How much is a Facebook stream impression worth? While we still hear Page transactions are occurring in the sub-$0.01/fan range, one popular generic Page owner is auctioning off the right to post a status update to his 300,000 Facebook fans on eBay.

The owner of the generic Facebook page I ♥ Being In Bed has put the right to “send out a message to ALL fans of my page of 265,000+ growing 20k+ new fans everyday your link or message once per week for 4 weeks.” The link and text can include a photo or video as well. Right now, the auction has no bids.

While we expect Facebook to eventually establish rules against this kind of thing in the long run, it goes to show that entrepreneurs are still actively experimenting with Facebook Page arbitrage.

At 8.3 million monthly players and growing, Farm Town is one of the most popular games on Facebook. Apparently, it’s also one of the most addictive.

Tonight, Farm Town was inexplicably unavailable on Facebook for a period of about 3-4 hours. Apparently, the developers of the game had some significant server problems, according to a note they posted in user forums. However, that didn’t stop users from expressing their sadness:

We’ve received several questions about whether the application’s downtime is related to policy actions on ad networks earlier this evening. Right now, it appears as though that is not the case. We’ll let you know if we hear any more information.

We’re still confirming with the parties involved, but we’ve received multiple reports tonight that two major Facebook Platform ad networks have temporarily suspended operations tonight while they come into compliance with new Facebook Platform policy enforcements.

According to what we’re hearing, SocialReach and SocialHour notified publishers tonight that they would be in effect going into hiatus until the problems are fixed. As a result, developers are scrambling to fill their inventory from other Platform ad networks for the time being.

Facebook has been increasingly cracking down on Platform ad networks that make liberal use of profile pictures and data to increase conversion. Specifically, the policy enforcement team has been contacting ad networks lately instructing them to make sure they’re in the clear on two key issues:

1. Misleading ad creative. Often times, some ad networks use friends’ photos or names in ads like “Can you beat their IQ score?” that falsely imply friends have previously engaged with the app or site being promoted.
2. Putting user data in landing pages. Sometimes, ad networks have put Facebook profile photos in the landing pages users reach when they click on a Platform ad. This is also somewhat misleading and can violate Facebook’s privacy policy.

In general, Facebook is trying to clean up the image of ads on the Platform to maintain user trust. Obviously, it’s very challenging to do constant quality control on every ad network operating on the Platform.

As we get more information on the policy enforcements tonight, we’ll let you know.

A new Facebook gadget for iGoogle is available that lets you directly access the News Feed and update your status from your iGoogle home page. The stream is updated without having to refresh the page. However, you can’t comment or Like stories from the gadget just yet. (You can view a subset of comments for now.)

Here’s what the process of adding Facebook to iGoogle looks like:

1. Click here to add the Facebook Connect gadget to your iGoogle home page.

2. Once the gadget is added to iGoogle, you’ll be asked a series of requests for special permissions to allow iGoogle to a) update your status, b) remember you for constant reauthorization, and c) access the News Feed and Wall.

3. Now you can view live updates from your friends and the Pages you’re fans of, as well as update your status from iGoogle.

Notice that back on Facebook, my status has been updated via “iGoogle Gadget.”

This is not the first Facebook Connect widget that has taken advantage of Facebook’s “open stream” API. Desktop applications from Seesmic and TweetDeck allow users to monitor and update the stream from desktop applications. Now, gadgets like this one for iGoogle show that Facebook’s stream API is bringing more social context to portals as well – and driving more content sharing inside Facebook.

Update: A previous version of this story said that the gadget was developed by Facebook. It appears that this app was designed by Facebook but developed by Google, however. Thanks to Facebook and Michael Bauser for the correction.

May stats are out from Compete, and the web analytics company says US traffic to Facebook’s main consumer website increased by 8% during the month to 82.9 million uniques. For those keeping track at home, that’s back up from Facebook’s “dip” to 4.6% monthly growth in April after growing by 11% in March.

Traffic to Facebook Connect-enabled sites increased 14% in May to 65 million US uniques after growing by a whopping 40% in April.

By contrast, however, Twitter was flat for the quarter in terms of reach. The site registered 19.7 million uniques for the month, up 1% from last month. Twitter’s audience grew by nearly 40% from March to April, so it’s surprising to see that curve flatten off rather quickly. MySpace traffic held at 56.9 million uniques for May, up 2% from April.

Twitter’s US audience growth decreased to 1% in May, according to Compete

Overall, 8% US audience growth (6.1 million incremental US uniques) to 82.9 million is an impressive clip for Facebook at this stage. Over 40% of the US internet population is now logging into Facebook each month.

Today Inside Facebook is launching an interview series with several of this year’s 2009 fbFund winners. Participating in the fbFund REV program this year will be 18 startups and 2 nonprofit organizations that are leveraging Facebook’s platform in fresh and innovative ways. This summer, winners will move into Facebook’s downtown Palo Alto offices to participate in the fbFund summer incubator program, where they will get the opportunity to work among each other under the mentorship of the Facebook Platform team and the fbFund Advisory Council. Once again, congratulations to all!

In today’s interview, CEO of Sofa Labs Brian Phillips shares the thinking behind Frintro, one of the first online dating sites to integrate Facebook Connect into the core user experience. Sofa Labs co-founders also include Katherine Woo and Skye Lee, both of whom are also former PayPal veterans. The team impressed me with their positive energy and passion for innovating in the online dating space.

Q&A with Brian Phillips: Part 1

“What’s totally fascinating about the second-degree social graph, which is where we’re focused, is it’s huge, and no one appreciates the size of it. For example, I have 175 friends right now who have been using Frintro … and with 175 friends, I have 60,000 friends of friends.”

Q&A with Brian Phillips: Part 2

“We’re all passionate about dating in general because we like to think, ‘Hey, what’s more important than helping friend’s find love?’ That’s  the mission we really get behind.”

“We have 500 active alpha testers … but we have very ambitious goals. In year 1, we’d love to see that grow from 500 people to 500,000 people. Once we get engagement and interactions right, we can really grow this business because we think we’re providing a really valuable service. We’d love to see some hypergrowth.”

Q&A with Brian Phillips: Part 3

“Frintro has facilitated several dates, and there’s a few budding relationships, which we’re really excited about. One of our key metrics over time will be number of marriages … At some point, I’d love to report back and tell you about our first Frintro marriage because I’m pretty confident it will happen.”

“We think there’s tons of opportunities in dating to innovate on … For example, I get asked a ton about mobile, and I do think mobile and dating is an interesting space, especially with Facebook mobile Connect becoming available, iPhone 3.0, and background applications, there’s tons of interesting stuff you can do there, so that’s not on short-term roadmap, but we certainly can’t ignore it long-term.”

A shot of Frintro’s user interface:

We’re excited to see how Frintro changes the online dating landscape. Stay tuned throughout the week for more featured 2009 fbFund REV winners.

Recently, a new study from the Harvard Business School showed that in “stunning” contrast to social networks, where most of the activity is focused around women, on Twitter, men are much more likely to follow other men than they are to follow women. In other words, men find the content shared by other men much more interesting on Twitter than on Facebook, while men find the content shared by women much more interesting on Facebook than on Twitter. Why might this be?

The authors of the HBS report, Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, start down an interesting track in their parenthetical note wondering why men are less interested in women on Twitter: “because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.” Here, I believe Heil was implying that men are more interested in following women who they can find real information about, but women in general share less personal information (like you’d find on their Facebook profile) on Twitter, so as a result men follow women less on Twitter. While the Harvard report didn’t explore this idea in more detail, we’ve all made similar anecdotal observations about Twitter in general: it is a place where people build public identities, and as a general rule share less sensitive personal information.

The natural levels of disclosed identity on Facebook and Twitter reflect important things about their future. While social media PR professionals wrestle with whether Twitter is a conversation platform or a broadcast platform – in and of itself a very interesting question – one thing we’ve all intuitively known since we were children is that not all conversations want to be public. While celebrities and those wanting more professional visibility are sharing a lot of information on Twitter, most people will always have a variety of topics that they’re unwilling or uninterested in talking about publicly: proprietary business information, personal/family matters, or (depending on how concerned you are about identity theft, stalkers, or surveillance) any other random topic that may incidentally contain and disclose personally identifiable information about you (like your location at a specific point in time, preferences or tastes, birthday, etc.).

Twitter follower statistics from HBS:

By contrast, Facebook is largely private. With some notable exceptions (like profile photo and fan pages you’re a fan of), almost all personal profile data, photos, and shared content are by default only accessible by people in your friends list. As a result, Facebook identity is strong due to high levels of disclosure and social reinforcement. Not only are profiles detailed and authentic, but every time users make a real friend connection, they’re building more trust in both their Facebook identity and others’ as safe contexts to share personal information. Further steps, like tagging friends or being tagged by friends in photos, reinforce that trust in that identity even more – each tagged photo is like a “vote” that your Facebook identity is real.

Is this significant? As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told us last week, the power of Facebook identity is a lot stronger than you’d think:

You can start a blog saying you’re someone you’re not, you can start an account on some other service really easily saying you’re someone you’re not. One thing that’s really interesting about Facebook is, for example, I had a friend who decided that he wanted to create fake identities for himself on Facebook using a bunch of different accounts just for fun – but he couldn’t do it. He could get a few fake people to add him as friends, but ultimately people looked at the people that he knew and asked, ‘Why don’t you have friends?’ or ‘Why don’t you have pictures of you with other people?’ They thought, ‘Something just doesn’t add up here.’ It was really hard to create a fake account, and because of that understanding of realness within the system, it’s really easy to weed out different behavior when someone’s trying to be a worm or trying to phish.

Conclusion: Today, Twitter is a Communication Platform, but Facebook is an Identity Platform

People who are concerned about the security of their identity are obviously less likely to share personal information in a public forum. Thus, because Twitter is largely public and Facebook is largely private, the degree of disclosed identity on Twitter is likely to always be lower than that on Facebook. That means significant things for the future of Facebook and Twitter as products, and also as businesses:

1. Content sharing. Content shared on Twitter is likely to always be different than content shared on Facebook. In particular, those concerned with identity theft, being stalked by strangers, or tracked by anonymous surveillance systems are going to be the most conservative, while those concerned with increasing their celebrity or visibility are always going to be the most aggressive.
2. Advertising. Facebook’s advertising business is largely based on targeting users according to information they declare in their Facebook profile. Currently, Twitter profiles contain sparse biographical data and basic follower/following statistics. Twitter’s business model is unlikely to be based on profile targeting.
3. Identity Platform. Recently, Twitter launched a competitive product to Facebook Connect called Sign In with Twitter. So far, Facebook Connect has been implemented by about 10,000 websites, desktop and mobile applications, and most recently, video game consoles. In order for Sign In with Twitter to gain market traction, it’s going to have to continue to prove itself as a reliable identity system even though many users are hesitant to share more sensitive personal information.
4. E-Commerce. Facebook is in the process of alpha testing a payments system built on top of Facebook identity. In the future, it could spread its payment platform across all websites which connect to and rely on Facebook identity through Facebook Connect. Twitter is still a ways off from building its own commerce system on top of the Twitter platform, but interesting payment applications are starting to develop on top of Twitter like we’ve seen on the Facebook Platform for the last couple of years.

When viewed this way, Facebook and Twitter actually look like pretty different products and businesses today. Twitter is a hybrid broadcast/conversation communication platform, while Facebook is an identity platform with communication, content distribution, and financial applications built on top of it. Unless Twitter gives users more Facebook-like control over different parts of their identity, Twitter is going to have a hard time serving those users who are more sensitive to security in addition to those aiming for more visibility. But Twitter may not be worried about that right now anyway.

[image credit]

Facebook’s international growth continues at a torrid pace in many countries around the world. Now, Vincenzo Cosenza – translator of Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible in Italian – La Bibbia del Marketing su Facebook – has created a world map visualizing just where Facebook leads, and where it trails other regional networks, based on Alexa and Google Trends data.

As you can see from Cosenza’s map, Facebook is leading in many large markets around the globe, with some notable exceptions. Facebook’s international growth over the last 18 months has been nothing short of remarkable. Currently, over 70% of Facebook’s 200 million active users are located outisde the United States, and the site has been fully translated by users into over 60 languages, with dozens more in process.

Nevertheless, Facebook isn’t close to QQ or other market leaders in China, Orkut is still leading in Brazil and India, Hi5 in Mexico and a few other countries around the world, Maktoob is leading in some middle eastern countries, and VKontakte is leading in Russia.

For more details on Facebook’s international growth trends, check out Inside Facebook’s Facebook Global Monitor – June 2009 Edition.

For performance advertisers, unexplainable differences in delivery rates happen all the time – and have a big impact on the bottom line. However, today, Facebook has issued a note to advertisers in the Facebook Ads campaign management dashboard letting them know to expect lower traffic today. Advertisers may be seeing the following notification:

There is a large targeted campaign running 6/8/2009 that may impact your delivery for this one day if you are targeting the same users. We advise that you do not drastically change your bidding behavior.

There’s no mention of who the campaign might be for, or what the targeting segments are that it will affect, but the message is interesting and helpful nonetheless. A large campaign like the one Facebook describes is likely to push up the minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bid that any other advertisers with campaigns affecting the target segment would need to enter in order to ensure that their ads are shown. As a result, many advertisers may see lower impressions and clicks today.

It’s particularly interesting that the notification has been put out as it’s not necessarily something Facebook is duty-bound to communicate. Without it advertisers would likely interpret a drop in impressions during the day as a need to up their CPC bids. The one-day spike would result in a short-term financial gain for Facebook, as bids across the board would rise, but may have resulted in advertisers eventually decreasing their spend if advertising suddenly become less cost-effective.

The notice should help advertisers to interpret any traffic dip as a one-day event and reassure them that Facebook is likely to be open about future events that may affect them.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

Some of the world’s most well-known brands are launching marketing campaigns on Facebook, but many just getting started on Facebook may be wondering which is the best way to go: Facebook Pages or Facebook Groups?

While it used to be the case that either would work, these days the decision is clear. For businesses large and small, Pages (now also known as “public profiles”) are the way to go for four important reasons:

1. Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
2. Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
3. Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
4. Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO

Sorry Groups, but the future of marketing on Facebook will be through the stream.

1. Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream

With Groups, admins have a few different ways of communicating with members: sending messages to their Facebook inboxes, starting discussion topics on the Discussion Board, posting on the Wall, and uploading photos, links, events, and videos. However, none of these actions automatically make their way to the News Feed.

Compare this to Pages: admins can post status updates, links, photos, and videos to their Walls and get direct access to the News Feed – not to mention get instant feedback when fans like and comment on Wall posts. Pages are a must for organizations who want visibility in the stream.

The New York Times‘s recent video generated 128 likes and 50 comments.

versus

A university’s Class of 2008 Group: here’s the Group’s Wall, which doesn’t allow for photo, video, or link attachments; posts are not placed in the News Feed.

2. Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media

Not only do Pages have more powerful access to the Facebook home page, but they also have better integration with rich media. Page admins can attach links, photos, and videos to Wall posts – and more recently, application content with the Publisher coming to Facebook Pages. With this Publisher integration on Pages, Pages can be used by organizations in increasingly creative ways, as suggested by the Developer Blog:

• Promote philanthropy, coupons, or sweepstakes. A Page admin can solicit a charitable donation, publish a coupon, or announce a sweepstakes, and the resulting post appears in the streams of its fans, driving traffic to an appropriate tab on the Page or an external site.
• Gauge fan interest. Polling applications are a good way for a band or brand to gather information from its fans.
• Encourage fan interaction. The many artistic applications out there can give fans the ability to create works of art directly on a Page to show their appreciation.
• Host live events. Bands, brands, and public figures all want to interact with their fans and supporters in real time. Use the Publisher to announce a live event and drive traffic to the event.

3. Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard

In early May, Facebook announced an upgrade to its Facebook Insights dashboard for Page admins. As we shared back then, new features to the dashboard 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

For all organizations, from nonprofits to big corporations, tracking how users are interacting with content is vital. Knowing numbers and seeing trends help Page admins constantly improve their Pages; by contrast, there are no such tools for Groups, leaving Groups admins guessing what they’re members are thinking.

4. Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO!

Increasing your organization’s rank in Google search results is another reason to choose a Page over a Group. When Facebook added Pages to users’ default public search listings, Pages such as Gap, U2, and Obama saw a dramatic increase in their Google search ranking in just one weekend – with over 112,000 new links pointing back to Gap’s Facebook Page, 188,000 to U2′s, and 3.1 million to Obama’s. This is especially true for larger organizations that get vanity URLs for their Facebook Pages. (The latest news is that vanity URLs may be given away in a land rush.)

Conclusion: The Future of Groups?

It’s evident that Facebook Pages are evolving alongside the Facebook Platform in ways that Groups aren’t: Facebook has integrated Pages with the stream and rich media, as well as provided benefits to Page owners in the form of greater analytic tools and SEO. But that said, Groups still have their place among tight-knit communities that want to leverage the social graph in more intimate, exclusive settings. If Groups continue to be popular among users as they have been, then in time we should expect to see them evolving in ways that provide members with a more integrated user experience.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com