A new Facebook application called Selective Twitter Status by Andy Young, a computer science student at Oxford, is enabling public profile owners to syndicate their Twitter updates to their Facebook public profile automatically for the first time. This is a feature that many have been waiting on. Selective Twitter Status also works with personal profiles, too.

In addition to being able to update public profiles, Selective Twitter Status (as its name implies) also allows users to select which Tweets to syndicate to Facebook. If you’re using Twitter’s update syndication Facebook app, you know that every Tweet you post shows up on Facebook, which can cause some major clutter. It’s especially confusing to Facebook friends if you’re responding to Twitter users.

Now you can control which Tweets you want to make it to your Facebook page – just add “#fb” to the end of your Tweets to update your Facebook status.

Setup couldn’t be easier. Simply go to the application, choose either a Page/public profile you own (or your personal profile) and enter your Twitter user name. Make sure you turn off automatic updating from your Twitter account, or all your Tweets will still pop up on Facebook.

That’s it. You can now enjoy the convenience of syndicated posting without flooding your Facebook profile or public profile!

Facebook’s first vote on revisions to its new governing documents has begun. So far, in early voting, the newly proposed (and revised) Statement of Rights and Responisbilities and Facebook Principles documents are leading the current Terms of Service 71-29%, with just over 5,000 votes so far.

Why the vote? Last month, after reverting previous changes to its Terms of Service in response to user and press complaints about data ownership rules, Facebook announced a new process for making updates to the site’s Terms of Service that includes a user comment period on any proposed changes. If enough users comment on the proposed changes, Facebook will hold a user vote:

• If 30% of all active users (defined as users who have logged in once in the last 30 days) vote, the results will be considered “binding.”
• If less than 30% of all active users vote, the results will be considered “advisory” (i.e. non-binding).
• Voting will be done through the Site Governance Vote application developed by Wildfire, and Ernst & Young will “audit the vote tabulation… to ensure the votes are accurate.”

As we’ve said before, Facebook has clearly set the threshold for binding user votes extremely high – assuming 200 million users have logged in during the last month, that means over 60 million users would need to vote on the changes to the new terms for them to be considered binding. The probability of that happening appears low. Thus, the results of this vote will likely be considered “advisory.”

Nevertheless, the industry will be looking on to see how Facebook incorporates the feedback it gains through this process into its plans. After reverting its TOS, Facebook solicited input from privacy advocates and concerned users in making revisions to the newly proposed governing documents. If the new documents win out, they’ll likely be adopted soon. If not, things may get a little more “complicated.”

Users interested in logging their vote can find the Site Governance Vote application here and follow the Site Governance public profile. The voting period will run until noon on April 23.

The application deadline for the latest round of Facebook’s fbFund program is quickly approaching on Monday evening.

The fbFund is a seed fund created by Facebook, Founders Fund, and Accel Partners to invest in developers building on the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. This year, fbFund winners will also be invited to participate in a 10 week summer incubator program in Palo Alto where they will receive advice and mentorship from the newly formed Developer Advisory Council.

Process & Investment Structure

Here’s how the fbFund process works. Developers interested in applying for the program have until 11:59pm PT this Monday, April 20, to do so. Out of those applicants, about 50 finalists will be selected by a jury appointed by Facebook. Then, out of those finalists, winners will be awarded up to $100,000 seed investments.

Exact details of the funding structure will be announced in the coming weeks. fbFund representative and Founders Fund investor Dave McClure tells Inside Facebook he expects fbFund winners to be ready to take a larger seed round a few months after the summer.

Developers can submit applications for any services running on the Facebook Platform, but Facebook is also encouraging developers to submit applications for services built using Facebook Connect – either on the web, iPhone, or desktop. Applications will be judged based on “originality of concept, market, social/usefulness, expressiveness, intuitiveness, and business potential.”

New Summer fbFund Incubator Program

In addition to the infusion of capital, fbFund winners will also be invited to participate in a new 10 week incubator program in Palo Alto this summer that will run from mid-June to late August 2009. McClure says elements of the incubator program are being modeled after Paul Graham’s Y Combinator, as well as the Stanford Facebook class he co-taught with BJ Fogg in the fall of 2007.

As such, fbFund is putting together a Developer Advisory Council which will pair fbFund winners with advisors from Facebook, Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Slide, Zynga, Social Media, KISSMetrics, Kontagent, Citizen Sports, Tapulous, and Serious Business to provide mentorship to fbFund winners. In addition, the fbFund incubator program will have weekly guest speakers on topics relevant to participants’ businesses.

It’s a fantastic opportunity for developers to learn from some of the most talented and experienced folks in Silicon Valley. Like last year, winners will be included in Facebook’s PR efforts as well.

Other Notes

The fbFund program is only open to developers willing to incorporate in the US, Canada, or UK, and companies that have already accepted more than $500,000 in funding are not eligible to apply. Last year’s winners came from a variety of verticals – like weddings (WedSnap was acquired by TheKnot) and advertiser tools (Wildfire has partnered with many big brands) – but if you asked us, we’d encourage developers to submit applications in spaces where there Facebook has demonstrated strong interest, like games, sports, family/baby/mom, and enterprise applications.

The deadline is coming up in a few days, so interested developers should apply here.

Ashton Kutcher and CNN have been publicizing their recent race to 1 million Twitter followers recently, with Kutcher saying he will donate 1,000 malaria nets to Malaria No More and video game publisher EA offering to put Kutcher’s 1,000,000th follower in The Sims 3. It’s been covered everywhere from Cele|bitchy to TechCrunch. Currently, it’s a dead heat, with Kutcher at about 955,000 followers, and CNN at about 969,000.

However, ironically, Kutcher’s public profile on Facebook has just crossed 1 million fans first – growing by 600,000 fans in the last 3 days, according to PageData – despite any direct promotion. During the same time frame, Kutcher’s Twitter account has gained about 150,000 users, according to Twitterholic.

While the Facebook fan explosion is almost certainly largely due to the press surrounding the Twitter battle – and Facebook is many times larger than Twitter in terms of active users – it’s nonetheless interesting that Kutcher’s Facebook fan base has also grown so quickly. Currently, it’s adding several thousand fans every 10 minutes.

Actor Vin Diesel has enjoyed a resurgence following the release of the film “Fast & Furious,” but he’s also become wildly popular on his Facebook public profile. The page has gained nearly 1.5 million fans in the last week, and is still growing at a rapid rate, according to PageData. The success of the page has given a lot of exposure to the film, including all of Diesel’s appearances on TV and his international promotion of the movie.

In his latest movie, Diesel reunites with the original cast of the 2001 “The Fast and The Furious,” marking the first time he’s had a leading role in any of the F&F movies in 8 years. His work in between the two films hasn’t enjoyed nearly as much success as the original F&F.

The page itself contains recent photos from Diesel in Rome and the Dominican Republic, links to promotional sites and material, and events for his appearances on the talk show circuit. The last post has received over 15,000 likes and 3,300 comments – some of the most we’ve seen anywhere.

Whether or not Diesel himself is actually posting the updates, photos, and links is unclear. What is clear is the page is receiving a ton of traffic. It’s a testament to the exposure a studio or production company can get by making the effort to share content on Facebook. Diesel’s example shows that Facebook can be an easy way to promote new movies, public appearances, post movie trailers, and drive traffic to official film pages. It can also serve to stir up quite a bit of interest in upcoming films.

Generating numbers like those on the Vin Diesel page could translate into a potentially huge audience in the theaters, and not just here in the States. International users are another demographic with a strong representation on Diesel’s page. Facebook’s popularity continues to grow by leaps and bounds in Europe, and the F&F franchise has traditionally done well overseas. Developing a Facebook fan page for stars and movies could prove to be an easy win when it comes to grabbing the attention of international movie-goers, and those all-important international dollars that offer big bumps in final box office numbers.

Related Resources:

• Facebook Marketing Bible, Agency & Brand Edition

Facebook has just turned on a feature enabling public profile owners to update their status on their Pages from a mobile phone via SMS. It’s a feature that’s been standard for personal profiles for some time, but has been missing from Facebook public profiles until now.

Mobile updates can be particularly engaging ways for public figures and celebrities to engage fans. For example, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban does so regularly via Twitter, and fans love it. Just a few minutes after tonight’s dramatic win over the Rockets, he posted:

Cuban uses Selective Twitter Status to syndicate updates to his Facebook public profile, but now public profile owners can update via mobile directly.

In order to activate the SMS status update service, public profile owners can simply click “Edit Page” under their profile picture, and edit the settings for the “Mobile” application. After entering the phone number you want to use for posting updates, Facebook will send an confirmation code via SMS. Once you’ve confirmed your number, you’re good to go.

However, only mobile accounts with certain carriers in the US, Canada, UK, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Maldives are supported at this time.

In what is the first Facebook Connect integration we’ve seen on YouTube (or any other Google-owned property for that matter), Coca-Cola Europe just recently launched a new “social interactive music show” called Green Eyed World. Interestingly, YouTube has significantly demoted the placement of the the standard comments module and replaced it with a very prominent Facebook Connect integration.

The show is about a 23 year old singer from London who is selected to go to New York City to pursue her dreams of becoming a music star. Once users log in through Facebook Connect, they can leave comments and votes to influence her decisions, and see a stream of their friends’ comments and votes as well.

“This interaction between YouTube and Facebook is the first of its kind,” Google’s Benjamin Faes, Head of YouTube & Display for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said in a release. “We are creating a new technology implementation with these platforms. At any time during Green Eyed World, viewers can comment or vote, creating a live dialogue between themselves, their friends and the hero. The video pauses, and a small window pops up where the interaction can take place quickly and easily”

As we’ve documented before, content producers are finding that Facebook Connect can increase the authenticity of user comments and community. Users logging in with their real identities are less likely to leave lower quality comments as commonly happens on YouTube, which is especially valuable in the case of branded content.

In addition, Facebook Connect’s ability to share content back into users’ profiles and their friends’ news feeds can be a powerful driver of traffic. Facebook sent more traffic to Perez Hilton than Google did in January, and video sites are currently some of the most popular Facebook Connect integrations.

Despite the fact that Google founded the OpenSocial movement and is building its own competing product in Google Friend Connect, YouTube opened up and partnered with Facebook for the Coke integration. While the companies still have some unresolved questions about the way Google Friend Connect itself works with Facebook, the presence of Facebook Connect on YouTube is part of a bigger initiative on YouTube’s part to be more flexible with content partners and brands, and is a good sign for Facebook Connect.

As Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee writes, “YouTube is showing increasing flexibility about what partners and sponsors can do on its pages, allowing CBS and ESPN to embed their video players of choice on its pages. Enabling Facebook Connect more broadly could be a very effective and appealing next step.”

Green Eyed World is directed by Tony Valenzuela, who previously worked on “America’s Next Top Model,” “CSI: Miami,” and “The Closer.” It is being produced by Austria-based FFP.

comScore issued a report this morning showing that Facebook is now the #1 social network in 11 of the 17 European countries it tracks, with nearly 100 million unique visitors on the continent in February.

Overall, Facebook’s total share of European internet minutes increased from 1.1% to 4.1% during the last year, and its share of total European social networking minutes increased from 12.3% to 30.4%.

On a per country basis, the UK is still Facebook’s largest market with over 22.6 million monthly uniques according to comScore. France is next with 13.6 million, followed by Turkey at 12.3 million, Italy at 10.7 million, and Spain at 5.6 million. The full chart is below.

Developers and marketers interested in reaching European users still a big opportunity to move quickly and reach Facebook’s users in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. Developers who localize their applications and translate their content have shown very rapid growth.

Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible, the leading and most comprehensive resource on Facebook marketing today, has been fully translated into French / Français, Spanish / Español, and Italian / Italiano for marketers and developers interested in diving in and learning more about marketing best practices and the inner workings of the Facebook Platform. In addition, further details on Facebook’s audience size and growth rates in 95 countries are available in our Global Market Monitor report.

If you’re a Facebook user and own an iPhone, there are several tools that can help you synchronize information on your Facebook friends with your iPhone contact list. Here are a few of the better apps we’ve seen so far that you may want to take for a spin.

Vringo, at left, and Photo Phonebook, below, are free iPhone applications that allow you to assign your friends’ Facebook profile pictures to your iPhone contacts. While it is normally pretty tedious to take pictures of your friends and manually assign them to contacts in your phone, these apps provide automatic matching and syncing capabilities between Facebook profile pictures and iPhone contacts. When you receive a call, the caller’s most recent Facebook profile picture is displayed on the phone screen, giving your contacts greater control over how they’re represented in your phone.

Vringo gives users greater control over the syncing process, allowing users to review suggested matches before assigning pictures to contacts. With Photo Phonebook, there’s a higher probability that pictures are erroneously assigned to contacts. However, poor photo quality is a shared complaint across users of both apps: the photos are often overly stretched or compressed. Another similar app to explore is MyPhone+, which is currently unavailable for download due to a bug in the latest version (v1.3).

FriendSync is a paid iPhone application ($1.99) that syncs not only Facebook profile pictures, but also other data such as your friends’ names and birthdays. Like Vringo, FriendSync automatically suggests matches, but allows users to customize options beforehand and manually adjust syncing as needed. One of the many options FriendSync makes available to users is the ability to customize the image size of a picture when an incoming call comes in. Note that iPhone user reviews repeatedly express the app as being quite slow.

There are also free tools, including Fonebook (for PC users) and AddressBookSync and FacebookSync (for Mac users), to sync Facebook data with Outlook and Mac Address Book contacts before syncing with the iPhone. All of these apps sync Facebook profile pictures and birthdays with your computer’s contacts. AddressBookSync even tries to sync the current locations of your Facebook friends, and FacebookSync’s previous attempt to sync phone numbers and email addresses from Facebook got it into trouble with Facebook’s Terms of Use, which prohibits the syncing of private contact information such as phone numbers, email addresses, and chat names.

Facebook’s strict terms is one of the reasons why the majority of Facebook-iPhone syncing apps focus on syncing photos and birthdays as opposed to more practical data like phone numbers and email addresses.

In general, there seems to be a healthy demand for tools that sync Facebook friends with iPhone contacts, largely because the overlap between users’ Facebook friend list and iPhone contact list is significant. Developers working to meet this area of demand need to ensure that the next versions of syncing apps deliver better photo quality, greater reliability (e.g., faster upload times and fewer crashes), and increased control over syncing preferences and permissions (e.g., allowing users to review automatic matches before syncing and customizing photo image size).

While Facebook has focused its Platform efforts over the last 18 months on growth over monetization, several payment providers have moved quickly to fill the gap by providing payment processing services to Facebook Platform application developers. Based on what we’re hearing, those payment companies experienced very strong growth in Q109.

Although most of the companies we spoke with did not want to publicly disclose specific revenue figures, Inside Facebook’s survey of leading payment providers on the Facebook Platform shows that payment providers overall experienced about 35% growth in both overall transaction volume and dollar volume on Facebook for the first quarter. Some reported growth as high as 300% for the quarter, largely due to new distribution partnerships.

Challenging Economy Not Slowing Growth of Microtransactions

Although the impact of the economic slowdown on traditional advertising has been well documented, social applications and games monetizing through direct or indirect payments have been less affected. Analysts have offered explanations for this disparity, citing entertainment’s historically strong performance in a bad economy (because people have more free time and need more diversion) or consumers’ general preference for small purchases (because they’re holding off on making big buys like cars). Regardless, consumers on the whole are showing increasing demand for virtual currency – not only within Facebook but across social networks (like MySpace and hi5), emerging mobile platforms (like the iPhone), and online games in general. (You can track the social games space in detail at Inside Social Games.)

As a result, many social app and game developers large and small are posting strong profits – one developer of a leading analytics platform said recently he couldn’t believe how much some game developers are making. For example, Zynga, one of the largest developers of social games on Facebook and MySpace, is rumored to be profitable on $10-15 million in quarterly revenues, and Playdom recently told Inside Social Games that they were profitable as well. However, for every Zynga and Playdom, there are a dozen smaller developers focused on iterating just one mechanic or game. Nevertheless, social games and other applications which monetize through user micropayments are garnering significant attention from venture capitalists in Silicon Valley who are attracted to the margins and economics of virtual goods.

Growing Ecosystem of Players

As a result, a growing number of payment providers have begun focusing on serving application developers monetizing through user payments for virtual currency, virtual gifts, or other in-app features or items. It’s a complex ecosystem: some companies having previous experience in online or mobile payments, often with focus on particular international markets, while many new startups have also formed hoping to gain a foothold inside Facebook and other emerging social platforms.

Developers interested in moving beyond simply integrating PayPal, Amazon, or Google now have a plethora of payment companies to work with:

• SocialGold, TwoFish, and PlaySpan are three startups aiming to help developers optimize their virtual economies by providing analytics tools layered on top of the payment system. SocialGold has built their own credit card processing product, while TwoFish’s model is based on revenue sharing.
• Zong, Paymo, and MobillCash have increased their focus on social app and game developers in the last two years. These companies enable users to pay with premium SMS messages which are billed to their mobile phone providers. Zong has a mix of direct and aggregator relationships with international carriers, while Paymo works primarily with aggregators.
• Spare Change has developed its own currency, called “credits,” that users can purchase with a credit card or Paypal and spend on a variety of Facebook applications.
• Offerpal Media, Super Rewards, AdParlor, Peanut Labs, Sometrics, and Gambit provide developers with managed offer networks that users can pay for either directly or indirectly (i.e. through CPA offer completion). These companies have partnered with many of the payment providers above and help developers optimize which payment options to display most prominently (for users who choose paid offers) in order to optimize revenue.
• Other payment companies, like Global Collect, CC Bill, and Zuora are also active in the space.

Facebook Staying Mum on Plans

Despite having announced a beta program for its own in-house Facebook Platform payments system in December 2007, Facebook has remained mum on its plans since, and no system has ever been publicly launched.

While the company is certainly evaluating a payments solution for developers, the lack of announcements from Facebook has led many to conclude that building a payment system is not currently a high priority for the company – a move that many in the industry have questioned, citing the overall strength of the space. While Facebook will most likely build its own payments system eventually, the company seems to be more focused on making sure Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform continue to grow and provide substantial value for the larger application and publisher ecosystems rather than focus on building a robust payments solution right now.

A platform-wide payment system or virtual currency could certainly benefit developers, who are always interested in making payments as frictionless as possible. It could also benefit publishers interested in developing social commerce on the web through Facebook Connect. However, many say that even if Facebook were to build a system itself, it would be challenging for the company to provide a better set of products across a market very fragmented by geography and demographics than those the current ecosystem of third party payment providers have collectively built. (As a point of contrast, global social network hi5, which reportedly laid off half its staff a couple weeks ago, has refocused its business around a gaming portal model and has been striking deals with multiple payment companies.)

Even if Facebook were to build its own system, it would likely not want to stifle third party innovation, lest the company make it harder for developers to monetize the Facebook audience and grow the Facebook Platform economy.

Facebook Continues to Develop Gifts, Credits

Nevertheless, Facebook has still been experimenting with its own virtual currency, “Facebook credits,” which are used to buy Facebook Gifts and paid for via credit card in the Facebook Gift Shop. Facebook is rumored to have done between $30-$40 million in virtual gift sales in 2008, and the company has been conducting multiple experiments with virtual gifts in recent weeks and months.

For example, it’s done several tests around birthday gifts and holiday gifts on user profiles, and recently also started experimenting publicly with a new credit gifting system that allows users to give virtual credits to each other as a reward for sharing good content. There was also a little stir a couple of weeks ago around a comment Facebook’s Gareth Davis made about Facebook “looking at” its own virtual currency options, but based on what we know that reaction was overblown.

Conclusion

While it is still early, the payments market on the Facebook Platform is growing quickly, and significant opportunities exist for application and game developers to optimize their services for better monetization through user-pay. The promise that virtual currency monetization and virtual economy optimization are showing is attracting many wannabe game developers who see an opportunity to apply principles of economics and retail dynamics inside Facebook apps in a systematic way. While the sustainability of user pay and freemium models is still yet to be borne out, the revenues that app and game developers – and payment providers – are seeing are real, and we expect them to grow significantly throughout 2009.