Since Facebook recently started testing its new Facebook Credits payment system with three applications, there’s been a lot of interest from developers in trying out the new service. Although Facebook isn’t taking signups at the moment, last night Facebook put out a notice letting developers know that they can go to this form to express their interest in participating in future tests.

We’ve heard a lot of developers are interested in learning more about the current Facebook Credits alpha test.  At the moment we are not accepting additional partners into the alpha, but we are collecting names of interested parties for potential future beta tests of this feature. If we test this feature further, we’ll be testing it with applications of varying user bases, business models, and functionalities – there is not one particular kind of application we would be looking for.

Please sign up here to register your interest: http://facebookcredits.questionpro.com/

Thanks,
The Facebook Platform Team

However, Facebook doesn’t make any indications of when exactly the test may open up to more developers in a closed “beta,” or when we will see a fully open launch.

As for the survey itself, most of the questions aren’t particularly revealing about the direction the system might be headed. However, the last does make a note about terminology:

Do you currently use the term “credits” in any of the applications you listed?

Facebook has been very strict about the use of terms that they see as linked to core features in an effort to limit the confusion of users between the site and applications that run on the platform. “Wall” and “poke”, for example, are forbidden terms and there are restrictions even on more common terms such as “message”, “status” and even “friend.” Could we see “credits” added to this list in the future? It seems possible, and developers of games with virtual currency systems may want to make a note of it.

If a company has ever wondered what makes a good Facebook Public Profile, they might have a new measure: The Facebook Blue Ribbon Award. Judged by Facebook’s marketing solutions group, the award is given to companies whose Facebook Pages have not only attracted a large amount of “Fans,” but have facilitated deep engagement with the profile’s main features.

The inaugural blue ribbons were awarded to the Pages of H&M, Starbucks and Vitamin Water. According to a note posted by Facebook, the marketing solutions group “looked at the most popular pages by fan count and then looked at interactions of the fans with the Page ratio (defined as comments, likes).” The awards will be issued monthly.

The three winners had some common characteristics. While many company profiles tend to serve as a way to redirect users to their home websites, the Blue Ribbon winners seemed comfortable having users spend time on Facebook. Each company uploaded original video and photos that live on Facebook. H&M showed photos for its summer line of clothing, while Starbucks uploaded videos that detailed some of its charity efforts in Africa.

Vitamin Water has always had pretty witty marketing efforts (just read the side of one of their bottles). Their Facebook page was no exception. One video focused on their actual product very little. Instead, it featured many of the athletes they sponsor, including Lebron James, Kobe Bryant and David Ortiz, who told the camera what music they like to listen to before or after a game. The video doesn’t have the polished look of a TV ad (and it’s also quite a bit longer). But that’s what makes it effective; it fits a more informal, social medium.

All the sites received lots of comments from fans. Rather than merely link to its corporate website, Starbucks posted content from the Serious Eats blog, which has been running a series on roasting coffee and Starbucks’ Coffee College. The posts received hundreds of comments.

Conclusion

We were impressed by the three award winners’ Pages. Moreover, the existence of this award will enable companies to learn from each other as they try to improve their Facebook marketing efforts and innovate on top of their Pages. Many Facebook users are eager to become fans of their favorite products, but finding the proper content to serve up to them isn’t always easy. This should help companies in their efforts.

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

After increasing reports of deceptive advertisements within some Facebook applications, Facebook has confirmed that it has banned two advertising networks from operating on the Facebook Platform.

The two ad networks, SocialHour and SocialReach, were allegedly presenting Facebook users with misleading advertisements inside third party applications, and sometimes putting Facebook user data on outside landing pages in ways that violated Facebook’s privacy policy. The ad networks are currently not serving any ads on Platform applications, and developers have turned to other networks to fill their inventory.

Facebook says it banned the ad networks for “deceptive content” and failing to correct their practices after being warned.

“We’ve received some reports of deceptive content in ads placed within apps by developers.  These ads are not from Facebook but we are concerned about any potential threat to our users’ experience.  We have had the ads removed from a number of apps and prohibited two advertising networks from providing services to applications on Facebook Platform because they were not compliant with our policies and failed to correct their advertising practices,” a Facebook spokesperson told us.

Are the suspensions permanent?

“We will evaluate each circumstance individually, and are certainly open to reinstating relationships with those who demonstrate a commitment to appropriate practices,” Facebook said.

SocialHour and SocialReach had no comment on the suspensions.

Facebook has been increasingly cracking down on Platform ad networks that make liberal use of user data to increase performance. For instance, some ad networks use friends’ photos or names in ad copy like “Can you beat their IQ score?” that falsely implies friends have previously engaged with the app or site being promoted. Sometimes, those ads prompt users to enter mobile phone information, but users often don’t know they’re signing up for a subscription service that is automatically billed to their mobile carrier every month.

In general, Facebook is trying to clean up the image of ads on the Platform to maintain user trust. In this case, Facebook warned ad networks that were engaging in behavior it deemed unacceptable a couple of weeks ago of new policies, but apparently not everyone sufficiently changed their practices in time.

Before May of this year, Facebook didn’t report numbers on its userbase in Iraq. However, now that it is, the number of active Facebook users in Iraq has grown from just 400 on May 1 to over 45,000 as of today – over 100x growth. Even though it’s likely that Iraqis have been using Facebook before the company started reporting numbers on the country, Facebook’s stats still reflect the site’s increasing spread in the country in recent weeks.

While it’s not apparent what caused such rapid growth in the last month, Facebook has made great strides in language localization. In March, Facebook announced that the site was available in Arabic, one of the official languages in Iraq. What’s interesting about this particular translation project is the linguistic challenge of translating an English site into langauges, like Arabic, that read right to left, that are more gender-based, and that have different dialects that are constantly changing. As Facebook’s Ghassan Haddad writes on the Facebook blog:

“In English, verbs do not change based on the gender of the person described, whereas in Arabic and Hebrew, two words with the same meaning are used differently based on whether a person is male or female. In order to deal with this issue, our developers built a feature we call dynamic explosion, which detects a person’s gender and selects the matching translation.”

Of its counterparts in the Middle East, Iraq’s Facebook audience is still small, with countries like Israel at 1.2 million users, Saudi Arabia and the UAE at 600,000 each, and Kuwait at 170,000, according to Inside Facebook’s Global Monitoring Report. Nevertheless, the growth of Facebook’s reported audience in Iraq reflects strong demand for the service in the region.

Iran was also in the news recently for blocking Facebook for a few days during its recent presidential election season. However, it has since lifted the ban.

Continuing our interview series of the 2009 fbFund winners, we now turn our attention to Funji, an avatar-based social networking platform for the iPhone that allows you (in the form of your avatar) to decorate your room and interact with other Funji users by visiting their rooms … and soon, hugging and kissing them too. Funji Home Version 1.1 is available in the iPhone App Store with Version 1.2 coming soon. We recently spoke with Shinyoung Park, CEO of Funji, about the company’s vision for bridging Facebook with mobile social networking.

Shinyoung, congratulations on winning the 2009 fbFund competition. What is Funji?

Funji is an avatar-based mobile social networking platform. We just launched our iPhone app about two weeks ago and are going to extend the app to other smart phones, including Blackberry and Android at the end of this year. In the game, you decorate your avatar in a room environment and visit other people to see how they decorate their rooms. The idea is to trigger friendship when you’re on the go.

How does the mobile aspect make avatar-based social networking unique?

Through mobile devices, people can have more personal, intimate interactions relative to traditional web environments. Ultimately, we want to be at a point where users can more easily explore each other’s rooms, especially among close friends. Soon users will be able to invite their Facebook friends and see which of them are Funji users via Facebook Connect.

What are current features of the app, and what features are coming soon?

Currently, there are two basic interactions: add a friend and leave a message. We’re seeing that the status bubble next to each avatar that lets users update their Facebook status is being used as a trigger to talk to other people (e.g., Movie this weekend? I’m bored.), and promote blogs. Back to the status bubble, Facebook Connect allows you to update your status through Funji. It’s like a visual tweet. Users can also upload photos, save them in their Funji home folders, and publish them to their Walls.

In the future, a point system and ranking will allow users to engage more deeply with the app and unlock items to decorate their rooms. There will also be different types of interactions such as teasing your friends by shaking your phone and kissing your friends by kissing the screen. Funji is about doing good for other people. These features will come as we make rooms more interactive: users will also be able to hug each other, dance with each other, and chat with each other through bubbles. Text and location-based features are also on our list.

What inspired Funji?

When I was working in Korea, I saw that the avatar market was growing like crazy and that every teenager was trying to get a mobile phone. A lot of entrepreneurs want to make people happy, so what could I do? I wanted to bring Funji users closer to their friends and family by providing a channel to talk more openly. The mobile phone is the most intimate device. People can bring it wherever they go. In the beginning, I wanted to build a hardware that people could personalize, but when the iPhone came out and had every component we would need, it became clear that we would build an iPhone app.

What were you working on before Funji, and how did you make the transition?

I had my first start up in 1999, a baby/childcare education portal, which was sold to an education company in Korea. From 2002 to 2006, I worked with mobile apps at SK Telecom, and then moved to New York to do a Masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications program. There, I developed Funji as my thesis. In July 2008, I moved to San Francisco and incorporated by company with some seed funding. Our team began building the first prototype, working remotely from Canada and Korea until I finally recruited them to our San Francisco office.

What geographic and demographic audience are you reaching?

We’re targeting the U.S. market, specifically teenagers and college students.

Now that Funji has been in the iTunes store, any surprises in terms of user behavior?

The Funji iPhone app in available in the iTunes store for free. We’re getting user feedback and working on making the app more stable. We were pleased to find that users were spending 10 minutes in the game, whereas most users spent one to two minutes in other apps. Users were spending more time decorating their spaces and visiting other people.Users have been publishing their rooms 1.6 times per session.

How will Funji leverage the virtual goods market?

The virtual goods business model is a good one. We plan to have in-app purchases and register all our virtual items in iTunes. We’ll be offering vacation, graduation, Christmas, etc. packages and feature limited and exclusive items, as well as allow users to generate their own items to sell. We may also introduce real-time virtual gifts and branded goods. With branded goods, users can choose to use their rooms as promotional tools. For example, Up could have a promotion in our app with its own characters and balloons.

As virtual goods take off, so is the payment industry. What are your thoughts around Apple’s payment strategy and future plans to integrate Facebook credits or mobile payments into your game?

In Korea, 30 percent is a lot. As the platform expands, Apple will cut less than 30 percent. As for Facebook credits, it’s possible. We want to allow as many payment systems as possible, and iTunes is the easiest for now. Eventually, mobile payments make sense too.

The TNT television network turned their coverage of sporting events social recently, inviting fans to log on through Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to watch recent NBA games and NASCAR races online. In order to give users the option to plug into all three services, TNT used the Gigya Socialize widget, which integrates all three services into a single stream.

Of the three services, the most users logged into Facebook. However, though fewer people were logging in through MySpace, they were sending the most messages, accounting for as much as 53% of chatter during the NBA games and 44% during the NASCAR race.

Here’s how the numbers broke down:

Nascar on TNT (Pocono 500) Users:
MySpace: 27%
Facebook: 54%
Twitter: 19%

Nascar on TNT (Pocono 500) Messages:
MySpace: 44%
Facebook: 37%
Twitter: 18%

NBA Eastern Conference Finals Users (average of all games):
MySpace: 40%
Facebook: 48%
Twitter: 12%

NBA Eastern Conference Finals Messages (average of all games):
MySpace: 53%
Facebook: 35%
Twitter: 12%

Turner Networks, which owns and operates TNT, also implmented a major partnership with Facebook before and during coverage of the Presidential Inauguration on CNN.com, and more recently during the NBA All-Star Game. By adding MySpace and Twitter, the network has obviously opened up the service to more users. More importantly, MySpace users, especially those logging in for the NASCAR race, have sparked more chatter, which is what the Gigya service is intended to enable.

As we continue our conversations with this year’s 2009 fbFund winners, we turn from online dating with Frintro to online safety and security solutions with Life360. Life360 is an online platform that allows families to stay in better communication with each other, especially in the event of an emergency, through a collection of apps and widgets. Currently, popular widgets include Emergency Messenger, LifeID, and Lost & Found, with new widgets coming soon, including Collision Detector, Panic, and Curfew 2.0. We recently spoke with Chris Hulls, co-founder and CEO of Life360, about his company’s vision.

Inside Facebook: Chris, what is Life360 in a nutshell?

Chris Hulls: At Life360, we’re building the equivalent of OnStar, but for a family’s every day life. We manage safety and emergency preparedness. There are different products out there, ranging from lost-item to child-tracking services, but they are primarily offered as point services. We make these tools manageable on an iGoogle-style platform that reuses family information (so that users don’t have to register every time they add a service) and can add our safety and security widgets in a couple clicks. We’re building our own set of widgets in-house. There’s a long-term opportunity here to build applications around the family.

What motivated you to innovate in the family safety and security space, and what have been key milestones since then?

I was in the military/air force when I was 17 and liked it until 9/11 changed things for me. I went back to school to study business at Berkeley and came up with idea during Hurricane Katrina. I finished school, went into banking, and then decided to do my own thing after having a cancer scare. When you’re faced with mortality, it changes your outlook on life.

The idea behind Life360 quickly grew much bigger when we won Google’s Android contest and received our first seed funding. If you look at the industry, a lot of the companies acquire users by giving them the impression that if they don’t sign up something terrible will happen. As a site, we’re careful to encourage people to take risks and live life fully, but in responsible ways. This may not work in our interests financially, but it’s a way of life we strongly believe in.

How is Life360′s platform integrating with Facebook?

Facebook gives us better user data and an expanded messaging system. There’s potential to take the Facebook stream and process it in a number of ways. We could turn status updates into a messaging system using 411 or 911 as codes. Our system could then pick up on these status updates and email, call, or text the user’s list of contacts, which are stored in our system. Or, we could use the Facebook stream to create a family feed tool that brings status updates to Life360 without friending mom – via a widget or email digest. Most companies addressing what-if situations don’t have high user retention. We’re trying to change that because there’s a huge potential to make our service applicable for daily life, and Facebook can give us the presence to do that.

Who’s on your team?

I work with my co-founder Dilpreet Singh, who is Life360′s CTO. His background is in Computer Science, and he got his MBA from Berkeley. He’s been an engineer for five to six years now and used to serve as Director of Products at a CRM company. Together, we work with a dedicated group of developers.

What are your plans to stay financially sustainable?

We plan to operate on a subscription-based service and charge per family.

Who’s your target demographic?

Right now, moms with young kids. But there’s a huge demand for services with the aging baby boomers.

What’s Life360’s biggest challenge going forward?

Our biggest competitor is to do nothing. People don’t think of using the web/tech to manage everything to do with what keeps them up at night, the what-ifs. The biggest challenge by far is building awareness. That said, point-of-sale safety and security companies are competitors for now, but we hope to partner with them in the future.

With the announcement of the upcoming launch of Facebook usernames today, Facebook is taking another step toward strengthening identity on the site through vanity URLs. Now, user profiles pages will sit at URLs like facebook.com/Jenny instead of facebook.com/profile.php?id=12345678, which are much easier to understand and remember (and, great for SEO).

But Facebook usernames will also make it possible for users to tag each other through the use of an identifier like Twitter’s “@justinsmith” for the first time. The inability to address other users in a succinct way has always been a major limitation of Facebook status updates to date.

Now, Facebook users could easily tag other users (and Pages) in-line, without needing to attach a link or manually tag. This kind of addressable identity is one of the major strengths of Twitter.

This could mean a variety of interesting things for the future of Facebook usernames. For many users, Facebook usernames could eventually replace other email accounts for a broader range of messaging use cases. Eventually, Facebook usernames could become increasingly used across the web as unique identifiers through Facebook Connect.

For now, Facebook usernames will mainly strengthen identity within the site through URLs (and at the same time boost Facebook’s SEO). However, I expect we’ll be seeing them much more in the future.

Facebook has just announced the Username Landrush of 2009 for Facebook profiles and Pages – and with it perhaps the greatest Facebook SEO opportunity to date.

Now businesses can get vanity URLs for their Facebook Pages and benefit from Facebook’s significant PageRank if they get a high quality Facebook username.

However, Facebook has put some rules in place to curtail the upcoming bonanza and is structuring the landgrab to prevent squatting as much as possible. Here are the most important rules you need to know:

1. Only pages with more than 1,000 fans before May 31 will be eligible to choose a username. In other words, you can’t go start 10,000 pages today and expect to get Facebook vanity URLs for them. You have to have started a while ago and built your Page up. However, this rule weeds out legitimate Page owners with less than 1,000 fans as well.

2. Facebook is not allowing Page owners to choose generic vanity URLs. The most SEO-able usernames are those that most closely match frequently searched terms, like “flowers” or “pizza.” However, Facebook says that generic words are not available as usernames at this time. Rather, Facebook “encourages all users and Page administrators to create a username that closely matches the true identity of their name or business.”

3. Facebook is not allowing Page owners to change or transfer usernames/URLs. Once you pick a username for your page, that’s your page’s username forever – so pick one you’re going to like for the long term. This also means that it will be harder for a black market around usernames alone to develop. However, good usernames will now become a selling point of Pages, just like the number and type of fans.

4. Facebook is allowing rights holders to prevent their trademarks from being registered as usernames. If you own a trademark that you want to prevent others from registering as their Facebook username, Facebook has created this form that you can fill out to file the request.

For more comprehensive details and best practices on marketing with Facebook Pages, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible.

The Facebook vanity URL landrush is on. Starting this Saturday morning, June 13, at 12:01am EDT, Facebook users will be asked to choose a username for their Facebook profile that will replace the current numeric URLs for profile pages.

According to Facebook,  users will be able to choose a username on a “first-come, first-serve” basis for their profile and the Facebook Pages that they administer by visiting this page after midnight on Friday night. Users will also see a notice on their home page asking them to choose a username/URL:

When the landrush starts, users will be able to choose just one username for their profile and for each of the Pages that they administer (they will not be available for groups or events). Usernames must be at least five characters long and can only contain letters, numbers, or periods. They will only be available in Roman characters at launch.

However, users should be careful to choose the right one: once you have made a choice, you won’t be allowed to change it or transfer it to someone else later on. Facebook isn’t allowing transfers in order to undercut the rampant squatter market that would otherwise develop – although there will still definitely be cases of abuse. Facebook says that generic words like “flowers” or “pizza” will not be available as usernames, though we’re not sure how exactly those rules will work.

Facebook says that if you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you “may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or ‘squatting’ on names.”

For developers, usernames will not be accessible through the Platform API at this time, so developers will not be able to access or store usernames. Rather, they’ll have to stick to user IDs.