There are a few video reviews posted to a Ruba YouTube account that appear both on the home site and its Facebook page.

The site was started by Mike Cassidy, formerly of Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation, and Arnaud Weber, who has worked for a number of technology companies, most recently as a technical lead on Chrome. Both founders have extensive travel experience, not to mention loads of success building successful businesses.

Tapping into Facebook Connect gives Ruba guides and visitors quick access to the travel experiences and local knowledge of all their Facebook friends. Newly posted reviews can be shared through Facebook, and there are already a number of reviews and videos up.

This confidence in Facebook Connect is a strong comment on the power of Facebook to drive all-important early traffic to a beta site. Cassidy and Weber have more than proven their ability to spot trends and turn them into dollars, and it speaks volumes that they are relying heavily on Facebook to build a site that relies entirely on users for content.

Given that people over 35-years-old represent Facebook’s fastest growing demographic (women over 55 being the fastest growing group overall), it’s not surprising that more entrepreneurs are showing interest in genealogy applications on Facebook.

Most recently, popular family social network Geni.com launched a Facebook application that allows users to retrieve data from its popular genealogical website. Without leaving Facebook, the application allows Geni users to access their family tree, find (and add) relatives to it, and maintain a family calendar and profile.

Since releasing the app in early April, it has enjoyed steady growth. To date, it claims around 62,000 monthly active users.  Geni faces some stiff competition within Facebook’s application ecosystem, however. The We’re Related Facebook app, developed by FamilyLink.com, claims just shy of 16 million monthly active users, making it the fifth most popular application on the platform. The Family Tree Facebook app, developed by Familybuilder.com, has more than 3 million.

In addition to building applications, both Geni and FamilyBuilder have also utilized Facebook Connect, creating a nice continuity for their sites’ users who want to employ their Facebook identity to manage their experience across both sites. With their Connect implementations, users can publish their actions — such as editing a family tree or uploading a picture — into their Facebook News Feeds.

The Geni app is pretty straightforward after you add it to your list of applications. It has a tabular interface with the following categories: Home, My Tree, My Relatives, Friend Trees, Calendar and Profile. The home tab almost serves as a News Feed for your family, noting when you added family members or an event to your family calendar. It also has a “Family Stats” box that lists your family members, blood relatives and ancestors. The app is innately social. You can choose to share lots of information, such the Family Tree you’ve built, with your Facebook friends.

Conclusion:

We’re not surprised to see genealogy websites have such successful presences on the Facebook Platform. Their purpose of mapping people’s most fundamental connections closely matches that of Facebook’s own mission statement.

The potential to build out detailed family trees on Facebook will be promising as Facebook attracts older users who can interact with the data. While the early users of Facebook trend younger, many Facebook users have seen their Baby Boomer parents join Facebook during the past couple years. As they create accounts, they could fill out more detailed family trees, providing a digital record of their heritage for future generations.

A reworked application from SlideShare makes it easy to share presentations on Facebook, and offers an indirect connection between Facebook and LinkedIn.

SlideShare is a service for sharing PowerPoint, OpenOffice, or Keynote presentations. The updated application will now share any material posted to either Facebook or SlideShare with the other site. And adding SlideShare’s application for LinkedIn gives you the power to post presentations and documents to all three sites from any one.

You’ll need to register for a SlideShare account to use the service. Once you have an account, you can easily link it to both Facebook and LinkedIn and begin sharing content across all three. You can also add a SlideShow box to your Facebook profile to keep make your presentations easier to find for customers and clients, and you’ll have the ability to favorite and comment on presentations posted by friends and colleagues.

The connection between Facebook and LinkedIn, though indirect, is unique and should be beneficial to businesses posting company presentations or information, and to job seekers that want a dynamic way to display a resume. It’s rare to find an application that bridges these two sites, and having the ability to automatically post in both is a big time saver. The interface is essentially the same across all three sites to make uploading easy and familiar.

People are making money with social games. And according to Sarah Lacy at BusinessWeek, people close to Zynga say the company is doing north of $100 million a year in total sales.

In addition, the company recently passed RockYou to become the #1 developer on the Facebook Platform by reach, according to AppData. Currently, the company leads by about half a million users with 40,514,702 monthly active users to RockYou’s 40,017,268…

>> Read more at Inside Social Games

A new application linking Twitter and Facebook through Facebook Connect gives users more control over which Tweets show up on their Facebook page. Like Selective Twitter Status, TweetFace lets Twitter users filter which updates change their Facebook status. However, TweetFace has a few extra options beyond those offered by Selective Twitter which give users even further control over how their Tweets are presented on Facebook.

TweetFace separates itself from similar applications by giving Twitter users the power to post links from Tweets to the Facebook wall as wall attachments. Links to videos, articles, and photos will now be visible to your Facebook friends and show up in their stream, just like if you had shared them inside Facebook.

You also have the ability to ignore @replies, which can quickly clog up both Twitter and your Facebook wall, and TweetFace also changes @mentions to their real names so your Facebook friends don’t have to be loyal Twitter followers to know who you’re talking to.

Getting started with TweetFace is as simple as any other app using Facebook Connect. You’ll want to make sure all other applications connecting Twitter and Facebook are disabled, or you’ll get overlap that will nullify the advantages of TweetFace. Check the boxes that apply to the features you want, and you’re good to go.

There’s also an option to keep tabs on links you post to Facebook using the awe.sm tracking tool. However, you’ll have to get in on the “super-secret alpha” to start using this now.

Another phishing attack is making the rounds on Facebook today. Like previous attacks, this one encourages users to enter their Facebook login information on a site that looks real but isn’t (this time, it’s fbaction.net – no link intentionally). Currently, it appears as though the phishers aren’t attempting to get users to download viruses or malware, but simply trying to steal passwords.

It’s unclear how many people are affected, but Facebook has already responded by blocking links to the site from within Facebook, and phishing directories used by many browsers and ISPs to prevent further spread of the attack appear to have already flagged the server too.

Generally, Facebook catches most attacks like this through automated spam filters before they become very widespread (with the exception of the Koobface worm last year), though it can never prevent phishing attacks completely. In the past, Facebook has filed suit against large spammers like “Spam King” Sanford Wallace, so it’s possible that Facebook might press charges against the perpetrators of this attack as well.

Related Stories:

• Why Facebook Is Working with Microsoft to Fight Koobface Virus
• Update: Facebook Security Fighting Koobface Worm, Chain Letters

Facebook’s Chris Kelly, who has been at the forefront of Facebook’s online privacy issues during his tenure as Chief Privacy Officer, has just announced that he is forming an exploratory committee for his long-rumored run for California’s Attorney General.

In a YouTube video posted on his campaign website (also embedded below), Kelly said today:

For the past four years, as the chief privacy offer at Facebook, a company that has only begun to transform our information based economy, I have dealt first hand with the complex legal challenges and privacy issues that affect California businesses and consumers. We need a strong consumer protection advocate as California’s chief law enforcement officer, defending people against unfair practices and schemes…

For the past four years I’ve worked closely with attorneys general from across the nation to make the internet safer for consumers of all ages, particularly young people. I understand the technological challenges parents face in protecting their children from potential online predators, preserving online privacy, because I’ve been building systems to help protect you and your children.

Kelly has indeed spent a lot of time in recent years helping working with attorneys general from around the country as Facebook has sought to fight off spammers, online predators, and a host of other issues. Kelly also presented to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation last summer on Facebook’s privacy policy and issues related to Beacon, Facebook’s information sharing/advertising product that generated significant privacy concerns and was eventually shut down. Facebook has since relaunched related functionality in opt-in form through Facebook Connect.

He also served as Facebook’s spokesperson during the latest round of privacy concerns after the terms of service update that it ultimately reverted, declaring publicly that Facebook users own their own data.

Clearly, Kelly is going to lean on his deep experience in cutting edge online privacy questions in his campaign messaging. These emerging issues are going to only have increasing impact on the everyday lives of millions of citizens as more and more of our lives are shared online and through Facebook. Kelly has experience working on privacy law in a variety of corporate settings, including Spoke, Excite@Home, Baker and McKinzie, and Wilson & Sonsini.

Kelly’s run for California AG has been rumored for a long time. Facebook recently hired the ACLU’s Timothy Sparapani as Head of Public Policy, who may take over some of Kelly’s work now that he will be busy campaigning this year.

You can follow Kelly’s campaign on Facebook and Twitter.

A few weeks ago we reported that Facebook developers were seeing a large surge in negative 1-star and 2-star reviews without text comments because of a new “review on uninstall” flow. There was much criticism of new process on the Developer Forums, but today the forums tell a different story. Facebook has begun rolling out side-wide reviews widget atop application canvas pages asking users for their review on the current application.

Some notes about the new feature:

1. Text based reviews are still absent. This is likely done on purpose to procure more reviews, since on average a user is more likely to rate an application than type out a thoughtful text review.
2. This is first time we’ve seen foreign (non 3rd party) code appear within the context of an application canvas page. To date canvas pages have been entirely designed by developers. While a collapsible review widget should not cause any problems (and the benefits of this far outweigh any consequences), it is something to consider when designing your canvas pages.
3. There have been a few reported bugs but Facebook has already on top of them.
4. If you removed the reviews application from your application about page, you’ll want to add it back to harness these ratings.

Overall, this is a great move from the Facebook Platform team. Not only does is make developers satisfied, but should actually improve the usefulness of the Reviews application in general.

As companies try to strengthen their presence on Facebook and attract users (or “Fans”) to engage with their products, Involver has launched a new set of applications that businesses can easily add to their Facebook Pages. According to a blog post by the interactive marketing vendor, Involver can integrate streams of content “in a matter of minutes” from a company’s Twitter account, YouTube channel, and RSS news feeds (to name a few) onto its Facebook public profile.

Involver has used Us Weekly’s Facebook public profile, where many of these apps have been implemented, as a poster child to lure potential clients to the product. The implementation received notoriety because Involver helped the magazine set up a spot within the public profile’s main News Feed to push sponsored (paid) content from State Farm Insurance.

The technology itself could help companies who want to set up automatic feeds into their Facebook public profiles, making the product especially attractive to traditional media companies who want to see Facebook users read (and share) more of their content across the social network. The product provides another avenue in which these media companies might utilize Facebook to monetize their content.

Us Weekly, which to date only claims just shy of 4,000 Facebook Fans to its public profile, might not be the beacon of potential for where implementations like this could yield big dividends for media companies, however. As Nat Ives of AdAge noted:

If the approach takes hold, imagine what sponsorships could mean for Facebook pages belonging to The New York Times page, with 447,749 fans so far; National Geographic, with 453,013 fans; or even ABC’s “Lost,” with 785,093 fans.

Involver won’t be the only company looking to monetize Facebook public profiles. One upstart, the San Diego-based Status Plug, has been focused on finding ways to connect advertisers with Facebook Page administrators. The company hopes advertisers will pay a fee to have a status update published into a public profile’s News Feed or Wall. The status update may contain video, audio, images, text and links to that advertiser’s product.

“[Facebook Pages] Admins set their own price and they can choose what ads they publish,” Carson Mehl, Status Plug’s founder, told Inside Facebook. “I think this will keep the quality of the ads at a high level.”

However, Facebook users are more likely to un-fan public profiles publishing spammy status updates.

Conclusion

Any ideas for monetization on top of Facebook Pages seems favorable for both the companies looking to increase the usefulness of their public profiles and for Facebook itself, since it provides troves of content that might entice people to spend more time on Facebook (instead of elsewhere on the Web). Facebook can then derive revenue through its existing ad products and by directing traffic to public profiles as it currently does today.

For companies with Facebook public profiles, especially media organizations, we see no downside to the arrangement (as long as the sponsorship is integrated fittingly with users’ expectations). However, companies should realize Facebook could ask for revenue sharing in the future, should the company encounter more pressure from its investors to dispense with its “site growth before revenue” strategy.

Ad firm upstarts looking to build an entire business model — or a majority of it — upon this technology should be careful. The early iterations of the Facebook platform and how it affected developers taught everyone in the ecosystem a valuable lesson: Redesigns or sudden distribution rule changes can alter the Facebook landscape overnight.