As we’ve seen in other parts of the world, Facebook continues to grow by more monthly active users every month in Latin America. This past month, it grew by 3.9 million users to reach 39.3 million monthly actives in the region, according to our Global Monitor report. This is up from the approximately 2 million it gained in September.

Argentina and Mexico continue to lead the growth charts, gaining 637,000 and 772,000 new users, respectively. Argentina also passed Colombia to become the largest in the region, with more than 7 million monthly active users. However, Mexico has a larger overall population and a lower Facebook penetration rate, so we expect it to pass Argentina at some point.

That’s among Spanish-speaking countries. Brazil is the largest country in the region, has the lowest penetration rate, and also gained 558,000 last month to be the third fastest growing country. If this pace continues, which it is on track to do, the Portuguese-speaking country will eventually be home to the most Facebook users on the continent.

More movie companies are using Facebook to reward fans and followers of their films by offering everything from early trailers to choosing where a movie is released.  Disney is the latest to cater to the Facebook crowd, giving fans of its upcoming “Alice in Wonderland” remake a first look at artwork from movie posters.

The page for the Tim Burton adaptation of the classic story currently has close to 70,000 fans. Disney has been launching individual pages for characters, too, and the one for Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter character collected the most fans of the three (no surprise there), with around the same number as the movie page. Disney then released images from movie posters on that page.

Movie fan pages are proving to be a valuable tool for film companies, but administrators have to know how to use pages in order to make them beneficial. The “Where The Wild things Are” fan page recently peaked at nearly 2 million fans, giving the studio a massive audience. Unfortunately, updates became less consistent, and fans are now defecting from the page. The administrators of the page missed out on any number of opportunities to cross promote other movies, projects, sponsors or any number of angles by failing to engage fans of the page or capitalizing on a huge following that they really didn’t have to work very hard to gain.

One success story in creating a more dynamic page is the efforts of the studio behind “Paranormal Activity.” The ultra-low budget film utilized social networking to help find viewers before ever even committing to theaters, thus ensuring the money would be waiting when the movie actually hit screens.

Disney isn’t updating the Alice-related pages very often, but they’re at least continuing to keep fans engaged. They’re offering up just enough content to keep the pages growing, and we’ll watch to see whether or not they increase their updates as the 2010 release draws closer.

We’ve been covering Facebook’s gradual rollout of the Facebook Ads APIs in recent weeks. Now, we’re beginning to see the first tools built on top of the APIs come to market. This week, two London-headquartered agencies, 77Agency and Techlightenment, are showing off what’s coming soon.

77Ageny’s new Facebook Ads tool lets advertisers manage multiple accounts, track conversions, run custom reports, bulk upload multiple campaigns and ad groups, and manage bids in real time. The agency says it is planning to license its tool to its finance, fashion, entertainment, telecom, publishing customers over the next few months.

“Our vision is that Facebook is going to be an alternative to Google AdWords. Facebook Ads is going to be a big direct response opportunity,” Marco Corsaro, Managing Director of 77Agency, told us from Rome this morning. “We have received a significant amount of queries from our clients who are already using Facebook Ads, and are interested in exploring our technology to do that in a better way.”

London-based social media agency Techlightenment tells us that its new social ads management tool, called Alchemy, will be launching in “full beta” in the next couple of weeks.

Techlightenment director Ankur Shah says that their service features better budget control, dynamic copy creation, auto-optimization for CPM, CPC and CPA, and day-parting.

Both companies have been working directly with Facebook as part of the initial testing of the Facebook Ads APIs, an expansion to Facebook’s performance advertising platform that we think should have been launched a lot sooner. Managing sophisticated Facebook Ads campaigns has been a major headache for agencies to date, so giving them more automated ways of managing and optimizing spend is good for the entire ecosystem. We expect to see many more advertiser tools coming soon.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with Facebook Marketing Service Provider Directory, and the rest of our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

The entire social gaming industry has been criticized in recent weeks for running deceptive advertising offers. But how bad has the problem been, really? After all, low-quality ads for weight loss, teeth whitening, and a range of other dubious promises run in major ad networks and appear on prominent web sites all over the web. So here is the result of our investigation into the past and present problems with offers as they have affected social games and other applications on social networks.

Based on our research, we believe that offer companies have run many deceptive offers. Yet the majority of offers have not been deceptive, but rather legal and also low-quality. These offers have been some of the most lucrative for offer networks and developers. However, a meaningful minority of offers have been high-quality, and point the way forward for the concept of incentivized advertising in social networks.

To really understand the scope of the problem, one has to first understand how it fits into the larger, yet still-young social gaming industry. Here, we’ll lay out the history of offers on social networks, include what most offer companies who are active on Facebook and MySpace told us about the issues, discuss ongoing enforcement measures, and look at what’s needed to improve the ecosystem.

A Brief History of Offers

How long have offers been running within social networks? Since the rise of social gaming. Games began getting traction on social networks starting when Facebook launched its developer platform in May of 2007, but developers needed revenue to support themselves. Many users had never paid for virtual goods before, and they didn’t necessarily want to start paying out of pocket — and anyway, most developers had little or no experience building virtual economies. So offer companies sprang up, or in many cases migrated over from the advertising industry.

In social networks, these companies let users earn points to buy things like virtual currency by signing up for a Netflix subscription… or a mobile quiz subscription. To make this possible, offer companies, at their simplest took (and still take) advertising inventory from dozens if not hundreds of ad networks, then display that inventory within “offer walls” that appear in the payment page on social games. At its most basic, an offer wall is simply targeted ad inventory displayed within a window on a game. Like “scotch tape between two pieces of string,” as one industry source described them; it’s not as if many offer walls are fine-tuned technological marvels, although some companies are more sophisticated than others.

But how bad were offers in the beginning? As another person in the industry told us, it was not as if offer companies and developers said “how can we scam users.” Instead, many of the more legitimate advertisers who found their ads running within social applications also found themselves being burned by some users. A game player who wanted to get points didn’t necessarily care about the offer, so they’d sign up for the offer, get the points, then cancel — or some variation of that scheme. A few big advertisers, like Netflix, have internal methods that allow them to survive in this harsh environment, but others cut off social offers due to these issues.

So what sort of advertisers were left entering this environment? Mostly the ones that have been dealing with hard-to-monetize users for many years on the web: performance advertisers. Over a decade in to this industry, you can still spot their handiwork in such places as in the remnant ads of well-respected tech companies like Google and Yahoo, and on major news sites. Many of the ads that you’ll see in these locations are exactly the ones being criticized for appearing in offers: mobile ringtone subscriptions, IQ quiz ads, etc. They are not all illegal, or even necessarily deceptive, but when you see them, you wonder who would want them.

What Offer Companies Told Us

We reached out to almost every company in the space about these issues, and we heard back from most, including the largest ones. But not every company was willing to speak to us on the record — and most of those who did gave incomplete responses. Also, in order to define how big the scam problem is within offers, you first need to define what a “scam” is. On Facebook, for example, a variety of offers are permitted as long as they clearly disclose payment terms, and include an opt-in checkbox when asking for payment information.

Here are the aggregated, anonymized answers. We believe they are the most detailed information published yet about the current (and recent) state of the offer industry.

• Around 20 percent of offers have been clearly legitimate brand ads, along the lines of Netflix subscriptions.
• Another 60 percent have run a wide quality range, from the sorts of ads that aren’t illegal but also aren’t clearly valuable (like some ringtone subscriptions)
• The last 20 percent have been offers that willfully trick users into things like paying more than advertised or providing private personal information

Of course, these numbers are according to the offer companies themselves.

Regardless of what happens with scammy ads elsewhere on the web, the industry’s own estimates do not reflect well on offer companies, or on application developers that have been running offers. However, people should not think that social gaming revenue only comes from offers. We have estimated that about 30% of overall revenue for social gaming companies comes from offers. The other 70% comes from some form of direct payment, like PayPal, credit cards, mobile payments, prepaid cards, and other methods.

Beyond the stats mentioned above, here’s what companies told us:

Where have the ads come from? Most companies we spoke said they have worked with many, many different ad networks, including Azoogle, Adteractive, Valueclick, and dozens of others. There are literally hundreds of ad and affiliate networks out there whose ads could show up in social media via an offer wall. Many offer companies also said they work directly with major brands. But when we asked each offer network to specifically provide us with the names and contact information of their advertisers, only a couple did. It’s not clear to us how many offer networks actually have very many direct advertiser relationships. Meanwhile, the brand advertisers we have spoken with say they are having some success, but they want the overall offer quality to improve in order for the space to become a safer place for them to invest. As you can see from any offer wall these days, several brands do have ads that run within offers.

Are the users who take offers valuable to advertisers? Most offer companies said that advertisers discount offers on social networks, due to people not following through on offers, with the range we heard running between 20% and 40%, depending on the offer company. In other words, because of the incentivized nature of the offers, there are well-known issues that affect lead quality, and so advertisers are still adjusting bid prices accordingly.

How do offer companies provide data to advertisers? Some offer companies said they provide specific information about the customer source to advertisers, such as the application the customer came from. Many said they did not always do this. In general, we have not been able to get specific information from any of the offer companies on what data, exactly, they provide to advertisers. In many cases, from our understanding, there are multiple ad networks between an offer company and the actual advertiser, and the data does not get passed through the middle-men. So advertiser visibility is often, but not always, low. Ad industry experts say this is one of the main reasons that advertisers have been slow to invest more intelligently, and thus heavily, in offers.

Who handles user complaints? Because many offer companies operate behind the scenes, users typically do not report ad problems to them. Instead, they report to the developer or the advertiser. According to offer companies, the main reason users find and report issues to offer companies concerns virtual points they’ve earned through offers, that they have yet to receive. In many of these cases, a payment may take hours or days to clear, while users expect their points within minutes — but this is a small issue compared to users complaining about deceptive or unclear offers themselves. In most cases, there are not automated feedback loops for developers to tell offer networks which ads to stop running. Right now, that feedback happens manually. Given the potentially millions of ads and hundreds of networks that can pipe in ads, accountability is hard to create.

What portion of users are blocked from taking offers? The consensus ranged from less than 1% to around 5%. The offer networks are blocking users who are known to be trying to game the system in order to mitigate fraud from the user side as well. Many have large operations teams that handle this.

Have offer rates declined in recent months? Netflix hit most offer providers with a rate reduction recently due to the quality of offer leads, we heard from multiple networks, although some say they are seeing higher rates again. However, while some offer rates have been decreasing, others have stayed steady or have been growing — at least until a massive number of offers got taken out in recent weeks.

Offer Providers

Here’s an alphabetical list of the companies we consider to be offer providers for social games, although some may only run offers as a small and non-essential part of their business.

- AdParlor
- Boomerang Networks
- Deal United
- DoubleDing
- Firecue
- Gambit
- Gratispay
- gWallet
- Offerpal Media
- Peanut Labs Media
- Q Interactive
- RockYou
- SocialCash
- Sometrics
- SponsorPay
- Super Rewards
- SupersonicAds
- Tatto Media
- TokenAds
- TrialPay

Punishment

A couple weeks ago, Facebook said it had banned two more ad/offer networks. It didn’t say at the time who the companies were, but Facebook recently confirmed their identities to us: Tatto Media and Gambit. The reason in both cases, Facebook tells us, is “repeated policy violations.” The company is not providing more detail on what the exact violations were because the bans are a legal matter.

Here’s what Facebook said last week:

In addition to legal notices that have been sent to many ad networks to mandate ongoing compliance on Facebook Platform, today we are disabling two additional offer and ad networks who have repeatedly violated our policies.

Tatto Media has a history of trouble. For example, it was fined by the Washington state Attorney General earlier this year for running the deceptive “luv crush” ads where users were shown a fake email interface that tricked them into paying for horoscope subscriptions. More recently, it served as the poster child of scammy ad networks in TechCrunch’s “Scamville” offer scam exposé — for selling similarly deceptive ads within offer walls. Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus followed up by calling it the “worst offender” on Facebook, mentioning that it had already been banned.

Gambit is a bit of a different story. The company has articulated itself more clearly than most of its competitors about offer issues, including this in-depth post on its company blog. It has also recently looked to diversify away from advertising offers; for example, a few weeks ago it announced a partnership with online labor services company Crowdflower, where users can earn points in a game through doing online-based jobs for companies. In terms of the ban, the company says that it was “working closely with Facebook employees on compliance, accidentally showed some non-compliant ads, and [was] shocked to learn of Facebook’s reaction” — although we have not been able to verify this claim.

A ban isn’t necessarily for life. It’s possible Gambit and Tatto could return at some point in the future, but Facebook had no comment on the chance of that happening.

MySpace recently toughened its terms around offers, too. And Zynga, the largest social game developer, has also taken all of its offers offline until it can be sure of offer quality. Running clean offers, in other words, is now a necessity for anyone hoping to continue on in the business. That means less inventory, at least for the time being.

A final point about punishment: Facebook has been disciplining individual apps when they run ads that violate its policies for a long time. The company slaps developers with punishments like turned-off feed stories, etc., often. Most of the time the public never finds out about it, because the developer doesn’t want anyone to know. It is our understanding that Facebook has taken at least 50 apps offline in recent months that have 1 million monthly active users apiece.

Solutions

At its most basic — and as many industry observers have noted in recent days — offer companies need to be more transparent with users and with advertisers about how their businesses work. Valuable offers must either be for something that users want to purchase already, and so they will want to buy using the discount provided in the offer, or else be for a product that is actually good, but might require a trial or other incentive to get the users to see for themselves (like Netflix).

There are historical examples for what happens to incentivized advertising on the web. The free iPod-style incentivized ads boomed then busted — or in some cases evolved — earlier this decade. On the other hand, many ads that appeared in search engines early on were of very low quality. Google succeeded in targeting ads to what users were searching for, then brought on more and more legitimate advertisers. The latter example, in some sense, is what the offers industry hopes to do now. The good news is that users clearly do care about offers as a concept. They have clearly shown, after all, that they are willing to use them instead of paying for a good directly.

On the consumer side, offer companies should provide clear descriptions of what, exactly, users are signing up for, as Andrew Chen writes. Is the offer a subscription? Is information going to be shared with third parties? If advertisers have nothing to hide, why not have a Facebook page about their products? Some of these changes already appear to be in the works, driven by Facebook, MySpace and some game developers, but now is the time for every offer company to prove it can self-regulate.

The same focus on transparency and self-regulation needs to happen on the advertiser side, too. Many offer companies say they have direct relationships with advertisers, but they should be more transparent with developers about when this is or is not the case. Legitimate advertisers need to clearly understand the value of offers to their businesses. Where are offers showing up? What’s the incentive in the app for the user?

The first step is for offer networks to improve filtering controls over what offers apper, as many low-quality offers are not valuable to users, and skirt the rules of what platforms and developers now find acceptable. High quality advertisers have told us they don’t like showing up next to low-quality ones, and more may get scared away if quality is not improved.

And from that last point, there’s also the question of how offers can innovate to become more valuable to advertisers, developers and users. Some offer companies have started integrating ads directly into games, associated with relevant virtual goods. See TrialPay’s integration of FTD’s real-life flower sales into Playfish’s Pet Society for a good example of that. And perhaps offer companies should take a closer look at AdNectar, and other companies that integrate branded virtual goods into games. As Jay Weintraub writes, “Facebook pages are necessary, but they don’t compare to an experience that is more powerful and safer than Second Life. For example, 65mm and growing virtual farmers should all be using Miracle Gro to plant, John Deere tractors to till, and Whole Foods to sell their food to.”

The industry will lose some money as a result of higher standards for offer quality in the short term, but in the long run, advertising must become higher quality if it’s going to play a meaningful role in the mass market of social games. Social games are the largest and fastest growing segment of the US virtual goods market, according to our Inside Virtual Goods report, and about 30% of all social game revenues will come from offers this year. We don’t know exactly what portion of offer revenues came from scammy offers, but we estimate it could be significantly more than the 20% of offers that offer networks now admit were scammy. And, given that offers have served as an important on-boarding experience in getting users to get engaged enough with games to make direct payments for virtual currency, the decrease in the number of available offers might at least slow down the growth rate of the number of new users who decide to start paying for virtual goods as well.

Still, 70% of virtual goods revenue comes from some direct payment method, and the decrease in offer inventory is likely to mean more users use direct payments — benefitting direct payment providers. And companies that have run a minimal amount of offers, like Playfish, obviously are not being significantly affected.

The offers issue has also raised questions for the industry as a whole. The scam problem could have been solved before now.

The fact that offer companies were willingly running what they acknowledge to be scammy offers goes to show that regulation is needed. Facebook and MySpace are in the best position to enforce this regulation, as they can put the burden on developers to self-regulate by suspending their apps if bad offers are found. Facebook has been criticized for not acting more quickly.

Facebook has said that it will continue to be an open platform, which means that people are free to build applications and monetize as they choose, but they need to follow Facebook’s policies. If developers don’t, Facebook will try to enforce it. It is also building out its policy enforcement team to weed out more bad ads, and suspend ad networks that repeatedly violate its policies, though it could always be improved more quickly.

As it has shown with the two most recent bans, it is quite serious. Indeed, the scammy ads issue is getting more serious in other industries, too. Google recently decided to draw a hard line against violating advertisers, immediately banning any perpetrators; this is after years of softer enforcement. Meanwhile, Congress is holding hearings on a wide range of large brands that have used scammy ads, while European regulators are going after tricky ringtone providers.

And, the press also needs to do a better job. Specifically, blogs like ours that cover the industry need to be more focused not just on what companies are doing right, but what they are doing wrong. We and others have covered offer and social network advertising problems that have been long-running issues on Facebook and other platforms. One challenge has been in going beyond pointing out that a few bad offers exist and instead trying to quantify the scope of the problem. So we will continue to investigate these and other industry issues.

Finally, some of you may wonder where some of our advertisers stand on these issues. We take this issue seriously. We have rejected some prospective advertisers in the past because they were doing things that didn’t meet our standards, and we are aware of some problems with offers some of our sponsors are running. In recent months, we have been working on gathering more information on how big these problems are. We are continuing to review each advertiser on a case-by-case basis.

[Quiz ad images via VentureBeat]

Facebook is the largest photo sharing service in the world, with over 2 billion photos uploaded by users each month. So when the company is testing a brand new way for users to get most of those photos onto the site, it’s a big change.

Although the current photo uploading tools are obviously working well enough to support the current volume of photo sharing on Facebook, many users have some technical problems when uploading photos. As a result, Facebook has decided to forego relying upon ActiveX controls, Java applets, and even Flash in a new version of the photo uploader tool it’s testing. Instead, it’s built entirely in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Users can test the new uploader by activating the “prototype” app.

When you activate the new photo uploader, here’s how it looks:

Here’s how it works, according to Facebook’s Chris Putnam,

The photos in thumbnail view are served by a light-weight local web server thread, while the filesystem information is provided through a JavaScript API. After selecting photos and starting an upload, you’ll discover another great feature–asynchronous uploading. The plug-in spins off a background thread to perform the upload regardless of what the browser is doing in the foreground. Then the local web server provides JSONP endpoints to retrieve progress information or cancel the ongoing upload, without needing to re-embed the plug-in itself. With this approach you can even navigate away from Facebook entirely without worrying about your uploads.

Facebook goes into detail on its approach to the security model in the new uploader here.

Obviously, maintaining security around user data is a primary concern for Facebook, so the team behind the new photo uploader is going to be doing a lot of testing and observing to see how the new tool is used. “Depending on the results of these tests, we hope to roll it out to all users soon,” Putnam says.

Facebook Page owners have been able to target “Updates” – Facebook’s term for message blasts that Page owners can send to fans that show up in a secondary tab in the Inbox – by age, sex, and location for a long time. Now, Facebook has added a new way for Page owners to target news feed stories to fans by location and language as well.

Here’s how it works. First, Page owners will notice a new targeting button to the left of the Share button on their Page. Clicking the targeting button gives Page owners two options: “Everyone” or “Customize.”

When “Customize” is chosen, Page owners can then specify language and/or city, state, or country targeting parameters for the News Feed story:

Overall, it’s a nice new way for Facebook to let Page administrators share the most relevant content into the stream. The new features will be especially useful for Pages with geographically diverse fan bases, like major celebrities and global brands, as well as local businesses. Now, Barack Obama can publish updates to fans around the world in their native language, Coca-Cola can target messages to users only in the appropriate regions, and chain stores can let fans in one particular city know about upcoming events or promotions.

Performance advertising conglomerate Adknowledge is adding more banner advertising to its inventory, starting on Friday when it absorbs SocialMedia’s ad network on Facebook. The latter company is moving away from that business completely as it focuses on “social ads” — interactive ads where can do things like see others’ tweets about a product and send their own responses back to Twitter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. This is Adknowledge’s fourth acquisition in social network advertising, following its purchase of application ad network Cubics in December of 2007, then the addition of Lookery’s network in November of 2008, and most prominently the acquisition of a top advertising offers provider, Super Rewards, in July.

Starting on Friday, developers using SocialMedia will be moving on to the Cubics platform, according to Chris Smutny, Adknowledge’s vice president of social applications and online gaming. While many of the largest app developers, especially in social gaming, have moved to virtual currency monetization, he sees a range of apps still making money primarily through ads. The ubiquitous simple quiz apps, for example.

SocialMedia was one of the first social application ad networks, but it’s been focused elsewhere for quite a while. So when Smutny told us that the purchase would broaden the company’s banner-ad footprint, we asked him by how much. He said it would be “decently material,” but didn’t provide specifics. He and others at the company also are notably emphasizing something else with this news, which is that Adknowledge is not building applications to compete with developers while serving ads for them at the same time. RockYou, in some sense, does both.

Super Rewards is one of the many offer companies that has been running some deceptive offer ads, but like others, it says it has been busy cleaning things up. In the context of this news, Smutny adds that the company has started making direct ad sales so high-quality advertisers can reach across its banner network and its offers in a single buy. Readers in Western Europe and Australia can see the company doing this, with T-Mobile, Mastercard and UNICEF currently running campaigns.

The purchase cements Adknowledge’s long-evolving strategy — give developers ways to make money through banner ads as well as through direct payments and offers within offer walls, then package this inventory and sell it to its existing base of advertisers.

A few weeks ago, Facebook launched a new “widgets center” for businesses and users to create Facebook widgets for their websites or blogs. Originally in the widgets center were the Profile Badge, Photo Badge, Fan Box, Live Stream Box, and Page Badge. Now, Facebook is promoting a Fan Badge widget both in the widget center and on Pages that users are a fan of.

It works just like you’d think, promoting the Facebook Page the user is a fan of. Here’s how the tool to generate the Fan Badge widget looks:

Page owners can drive users to the wizard with their Page preselected in step 1 by choosing their Page from the drop down and copying and pasting the URL.

With Fan Badge widgets, Page owners have another way to encourage users to promote their page and drive more traffic (and fans) to it. Of course, this is good for Facebook as well – all the Facebook widgets out on the web act as a giant funnel bringing people in to the Facebook ecosystem.

Last night, Facebook announced that after a week-long “notice and comment” period, it has decided to adopt the updated privacy policy it initially proposed in late October.

Because the proposed policy did not receive over 7,000 comments — the threshold Facebook laid out in its latest Statement of Rights and Responsibilities — the new policy did not go to site-wide user voting as happened earlier this year. In fact, the English version of the draft only got about 1,000 comments total.

What changes does the new policy bring about? As we detailed when the new policy was proposed, part of the intent with this draft was to provide a “clearer and more comprehensive” description of what the policies actually mean.

Facebook also added a blurb on “location” in which Facebook says it will treat your location as subject to your overall privacy settings (share with “everyone,” just “friends,” etc.). So Facebook is preparing, at least legally, for more location-based services:

Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.

In terms of advertising, Facebook has included language that allows it to provide general statistics about users who interact with ads, but not personally identifiable information. Facebook also says:

We may institute programs with advertising partners and other websites in which they share information with us:

• We may ask advertisers to tell us how our users responded to the ads we showed them (and for comparison purposes, how other users who didn’t see the ads acted on their site). This data sharing, commonly known as “conversion tracking,” helps us measure our advertising effectiveness and improve the quality of the advertisements you see.
• We may receive information about whether or not you’ve seen or interacted with certain ads on other sites in order to measure the effectiveness of those ads.

Other notable reiterations of previous policies include what Facebook has to say to developers. “We do not guarantee that Platform will always be free,” according to the document.

Overall, the new policy does not represent any major shift in Facebook’s privacy philosophy, but is a part of its overall effort to simplify its privacy and legal documentation.

More politicians and watchdog organizations are paying attention to Facebook’s privacy policies too. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has pushed the company to adopt more detailed rules about a number of practices, including better informing users what data they are sharing, and with whom.

And just today, Jim Gamble of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, criticized Facebook for not placing the CEOP “report” button on its website. Facebook responded, “We are confident that the Ceop button is an excellent solution for sites that have not invested in as robust a reporting infrastructure as Facebook has in place and one we continue to improve.”

Facebook’s recently-redesigned home page features a top stories view of the most interesting items that your friends are sharing, plus a live feed view of the most recent items. And both views just got a seemingly small new update: A simplified interface for hiding whoever is sharing stories that you don’t want to see.

Here’s how it works. Drag your mouse over a feed story item. You’ll see the word “hide” appear. Then mouse over it and you’ll see it turn into a button. Click on the button and you’ll get a minimized view of whatever you just hid — a person, page or application.

There’ll be a link to “edit options” within that view. If you click on it, you’ll see a pop-up window showing a list of the people, pages and apps you’ve already hidden, including whichever one you just did. You’ll have the option to add any of them back in within this window. You can also find the “edit options” button at the bottom of either feed.

Previously, the “hide” button gave you a drop-down menu showing a variety of options for hiding friends and apps.

Also, this is just how the new features works for the top stories view. In the live feed, meanwhile, you have the new hide option, but “edit options” shows you the same interface as the live feed had already: the number of friends who will show up in your live stream, the people you’ve blocked, but no options for hiding or unhiding pages and apps.

So let’s say you hide an app, then want to add it back? This is a use case near and dear to many developers hearts — as you might imagine from this Facebook help center thread titled “How do I unhide Farmville notifications?”

Right now, if you hide an app within the live feed, then go to the news feed and click on “edit options” at the bottom of the page, you’ll also see the same old window as on the live feed. However, if you reload the page on the top stories view, you’ll see the regular news feed interface of everything you’ve hidden — including the app you hid while in the live feed. So, there is a way that a user could bring an app back that they hid within the live stream. It’s just not very obvious.

Note: We don’t mean to pick on NetworkedBlogs in the screenshots — in fact, it’s the app we use to publish Inside Facebook’s stories on to Facebook.