Facebook has just begun pushing an upgrade to its “Insights” metrics dashboard for Facebook Pages that gives administrators more visibility into how their posts and content are engaging fans. It isn’t live for all Page administrators now, but should be up for everyone over the next couple of days.

For Page administrators not already using Facebook’s Insights to gain a deeper understanding of the audience engaging with their Facebook Page presence, now would be a good time to start learning more. Here’s what the new dashboard looks like (click image to enlarge):

New features include:

• A new graph showing different types of fan interactions with the Page over time. Here, you see that the graph combines comments, wall posts, and likes to show relative volume of interactions.
• A new count of active fans this week, with full age/sex/location breakdown.
• A new count of total interactions this week, broken down by type.
• A new post quality rating, from 1 to 5 stars.
• Graphs for Interactions, Interactions per Post, Post Quality, Stream CTR, Posts, Page views, Media Consumption, Reviews

The new “post quality” rating is a particularly interesting metric that measures how engaging your Posts have been over a rolling seven-day window. “Your Post Quality is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis. The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans),” Facebook says.

The new “Stream click-through rate” graph should also be particularly valuable metric for Page administrators gauging the effectiveness of different types of status update copy in re-engaging fans.

Marketers interested in learning more about best practices around Facebook Pages should also check out our detailed guide in the Facebook Marketing Bible and crash course for big brands in the Agency and Brand Edition. In addition, PageData by Inside Facebook provides constantly updating leaderboards showing which Facebook Pages are growing the fastest for marketers interested in surveying the competitive landscape.

Ever since the Facebook Page redesign (see tour of new features) several weeks ago, brands, celebrities, and small businesses have been showing increased interest in managing their Page and publishing to the Facebook Stream. The upgraded Insights dashboard should equip Page managers to do a better and better job.

More Screenshots:

Facebook has updated its Platform Guidelines policy documents since adopting the new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that govern the site at the beginning of the month. The updated guidelines, which go into effect May 12, aren’t substantially different from the old policy documents, but are better organized and slightly more concise.

“The new Guidelines document has almost the same content as the previous version of the policies,” Facebook’s Paul Jeffries said. The few changes we made were primarily to accommodate product changes, eliminate redundancy, and clarify ambiguities. For example, we clarified that user data you get from the API is always subject to the restrictions on storage (so you shouldn’t pre-fill data in a form for users to submit to your application if you plan to store that data; users should enter that information directly). But the caching restrictions have been modified to allow for retaining user data you get from Facebook beyond 24 hours in certain offline situations. And we more clearly explained the policy around use of Facebook’s product terms and trademarks.”

Here’s the new part pertaining to data caching rules for applications that may go offline, like desktop or mobile apps:

Offline exception: Applications that run on a device controlled by and possessed by the user — such as desktop or laptop computer, mobile device, or other embedded device — can cache user data received from Facebook for more than 24 hours only when Internet connectivity is unavailable or it is impossible for the application to run. Such data can be stored on the client device but not a remote server, and cannot be made available to the developer. Cached data older than 24 hours can be displayed to the user (or otherwise used by the application) in lieu of updated data only until an update is possible, and in no case beyond 14 days after the last update.

The updated Platform guidelines are available in 9 parts, linked below for your evening reading pleasure:

I. Platform Policy Overview
II. Additional Policies Governing All Applications and Developers
III. Additional Policies Governing Application Integration On Facebook.com
IV. Additional Policies Governing Facebook Connect
V. Escalation Procedures for Facebook Policy Issues
VI. Contacting Facebook
VII. Copyright Policy
VIII. Developer PR Policy
IX. Branding and Promotion Policy

Facebook is beginning its move from 10 buildings in downtown Palo Alto to a new 150,000 square foot building formerly occupied by HP spinoff Agilent next week. The move to 1601 South California Avenue in Stanford Research Park starts May 14, the San Jose Merc reports.

Facebook is leasing its new headquarters, which will bring all nearly 900 employees in the area back under one roof for the first time in a long time. Since co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg brought Facebook to Palo Alto, it’s occupied a variety of buildings downtown.

Employees will be provided a shuttle from Caltrain stops in downtown and on California Ave. There aren’t as many restaurants and coffee shops near the new building, so Facebook’s cafeteria is sure to be busy. However, the new building remains just two blocks off the campus of Stanford University, where Facebook recruits heavily.

As LivingSocial continues its ascent past 31 million monthly active users and beyond, the MyCalendar application has jumped into the top 5 on the Facebook application leaderboard, joining popular apps Super Wall, Movies, and Causes. MyCalendar has quietly gained momentum in recent weeks, now reaching a total of over 28 million monthly active users (MAU) between two different copies of the app, according to AppData.

MyCalendar allows users to populate calendars with birthdays, holidays, and other customizable occasions, and invite friends to join these events. Reminders are then sent to users via email or Facebook Notifications anywhere between one day and three weeks before the event (or no reminders at all), based on user settings.

In addition to the main calendaring feature, the application provides other birthday-related features, including sending virtual gifts to friends, weekly horoscope reads, and personality assessments based on birth month. These stories are published to users’ Walls and the News Feed with permission. The popularity of apps that enable users to track, organize, and share events with their friends on Facebook is natural: on Facebook, an event organizer can not only expect to find most invitees, but can also anticipate viral circulation if that’s the intention.

Yet, despite the healthy demand to make calendars more social, it’s surprising that MyCalendar has earned a spot next to the consistently high-performing applications LivingSocial and Super Wall. A possible reason for this unexpected high growth is that since Facebook’s homepage redesign, birthday reminders have become less visible, making it easier to unintentionally miss a friend’s birthday. While MyCalendar solves this problem by giving you the option of adding your friends’ birthdays to your calendar, even suggesting upcoming birthdays to you, doing so essentially sends requests to your friends to install the app. This is also the case when you invite friends to attend your events. In other words, the app isn’t shy about using viral tactics to boost installs.

Overall, the user experience can be improved, as you’re constantly worried whether the next click will spam your friends. Navigating around the application can also be distracting. You’re frequently being asked to take IQ quizzes and install the Pass a Drink app, both of which are irrelevant and navigate you away from the app itself. Another improvement could be made on the editing process: currently, editing events that you’ve already created involves deleting and recreating them with your new edits.

A question to think about is how users and Facebook will react to leading applications that aren’t necessarily transparent or well-designed, two overarching principles that guide Facebook’s delayed Application Verification Program. However, as shown by MyCalendar’s daily declines in MAU, there’s some indication that MyCalendar’s envied growth may not be sustainable in the long-term. The application leaderboard should be viewed in its entirety.

To be fair, retaining users is challenging for any social calendar application. With so many competing choices to manage and share events, Facebook’s own Events application being one of them, not to mention Google and Outlook calendars, owning more than one calendar gets tiring, and few would choose to access their calendars through Facebook when forced to simplify. While MyCalendar may be winning for now, its long-term success will depend on whether or not it can prove itself to be a truly social application, being meaningful, trustworthy, and well-designed.

During the campaign season, President Obama amassed a huge network of nearly 6 million Facebook fans of his public profile page to organize supporters and raise money. Recently, however, the President has refashioned his Facebook presence to highlight his efforts to govern and drive policy changes in Washington with the launch of the White House public profile.

The new presence, which launched last week, has grown substantially in the past few days. Just last Friday, it claimed around 31,000 fans. Since then, that number has surged to more than 172,000 fans.

The president’s supporters — as well as people who didn’t vote for him — should view the White House Facebook profile as an integral aspect of his campaign promise to bolster government transparency through the use of the Web. Obama’s ability to deliver on that promise has been met with mixed reviews. He received criticism for failing to update his personal Twitter account for more than two months after his inauguration, with some arguing he merely used Web 2.0 tools to get elected.

But in reality, Obama’s promise to increase government transparency through technology has come to fruition in the following ways:

1. A revamped Whitehouse.gov has an issues tab that allows citizens to track progress made on each major issue facing the country.
2. The site features Obama’s weekly YouTube video address.
3. His staff updates a blog.
4. People can subscribe via RSS to ensure they don’t miss an important piece of content.
5. People can bookmark posts on Whitehouse.gov to their favorite social networks, including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.
6. The administration launched recovery.org to help citizens track where the government spends and allocates their tax dollars. They can also report abuses they see in the spending of government funds.

But all of these initiatives have lacked one characteristic that only a site like Facebook can address: the ability to make information social by providing tools that instantly enable users to publish their thoughts on critical issues. On Whitehouse.org, users cannot comment on posts. Instead, they find themselves relegated to the static “contact us” form.

Facebook, on the other hand, creates a two-way conversation. As an example, the most current blog post on Whitehouse.org has also been posted on the Facebook public profile, where it enjoys 39 comments so far.

Conclusion:

We welcome President Obama’s efforts to utilize Facebook to improve government transparancy and communicate with citizens, but his administration should be more aggressive and original in its efforts. As of now, the Facebook page merely republishes information posted to Whitehouse.gov. The administration should post more content that is original to Facebook, giving users added incentive to visit the page. They might also consider building applications that increase engagement with the administration’s efforts.

Finally, the profile page is too faceless. While we don’t expect the president to comment on every item posted to the page, the members of his staff should make efforts to participate in the conversations occurring there. Their names and faces should be front and center, letting citizens know the new government hears their opinions and will respond to them.

A new Facebook application that allowed users to export the full contents of their stream into an RSS feed has been quickly shut down by Facebook for violating the site’s privacy rules.

Newsfeed RSS was an application developed by Teck Chia that took Facebook’s “Open Stream API” and made the contents a little too open. Here’s the problem: converting users’ Facebook streams into RSS feeds is inherently insecure, because many RSS feed readers make feed URLs public and indexable. That could lead to information Facebook users thought they were only sharing with their Facebook friends ending up in search engine archives forever.

As Facebook engineer Ari Steinberg wrote (not speaking on official behalf of Facebook) in this forum post,

I think there are some definite privacy issues with this app which I’d imagine led to it being taken down… imagine if just a few hundred thousand people decided to do that – suddenly you’d have tens of millions of people’s private content publicly searchable on Google without their permission.

We’re certainly not opposed to enabling you to export your own content (in fact, we’re always trying to work on ways to make that easier) but exporting all your friends’ content to a totally public place without their permission isn’t cool.

The move by Facebook to shut down Newsfeed RSS was the right one, as it clearly created privacy problems. Most users who would have tried out the app would have inadvertently shared private information about their friends without actually intending to expose them.

However, it’s clear that users do want to consume their Facebook stream outside Facebook.com. The new client applications built on Facebook’s Open Stream API are a more secure step in that direction that Facebook is highly encouraging.

At the end of the day, users’ trust in Facebook depends on the social contracts between users implicit with sharing on the site. Users who violate their friends’ privacy will naturally be moved further out in the “circle of trust.”

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor – Current Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

Today, Inside Facebook released the May 2009 edition of the Facebook Global Monitor – tracking Facebook’s growth in global markets. The Facebook Global Monitor tracks Facebook’s international growth to enable marketers, developers, and analysts to spot trends and opportunities. A few highlights from the May report’s findings:

• Powered by growth in users over 35, Facebook crossed the 60 million active user mark in the US last week.
• Facebook’s European growth continues at a strong pace. Facebook added more than 1 million active users in Italy during the last 30 days, and 7 of the 10 fastest growing countries on Facebook are in Europe.
• Facebook grew by nearly 9% in Germany during the last 30 days, crossing the 2 million mark for the first time ever. Facebook’s German audience is up 250% in the last year and nearly 50% in the last quarter.

The Facebook Global Monitor is a premium service and newsletter produced by Inside Facebook that provides vital data and insight to media industry executives, global marketing and communications firms, analysts, and developers for whom Facebook’s rapid international expansion poses significant opportunities or threats.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $99 per issue, or $395 for a six month subscription. Future monthly updates will be delivered directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic. (Custom reports are also available.) You can reach us at mail AT insidefacebook DOT com with questions at any time.

Each month, the Facebook Global Monitor provides the latest comprehensive data on the expansion of Facebook’s audience in nearly 100 global markets. In addition, the Monitor provides alerts on breakout and cooling markets, as well as our latest in-house projections on Facebook’s growth in each country 30 days, 90 days, and 12 months into the future.

See the full table of contents of the first newsletter below. All reports are based on primary research by Inside Facebook using data from Facebook, and each section is designed to elucidate key actionable trends.

We believe big opportunities exist for developers and marketers to reach and engage the Facebook audience in these rapidly emerging and expanding markets. Cheers to continued growth in 2009!

The Facebook Global Monitor

Tracking Facebook in Global Markets

May 2009

Contents

I. Introduction: The Year That Facebook Went Global

II. Global Market Report

1. Audience Size Today

2. Fastest Growing Audience

• Last 12 months
• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

3. Market Penetration Today

4. Largest Market Penetration Increases

• Last 12 months
• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

III. Emerging Market Analysis

1. Growth Projections

• Next 30 days
• Next 90 days
• Next 12 months

2. Technical Alerts

• Breakout Markets: Last 90 Days
• Cooling Markets: Last 90 Days

IV. Regional Summaries

1. Africa

2. Asia / Pacific

3. Europe

4. North America

5. South America

V. Country Updates

1. Argentina

2. Australia

3. Austria

4. Bahamas

5. Bahrain

6. Bangladesh

7. Belgium

8. Bolivia

9. Bosnia & Herzegovina

10. Brazil

11. Bulgaria

12. Canada

13. Chile

14. China

15. Colombia

16. Costa Rica

17. Croatia

18. Cyprus

19. Czech Republic

20. Denmark

21. Dominican Republic

22. Ecuador

23. Egypt

24. El Salvador

25. Finland

26. France

27. Germany

28. Ghana

29. Greece

30. Guatemala

31. Honduras

32. Hong Kong

33. Hungary

34. Iceland

35. India

36. Indonesia

37. Ireland

38. Israel

39. Italy

40. Jamaica

41. Japan

42. Jordan

43. Kenya

44. Kuwait

45. Lebanon

46. Lithuania

47. Luxembourg

48. Macedonia

49. Malaysia

50. Maldives

51. Malta

52. Mauritius

53. Mexico

54. Morocco

55. Netherlands

56. New Zealand

57. Nicaragua

58. Nigeria

59. Norway

60. Oman

61. Pakistan

62. Palestine

63. Panama

64. Paraguay

65. Peru

66. Philippines

67. Poland

68. Portugal

69. Puerto Rico

70. Qatar

71. Romania

72. Russia

73. Saudi Arabia

74. Serbia

75. Singapore

76. Slovakia

77. Slovenia

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor – Current Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

78. South Africa

79. South Korea

80. Spain

81. Sri Lanka

82. Sweden

83. Switzerland

84. Taiwan

85. Thailand

86. Trinidad and Tobago

87. Tunisia

88. Turkey

89. Ukraine

90. United Arab Emirates

91. United Kingdom

92. United States

93. Uruguay

94. Venezuela

95. Vietnam

Footnotes & Methodology

Facebook is building a sales team to run its new Australian headquarters in Sydney, according to the Australian newspaper Australian IT.

The team is being headed by Paul Borrud, previously the company’s VP of US West Coast Sales. Although Borrud didn’t share information on the size or composition of his team (Australia IT says Facebook is looking to hire a staff of 10 for now), he did comment on plans to generate advertising revenue from Australian agencies and advertisers via engagement ads (to the right of the Home page) and performance ads (to the right of user profiles).

“We think there’s a great opportunity to work with agencies and advertisers who want a different type of relationship with their customers,” Borrud said. “With Facebook, businesses have the ability to go beyond simple click-throughs and interact with users through friend networks and all aspects of Facebook including applications and pages.”

Facebook is building its Sydney sales office in hopes of helping advertisers connect with its 5.7 million users in Australia and 750,000 users in New Zealand. Early-bird opportunities still exist for marketers and developers who want to engage this audience on Facebook before more businesses and entrepreneurs in the region catch on.

The office is Facebook’s first in the region. Last October, Facebook announced its European operations would be headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and the company has been posting sales positions in Sydney, Paris, London, Toronto, New York, and Atlanta for most of the year. Currently, Facebook lists sales openings in Sydney, Paris, Toronto, Italy, Spain, Dublin, London, Germany, Stockholm, Los Angeles, and Palo Alto.

The Facebook gaming leaderboards have experienced quite a number of changes in the last month! Over half of the games and applications have lost rather significant numbers, but at the same time, such losses have given a number of new titles a chance to make their appearance in the Top 25.

Zynga and Playfish’s battle for the #1 spot continues between Texas HoldEm Poker and Pet Society, with the latter closing the gap with a gain of 1,348,759 to Zynga’s 1,054,775. However, that same growth did not hold true for spots 4 – 6 with Bumper Sticker, Pass A Drink, and Lil Green Patch losing about a million active users each.

Playfish title Geo Challenge kept it’s #8 spot with 3.97 million active users this past month with Word Challenge coming in behind, but surprisingly enough the other Playfish titles were ousted by MindJolt Games who jumped all the way from #17 to #10.

>> More on “The Top 25 Facebook Games for May, 2009″ at Inside Social Games

Since Facebook rolled out the new home page stream a few weeks ago, one of the most common requests from users has been to make the stream truly “live.” Today, Facebook has just starting rolling out an update to the stream with live in-line updates in near real time.

Now, the stream shows the number of new posts that have been shared since the Facebook home page was loaded at the top of the page just below the Publisher. See “Show 2 New Posts” in the screenshot below:

You can then click the number to expand the prompt and see the new posts in line.

“Live updating for the stream was one of the most common requests we received for the home page,” Facebook’s Adam Hupp said.

Shortly after the new home page launched, Facebook made several usability enhancements to the stream, including better filters, better highlights, moving friend requests back to the top of the right column, and easier friend list management. The company said at the time that the live stream would come “soon.”

Last week, Facebook announced new Stream APIs, enabling developers to integrate the Facebook stream outside Facebook.com. We would expect Facebook to enable real-time stream notifications for developers in the future too.