Facebook today is formally announcing new APIs to enable applications developers to access and publish information in users’ home page streams.

The new Facebook “Open Stream” API includes two new methods: stream.get and stream.publish. With these new methods, developers can “access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix, and display the stream back to that user however you choose, wherever you choose, in the manner most relevant for the user experience. Other new API methods will allow users to both publish into the stream and to add comments and ‘likes’ to posts in the stream,” Facebook says in a blog post this morning. Details are available in the developer wiki.

Now, Facebook users will now be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream in any application they’ve authorized. Early applications have already been under development using the new functionality, including Seesmic and TweetDeck, which we profiled last month. The entire stream will be available for developers to remix and create new experiences, and we expect to see developers create many more applications that optimize the real-time Facebook experience for different use cases.

However, unlike speculation that made its way around this weekend after an article was published in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is not opening access to all content shared by users to application developers. Rather, these new features are complementary to new APIs Facebook released in February which enabled app developers to access users’ status, links, notes, and videos.

Today’s announcement fits the trajectory of Facebook’s overall strategy in recent months of prioritizing real-time updates, but it isn’t a radical departure from Facebook’s privacy-oriented Platform APIs. Unlike Twitter, where shared information is be default public, on Facebook, shared information is by default private. This means that many applications which the marketing community is clamoring for – like the ability to search and access all updates shared by Facebook users – is not part of this release.

Rather, Facebook is encouraging the developer community to think about new ways of integrating the home page stream experience into their applications. Now that Facebook app developers have easier access to more data, Facebook hopes new real-time apps will dramatically increase content sharing across the Facebook Platform.

While online retailers, restaurant review sites, social networks, and technology-oriented media sites like TechCrunch and CNET have embraced Facebook Connect as a means to encourage registrations and generate page views, perhaps no business sector could benefit more than the struggling newspaper industry.

In a sign that newspapers have begun to understand the opportunity Connect presents for their sites (and their readers), Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper, recently accounced that it would partner with Facebook to allow users to log into the site with their Facebook identities, The Local reported. When Bild readers log into the site via Connect, the comments they make to stories can be published back into their Facebook News Feed, thus drawing Facebook’s users back to Bild and the original articles published there.

“It’s a classic win-win situation for both sides,” Bild spokesperson Tobias Fröhlich told The Local, adding that no money or user data would change hands in the deal. “There are more possibilities for greater exposure to both Facebook and Bild content,” he said.

Newspapers, especially those in America, should follow this implementation closely to see if Facebook draws additional traffic and improves user engagement on Bild’s site. The decline of newspaper revenue, both in print and online revenues, has been staggering. In an economic analysis in the 2009 State of the News Media Report, researchers revealed chilling numbers:

In 2006, total industry advertising was $49.3 billion. In 2008, it was about $38 billion (estimating fourth-quarter results) – a decline in the two years of 23 percent….Newspaper stocks, which had lost 42 percent of their value from the start of 2005 to the end of 2007, lost an astonishing 83 percent of their remaining value during 2008.

As print sales plummet, online advertising has failed to make up for the shortfall. In fact, the Web accounts for only 10 percent of the industry’s revenue, the report contended. As a result, newspapers need more dynamic ways to engage with their Web users. They also must learn more about their readers in order to serve up relevant advertising (if that’s the thing that can sustain newspapers and other media companies over the long haul, which some doubt).

Conclusion:

It’s discouraging to look over the current list of sites that have added Facebook Connect and not see the likes of a New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. While those newspaper sites offer the obligatory “Share on Facebook” option, they miss out on the two-way engagement facilitated by Connect.

By not implementing it, the conversations their users have about their content while logged into Facebook are less likely to be diverted to their own site. Although they will get traffic from people using “Links” on Facebook, it adds unnecessary steps for end-users that a simple implementation of Connect could potentially eliminate. In addition, the publishing of stories as “Activities” in a News Feed, which Connect allows, can help draw traffic back to their sites.

Facebook and the newspaper industry should talk more, too, as they share a mutual challenge: While both provide essential services that people need to communicate and consume information, they must construct a viable business model based on online advertising. For Facebook, the challenge has been getting people to click on ads when they are in the mode of communicating with their friends (which can be more difficult to monetize than other online activities, like, for example, typing a product-specific keyword into Google).

Newspapers, for their part, often fail to understand how to target their advertising online, either due to a dearth of detailed demographic information or a failure to understand their users’ online habits. Facebook has those missing pieces of information for a lot of newspaper readers who happen to also have Facebook accounts. If they worked together, they could solve the online ad puzzle together.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games:

Monday, April 20

• Fragegg is a New Social Gaming Portal with Its Own Virtual Currency
• Virtual Goods Booming in Asia (25X Bigger than American Market?)

Tuesday, April 21

• Greystripe Delivering In-Game Ads for iPhone App Developers
• PlaySpan Acquires Spare Change – Combining Forces to Monetize Social Games
• Mattel and RealNetworks’ GameHouse Team Up for Live Uno

Wednesday, April 22

• SupersonicAds Building Virtual Currency Monetization Platform for European App Developers
• The Wars Calculator is a New Reference Utility for Mob Games on Facebook and MySpace
• GamesCampus Partners with Ukash for In-store Vouchers

Thursday, April 23

• Virtual Goods Used to Incentivize Age Of Conan
• EA Experimenting with Mainstream Virtual Goods in BattleForge

Friday, April 24

• Taxi Mogul Lets Players Build Their Empire in New York on Facebook

Facebook continues to experience broad international growth, but it’s experienced some of the most rapid growth during the last year in Italy. In fact, there are nearly 9 million active Facebook users in Italy as of today. As such, more Italian companies are developing Facebook applications to reach people on the Facebook Platform.

One of the most recent apps is called “Who is the Nicest Character of the Gospel?, created by what is said to be the most important religious magazine in the country, Famiglia Cristiana. The objective of the app is to promote a new official version of the Bible, and is an “experiment of great openness for the Catholic community and a new way of [spreading] the holy message,” according to Vincenzo Cosenza, the Director of the Rome office for Digital PR, who created the application.

The app is emblematic of the increasing number of international apps on Facebook. Facebook’s Platform team also recently held development contests for applications in French and Spanish. To learn more about the winners click here.

To get a deeper perspective on Facebook application development and marketing, be sure to check out our fully localized and translated versions of the Facebook Marketing Bible:

• Italian / Italiano
• French / Français
• Spanish / Español

Virtual gifting has become a pretty popular way of reaching out to friends on Facebook, and now there’s a new way to make those gifts even more personal. GreetBeatz is a new site custom tailors a song for your friends with personal information that you provide, and then sends it to their Facebook profile.

You can commission a song for friends using a few easy steps. You start the process by logging in to Facebook Connect, then fill in your friend’s name and a few facts about him or her. GreetBeatz then takes the info and puts together a song (telling you when it will be completed) and posts it on your friend’s wall. There are a few samples on the site to give you an idea of what the finished the product will sound like.

So far the site only features one artist, but GreetBeatz says more are coming soon. The current talent is a hip hop artist named Thunda, and I have to admit, he ain’t bad. GreetBeatz gives artists that are shopping around demo tapes a powerful tool to make a little money and get their name and music out to a larger audience.

Most tradiontal gifts are just something that show up on your Facebook wall, but GreetBeatz is banking on recipients sharing the songs with friends and spreading word about the site and its artists. There is a fee associated with commissioning a song, but they’re currently running a lower introductory rate to get people interested. Inside Facebook readers can get a 50% discount by using the code “INSIDEFACEBOOK4LIFE”.

Earlier this week, Inside Facebook detailed the nascent market surrounding Facebook Page squatting: some entrepreneurs are building Facebook Pages around local cities and towns and trying to sell ad space on them for profit.

However, while the future of Facebook Page squatting in light of Facebook’s intentions for Pages may be questionable (Facebook wants Pages to be managed and operated by an authorized agent), that’s not stopping some from selling ad space on their own (legitimate) Pages.

The latest example is Us Weekly, the popular celebrity magazine, which recently sold a sponsorship of the News tab of its Facebook page to State Farm, according to AdWeek.

The State Farm sponsorship on Us Weekly’s Facebook page, which is not yet live, extends a campaign State Farm is already running with the celeb magazine. But Us Weekly plans to use Facebook page sponsorships as added value or independent ad inventory for other advertisers after that.

“We do anticipate that this becomes another tool in our tool chest, among meaningful ways to let brands reach our audience in a very credible, differentiated environment,” said Steven Schwartz, the chief digital officer at Us Weekly’s parent, Wenner Media, since January.

While Us Weekly’s Facebook Page only has 3,000 fans (it is in the process of launching a new version with the help of Involver), some Facebook Pages have several million, and could theoretically sell various kinds of sponsorship integration.

What does Facebook think of that idea?

“Currently we do not restrict Facebook Page owners from having sponsors on their public profiles.  But, if brands are looking to create and maintain lasting connections with people our Engagement Ads are the single best way to do that,” a Facebook spokesperson tells Inside Facebook.

It’s probably a net positive for Facebook for there to be a market for Facebook Page inventory, but Facebook will be paying close attention to see how the market for Facebook Page inventory develops. Facebook has allowed application developers on the Facebook Platform to sell their own inventory with almost no restrictions since it launched in 2007, and recently started alpha testing its own in-house ad network for app developers.

Lately, many marketers have noticed that hundreds of Facebook public profiles have been assigned a nice-looking “vanity URL” (like http://www.facebook.com/barackobama) in order to make them easier to find and improve their SEO. In addition, some have reported seeing survey questions from Facebook asking users if they would be willing to pay for vanity URLs for their own profile pages.

Currently, all vanity URLs are assigned by Facebook (PageData offers a view of all Facebook Pages that have been assigned vanity URLs for those interested in seeing which types of Pages Facebook has chosen), but how does Facebook decide who gets one?

As of yet, Facebook has not officially stated how it decides who gets vanity URLs. A Facebook spokesperson tells Inside Facebook today:

“We don’t offer specifics on which parties may have received ‘vanity’ URLs, but it’s something we’ve experimented with and have only offered on a very limited basis. We’re looking at how we might roll this functionality out to all of our users, but we don’t have anything to announce at this time.”

In other words, Facebook is still evaluating different ways of rolling out vanity URLs to balance SEO and direct sales opportunities.

Clearly, vanity URLs represent one of the best SEO opportunities on Facebook ever (for background, see Search Engine Land, SEO Chat, ClickZ, Matt Cutts), and Facebook knows it. As such, they’ve got to be careful how they roll out the program, because URL changes are hard to undo in the SEO world.

Facebook wants to get as much traffic as it can flowing into the Facebook.com ecosystem, but at the same time is considering becoming a vanity URL “registrar” of sorts as well in order to establish another secondary revenue stream.

Those familiar with the history of domain name arbitrage know the type of economy that Facebook could be sitting on. Nearly 200 million domain names are registered worldwide – generating somewhere around $10 per domain per year. There is also a substantial domain name aftermarket, where hundreds of names are sold for tens of thousands of dollars each year, with several transactions going into the millions.

While Facebook.com/hotels isn’t as good as hotels.com, the same fundamental principles apply. It’s not unfeasible to think that a million or more businesses and individuals interested in securing their vanity URL for SEO purposes would pay Facebook somewhere between $10-$100 per year for “prime real estate” to ride Facebook’s SEO coat tails. Facebook could also auction off rentals for premier keywords (like “hotels” and “mortgage,” etc.) for much more than $100 per year if it wanted.

Facebook is still deciding how it wants to play its vanity URL cards, and it’s likely to be a few months before they launch any official programs in this direction. However, the company is smart for considering its revenue generating options.

Facebook’s first-ever user vote on proposed changes to the site’s Terms of Service has just concluded, and the results are in: the new documents have won out over the old documents by a 74% – 26% margin.

More than 650,000 people voted during the last week – far short of the 60 million votes Facebook said would be required to make the vote’s results “binding.”  Nevertheless, Facebook is likely to adopt the new governing documents, since it has invested so much time, energy, and PR effort in its process of revising them with input from privacy advocates and concerned users.

Although Facebook promoted the TOS vote on every user’s home page, less than 1% of users who saw the notice participated. It just goes to show that while a few users clearly got upset over TOS issues, most just don’t care enough (or aren’t familiar enough with the issues to care, privacy advocates would say) for now.

Given the number of people who are growing up on Facebook – as well as the influx of users over 35 onto Facebook, especially in recent months – we expect there to be continued concerns about online rights and online privacy on Facebook in the years ahead, particularly as those concerns relate to the ways Facebook allows users to control access to personal information. The number of ways that personal information being shared by people on Facebook could theoretically be misused at some point are endless.

However, Facebook has done an unprecedented job at building and establishing trust with its users, who continue to share more and more information on the site in droves. As long as Facebook continues to prove itself a good steward of that trust and data, users will be happy with the service and increasingly trust it with more of their personal information.

Fluid, a firm that helps companies with their online retail marketing, has built a product called Fluid Social, which helps shoppers at retail websites view what their Facebook friends have said about certain products. While it remains to be seen whether or not Fluid Social can truly engage (or motivate) customers to participate in discussions by tapping into their Facebook networks, it highlights the potential Facebook Connect offers in making e-commerce websites more social and personalized.

Here’s how Fluid Social works:

1. For the retail sites that implement it, it allows users to comment on specific products, view their Facebook Friends’ comments on those products through Facebook Connect, and learn what their Facebook Friends’ favorite products are on that website. These are broken into aptly named tabs beneath the product (“Share,” “My Friends Say,” and “My Friends Like”).

2. Using Facebook Connect, users authorize the participating retail site to install its custom Facebook application to their Facebook account. In most cases, the app can enable users to update their status messages or publish news about the retailer’s products into their News Feeds.

3. Some of the implementations, such as bag-maker JanSport’s, allows Facebook users who install the customized app to “buy a product” or “invite friends to comment” on the product from Facebook. In other implementations, like Vans shoes, the technology has allowed people to email friends and invite them to chat with you about the product on the retailer’s website.

Conclusion:

Fluid Social represents an innovative approach towards improving people’s e-commerce experience by leveraging the personal networks they have built on Facebook.

The main problem of user-generated reviews in the past (like on Amazon or Yelp) has been the impersonal nature of them. When we pick out a pair of jeans at a store, we rarely ask complete strangers for their opinion. We would ask our friends and family. If they aren’t with us, we call them on the phone and try to describe the product as best we can. Fluid Social allows for that personalized shopping experience in real-time, and we’re likely to see more and more integrations like it in the future.

While Yahoo has integrated Facebook profiles and functionality directly into its search results, Google is taking a different path – yesterday, the company announced that it is now including snippets of Google Profiles on the search results pages for US name queries. Links to find profiles by the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates, and LinkedIn are also included.

Is Google using its clout in search to try to unseat Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn? Google is definitely trying to gain a stronger foothold in people search by upselling Google Profiles, which it could use as a stepping stone toward further social ambitions.

Google has many social products, including Gmail and Gmail Chat, Orkut, Google Friend Connect, and Google Profiles (which have historically been primarily used for identity within Google products, but are now very public). It also founded the OpenSocial Foundation, which manages the OpenSocial standard used by many social platforms around the world. However, Google has never been able to pull its social products together into a cohesive ecosystem.

Before the News Feed was around, Facebook got its start by providing users with profiles to manage their identities. By promoting Google Profiles very prominently on the first page of search results (ads above the first result and profile snippets and links below), Google has suddenly made Google Profiles much more important than they ever have been before (most people don’t even know they have one). Were Google to succeed in promoting Google Profiles substantially, it could use other assets like Gmail and Gmail Chat data to build its own social graph.

However, currently, Google is still showing Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other social profiles in its search results. For users who have established profile pages on these services, they will likely continue to be more prominent in SERPs than Google Profiles in the near future. However, there’s nothing to stop Google from adding more powerful people search functionality (or promoting Google Profiles even more) whenever it decides to – a move that could prove very challenging to Facebook and every social service that depends on Google for people search traffic.