Late last month, we reported that direct to consumer virtual goods sales were now accounting for at least half of Slide’s revenues, and that the company is working on its own payment platform. Today, GigaOm reports that the company has laid off several members of its sales staff. Levchin confirms that the company is refocusing on larger, custom integrations in the $500,000 range instead of lower-margin deals in the $30,000 to $50,000 range.

The changes reflect the difficulties Slide has had selling more “traditional” ad units inside their network of social applications. Nevertheless, the company still claims a monthly audience of over 150 million uniques across Facebook, MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and other social networks – reach that still puts it in a league with only a few other application developers.

While Slide will certainly be focusing on larger, more custom sponsored integrations across its ad network, I continue to think Slide’s virtual goods business and payment products are going to be a much more significant part of the company’s future than most expect. Slide’s executive team built, ran, and sold Paypal, so it’s hard to find a front office more expert in the dynamics of e-commerce, payments, and emerging web platforms.

Michael Jackson’s memorial service is dominating all the news channels today, and Facebook has just shared the latest statistics of related activity on Facebook:

• As we detailed earlier, Michael Jackson now has the most popular page on Facebook, with over 7 million fans. Jackson surpassed Barack Obama, who had held the top spot since last year, yesterday.
• The free Michael Jackson glove virtual gift is the most popular in Facebook history, with over 800,000 given away so far.
• CNN Live with Facebook has seen over 500,000 status updates (about 6,000 per minute) from over 300,000 unique users as of 10:30am PT. More stats to come soon…

UPDATE: Here are the final metrics from Facebook.

• 1 million users logged in to Facebook “Live Stream” widgets on partner sites
• 800,000 status updates were made by those users

Facebook’s Live Stream widget was integrated by CNN, E! Online, MTV, and ABC News this morning. Here’s how the numbers broken down by site:

CNN:

• 733,000 status updates
• 759,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast
• 6,000 updates/minute at the peak

E! Online:

• 9,000 status updates
• 87,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

ABC:

• 48,000 status updates
• 97,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

MTV:

• 5,000 status updates
• 21,000 Facebook users viewing broadcast

Yesterday, we detailed the ways Facebook Connect is changing online video and television. Today, we see another powerful example: both ABC News and CNN are integrating Facebook’s “live stream” widget to increase engagement around their online broadcasts of Michael Jackson’s memorial service. With the live stream widget, Facebook users can see what everyone watching is saying, or just friends.

The ABC News and CNN Live integrations look very similar because both are integrating the same Facebook widget directly adjacent to their live video coverage:

So far, nearly a quarter million people have RSVP’d on Facebook that they’ll be watching the event on CNN.com/Live. Given the massive global interest in Michael Jackson, today’s broadcast could be one of the largest for Facebook’s live stream integrations so far.

True to his name, the King of Pop’s Facebook Page has now grown to be the most popular page on Facebook – outpacing Barack Obama’s page by about 100,000 fans. A week ago, we reported that Michael Jackson’s page was the fastest growing page on the site with nearly 2.5 million fans. Now, the page has gained 4 million more fans and reached a total of 6.5 million fans – the largest fan base on Facebook to date.

Here’s a look at an PageData chart tracking the dramatic increase in number of fans in the past week:

Meanwhile as fans are still posting tributes to the pop star on the page Wall, the Page’s administrator admin has been sharing updates on ways for fans to memorialize Jackson: promoting a free Facebook Gift (a sequined glove) that users can send to their friends and a widget that reflects upon the singer’s career, as well as urging fans to post their MJ memories on MichaelJackson.com.

Around the country – and around the world – people are mourning the death of Michael Jackson, and we’re seeing that Facebook is being used as a platform where these emotions can be shared. At this point, it’s not clear whether the page will be able to stay active and keep up with its over six million (and growing) fans. The first person voice of Wall posts is also somewhat awkward in the case of individuals who have passed away.

Nevertheless, fans are flocking to celebrate Jackson as his memorial service takes place this morning. Fans can also watch the Jackson memorial online at CNN Live with Facebook’s “live stream” integration here.

While Facebook has always allowed performance advertisers to schedule campaigns by day, advertisers have not had control over scheduling and delivery at more granular levels. This has created problems for advertisers in a couple of different ways:

1. Advertisers can only start campaigns at midnight, which may not make sense given specific campaign related events.
2. For international advertisers, starting at midnight US time might mean starting in the middle of the day in many other countries.

However, last week Facebook started testing a new time-scheduling feature that will allow advertisers to specify the specific start and end times of advertising campaigns down to 5 minute increments. While it’s not full traditional dayparting, it is at least a start.

Full Dayparting Coming Soon

When will more fully featured dayparting (a restaurant may want to schedule ad campaigns to run from 10am-12pm during weekdays, for example) be available? A Facebook spokesperson tells us Facebook is definitely working on it and it’s on the roadmap for the “next few months,” but a specific timetable has not yet been announced.

Full dayparting will increase the power of Facebook Ads significantly, as advertisers will be able to reach Facebook users during the times of day that are most effective given their product or service. Combined with Social Ads (a feature that allows advertisers to include a brief message about friends’ interaction with the ad next to the ad creative), many advertisers could see significant increases in conversation rates.

Thanks to Dave Kerpen at theKbuzz for the tip.

Entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, said in an interview today with Reuters that Facebook will see $500 million in revenues in 2009. He also said he expects Facebook will be doing “billions in revenues” in 5 years, and employees who sell their shares now are “making a mistake.”

Speaking on the same day that his new VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was announced, Andreessen said that Facebook could be making much more money than it is today if it wanted to.

“If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year…There’s every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now,” Andreessen said.

These numbers correlate with estimates we’ve been hearing in recent months, but it’s the first time someone from Facebook has spoken publicly in absolute terms on revenue figures for 2009.

A source estimated Facebook’s 2009 revenues break down this way, according to Silicon Alley Insider:

• $125 million from brand ads
• $150 million from Facebook’s ad deal with Microsoft
• $75 million from virtual goods
• $200 million from self-service ads.

Last month, when Facebook announced its $200 million investment from Yuri Milner and Digital Sky Technologies for 1.96% of the company in the form of preferred stock (in which DST did not get a board seat), Facebook and DST also announced plans for DST to buy “at least” $100 million of Facebook employee shares. That plan hasn’t taken effect yet, but Andreessen is advising employees against cashing out now.

“Generally speaking, people who are selling their stock in Facebook now are making a mistake,” Andreessen said.

Facebook of course hasn’t announced any plans for an IPO yet.

As Facebook crosses the 70 million active US user mark this month, one surprising group of Facebook users is actually coming back less: college students. Facebook’s audience amongst users 18-25 decreased by nearly 600,000 users (3%) in the last month, while their parents (and grandparents) are logging on in record numbers.

While users 18-25 are still the largest age group on Facebook by far, college-age students and recent college grads are easing up on Facebook over the summer. Why? Now that most students are out of school and busy working, they may just have less time to keep up with friends than they do during the school year.

However, as you can see, the number of US Facebook users over 35 grew significantly in the last 30 days, up by nearly 1.5 million in each of the 35-44, 45-54, and 55-65 categories. In fact, the number of US Facebook users 45-54 has more than tripled in the last 6 months, to a record 7.7 million active users today.

Thus, it appears that recent dips in baby boomers’ Facebook usage were only short-lived. Usage amongst users over 55 have just surpassed their March 2009 levels to reach all time highs – now, nearly 4.2 million Americans over 55 are logging into Facebook each month. The fastest growing group? Men over 55 – up 42% in the last month to nearly 1.5 million. The number of women over 55 on Facebook grew by 39% in the last month to over 2.5 million.

Facebook users over 26 now represent 60% of the total US Facebook population – and users over 45 now represent nearly 1/5 of Facebook’s US audience. In other words, Facebook now presents larger and larger marketing opportunities for brands interested in reaching older adults.

Methodology

All of these numbers are estimates provided by Facebook through its advertiser tools. We have been monitoring Facebook’s data closely over the last year.

Before the internet, the only way to make television social was by inviting friends over to watch your favorite show, the Superbowl, a movie, or other major events. But as the use of online video has grown at a staggering rate, websites are increasingly able to let people around the world interact with friends using social technologies like Facebook Connect.

The opportunities to make online video experiences more social are huge. Nielsen estimates that the amount of total online video streams grew by 41 percent in the last year alone.

1. During the inauguration of President Barack Obama, CNN ran Facebook’s “live stream” widget inside its website. As viewers watched the president’s speech, they could log-in using their Facebook ID and update their Facebook status messages. These messages appeared next to the video running on CNN.com. More than two million people updated their status.
2. During the NBA All-Star game, TNT implemented a similar Facebook Connect integration so viewers could watch the game and make comments as it progressed.
3. Within Facebook, celebrities and companies have utilized Facebook Connect to make online video more social. In May, the popular teenybopper band Jonas Brothers created a tab in their Public Profile that allowed users to experience their new single and comment on it. The band obliged their fans by engaging in the conversation themselves.
4. On Tuesday, CNN will broadcast the memorial for Michael Jackson and allow people to update their Facebook status message.
5. Video sites like YouTube, Joost and Hulu have made it possible for people to share video using their Facebook identity.

Facebook’s “live stream” widget has two tabs: One that shows status updates from everyone watching, and the other shows the status update of your friends. The second is the most immediately useful.

The fact you can watch an event like the president’s inauguration from your living room in San Francisco and hear what your friend in Boston has to say about it has immediate value for everyone – and is an especially effective way to increase engagement for publishers. But the interface could be customized even more, using Friend Lists. If, for instance, 150 of your friends were watching a World Series game or the season finale of Lost, you might want a tab to interact with your five closest friends and nobody else.

While the “Everyone watching” view makes it easy to discover what people around the world are saying about a particular event or program, it can be a bit noisy.

The implementations we’ve seen within Facebook to date, such as the Jonas Brothers, have been very effective at bringing traffic and attention back to Facebook Pages. If users visit the Page to chat, there is a good chance they will engage with other bits of content. However, bands shouldn’t feel constrained to keep everything within the borders of Facebook. They should run the video on sites all over the Web (like the inauguration and All-Star game examples), and stream updates back to the public profile.

Conclusion

All these use cases have been an admirable start in marrying online video with Facebook Connect. It will only be a matter of time before more customization options become available. The sharing of status messages during these events seems like just the beginning too. If online video sites could make use of other pieces of Facebook content, such as pictures, that could be very interesting. You could share pictures of your Superbowl party with your friends half way across the world, and that is very powerful.

All in all, Facebook Connect is starting to make a big impact in the way online video is watched and shared.

Although Facebook hasn’t developed a native Facebook application for Android phones yet, two third party Facebook apps have recently surfaced. New Facebook Android apps Bloo and Babbler are offering comprehensive Facebook features for users of the open-source phones by building native Facebook Android apps on top of the Facebook APIs.

These apps look really good and are pretty impressive given that they all run through Facebook’s general APIs – let’s check them out.

Bloo

Bloo, developed by Dimitris Couchell, supports status updates, wall-to-wall posts, YouTube video and photos. You can also comment on posts in your stream, and all of your activity in your feeds is highlighted in green.

Photos features are also robust. When you view your friends’ profiles and merge their contact information with a listing in your phone, you can then call or text that person directly from Bloo.When viewing photos in your feed, you view and add photo tags through Bloo from your phone. You can also upload photos to Facebook.

Finally, you can also view Facebook Events, get a recent Events history, and get one touch directions to Events. There’s also a dedicated button for synching events to your Google calender.

Babbler

Babbler, from Polish developers Kalicinsky.com, offers similar features to Bloo. With the Babbler Facebook app, you’re able to see your News Feed as well as your friends’ profiles, where you can comment and like wall posts and write on walls. You can also update your status and browse friends’ photos.

Babbler also lets you get notifications – such as when you’re tagged in uploaded photos or videos. You can also share links from the web browser or YouTube, as well as photos and videos from your galleries. Everything is run through a new interface with dedicated tabs for features that are most often used.

Conclusion

Both Bloo and Babbler use the Facebook API, which means there are some limits to what you can and cannot do from your phone. It does, however, mean that both apps are native to the Android OS (and not wrappers). Until Facebook decides to start building its own app for Android, we’re likely to see more and more third party apps like these filling the void. It will be interesting to see if and when Facebook decides to build one itself.

The upcoming changes to Facebook’s privacy settings will allow users to control who they share information with every time they post a piece of content to the site. While Facebook executives noted they want to “simplify” the process in which users share content with specific friends, the new settings are most likely aimed at making the site more public in nature.

In our detailed guide to managing your privacy on Facebook, you can see how the controls currently operate today. In general, you can best control the content people see by utilizing Friend Lists and the “customize” feature in the privacy console, which users access by choosing “privacy settings” in the upper right corner of the homepage.

For example, if you created a Friend List comprised of work colleagues, you could prevent that entire group from seeing your Status Messages. By clicking on “customize” under the status messages category on the privacy settings page, you can give all your friends access to your status messages, except certain friends or a friend list you choose.

Are the controls complicated today? It depends on who you ask. Media reports (and now Facebook) like to call the current controls “complex,” but they’re really not if you spend a few minutes using them. The issue really might be a lack of awareness of their existence. According to the New York Times, less than a quarter of Facebook users regularly change them.

The current settings do have a cumbersome flaw, however. Say, for instance, that the majority of the time you don’t want to share status messages with your work friends, but that occasionally you have one you’d like them to see. To do so, you would have to revisit the privacy console page to give them access. Presuming you’d want to revert back to blocking their access again after that particular post, you would have to visit the privacy console page yet again.

Under the new privacy controls, you can make a decision with whom you share each individual post, without the need to revisit the privacy settings page. Now, you will be able to select whether you share it with everyone, friends of friends, just friends, or “custom” (specific friends or groups of friends you choose). This is a big step toward greater openness, and, if implemented properly, it delivers on Facebook’s promise to simplify the process.

But the new privacy controls also seem to reveal Facebook’s desire to more aggressively compete with completely open services like Twitter. Specifically, the “everyone” feature will make more posts available for anyone on the Web to see. While executives said such posts won’t be indexable by search engines yet, we expect that they will be soon.

Conclusion

The ability for users to share with “everyone” will be one of the most significant changes Facebook has ever undergone as a site — and it’s a risk. Since Facebook’s inception, many users have enjoyed the ability to share with their friends and networks rather than the whole public web in general.  It seems unlikely to us that attitude will change overnight.

Furthermore, how Facebook sets the default for these new settings will matter a great deal. An “everyone” default will surely lead to people sharing information unknowingly. It will lead to user backlash that could be more widespread than the site changes of past that, for all the noise, only drew the attention of a small minority — mainly media, privacy organizations and industry followers. On Twitter, the presumption is that information will be public. On Facebook, people assume they are sharing between friends. Changing that paradigm too suddenly or without very clear user education and explanation could have massive repercussions for Facebook’s future.