Although Facebook has tens of thousands of advertisers using its self-serve Facebook Ads system and millions of users buying Facebook Credits to spend on Facebook Gifts and (recently) Platform applications, it has always required all advertisers and Credits buyers around the world to pay in US dollars. As a result, customers abroad have had to deal with exchange rates, and advertisers have had to manage budgeting campaigns in a different currency.

Today, however, Facebook has rolled out the ability to pay for Facebook Ads and Facebook Credits in 14 new currencies. Now, when you want to create an ad using Facebook’s online advertising system, buy a Facebook gift, or purchase a premium item in a Platform application participating in the payments alpha test like Group Card, you have the added option of paying in the following currencies:

1. Australian Dollars (AUD)
2. British Pound (GBP)
3. Canadian Dollars (CAD)
4. Chilean Peso (CLP)
5. Colombian Peso (COP)
6. Euro (EUR)
7. Danish Krone (DKK)
8. Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
9. Japanese Yen (JPY)
10. Norwegian Krone (NOK)
11. Swedish Krona (SEK)
12. Swiss Fanc (CHF)
13. Turkish Lira (TRY)
14. Venezuelan Bolivar (VEF)

For example, here’s what buying Facebook Credits in Chilean Pesos looks like. (The exchange rate is 54 Chilean Pesos to the Credit for those keeping track at home.)

What This Means for Advertisers

Growing and scaling its advertising solutions internationally is a key focus for Facebook, and the addition of 14 newly accepted currencies is a step in that direction, making the ad creation process as simple as possible for advertisers in many more locations around the world. Facebook will not be charging additional fees for the currency transactions involved, so advertisers in many new countries should be able to plan their Facebook campaigns more seamlessly.

What This Means for Developers

Facebook is currently testing a Facebook credits payments program for Facebook Platform developers in a few applications in an effort to create an additional low-friction payment option. So far, many developers monetizing their applications through payments have expressed interest in testing the system out, though only a few are actually live now. Given that over 70% of Facebook users live outside the US, the addition of new currency support should make Credits an increasingly viable option for users in those countries.

However, whether or not Facebook will be able to drive significant currency purchases in those countries remains to be seen – currently, the only way to actually purchase Facebook Credits is still with a credit card. Mobile payment companies like Zong and Boku have been aggressively working with Facebook application developers to help them access users in many international markets which are otherwise more challenging to monetize, so it will be interesting to see if Facebook’s new currency support has a significant impact.

Conclusion

Facebook has not yet broken out advertising volume or Credit sales by country. However, we expect Facebook to continue to expand its international payments infrastructure in order to be able to support an increasingly global base of advertisers and direct customers. With over 70% of users currently outside the US and growing, Facebook is giving advertisers and developers access to markets that would otherwise be much more challenging to reach.

Jessica Lee contributed to this story.

Two weeks ago, many Facebook users began asking questions about curiously good recommendations suddenly appearing in Facebook’s “People You May Know” suggestions list. At the time, many suspected that Facebook was saving contacts imported from Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc., in order to make future recommendations, but Facebook did not explicitly say that anywhere on the site at the time.

Now, that’s changed: within the last few days, Facebook has added the following message when you click a new “Learn More” link on the contact importer:

In addition, Facebook has added this new tool which allows users to delete contacts uploaded through the Friend Finder that Facebook auto-stored. According to the page, “Facebook uses the email addresses you upload through the Friend Finder to help you connect with friends, including using this information to generate Suggestions for you and your contacts on Facebook.” In other words, if your friends upload their contacts to Facebook, they could start showing up in your Suggestions list too.

As we wrote two weeks ago:

If Facebook is indeed storing imported contacts for the purposes of future friend suggestions, it should make that more clear. Because Facebook appears to only be using that information to make helpful friend suggestions, most users would not be concerned. Facebook generally has very high standards when it comes to user privacy, and not giving users the choice to not have their imported contacts saved isn’t worth “spooking” users who don’t want to see people they’ve emailed in the past showing up in their suggested friends list in the future.

Facebook has taken an important step in more clearly communicating what it’s doing with imported data, though there are always likely to be some users caught off guard by the nature of these recommendations.

Facebook has just announced that it’s now testing a new version of the “publisher” that allows users to choose who can see their status updates and posts.  The most interesting part? The first option is “everyone.”

In other words, Facebook is making it easy for users to post status updates that are visible not just to their Facebook friends – but for the entire world (and Google) to see. Facebook has said for a long time that it’s planned to give users more granular privacy controls over status updates, but Facebook has never promoted making status updates publicly visible this heavily before – though the company did take a step back in March to allow users to share some content on their profiles with everyone.

By contrast, Twitter’s public nature has made the site increasingly popular amongst users interested in broadcasting their messages as widely as possible or unconcerned with privacy. Now, users will have the same opportunity to be just as public on Facebook without getting a Facebook Page (“public profile”) as well.

According to Facebook, users can now choose to share status updates with:

• Everyone: Anyone, on or off, of Facebook can see it.
• Friends and Networks: People you have confirmed as friends and people in any school or work networks that you’ve joined can see it.
• Friends of Friends: Anyone who is friends with a friend of yours can see it.
• Friends: Only people you have confirmed as friends can see it.
• Custom: Choose any friend or Friend List to include or exclude from seeing that piece of content.

The concept behind per-item privacy controls on shared content is powerful: now, users can share content that’s not privacy-sensitive publicly (like interesting links or comments about the weather) while still only sharing personal information with friends. The new publisher also allow users to only share status updates with particular friend lists, making it easy to share content that’s only intended for some friends to not be visible to others.

Facebook says the new publisher is now available to people “who had previously set their status updates and profile privacy settings to be visible to ‘Everyone,’” but that the test should be expanded to more users soon. We’ll of course keep you updated as Facebook contniues to roll out the new publisher more widely.

Yesterday, Facebook added a new API call and FQL table to query mutual friend relationships between two users. The concept has been around for years on Facebook, but now applications have access to this same information without having to perform expensive queries on their databases.

As with most data accessed using the API or FQL tables, this information is still held to the Platform’s policy on data usage: in most cases, data may not be stored for more than 24 hours.

Technical Details

Since this API is new, a function doesn’t exist in the official Facebook PHP client yet. If you’d like to take advantage of this API call right away, you can add this code into your facebookapi_php5_restlib.php file. This function requires a session key to work. If you do not have a session key for the users you’re making a comparison on, see below. Included in the code is an example of how to utilize the new call.

One point of interest: the new API call requires an input of two user ID’s to make the comparison. The second parameter, “source_uid”, must be set to the user ID matching the current session key. The first parameter, “target_uid”, can be any user ID even if the “target_uid” is not current friends with the “source_uid” – making this API call powerful.

The API call requires a session key to function correctly (you will receive an error otherwise). However, Facebook is also offereing this data in FQL format under the new standard_friend_info table. According to Facebook, you should only use the FQL table if you do not have access to the session key – otherwise, use the API call as outlined above.

While the Facebook username landrush officially opened two weeks ago, Pages with under 1,000 fans or created after May 31 still haven’t been allowed to get vanity URLs. However, Facebook is lifting that restriction this weekend: starting at 11:59pm ET on Sunday, June 28, all Facebook Page owners will be able to obtain vanity URLs for their Pages.

Why did Facebook not allow all Page owners to get usernames at the same time as everyone else? Essentially, to mitigate squatting. Facebook wants to make sure every vanity URL that gets registered in the system is authentic, and put this restriction in place to prevent speculators from creating thousands of Pages in order to squat on vanity URLs. However, this rule has delayed legitimate Page owners with less than 1,000 fans from getting a vanity URL for over two weeks as well.

Millions of names have been reserved since Facebook opened up username registration. However, so far, username squatting has not been a widespread problem. Nevertheless, now that every Page is getting turned loose, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a fresh round of aggressive Page owners testing Facebook’s policy limits this weekend.

Update: Previously, this article said usernames would be  available at 12:01am ET on Sunday. Facebook now says usernames will be available at 11:59pm ET on Sunday night.

While many big brands have been building custom applications on the Facebook Platform, many have also been engaging with large audiences through sponsored integrations with Facebook applications. The latest is from the most valuable brand in the world: Coke.

Coca-Cola and MediaVest have partnered with appssavvy to develop a marketing campaign inside the already-popular Living Social, giving the drink company exposure to the more than 17 million monthly users of the Facebook application which has become popular for its “pick 5″ lists that users often share with friends.

The sponsored area of the application features  a “Things that make me happy” list and gives users the opportunity to fill in what they feel are their favorite five “Coke secret ingredients.”  The format will be familiar to anyone that’s used a LivingSocial app on Facebook — just enter a word or a few letters into the search box and you’ll see a list of secret ingredient options.

By piggy-backing on the success of LivingSocial, Coke and appssavvy have tapped into a huge social community instead of building up a fan base from scratch. The Coke Facebook Fan page has about 3.5 million fans, but they’re able to reach a different segment of the Facebook audience by sponsoring LivingSocial.

Many brands, both small and large, are building their own specific apps for Facebook, which then take time to catch on, if they catch on at all. Sponsoring already-popular apps gives brands an immediate impact and skips the lag period associated with a new application. It’s also an important way established applications are monetizing successfully.

This morning I gave the opening presentation at the Social Gaming Summit, discussing an overview of the major platforms, players, and monetization stats in the social gaming industry. For those interested in checking out the slides, they are embedded below.

Topics covered: Facebook, Facebook Connect, iPhone, MySpace, Hi5, Twitter, Monetization, ARPUs on Facebook and MySpace, IP, copycats.

Facebook doesn’t let users skin their profile pages, but a browser plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox called PageRage Super Profile by Yontoo Technology allows users to create the appearance of doing just that. In fact, the app is currently the fastest growing application in the 100,000 to 1 million monthly active users (MAU) category, according to AppData, with nearly 1 million monthly active users and a gain of 200,000 MAU in the last week.

With PageRage, you can customize your Facebook profile with a full profile layout. Your friends who are also users of the app can then see this layout when they are viewing your profile. So far Facebook has kept the profile page layout the same for everyone – simple white and blue – but users are showing interest in customizing their profiles like they are able to on other sites (MySpace, Twitter, etc.)

In the past 90 days, the app has experienced a decline in users, until about mid-May when user growth began to rise.

Accompanying PageRage Super Profile in the Top 5 fastest growing apps this week are My Best Girls! at #2, SpeedDate at #3, People I Love! at #4, and Which Car suits your Personality? at #5, which have made weekly gains ranging from over 100,000 to almost 200,000 MAU, representing MAU growth between 20 and 30 percent.

SpeedDate appears on the leaderboard many times, at #3, #9 to #10, #14 to #16, #18, and #20. SpeedDate has apparently been aggressively buying out apps and completing reskinning them with its own app again – which got the app into trouble with Facebook last summer.

In the Top 20, you’ll also find that games by popular developers Zynga and RockYou! are doing well such as Special Forces and Speed Racing. Those simple quiz apps are still growing too.

As one might expect, compared to the 1 million to 10 million MAU category, the 100,000 to 1 million MAU category features a lot more individual developers who are making their way to the top of the leaderboard. As the virtual goods economy and payments space takes off continues to grow, individual developers are still building substantial businesses without incredibly large audiences.

The dust has settled from the initial Facebook username land rush, and according to PageData metrics, about 8,000 Page owners have claimed their vanity URLs thus far. When the gates open to Pages with under 1,000 fans this Sunday, we’re sure to see another rush to grab good names.

Taking a look at the Facebook Page landscape this week, which Pages are growing fastest right now? Here are the current fastest growing Facebook Pages in the 1 million to 10 million fan range:

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Starbucks Coffee Company	3,117,072	+656,102	+26.66
2.	Victoria’s Secret	1,422,418	+524,999	+58.50
3.	Flipping the Pillow Over to Get to the Cold Side	2,559,359	+471,618	+22.59
4.	Being barefoot	1,827,032	+416,374	+29.52
5.	Vin Diesel	4,892,331	+253,807	+5.47
6.	Fresh Prince	1,535,239	+222,746	+16.97
7.	Laughing when someone falls	2,106,519	+217,756	+11.53
8.	David Beckham	1,664,510	+216,978	+14.99
9.	Selena Gomez	1,676,313	+198,851	+13.46
10.	I Hate One Word Text Messages!	1,284,294	+188,923	+17.25
11.	Laughing	2,040,233	+168,158	+8.98
12.	Eminem	1,360,317	+163,504	+13.66
13.	Facebook	3,652,444	+163,261	+4.68
14.	Ashton Kutcher	2,338,209	+160,415	+7.37
15.	I Love my Family	1,248,514	+158,021	+14.49
16.	Mafia Wars	2,361,146	+128,826	+5.77
17.	李连杰 Jet Li	1,023,409	+124,248	+13.82
18.	Rafael Nadal	1,609,162	+117,310	+7.86
19.	Michael Jordan	1,005,471	+111,853	+12.52
20.	Roger Federer	1,952,996	+105,149	+5.69

Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret’s Facebook pages have seen some pretty notable weekly gains. At #1 for top gainers this week, Starbucks gained over 600,000 MAU, putting it over the three million fans mark, and Victoria’s Secret’s MAU grew by over 50 percent.

With a weekly gain of over 600,000 fans, Starbucks’s page now has over three million fans:

Victoria’s Secret’s page grew by over 50 percent:

Out of these 20 fastest growing public profiles, it’s significant to note that nine of them, or almost 50 percent, are the official pages of individuals – with Vin Diesel still in the lead. Four of them are brands, including Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret; and six of them are generic unofficial pages, from Flipping the Pillow Over to Get to the Cold Side to I Hate One Word Text Messages!

As brands launch more engaging marketing programs on Facebook, we expect these proportions to change – with the pages of brands and individual celebrities to go up relative to general interest pages. In fact, just as Facebook turned off publishing privileges for several top generic pages two weeks ago, we wouldn’t be surprised to see the trend continue in the weeks ahead. The Facebook Page marketing team is working hard to protect the integrity and authenticity of Facebook Pages, and will be continually developing ways for legitimate Pages to grow.

Related Resources:

• The Best and Worst Facebook Marketing 2009 Report

Zynga, itself being sued by Mob Wars creator Psycho Monkey for IP issues regarding the Zynga title Mafia Wars, has now filed suit against other leading rival Playdom for misuse of the mark “Mafia Wars” in ads it is running for its popular game, Mobsters…

>> Read More at Inside Social Games