When Facebook launched the real-time-stream version of the news feed in March, some users liked it, but many said they didn’t. At the time, people said they preferred the former design, an automated news feed that showed you interesting but older items instead of a live stream.

So now the new Facebook news feed shows you the automated news feed, similar to the home page before the March design. But by this point, millions of users have apparently gotten so used to the the live stream of (mostly) status updates that they want it back again, judging from various news reports and Facebook protest groups. So here’s a couple tips for how to bring it back, more or less, in the new design.

Before we get started, note that the new design does sort of include a live stream in the main news feed interface; you can just click on it it at the top center of the news feed home page to make it your default view. Note that this isn’t quite what the old feed was. That one contained mostly status updates, as other may other feed items, like photos, were moved into a “Highlights” section. Now, more items, including photos, are back in. The new version of the live feed also has another big change from before: There’s a default limit to 250 people in your live feed. More on tweaking that feature, further down.

Get those status updates back!

1. Go to your Facebook home page. In the left-hand column of friend lists and other feed filters, click on the “More” button. The full view of the column will open up.

2. Browse down the column until you see the “Status Updates” category. Click and hold on it, and drag it to the top of the page, above the “News Feed” category.

3. You have now set your default home page to be these status updates

4. Also: As before, you can scroll to the bottom of the feed, click on “Edit Options” button, and select which people you don’t want to see in the feed.

What about the Live Feed?

Let’s say you like the new version of the live feed that Facebook rolled out on Friday. You like seeing all the other information about your friends in a raw, chronological stream, and you also like seeing the new information mixed in, like photos and who you’re friends just became friends with. But there’s a problem — if you have more than 250 friends on Facebook. The company has made it so that the live stream only shows you the 250 most “engaging” of your friends, it tells us. These are apparently the people who you already interact with the most frequently on the site. This limit is not a big deal for most users, as the average person has 130 friends on Facebook.

But let’s say you have 500 close friends on the site, and you want to keep close track of them in the live feed? Here’s how.

1. Make sure you’re on the news feed home page (not the “Status Update” home page if you followed the previous set of directions). Scroll to the bottom of the feed and click on “Edit Options.” You’ll see a window pop open that lets you do a few things.

2. At the bottom of the box, you’ll see a a “Number of Friends” section that shows you how many of your friends are currently appearing in your Live Feed. The default is 250, so if you want to up the number, type it in. You can go all the way up to Facebook’s friend limit: 5000 people.

3. On the top left-hand side of the box you’ll see a “Show More” feature. Select friends in this section to gurantee that everything they do will show up in your live feed. Otherwise, these friends may not automatically appear within the select number of friends that you chose in the previous step.

4. On the right-hand side of the window, you’ll see a list of the people you have at some point previously banished from your news feed. You can add or subtract people from that list.

Facebook is hosting a Developer Garage in Palo Alto on Wednesday, this time called “Roadmap Edition.” Facebook says it will be giving developers a “sneak peak of the Facebook Platform roadmap,” and we’ll be there with all the details.

While we don’t know what changes Facebook will specifically announce this week, we have heard from multiple industry sources that the company has been contemplating changes to the Platform recently that could significantly alter the way applications integrate with Facebook’s “viral” communication channels – the requests, notifications, and feed stories that enable much application distribution and re-engagement today.

Earlier tests that we’ve seen in the wild have included new access points for Facebook’s communication channels on the top menu bar in one case, and a missing bottom menu bar in the other, but these are just small tests and aren’t indicative of any specific site-wide product changes. A post yesterday by VentureBeat goes along with what what we’ve seen from some of the test screenshots, and also mentions that Facebook has been encouraging developers to rely more on getting users’ email addresses directly, instead of relying on Facebook’s viral channels for user communication as developers have since the Platform launched.

Were Facebook to make significant changes to the Platform’s viral channel mechanics, it would be somewhat reminiscent of the spring of 2008, when Facebook substantially redesigned the profile page, removing application boxes, which were then one of the major Platform viral channels, from the profile almost entirely. While last year’s changes caused a big shift in the ways developers thought about designing for application virality (and brought big traffic declines to those developers most dependent on profile boxes), many developers adapted and have since thrived. In fact, 2009 has seen the rise of the Facebook Platform economy to its highest levels ever, primarily through the growth of virtual goods-based games and applications and the underlying payment ecosystem.

So while we’re looking forward to seeing what Facebook announces this Wednesday and in the weeks and months ahead, it’s clear that some developers are nervous about what’s coming down the pipe. Were Facebook to make similarly substantial Platform changes again this year, developers are concerned that it could create broader uncertainty for the Platform ecosystem in the longer term. A “second annual” macro-level change could cause investors to be more conservative with developer valuations (in both the private and potentially public markets) going forward.

We hope Facebook uses this Wednesday to give the developer community a clear sense of the boundaries of what it currently considers stable versus dynamic parts of the Platform API. Facebook has shown before that it has the vision to lead developers through painful change in order to reach a healthier place. However, it also needs to be clearer with developers about what assumptions they can make about viral mechanics going forward.

It’s been just over a year since we first launched AppData, the easiest way to track application traffic on the Facebook Platform. Since then, the number of interesting applications on the Facebook Platform has only continued to grow. Today, we’re excited to announce two big updates to AppData: faster loading times and historical DAU (daily active user) charts.

With AppData, you can:

• See which applications are gaining and losing the most traffic – every day
  
• See the leading applications and developers in any application category
• View historical traffic charts for tens of thousands of Facebook applications

AppData was designed to be an easy to use resource for anyone interested in tracking application trends on the Facebook Platform. That being said, the site has a lot of room for growth and improvement, and we’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions for features and functionality that you’d like to see added. Please send your thoughts, suggestions, and feedback to mail AT appdata DOT com. AppData is still in beta, and (as long as Facebook lets us) we look forward to making the site increasingly valuable to you in the future.

Here’s a look at what you’ll find on AppData:

1. Facebook Application and Developer Traffic Leaderboards

App Leaderboard 1. FarmVille 61,660,329 2. Causes 34,373,044 3. Mafia Wars 25,825,466 4. Café World 23,814,664 5. We’re Related by FamilyLink 21,249,758 6. Pet Society 20,714,196 7. YoVille 19,888,786 8. Farm Town 18,661,880 9. Texas HoldEm Poker 18,573,191 10. Happy Aquarium 18,351,975 11. Birthday Cards 17,670,442 12. Restaurant City 17,454,448 13. Facebook for iPhone 16,237,123 14. MindJolt Games 15,166,798 15. Movies 14,340,182

Developer Leaderboard 1. Zynga 174,616,631 2. Playfish 59,036,679 3. RockYou! 44,662,642 4. Causes 34,373,044 5. Facebook 27,458,622 6. Slide, Inc. 27,046,477 7. 6 waves 25,837,800 8. FamilyLink.com 22,016,200 9. eitandesign 21,409,274 10. CrowdStar 19,723,377 11. Slashkey 18,661,880 12. LivingSocial 15,262,473 13. MindJolt 15,166,798 14. 3happybytes 14,955,295 15. Flixster 14,340,182

2. Top Application Gainers and Losers – On a Daily and Rolling Weekly Basis

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Make a Quiz!	11,722,723	+4,488,718	+38.29
2.	Quiz Monster	10,036,195	+4,320,448	+43.05
3.	Happy Aquarium	18,351,975	+3,878,861	+21.14
4.	Café World	23,814,664	+3,755,339	+15.77
5.	Quiz Creator	4,748,099	+2,413,570	+50.83
6.	Causes	34,373,044	+1,844,044	+5.36
7.	RockYou Live	8,128,028	+1,539,703	+18.94
8.	FarmVille	61,660,329	+1,337,570	+2.17
9.	Movies	14,340,182	+1,175,306	+8.20
10.	Horoscopes	7,158,456	+874,836	+12.22
11.	Bejeweled Blitz	9,387,901	+672,871	+7.17
12.	Music Challenge	3,274,445	+609,191	+18.60
13.	Who was i, in my past life ?	1,830,061	+469,299	+25.64
14.	Music	11,832,427	+437,692	+3.70
15.	Pet Society	20,714,196	+432,279	+2.09
16.	Restaurant City	17,454,448	+379,576	+2.17
17.	Halloween Haunting	1,017,893	+371,167	+36.46
18.	Friend Quiz	4,312,447	+340,285	+7.89
19.	(Lil) Farm Life	5,767,916	+323,588	+5.61
20.	Facebook for iPhone	16,237,123	+294,116	+1.81

3. Historical Traffic Charts – For Tens of Thousands of Facebook Applications

That’s it for now! We look forward to hearing your thoughts. See more at AppData.com.

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 40+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook – November 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, Italian, and print.

The densely-packed Facebook Marketing Bible contains four detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, Tools for Application Developers, and Tools for Webmasters. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

In addition, Inside Facebook is happy to announce that through November 30th all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms). Now that Facebook has crossed the 250 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience inside Facebook.

The November 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Detailed updates on Facebook’s latest home page redesign, and what it means for Page owners and developers. Now that Facebook has moved back to a “Top Stories” view of the News Feed by default, new rules apply for maximizing your reach and engagement within Facebook. We’ve broken down all the new rules and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook than ever before – including details on other new features like status tagging, Twitter integration, why marketers should choose Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups, key SEO strategies every Facebook Page owner should know, and the best tools to manage your Facebook Page. See the table of contents below for more details.
• The latest updates on Facebook’s advertising tools, including the upcoming advertiser API and several powerful new targeting features. Now that Facebook’s new Ads Manager here, Facebook Ads are becoming more efficient to use than ever before. And, with Facebook’s new “connection” targeting, birthday targeting, and time scheduling tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in more targeted ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new developer Gift Shop program and “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency payment service for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues) – including Facebook’s latest international currency efforts.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, including the new Live Count widget. With Facebook Connect (now available in dozens of languages) and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
• New tools for advertisers to target their Facebook Ads better than ever before. With enhanced Facebook targeting tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in much more powerful ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• Plus, more updates on Facebook’s “website translations” functionality for Facebook Connect, recent rule changes for Facebook Platform ad networks, and more.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $149 with 12 months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

Last week, Facebook expanded its inventory of virtual goods in the Facebook Gift Shop once again, this time adding licensed music and sports-themed virtual gifts. Facebook signed an agreement with Lala.com for rights to distribute “web-only” and full MP3 songs in the US, but less publicized was the company’s partnership with Los Angeles-based Virtual Greats for rights to distribute officially-licensed NBA, MLS, and college-themed virtual gifts to Facebook users worldwide.

Virtual Greats is a licensing aggregator, gathering buckets of IP from the entertainment industry on one side and sub-licensing them to virtual worlds – and now, social networks, applications, and games, on the other. It got its start by focusing on celebrities like Justin Timberlake, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, and Paris Hilton, but has since also secured rights for entertainment brands like the Hulk and Street Fighter.

While Virtual Greats partnered with large app developer RockYou earlier this year, this is the first deal it has signed with a major social network. Sports-themed virtual gifts that Facebook licensed from the company are now available in the “Sports” section of the Facebook Gift Shop.

“The team at Facebook has great product sense – they know what users want,” Virtual Greats’ Brett Orlanski says. “It’s becoming clear that virtual goods aren’t just popular in virtual worlds.”

While it’s still early in the game, total virtual goods sales in the US will top USD $1 billion in 2009, according to our Inside Virtual Goods report. However, only a small percentage of that number reflects virtual goods sales by major social networks like Facebook and MySpace – the majority of transactions are occurring in social applications or other online games. Nevertheless, branded virtual goods represent a significant opportunity for Facebook to grow its virtual goods business.

Most developers don’t realize how complex it is to secure entertainment IP from rights holders. Orlanski says that, in addition to securing the right to sub-license items, everything Virtual Greats creates must be approved by the IP holder. For example, it must follow strict color codes and font guidelines for Laker jerseys, and Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg must approve how the items actually look. When you’ve only got 130 by 130 pixels, each one makes a difference.

Ultimately, it’s still early for branded virtual goods on social networks, but we believe the fundamentals make sense. People have paid a premium for branded items that don’t offer any other additional functional utility for a long time, and the same dynamics apply in many online contexts as well – Facebook included.

Guitar Hero has become the first video game to reach 1 million fans on Facebook, trailing only Mafia Wars and Texas Hold’Em Poker on the overall PageData leaderboard for all games. This is not the quite the same achievement as selling a million copies of the game — and, in fact, Guitar Hero has sold 7 million times in 2009, and 38 million total around the world, so it’s already doing pretty good.

All that said, the popular music game, now in its 5th version, has been steadily gaining fans not just because it is a popular game, but because it has an active Facebook page. It features plenty of interaction between fans on the wall, numerous events and good coverage of those events, and a comprehensive collection of videos and photos both from the Guitar Hero staff and the game’s fans.

Rock Band, a similar game to Guitar Hero, made by rival gaming giant Electronic Arts, currently trails its counterpart by a significant margin, with just over 313,000 fans. Rock Band has made some recent efforts to gain more of a foothold on Facebook, most notably with its Advance Into Overdrive Challenge, but the actual fan page still lacks the level of content and interaction found on the Guitar Hero page.

Guitar Hero is also making the most of the Facebook page by cross promoting its presence in other social networks, with a Twitter tab showing its most recent Tweets, and a fairly lengthy list of links to other promotions, sites and endeavors that feature the game. The game had a popular iPhone application for a while, but the recent addition of a similar app from Rock Band for the iPhone may steal a little of that thunder.

MySpace’s acquisition of leading Facebook music application iLike earlier this year gave it a strong foothold for distributing MySpace content inside Facebook. But now, the two companies are officially talking about how they might further share data.

That’s according to The Telegraph. “Hypothetically speaking, as nothing has been formally arranged yet, MySpace could become a Facebook Connect partner – which would allow people to share content they liked from MySpace with their Facebook network, ” Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg told the newspaper.

It’s not clear what data would be shared from one site to the other, although MySpace apparently would like to share more of its content with other sites as it is trying to make itself more of an entertainment hub than a general platform like Facebook.

Connect is a freely available software service that any web site or internet-connected device can use. It lets Facebook users sign into another service using their Facebook identity, then do things like share information from the other site back to Facebook. It’s not clear what would stop MySpace from implementing Connect on its site today.

[Update: Although, as others wonder, the mention of Connect begs the question of what might happen to MySpace's less developed competing program, MySpaceID. Perhaps Connect would be on MySpace.com, as a way to share information between those two sites, while MySpaceID would be for sharing information between MySpace and other web sites? It's hard for us to imagine Facebook doing some sort of special MyspaceID integration on its site.]

The report is vague about any details. Given MySpace’s focus on music — it also has the MySpace Music property where users can stream playlists of full songs, and some new features for artists — we wonder if the discussions are perhaps about music in particular? MySpace Music is a joint venture with the record labels, which is how the social network has the rights to stream playlists. iLike’s Music app, with more than 11.8 million monthly active users, currently offers a song playlist app that features YouTube videos. That’s a way to get around licensing issues, but also not the slickest of music-listening interfaces.

MySpace, which is also one of the largest online video sites behind YouTube, is already planning to run its own videos within iLike’s applications on other social networks, including on Facebook. But it has also said that streaming music isn’t coming to iLike at this point. But perhaps this was at least part of the discussion that The Telegraph reported? It’s not clear why there’d need to be a discussion about general content-sharing — MySpace can already add the Facebook Share widget if it wants to.

Although Facebook has looked into some sort of music streaming service, the closest thing to materialize, yet, is a virtual song gift that people can give each other through music company Lala.

In terms of the product, we’re interested to see how the data-sharing discussions goes. MySpace also recently enabled sharing into microblogging service Twitter. Besides music, MySpace is also one of the largest video-sharing sites on the web, as well as the second-largest social application platform behind Facebook.

Facebook and Twitter are both about sharing content, but at a very general level, they both want to be platforms for sharing content. How MySpace defines itself around content will need to somehow be strikingly different from either of them; music is possibly one way to pull that off.

The tech press, including us, didn’t get the memo until this week, but Facebook has hired National Journal tech-politics reporter Andrew Noyes to be its head of public policy communications. He’ll be based in Washington, D.C., where he’ll be working with Anthony Sparapani, the American Civil Liberties lawyer that Facebook hired away to run the public policy team earlier this year.

As Facebook grows around the US and the world, it has been beefing up its DC representation, as Google and other Silicon Valley technology have already done. On a somewhat related noted, it has also started making more public statements about larger technology issues, such as signing on to a letter supporting pending net neutrality legislation.

Here’s more, from the email that Facebook sent to its employees about the hire, via TechCrunch:

As Facebook continues to innovate and grow — with a rapidly growing user community of more than 300 million — it is important that we expand our capability to explain to policymakers, the press and the public how we enable people to share in a more trusted environment, help make the world more connected, and drive economic growth. Specific policy issues on the agenda for Andrew and the rest of Facebook’s DC office include enhancing cybersecurity and online safety, expanding digital privacy protection through user control of data, and protecting free speech.

Also, despite reports to the contrary, Noyes said he first mentioned the move on Facebook, not on Twitter. He’ll begin his new job in the middle of next month.

Facebook has been using the “Suggestions” module on the home page to increase engagement through friend discovery for months. Now, however, Facebook has expanded the set of reengaging actions it’s encouraging, adding some subtle game elements in the process.

With the latest home page redesign, many users are now getting Suggestions to “reconnect” with Facebook friends by writing on their walls. In some of these upsells, Facebook is showing a progress bar with statistics like “35% active” to encourage users to help their friends get more active.

Of course, it’s not clear what “35% active” even means (Facebook doesn’t surface activity scores anywhere else in its UI), but that’s not the point. These types of promotions have proven effective in the past; Facebook has been using similar progress bars on new users’ profile pages for quite a while.

However, not all of Facebook’s new suggestions have gone over smoothly. Some users have complained that Facebook has suggested it “reconnect” with Facebook friends who have passed away. That’s a difficult problem for Facebook to solve, but it has been working on ways to memorialize these people’s profiles.

Diva Cheryl Cole has a dance-pop smash hit out now called Fight for this Love, from the just-released album 3 Words. She’s not just number one on some music charts, but also on our list of the top 20 Facebook pages that gained the most fans in the past week. She got 305,000 new fans to reach 934,000 Facebook users. The reason?

Not just releasing a hit song and a new album that a lot of people like, maybe. Her label, Universal, has been doing an aggressive web-focused marketing campaign for months. As part of that, her Facebook page has been constantly update with fresh links, photos, and other media to keep fans engaged.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Cheryl Cole	934,465	+304,776	+48.40
2.	Big Prize Giveaways	1,502,573	+256,461	+20.58
3.	Mafia Wars	4,947,375	+198,870	+4.19
4.	Slash	1,240,953	+133,398	+12.04
5.	Where the Wild Things Are	1,871,605	+129,527	+7.44
6.	Microsoft Windows	241,258	+115,289	+91.52
7.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,513,435	+114,200	+3.36
8.	Celebs on Facebook	1,725,258	+108,585	+6.72
9.	Vin Diesel	6,591,020	+94,144	+1.45
10.	Türk Bayrağı	667,070	+85,927	+14.79
11.	Glee	621,884	+84,596	+15.75
12.	Facebook	5,532,732	+83,584	+1.53
13.	Playfish	1,512,132	+82,868	+5.80
14.	The Bible	916,976	+76,785	+9.14
15.	The Breast Cancer Site	612,499	+76,752	+14.33
16.	2012	302,315	+69,615	+29.92
17.	Contre Nicolas Sarkozy	119,383	+61,868	+107.57
18.	Twilight	3,894,463	+61,036	+1.59
19.	Justin Bieber	848,824	+60,521	+7.68
20.	Red Bull	1,550,321	+59,966	+4.02

Her page has been showing daily growth in the tens of thousands of users over the last month, spiking in the last several days as her song has climbed up the charts and as her album arrives at stores. It’s not clear whether Cole’s Facebook page is helping to drive the success of the album, or is benefiting from it, or some combination of the two.

In any case, in this past week, we also saw a few other interesting pages grow. At number four was Slash, the former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist, whose page was apparently advertised by Facebook itself several weeks ago. We noted in last week’s top 20 pages list that he’s been seeing strong growth for awhile. For whatever reason — maybe the viral sharing that the advertising has prompted among Slash-loving Facebook users? — the page has continued to gain more fans. It gained 133,000 new fans last week to reach 1.24 million.

Popular movie Where the Wild Things Are also had a strong week, as we covered in more detail on Friday. It has 130,000 fans now, to reach 1.87 million. We also noted on Friday that the page didn’t seem too active — but whoever is running it made three more updates on Friday afternoon, including a poll. So we’ll mute our criticism for now.

At number six, meanwhile, is Microsoft Windows. As Windows 7 just launched, fans seem to be voicing their appreciation. Although Microsoft is a strategic investor in Facebook, so we wonder if this page may have been, like Slash, receiving a little free-advertising love. After weeks of minimal growth, the app gained nearly 115,000 people in the last few days to reach 241,000 fans.