Facebook has just launched a new version of the site, called Lite, to give users a simplified, faster-loading experience than the traditional www.facebook.com. The company has said it’s intended to help new users, especially people with with poor internet connections, have a better experience than they have had so far. The app is only live in the US and India, according to Facebook developer Blake Ross, but a worldwide rollout doesn’t seem too far away.

As anyone who has tried to access Facebook on a slow connection already knows, features like photos can take forever to load, or even not load at all.

But more generally, the design aesthetic of Lite is appealing. The news feed includes a simple top toolbar, just items from your friends and a few obvious buttons for posting updates or media. The profile page is similarly bare. However, there’s no bottom toolbar for any third-party apps. There are currently only a few crucial in-house apps available. Facebook’s own Photo and Video apps are located within the profile page, while Events is available in the top toolbar.

Lite became available as a beta test last month. As a Facebook spokesperson described it to us, then:

Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates. We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

Facebook is currently seeing massive growth around the world. The company says some 70 percent of its more than 250 million users are from outside the US. Countries in Southeast Asia and Europe are seeing especially notable growth. Of those, some 65 million are already accessing the site on their phone.

Facebook’s previous logic for serving international users makes sense. But, of course, you can access the site from anywhere in the world now. So if you’re on a fast internet connection somewhere — and you just like a minimalistic feel for your web services — well, you can use it, too. That is what some US users are planning to do. Indeed, the reaction from US users has prompted Facebook to release it intentionally for US users, something it hadn’t previously planned on doing.

I’m asking Facebook what the long-term plan is for Lite. If this version of the site becomes significantly popular, third-party developers are likely to wonder how they can start accessing users through it.

While status updates have become an increasingly important part of communication on Facebook over the last year, it’s never been possible to “tag” specific friends or Pages in a structured way like “@” mentions work on Twitter. However, that’s changing today. Now, Facebook is starting to roll out a new status tagging feature that will let users tag friends and Pages in status updates and posts in much the same way as they have been able to tag friends using Facebook Photos for a long time.

Here’s how it works: when writing a status update in the publisher, users can tag connections by using the “@” operator, just like on Twitter. However, instead of needing to remember friends’ usernames, Facebook pops up a dropdown menu that allows users to select any friend, Page, group, or event. When a friend, Page, etc, is tagged, that shows up on their wall. When you’re tagged, a notification is sent to you as well, and you can remove tags of yourself in others’ posts.

Here’s how it looks in the publisher:

The viral dynamics of photo tagging have played a very significant role in making Facebook the largest photo sharing site on the web, and “status tagging” should only make Facebook more engaging. Just as we’ve seen on Twitter, easy to use addressable identity is vital for enabling deeper, more engaging kinds of communication.

“People use status updates to tell stories about real world experiences,” Facebook’s Andrew Huang, product manager for the status tagging feature, told us about the new feature. “This is about making the site more engaging.”

Page Administrators Can Track Tags Too

It’s important to note that Facebook is enabling status tagging for all of a user’s Facebook connections – not just friends, but Pages, groups, and events as well. This means Page managers will now have a major new channel for tracking comments and feedback about their brand or business. Up until now, brands have been able to track posts and comments made on their Facebook Page directly by fans, as well as search public comments made by Facebook users through Facebook’s new real time search. Starting today, all @ tags will appear on the wall of the Page as well, even though users never visited the Page. The same applies to event and group administrators as well. That’s a big deal for Page administrators hoping to gain more insight into how they’re being talked about inside Facebook.

Finally, Facebook’s Huang told us today that while they’re waiting to see how this feature plays out before they expand it, Facebook is definitely thinking about how new Platform APIs could enable users to tag in even more ways. We don’t expect to see new status tagging APIs in the next couple months, but developers should start thinking about the ways their applications could integrate with status tagging on Facebook.

For now, Facebook says it’s going to be rolling out the new feature slowly slowly over the next couple weeks, so you may not see it immediately.

New Facebook hire David Recordon announced this morning that Facebook has open sourced a piece of technology it gained through the FriendFeed acquisition called Tornado. The software was a key piece of a web server the FriendFeed team originally developed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections without blocking (slowing down), making it ideal for real-time services.

According to Facebook Director of Products and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, some of the distinctive features of Tornado include:

• All the basic site building blocks – Tornado comes with built-in support for a lot of the most difficult and tedious aspects of web development, including templates, signed cookies, user authentication, localization, aggressive static file caching, cross-site request forgery protection, and third party authentication like Facebook Connect. You only need to use the features you want, and it is easy to mix and match Tornado with other frameworks.
• Real-time services – Tornado supports large numbers of concurrent connections. It is easy to write real-time services via long polling or HTTP streaming with Tornado. Every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to FriendFeed’s servers.
• High performance – Tornado is pretty fast relative to most Python web frameworks. We ran some simple load tests against some other popular Python frameworks, and Tornado’s baseline throughput was over four times higher than the other frameworks (see image above).

Tornado continues Facebook’s tradition of open-sourcing many of the infrastructure projects it’s developed internally, including Thrift, Scribe, Hive, and many memcached enhancements. For more information, check out the Tornado home page.

We’re continuing to see international Facebook applications grow fast, as this week’s look at AppData’s up-and-coming apps reveals. These aren’t American apps getting big in other countries — although that is happening as well. The fastest-growing international apps here are mostly made by small developers based in other countries, a trend we’ve been seeing in the past year as Facebook continues to expand around the world.

Top Gainers This Week (100k – 1 million MAU)

First, some important notes about the stats. To get a sense for which apps are growing the fastest, we looked at all apps that have between 100,000 and 1 million users as of today, then examined their growth trajectories over the last 30 days and last 90 days. This cross-section of apps help us see which ones are not just blips in the data, but possibly on the way to becoming multi-million-strong mainstays. We separately cover the overall the top 20 gainers every week to see how market leading apps like Farmville (currently at 39 million monthly active users), are doing.

At the top of the up-and-comers list today is Turkish smash hit Senin İçin, which appears to be a simple gifting application, albeit with more elegant virtual gifts than many English-language apps in the genre. Meaning “for you,” the app has come out of nowhere, going from around 30,000 or so users as of August 29th to more than 681,000 today. This is a dramatic change, considering that the company had seen a long slide down to over the last three months. It’s not clear why, exactly, the app is growing, but by getting some 650,000 users in less than two weeks, it became Facebook’s number #15 overall fastest-growing app earlier this week. No company is listed as the owner of the app, just a few people.

The catch, for any app with a big international audience, will be how much money the developers can bring in. Countries like China and Korea pioneered the virtual goods model, but it has not yet been proven to work well everywhere — although metrics we’re seeing are strengthening. More traditional forms of online advertising, meanwhile, do not bring in much money for many markets. So, all that said….

A strong international showing

A quick look at growth trajectories among these apps shows most non-English growing faster than English-language ones.

Immediately following Senin İçin, a range of unsurprising English-language apps saw steady gains, including age-quiz app What’s Your Actual Age, role-playing game Superhero City and sports game Fantasy Football 2009.

But at number five is Chinese-language game 義氣仔女 (“Loyalty Earners,” according to Google Translate). As the translation suggests, it’s a mafia-style role-playing game. The developer is the well-known Hong Kong shop 6 Waves, a company that we’ve covered in some detail. It has launched more than 100 Facebook apps in all sorts of languages, and currently has some 21.5 million monthly active users across these apps. Loyalty Earners is a small but growing corner of 6 Wave’s empire, having doubled in size over the last month to reach around 768,000 users today, with 108,614 of that growth happening in the last week.

For example, another Chinese language app, 你…真的快樂嗎?, loosely translated by Google as “Are You Happy,” has grown from 40,000 to 425,000 in the past month, 98,000 of which came in the last week. The quiz-style app, at number 8 on today’s list, doesn’t look set to stop any time soon.

Number 11 is another interesting international one. Called Kuih Raya, it’s apparently another gifting app, but with a tasty twist. Named after the Malay term for cakes and cookies served on Eid — a holiday at the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan — the app appears to have nailed its particular target audience. It has grown from a few thousand monthly active users at the start of Ramadan, on August 25th, to 272,000 users today, up 81,000 in the last week. This growth suggests that many of its users are only using the app because of the holiday. It will be interesting to see how the developer will capitalize on the app’s growth after Eid happens on September 20th this year.

The same question awaits number fourteen on our list, Ramadan Card — a virtual card-sending app that calls itself “The 1st Ramadan e-Card on Facebook.” It has grown from 25,000 users a month ago to 673,000 users today, including 73,00 in the last week.

And possibly, the Turkish app Senin İçin is benefiting from Ramadan, although my nonexistent knowledge of Turkish doesn’t allow me to investigate that further.

Moving to other parts of the world, two French-focused apps are also seeing sizable gains, numbers 15 and 16 on our list, respectively. The former is Mon Cours, which has surged 68,000 in the last week after a long slow decline. The other, a video app made by Dailymotion is also seeing strong gains. The Paris-based online video company has a significant French-speaking audience; the app lets Dailymotion users share their most recently uploaded and favorited videos on to Facebook. The app has grown from 156,000 users a month ago to 308,000 today, including 63,000 in the last week.

Nearly a year after Facebook filed suit against German social networking service StudiVZ for copyright infringement, the two companies have reached a settlement out of court. As part of the agreement, Facebook will receive an undisclosed financial settlement, all claims have been withdrawn in US and German courts, and both companies can continue operating their services as they are today. The companies say no further details about the settlement will be released.

In the suit, Facebook basically alleged StudiVZ of blatantly copying its features and design by “replacing Facebook’s blue colour scheme with a red one,” and said it was “seeking to end StudiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed.” There were since rumors that Facebook was negotiating to buy StudiVZ from its new owner, the Holtzbrinck Grouppe, but Holtzbrinck wanted more money than Facebook was willing to pay, so those negotiations fell through.

However, it appears that Holtzbrinck may have bigger problems on its hands than legal action from Facebook itself: many German users are making the transition to Facebook on their own volition.

Today, Facebook has 4 million monthly active users in Germany, up from 2.9 million just 90 days ago, compared to the reported 5.5 million users StudiVZ has across three of its social networking sites: StudiVZ for university students, schuelerVZ for high school students, and meinVZ for the greater population. In addition, we’ve heard from German users that StudiVZ has been quite stagnant since the Holtzbrinck acquisition.

Nevertheless, Facebook will now be collecting settlement payments from StudiVZ as well. If StudiVZ wants to hold onto its lead for much longer, it’s going to need to do some serious innovation, as users appear to be moving to Facebook in droves.

Tattoodle, an app for creating and sharing virtual tattoos, and posting them on your profile, has gotten as popular as real tattoos over the summer. It grew from 891,000 monthly active users three months ago to 2.76 million a month ago and 4.24 million today. It added 104,000 new users just yesterday and 542,000 in the last week.

The basic idea is not new, so it’s interesting to see this app growing. The brightly-colored and widely divergent styles virtual types tattoos may have a special allure. The app lets you choose from categories of tattoos like “animals,” “creepy,” “man’s ruin,” “nautical,” and “skulls.”

The developer behind the app is called, interestingly, Make The Web Better. The company site says that it makes its money from a browser toolbar called Fast Browser Search. “It is through revenues generated by search that our Company is able to offer and continually enhance our world-class products free-of-charge,” the site says. While using the app, it is easy to navigate to a web page that also offers virtual tattoos but cleverly disguises a “Make Tattoodle my homepage” option into the background of the page. As the site explains, you first click through to add your tattoos (and maybe make Tattoo your homepage), then you’ll see its Fast Browser Search bar installed.

So, it appears Tattoodle is heavily monetizing through toolbars – a practice which can be lucrative, but has been historically criticized for overly aggressive advertising practices.

T.G.I. Fridays is taking an interesting approach to attracting Facebook fans to its brand, launching an ad campaign with an original character named Woody. Woody is an “average guy” looking to pick up 500,000 fans before the end of September, and if he’s successful, those fans will receive a free Jack Daniels burger.

Woody has a few commercials running on television and posted in the Videos tab on his Fan page, in which he promotes his the page and the free burger offer. So far the page has a little over 100,000 Fans, and should he reach the half million mark by the end of the month, the first 500,000 Fans will receive a coupon for a free T.G.I. Fridays burger.

Most of the other restaurants in the 500,000+ Fan category have accumulated their backing a little more organically, or through promotions and campaigns involving established offers or characters already associated with their brands. This is the first time we’re aware of that an ad campaign to garner Facebook Fans has centered around an entirely new, unknown character.

Most of the restaurants enjoying Facebook success are of the quick-serve variety, with McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Pizza Hut hitting the one million Fan mark recently. It will be interesting to see if T.G.I. Fridays can grab half a million fans in less than a month, especially since they’ve obviously spent the money to develop the page and buy television ad time. But the enticement of free food is a powerful one, and this seems to be the driving motivator based on the posts on the page’s wall.

There have been so many wonderful ideas over the years for sharing music on Facebook, it’s generally disappointing to see what actually gets launched. Basically, due to music licensing issues, there is still no good way to create and share playlists of full songs — the sorts of things you can do on sites like MySpace and imeem.

Latest example: iTunes 9. Today, Apple announced a new version of its ubiquitous music player, that includes ways to share tracks from iTunes to Facebook or Twitter. Both options are buried at the bottom of a drop-down tab in the iTunes store. With the Facebook integration, you don’t actually share a song, you just share the album art for the song and a link to the song within iTunes. The upside is that some fraction of the tens of millions of people who use iTunes will probably use this feature, leading to a little more music-information sharing. Previous rumors suggested that more advanced features might be coming to Facebook via iTunes, such as a way to share iTunes playlists into Facebook. Maybe we’ll see that in the future?

Third parties have tried offering streaming music over the years, from early applications to Project Playlist, and many have been shut down over licensing concerns. Facebook itself has also looked at how it could offer some sort of streaming music service, but that project seems to have stopped before anything could come of it. For the time being, music on Facebook is limited to third parties that let you share individual songs or music videos, or related things like finding nearby concerts. For Facebook’s nearly 300 million monthly active users, the experience is still underwhelming.

Politicians have been effectively using Facebook over the last election cycle, and now the company is moving deeper into government. Today, Facebook launched a “Facebook and Government” Page featuring best practices for how politicians and government bodies can use Facebook. Near the top, there are mentions of a new NATO Page and a “White House Live” presidential video stream widget.

It’s not clear how far Facebook is planning to go with its government efforts. The company has informally worked with politicians and other government types to help them understand how to make the most of the site. Indeed, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes helped organize the social media parts of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last year. For example, it was the first presidential campaign to launch Facebook Connect support — early in the campaign, in the fall of 2008. Obama’s campaign went on to trounce opponents in terms of Facebook fans, with his Page getting nearly four million fans by the time he took office in January. At least during the presidential election last year, the Republican Party seemed less focused on using the site. However, party representatives have rejected claims that it was not making a clear and somewhat successful effort to reach users on the site.

Facebook is not just about national campaigns, though. Smaller-time politicians, like a 23-year old who won himself a spot in the Maine state house of representatives last fall, in part by gaining supporters on Facebook.

So, if nothing else, this new Page is an easy way for Facebook to get the word out about using its site for politicking. As we saw in 2008, Facebook is becoming an increasingly important communications platform for political candidates and public figures around the world – and next year’s midterm elections in the United States will likely illustrate how Facebook is becoming even more important at the state and local levels.

Usain Bolt’s Facebook Page is running close behind the record-breaking Jamaican track star, at least in terms of his number of fans.

That’s according to the latest PageData statistics. When Bolt began breaking a string of sprinting world records at the 2009 Berlin World Championships on August 16, his Page had 1.06 million fans. Today, just a few weeks later, it has 1.44 million, growth of nearly 400,000 fans in just a few weeks.

However, it doesn’t appear Bolt’s social media team is keeping the page updated, as the last post was on July 22nd. I’m sure Bolt will continue adding fans for a long time to come, as even people who aren’t into track (like myself) see videos like the one embedded below. He is an amazing runner. However, in terms of building his long-term legacy, if not the brand value of his sponsorships, Bolt would probably benefit from a more engaging Page.

Some other notes on the stats: While Facebook sometimes folds unofficial pages in with official pages, we’ve noticed that happening more with major brands, like fast-food companies. Given the page’s lack of activity, I would be surprised to hear that Bolt’s people have been asking Facebook to absorb the many unofficial Bolt pages on the site.

And Bolt — or at least his social media team — has been busy on his 15,787-strong Twitter account. While it goes days without updates, once every week or two Bolt or somebody sticks in a few here are there. This isn’t a verified Twitter account, though, so it could just be an imposter.

Related Resources:

• Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook