It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean the onset of autumn, nor Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday coming up next week. It’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day this Saturday, September 19 — an odd meme from the 1990′s that has found millions of new fans this decade through the internet. If you want to read Facebook in Pirate English, here’s how.

Facebook has translated its site into Pirate English. Last year, you were able to access the dialect within the normal language chooser available in your account settings. But Pirate English doesn’t appear to be on the list at this point (although maybe Facebook will make it available on Saturday?). For now, if you want to read Pirate, follow this link to Facebook’s ajax language-picker page.

“English (Pirate)” is visible as one of the English dialect options, along with US, UK and “Upside Down” English. Just pick the pirate option and you’ll see Facebook’s masterful site translation go into effect.

This is a very small update, but shows how Facebook is trying to make itself a more central part of people’s lives. You can now log in to the site by entering your username and password instead of your email address and password like before.

Sure, many other sites let you do this. But the more interesting part is that Facebook has been promoting usernames for months, having let people get usernames in vanity URLs earlier this year. For example, my personal profile is now at www.facebook.com/EricEldon. Now, I can log in as EricEldon. The significance, or what there is of it, is that Facebook wants you thinking about using the site on its terms, rather than, say, in terms of the Gmail or Yahoo account you’ve been logging in through in the past.

The last few months have seen a big expansion in the scope and quality of desktop applications available for Facebook. The latest is a new version of Seesmic’s client, released today, that lets you interact with Pages you’re a fan of or administrator of without having to go to Facebook’s site.

This feature could be especially useful for people trying to track the latest updates about particular organizations, such as marketers and journalists. Seesmic already lets you read and reply to Twitter and Facebook from its desktop app. But neither it nor any other desktop has offered as many ways to interact with both Twitter and Facebook.

With the Pages integration, you can pick out Pages you’re already a fan of from within the app’s account settings. Toggle any page you want, hit save, and it will appear in the app’s left-hand menu. Click on a particular page and you’ll open up a new column in the app showing you all of the latest updates. You can post messages and respond to Page comments from within the app.

This desktop interface offers a faster-updating, more responsive interface for Facebook’s pages than using the company’s own site. Seesmic is also introducing some features for Twitter today, including a reply-all button for tweets mentioning multiple users, a timeline of “favorite” tweets, and a partnership with image-hosting company Yfrog. In total, the app has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times.

Seesmic is not the only desktop app to come out with some slick Facebook integration.

Today, Digsby rolled out a new version of its social media desktop client to include integration with basic Facebook features, as well as chat integration. The app now lets you chat and message across a wide variety of social networks, IM and email services.

And perhaps Seesmic’s biggest rival, Tweetdeck, also just launched a new version of its Facebook integration. Last week, the company introduced new ways to drag and drop photos and videos, add comments and likes, and create different groups of Facebook friends to follow.

Finally, Facebook itself has rolled out its own desktop apps of sorts, most recently introducing a new version for Mac as part of its launch of Prototypes.

On Tuesday, Facebook said it had become “free cash flow positive” this past quarter — meaning the company is financing its own growth rather than using investor money. But why is revenue growing? Reporters earlier this year have fueled speculation about many different revenue streams, from brand ads to self-serve ads to virtual goods.

Overall, Facebook revenue is “likely going to be above $550 million this year,” we have recently heard from several sources close the company. Last year, the company brought in a total of between $280 million and $300 million, as we and others heard then. The story now is how Facebook has gone beyond traditional social network banner advertising to grow revenue.

Where Facebook was, not too long ago

In our January interview with Facebook Director of Monetization and performance-advertising head Tim Kendall, he told us that “we have tens of thousands of monthly active advertisers” using the company’s self-serve targeted ad system. He added that “we are very pleased with revenue growth” on that front.

At the end of March, the company said it was seeing 70 percent revenue growth over the previous year. Around the same time, a TechCrunch article mentioned a surge in self-serve ads. 70 percent more than $300 million is $510 million. So at that point, it appeared that the big Facebook advertising experiment was starting to work. The company has been trying to develop new forms of ads that rely on user data and behavior — rather than the traditional impression-based model of most social network ads to date.

In early July, Business Insider and investor-blogger Fred Wilson both said they’d heard revenue was growing even faster, to around $550 million. Both reported revenue being broken down along these lines:

•    $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.

What we hear now

Facebook’s sales force has been bringing in more revenue directly, rather than through its long-time ad deal with Microsoft. Some of this money is coming in through large brand advertisers, through their experimentation with Pages, and related social ads.

But, Facebook’s self-serve ad system is a hit with a few new constituencies. “Performance advertisers,” the sorts of businesses like online education company University of Phoenix, are finding that ads on Facebook can be targeted so precisely that they are getting a clear return on investment. The right sorts of people see the ads, click, and sign up for an online course or whatever.

There’s another group also getting in on these self-serve ads now: Local advertisers. These small businesses are finding that they can bring in new customers by targeting people who live nearby.

Note: Some likely substantial portion of self-serve advertisers is from social gaming companies on the platform, especially Zynga. We hear that company might make up to $200 million in revenue this year, driving new users and revenue through spending tens of millions on Facebook’s self-serve system. This spending is obvious, as countless Facebook users have reported seeing ads for games like “Mafia Wars.”

There is a lot of churn among first-time advertisers, sources say. But, those advertisers with initial success tend to continue pumping money in, if not upping their Facebook ad budgets, these sources add.

Facebook advertising, in other words, hasn’t been working for everyone, but it’s working for some key groups. Performance marketers, for example, were some of the earliest users of Google’s search and keyword advertising products. Facebook, through its own profile and activity-based methods of targeting, is creating new value for these people.

In terms of how what we hear versus what the July reports said, we believe that brand ads and especially self-service ads are driving almost all new growth. As one source put it, the advertising team is “beating the shit out of its numbers.”

Advertising is the Strategy, For Now

Facebook’s leadership is almost entirely focused on ads for the time being, from what we hear. There has been a lot of speculation about its efforts to create some sort of virtual goods or payment system. Internally, it is seen as something to keep on the back burner. Virtual gifts, which the July reports heard accounted for up to $75 million in revenue this year, is a “tiny fraction” of revenue, says one of our sources. The caveat here is that Facebook may be accounting for gift store revenue as advertising, as one way it monetizes this feature is through selling “sponsored gifts” to advertisers.

In general, from what we understand, any sort of large-scale payments system or virtual goods expansion is likely a year or two off, if not longer. Facebook has no doubt been watching the explosion of this revenue stream among developers on its platform — we have separately heard virtual goods revenues could account for more than $300 million in platform revenue this year, money Facebook isn’t seeing any of.

Certainly, we expect Facebook to keep experimenting with its young “Credits” virtual currency system. But, for now, the company appears happy to let the ecosystem of social gaming companies, mobile payments services, offer-based advertisers, and others in the emerging ecosystem handle application monetization on their own.

Advertising is Paying the Bills

The other angle here is that Facebook is now financing its own growth, and through this new advertising revenue. Last year, for example, the company was apparently both losing money and taking out debt to fund capital expansion projects like a new data center in Silicon Valley.

Earlier this week, Data Center Knowledge reported that Facebook is making a big new investment in its existing Virginia facility. The publication cited analysts who estimated that the center could cost up to $125 million over the course of several years. It’s not clear how Facebook is accounting for that expenditure, but the term “free cash flow positive” signifies that the company is able to cover its own capital expenses. It appears that the company’s new revenue growth is paying for at least a portion of the new data center investment.

The conclusion? Facebook, more than ever before, is competing on its own terms.

TVGuide.com is using Facebook Connect to allow users to share their favorite television shows and check out what their friends are watching. Perhaps most striking is the ability to log in with a couple clicks and see which shows all of your friends on Facebook like — it’s a quick way for people to get a lot more value out of the site’s TV show listings.

The Connect application also allows Facebook users to add favorite TV shows to their TVGuide.com accounts. Crucially, it automatically pulls in people’s favorite shows from their Facebook profiles. This way, your friends don’t even need to be using TV Guide for you to see what shows they like. Users can keep tabs on their friends’ favorites, as well as the most popular shows among all their friends. There’s also the ability to add those shows to your favorites list and post the addition to your newsfeed.

A sidebar gives you the chance to add TV Guide as one of your favorites with some information on the Fan page’s total number of Fans. There’s also a link to news stories on the TV Guide site that have been linked through the Fan page. TV Guide’s Facebook Fan page currently has close to 11,000 fans, and it will be interesting to see if the cross promotion through Connect brings a lot more.

Dawn is using RockYou’s Pieces of Flair application to promote its Dawn Saves Wildlife campaign and the Everyday Wildlife Champions Facebook page. Users can spread word of the education and wildlife rescue initiative by sharing the Pieces of Flair — the app features some of the animals that Dawn dishwashing soap has helped clean after the wildlife has been caught in oil spills.

The campaign gives users a chance to learn more about the programs that are helping wildlife, as well as offering information on where people can visit the animals or start their own efforts to help the cause. Dawn is also currently running a promotion that donates $1 from the sale of special edition bottles of their dish soap to the Marine Mammal Center and the International Bird Rescue Research Center. The total potential donation is $500,000.

“Dawn has been focused on keeping the line between branding and cause clear. While Dawn is the driving factor behind the program’s success, it is ultimately the passion for wildlife conservation that drives the consumer,” said Susan Baba, external relations manager, Procter & Gamble. “Working with RockYou has helped Dawn raise awareness of this wildlife conservation effort and invite consumers to join the Everyday Wildlife Champions movement. In two months, 11,000 fans have joined the page and are actively discussing wildlife issues and events across the country. In addition, over $50,000 in donations has been activated online at www.dawnsaveswildlife.com.”

Dawn and RockYou launched the campaign in July, and more than 1.3 million Pieces of Flair were shared among Facebook users in the first three weeks.

Web analytics firms Quantcast, Compete, and comScore have all recently released updated numbers on Facebook’s US traffic, but they each differ from each other and from Facebook’s self reported numbers. Why? Each service uses different methodologies with different strengths and weaknesses – usually based on some combination of self reporting, ISP reporting, and panel sampling – but together, we can use them to triangulate trends in Facebook’s actual US traffic.

Here’s the latest from each:

1. Quantcast

Quantcast is reporting Facebook’s August US traffic at 94.6 million uniques, up about 6% since the beginning of July, and up about 150% since this time last year.

2. Compete

Compete is reporting Facebook’s US August traffic at 120.6 million uniques (just to www.facebook.com), up from 117 million last month and 40 million a year ago – but down from its extremely rapid US growth earlier this year. Compete’s numbers are well above those reported by any other firm, or Facebook.

3. comScore

According to comScore, traffic to www.facebook.com grew by nearly 14% month over month in July to over 87.7 million US uniques – the highest monthly growth rate Facebook has experienced in the last year according to comScore.

4. Facebook Itself

Finally, Facebook itself reported 81.2 million monthly active users in the US at the end of August in its advertiser tools. While this number is not real-time, it does generally provide a floor for comparison against third party metrics providers.

Summary

All the numbers tell similar stories, just in slightly different ways. Facebook’s US audience is up by over 100% in the past 12 months, and is growing 4-10% each month still, depending who you ask.

As an important aside, measure of Facebook Connect integrations on third party sites can throw off many third party Facebook metrics. Because thousands of sites have implemented Connect (and thus have code loading from a facebook.com subdomain like connect.facebook.com), many more US website visitors traffic all facebook.com domains than just the main Facebook website, www.facebook.com. Each of the firms says they have taken that into account in their numbers above.

Chart: Social Networking US Audience Numbers, July 2009

Source: comScore Media Metrix

Chart: Weekly Share of Visits to Facebook and MySpace within Social Networking Category

Source: Hitwise

Facebook has taken a lot of heat this past year for perceived privacy problems. But, for the first time, it has been named among the top ten most trusted brands in the US, according to a study by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe.

Most notably, the company was chastised by the press in February over changes it had made to its terms of service. The terms were unclear, and many people interpreted them to mean Facebook wanted new rights to user data. The company responded to criticism by introducing a multi-stage process where users could provide feedback on the terms before they were finalized.

That effort, among others, has apparently helped Facebook land the number ten spot on the survey, following other web companies including eBay, WebMD and Yahoo.

And in case you’re wondering, here’s a little more about the survey:

The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe conducted a two-stage survey to gauge the privacy policies and practices of leading consumer brands. First, the companies were rated as “most trusted” in an unaided survey of 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers. Second, an expert review panel at the Ponemon Institute judged the companies based on rigorous criteria, including the clarity and readability of privacy statements, notice, access to account information, cookie management, in- and out-of-network data sharing practices, as well as the availability of customer service staff

The Ponemon Institute is a privacy-focused research center. TRUSTe is a privacy services and seal provider.

Texas Pete Hot Sauce recently handed out 10,000 free samples through Facebook home page engagement ads and its Facebook Page, and the company is hoping to build on that campaign’s success buy recruiting more Fans with the promise of free hot sauce.

To promote its variety of flavors, Texas Pete was offering a limited number of product samples and included discount coupons for Facebook Fans. The company hoped to pass out 10,000 samples over a four week period, but hit that number of requests in just 6 days. Each sample contains a 1.9 oz. bottle of the consumer’s flavor of choice, can koozie (a bottle cooling sleeve) and a coupon. The coupon holds a unique bar code which the company hopes to use to track the redemption rate.

We’ve seen companies have success using Facebook as a springboard for sampling, with Splenda using a dedicated Fan page a few months ago to gather insight into public reaction to one if its new products.

Now that Texas Pete has seen that its Fans are paying attention, it’s looking for more of a Facebook presence. The company is promising to add a coupon for a “Buy One Get One Free” Texas Pete product to its Fan page if it can reach 100,000 Fans by Nov. 15th, Ryan Helmstetler of The Sales Factory, who built the campaign for Texas Pete, tells us. The page is currently around the 35,000 mark, but shouldn’t have a problem reaching the 6-figure mark by the mid-November cut-off date given recent trends in the “Food-For-Fans” campaigns that are becoming popular.

This approach is very similar to the Fan Woody campaign which just netted TGI Fridays a half-million Fans and counting (currently close to 640K) after the promise of a free Jack Daniels burger. While TGI Fridays also promoted their offer through more traditional media outlets, like television, Texas Pete seems happy to let word spread virally from its Facebook page. Given the brand loyalty that the hot sauce enjoys, it should only be a matter of time before Facebook users are flocking to the page to offer themselves up as Fans and get their free goods.

The past two days, we’ve seen a wide variety of companies presenting at TechCrunch50 somehow make use of Facebook — some built apps or used Pages, some accessed profile data, the news stream or photos through Connect. Here’s a quick review of what we saw, in chronological order, including links to other sites that have covered the companies in more detail.

SealTale: This doesn’t seem like a new idea. SealTale lets you place an endorsement widget on a web page, including a simple frame on Facebook. More on CNET.

Udorse: An endorsement site where people can endorse items in their Facebook photos, potentially convincing friends to buy them as well. More on TechCrunch.

Refmob: Cross-site service where people can get paid for referring their friends to jobs; includes a way to refer Facebook friends. More on VentureBeat.

Mota Motors: Used car marketplace site that accesses Connect to let buyers and sellers include their real Facebook profile photos. More on SocalTech.

YourVersion: News discovery engine site that lets you share stories on Facebook. More on TechCrunch.

Metricly: Simple analytics service that includes a way to track fans on Facebook. More on VentureBeat.

Crowdflower: Online workforce placement service that apparently includes a Facebook app where you can earn virtual currencies in exchange (I don’t see the app). More on Caem.la.

Cododot: Event-planning and invitation service focused on women. It lets you post invitations to Facebook. More on Techgeist.

Threadsy: Social stream aggregator site that lets you read information from Facebook along with other social sites. More on CNET.

Radiusly: Imagined as a sort of Twitter-LinkedIn hybrid, the company also lets you post items to Facebook. More on VentureBeat.

[Photo via Noah Hendrix.]