Facebook was the third most-visited destination of Internet users over 65, trailing behind Google and Windows Media Player, according to a November survey conducted by The Nielsen Company.

Only a year ago Nielsen reported that, for the 65 and over demographic, Facebook was much further down on the list of most-visited sites, ranking 45.

Usage of social networking and blog sites for this age group has increased 53% in the past two years and comprise 8.2% of visitors to these sites, Nielsen reported.

As previously discussed here, women in the senior demographics have led Facebook growth for much of this year, according to Facebook’s self-reported data, at least from February through September. Nielsen alsoreported that female Internet users outnumber men in this age group, similar to patterns of Facebook use we previously reported.

In February, Facebook’s fastest-growing segment was women over 55, although the men in that age group weren’t flocking to the site in nearly the same numbers. This trend continued into September when many more women aged 45-65 were joining Facebook than men that age, with nearly twice as many women over 55 than men.

Last month female users continued to dominate Facebook, totaling 56.1% of users.

Nielsen noted a similar pattern with Internet usage, “Among people 65+, the growth of women in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.”

Why should marketers care about the 65 and older online crowd, which Nielsen reported totals just 17.5 million, as of November?

Well, this age group comprises 13% of the population and tends to have both more disposable income and leisure time than other demographics.

In others words, they have more money to spend and more time to browse than others. And given the rapid growth of Facebook use among this population, there’s potential to cultivate this surging market.

(RED)’s Facebook Page shows how correct design considerations — plus some advertising — can make a Page much more effective. As we noted earlier in the week, the Page more than doubled its number of fans last week for World AIDS Day, from less than 200,000 fans a few days before the day to 446,000 today.

For those not familiar, Product Red, or “(RED),” is an advertising-based, for-profit company that sells licenses to other companies to develop a product with the (RED) logo. Those companies earn more revenue than they otherwise might through being associated with the AIDS-fighting cause; they then donate a portion of the resulting profits to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The idea is to harness capitalism for social causes; although the company has faced some criticism, (RED) says it has raised $140 million since its founding in 2002, with 100 percent of the money going to charity.

The (RED) Page features four tabs: “Turn Yourself (RED)”, “Shop (RED)”, “JOIN (RED)” and “(RED)Nights”.

The tabs contain options to let you change your profile picture to (RED) themes, buy products that benefit (RED), join the organization and learn about a concert series benefiting (RED). In addition to the apps, (RED) has been very active in communicating with its fans, and interaction on the site is high.

Organic growth and interest in World AIDS Day no doubt drove much of the growth, although we’ve ads for (RED) on Facebook and a guest post on the official Facebook company blog probably didn’t hurt.

One thing that we would recommend for (RED), however, is to continue to develop features and communicate with fans throughout the year. Its daily growth beyond the days around World AIDS Day is nearly non-existent. There is really no reason why such a well thought out Page built around an important cause should not consistently attract new fans.

So far, whoever is running the Page has posted a few updates since World AIDS Day. That’s good, although the updates have all been about (RED) and not the larger AIDS issues. In order to keep users interested who are passionate about fighting AIDS, we recommend the company broaden its Page’s focus.

Facebook’s Europe population gained 3.85 million people in November to reach 112 million monthly active users, based on the data from our latest Global Market Monitor report.

Before we look at the countries that grew the fastest, we should note that this is a big slowdown in growth from the 10 million the region gained in October. However, we believe that our numbers are lower than what Facebook is actually seeing. We obtain data from Facebook’s advertiser tool, which provides the company’s estimate for its current traffic in a given country, but the numbers provided may be delayed by days or weeks.

Yes, it’s entirely possible that Facebook is seeing a region-wide, if not larger slowdown. According to these numbers, it only gained 12 million worldwide last month, to reach 338 million — in recent months, the service has averaged more towards 30 million. However, the company announced on December 1 that it had reached 350 million monthly active users, 12 million more than what we count. For this reason, we believe that this data isn’t showing the full story.

In any case, Turkey gained the most users in November, with slightly more than 1 million new monthly active users. The country now has 16.3 million monthly actives, or 23.1% of its more than 70 million citizens. Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom all gained more than 400,00 new users. Growth tapered off from there. Denmark, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Spain actually lost users.

We’ll see what the data says in January.

As part of Facebook’s privacy changes yesterday, the company made users’ friends publicly available. While there was an option to hide your friends completely from any users who was logged in, that option did not also allow users to remove their friend lists from being publicly available.

Now, based on heavy media scrutiny and what appear to be a a lot of user complaints, Facebook is changing the functionality of the hide feature to also hide friends from people who are not logged in.

The feature otherwise works the same as before. Go to your profile page, click on the blue pencil icon at the top of your friends box list, and de-select the checkbox that says “show my friends on my profile.”

There are larger questions here about Facebook’s decision yesterday. While the privacy changes were a relatively aggressive move to make users’ data more publicly accessible, the main method for doing that was through having each user go through “wizard,” or interface where they could choose to leave their settings as is or choose to make them available to everyone.

Another other part of Facebook’s changes — to make some profile information unavoidably public, including friends lists — came across as misleading. While logged-out viewers see excerpts of users friends, anybody could theoretically refresh that page and eventually see all of a person’s friends. That possibility has been removed for users who choose to hide friends.

So why did Facebook show friends lists in public? The company hasn’t said, but one reason might be to make it easier for new users to see friends they have in common with someone they find through a search result. Another reason might be to increase the search engine rankings of users by cross-linking user profiles.

However, there is still a caveat. Friends lists are still accessible, and here’s how: if one of your friends adds an application, they are providing that application with data showing that they are friends with you, as well as friends with everyone else on their list.

More from the Facebook blog:

UPDATE on Thursday, Dec. 10: In response to your feedback, we’ve improved the Friend List visibility option described below. Now when you uncheck the “Show my friends on my profile” option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won’t appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications. Thanks again for your comments and suggestions.

We’ve also posted a third tutorial about the new privacy controls here. This video explains how to use the privacy control in the Publisher, the box where you publish status content such as updates, photos, videos and links.

Southwest Airlines is making a holiday travel-season push for Facebook fans with a giveaway called Fans Fly Free. It’s running from December 8 to 31, awarding 100 pairs of free roundtrip tickets to users who become fans.

The company has already been making use of its Facebook page for making announcements, such as which flights have wireless connectivity. It’s also been promoting special fare deals, directing traffic back to Southwest.com as well as other efforts intended to engage users.

But the giveaway is not the end-all, be-all of Southwest’s holiday marketing strategy, as actually entering the contest requires more than simply becoming a fan.

One must, first, allow Southwest access to your profile information, not only giving them what amounts to a free consumer data survey, but also creating the potential for the company to make more user-specific advertisements to fans on Facebook.

Contest entrants then enter personal information — phone, email, date of birth and state of residence. This again allows Southwest to hop from the realm of Facebook directly into the email inboxes and cell phones of their fans, so it can do things like provide state-specific specials and offers.

Southwest Airlines is among a group of large corporations trying to turn Facebook fandom into business via such giveaways. Similar tactics helped push Starbucks to be the biggest Facebook Page, back in July — it offered free ice cream and pastry promotions, and passed Coca-Cola as the most popular brand on the service.

Another interesting approach was T.G.I. Fridays’ September bid to pick up 500,000 fans for Woody, the campaign’s everyman face, by offering fans a free Jack Daniel’s burger.

Traffic on Southwest’s Facebook page, according to PageData, was up for the first part of November (pre-Thanksgiving) and tapered off towards the end of the month. It remains to be seen exactly what impact the giveaway may have, but if previous endeavors like Starbucks’ are any indication, it could be significant.

As Facebook grows, and touches more technology with services like Facebook Connect, and as Apple moves deeper into media with the success of iTunes and the iPhone, the two companies are increasingly finding themselves in contact.

Most recently, with Apple’s purchase of music service Lala, it is now one of the few direct partners selling virtual goods inside of Facebook’s gift shop. Here’s a closer look at that deal, and a lot more.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,” is the only comment the company gave about its purchase of the online music company last week. Facebook had previously launched a Lala service that let people buy songs for each other within its gift shop: for one Facebook Credit, you can buy someone to unlimited online plays of a song and for 9 Credits you could let them download the MP3 and get the song forever. Assuming the two companies keep the deal going forward, Facebook is now a full-blown distributor for iTunes and Apple is now a partner in Facebook’s still-young Credits virtual currency.

Interestingly, we heard rumors about the purchase a couple weeks ago — but we heard that Google and Facebook were looking, not Apple. However, we never confirmed that Facebook was interested, and we didn’t run the story. While Facebook has long been rumored to have been working on some sort of deal with Lala, as well as other online music companies, it has for the past year shied away from offering a music service itself.

Meanwhile, an anonymous source told Reuters that “Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level.” It’s interesting to think what a more full-blown deal between Apple and Facebook might look like. Apple, after all, has more leverage than any other technology when it comes to cutting deals with record labels over things like song licenses. It could potentially pull off better terms than what, unfortunately, startups like imeem were able to — then use Facebook as one of the venues for offering a streaming music service.

That last line was pure speculation, but we should mention that recent reports suggest that iTunes is moving more seriously into streaming via the Lala deal.

Here are some other ways that the two companies are currently connected.

Apple’s Facebook Pages, and its iTunes Facebook app

The company has a strong presence already on Facebook. Its Apple Students page has 1.41 million fans and its iTunes page has 2.34 million fans. Both pages are regularly updated with links to the latest relevant Apple news. And, this week, in conjunction with gift card company Blackhawk and digital card application developer GroupCard, the Page began letting people buy virtual iTunes gift cards for friends.

Apple separately has another promotion going on the iTunes page, where you get 20 free songs if you become a fan of the page (the songs are actually samples available through the Starbucks “Pick of the Week” iTunes promotion, not 20 songs of your choice). And, if you want your free songs, you have to not only become a fan of the page but install an app called “Free on iTunes” which is notably made by Apple itself. Aside: So yes, Apple has developed a couple Facebook apps. In order to get your songs, though, you’ll need to click through the app to iTunes; also, like any good Facebook app, it asks you to publish this action to your wall and your news feed. “Free on iTunes” currently has 109,000 monthly active users.

The takeaway here is that Apple is serious about using pages and applications to try to get more music sales out of Facebook. We should also note, here, that iTunes recently added a way for users to share links to tracks on Facebook.

Facebook on the iPhone

In March, Facebook introduced Connect for iPhone, which lets iPhone app developers allow Facebook users to log in to their apps and find Facebook friends to do things like play games with. We’re not sure how successful the effort has been — some developers we’ve spoken with have criticized the Connect implementation as being hard to use. But we have seen companies from social gamer Playfish to iPhone gamer ngmoco implement Connect here, and we expect Facebook to continue pushing the effort. In another sign of what is, if nothing more, respect, Facebook introduced this Connect integration half a year before it rolled out its full Connect for Mobile service (although it has long worked with other device-makers and carriers, so the timeline probably doesn’t signify too much).

Meanwhile, Facebook’s iPhone application continues to be one of the most popular apps on the device, as well as — to our knowledge — the single most popular mobile app for Facebook. It currently has 19.2 million monthly actives users, nearly half of whom use it every day, according to AppData.

Not Being Google

There are only a few places where Facebook and Apple clearly have relations, beyond just being developers on each others platforms.

One is engineers — Facebook has been hiring Apple engineers and other employees for years, although there are thousands of Apple employees, so this fact isn’t astounding.

Another, more important one, is that Facebook and Apple have a psuedo-rival in common: Google.

The search company has tried to rival Facebook Connect with what it describes as a more open web-wide identity service called Google Friend Connect. Most recently, it has integrated Twitter so that people can sign into Friend Connect sites using their Twitter IDs, then share information back to Twitter from the site.

And, in what one might call a proxy war, Google has also tried to bolster social networking rivals by leading the development of the OpenSocial application framework. This is fairly standardized set of application programming interfaces that companies like MySpace and Hi5 use to provide developer platforms, and that some developers use to run apps across those platforms.

Google has taken a similar approach to dealing with the success of the iPhone, in the form of its Android mobile-focused operating system. Here, Google also makes rhetorical use of the word “open” by leading an industry organization called the Open Handset Alliance. It brings together carriers, device manufacturers and other telecommunications companies to work on more fully implementing Android.

Note: While Friend Connect and OpenSocial do not appear to have gotten in the way of Facebook Connect or its developer platform, we are hearing from industry sources that Apple is very concerned about Android. Motorola’s Droid phone, for example, appears to have gone over rather well on Verizon’s network.

Where Will This Relationship Go?

Facebook has so far succeeded in being the dominant social network, social app platform, and identity platform. Apple has so far succeeded in creating the best mobile devices and most compelling mobile app platform. But Google, and all of its allies, don’t like seeing either. The independent successes of Facebook and Apple perhaps is causing the old proverb to apply: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

There might also be a more philosophical connection between the two companies. They both make great products, and they both strongly believe that they know what’s best for users despite regular, massive outcries about both companies ignoring what users “really want.”

Certainly, they seem to have different views about being open. Apple is by all accounts a very closed platform, to the degree that Facebook’s longtime iPhone app developer, Joe Hewitt, stopped working on it out of disgust. Facebook notably came back and phrased things more delicately, afterwards. Here’s the comment that Facebook’s vice president of communications, public policy and platform marketing, Elliot Schrage, gave TechCrunch:

[T]here’s been a fair amount of confusion and speculation about Joe’s comments and whether they reflect the official position of Facebook. They don’t. Facebook’s relationship with Apple and our commitment to the iPhone platform remain strong. In fact, though Joe himself will be moving to new projects, Facebook has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development. More generally, our work bringing Facebook Connect to the iPhone and with iTunes, iPhoto and other great products over the past year should illustrate our commitment to expanding our relationship with Apple and finding new ways to offer new services and features to the people who use both our products.

We should be clear that this comment was in the context of that situation, not our larger musings here about the relationship between the two companies. Still, quite interesting.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been taking steps to make its platform more like Apple’s. It continues to take an increasingly “philosophical” approach to Platform policy, and we continue to hear from Facebook app developers that Facebook is talking about implementing some sort of mandatory or at least highly desirable implementation of Facebook Credits. Like Apple, Facebook is taking a 30 percent cut of all transactions that go through Credits, we hear.

There’s no big strategic alliance between Facebook and Apple at this point, at least that we know of. Mark Zuckerberg does not, for example, sit on Apple’s board the way that Google chief executive Eric Schmidt until recently did. We don’t expect the relationship to get that close, given Facebook’s strategic investor, Microsoft.

But, the companies do seem to have an increasing number of things in common. Perhaps we will see more business deals between the two in the coming year.

When it comes to Facebook’s traffic in the United States, analytics firm Compete has an interesting record. The company has released its November numbers for web sites in the US, and here’s a look at what it shows happening to Facebook now.

The service actually lost around half a million monthly active users in November, to end at 128.3 million. Compete previously showed that Facebook’s growth was flat for much of the late spring and early summer, then grew from 122.2 million at the end of July to 128.9 million by the end of October. This does not clearly fit with the other data points that we have available for Facebook’s growth.

First of all, Facebook’s own advertising tool shows that Facebook had 98.1 million users in the US at the end of November, an increase of 4.1 million from October. Beyond the discrepancy in monthly growth numbers, however, that overall usage number is drastically lower than Compete’s estimate. One reason for this might be that Compete is counting people who use Facebook Connect on other sites every month, but do not go to Facebook.com itself — although it’s not clear how large this group of people actually is.

ComScore and Quantcast, two other services we regularly look at to better understand Facebook’s traffic, have not released their monthly numbers for November yet. But in terms of Facebook’s US traffic over the last half a year or so, Quantcast has showed some of the same slow growth that Compete does from earlier this year, while comScore shows ongoing growth starting in February. Overall, Quantcast had Facebook at 104 million US monthly visitors at the end of October, with comScore estimating 97.4 million.

So, we’ll wait and see what these two firms have to say about Facebook’s November traffic before jumping to any conclusions.

In the meantime, it’s also worth nothing that Compete shows the two other most popular social web services in the US — MySpace and Twitter — also not growing. Apparently, according to Compete, US users are feeling a little tired of socializing on big web sites.

This week saw Facebook users getting in the holiday spirit as Christmas apps continued to make their way into people’s daily regimen. To start, the top three apps with the most new daily active users this week have remained largely unchanged from last, with two expanding their daily user base by over 50 percent. Farmville by Zynga netted another 1.8 million daily users to a new high of 28.4 million.

Second on the list, Birthday Cards by RockYou! added 1.7 million for a total of 2.9 million and Quiz Planet! by Friendly Quizzes rounded out the top three with 836,000 new people adding to the sites 1.2 million total; a 72 percent increase over last week and a high for the app.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	28,407,350	+1,818,215	+6.40
2.	Birthday Cards	2,995,309	+1,769,703	+59.08
3.	Quiz Planet!	1,167,752	+836,389	+71.62
4.	Happy Pets	2,591,872	+685,694	+26.46
5.	Christmas Cards!	696,857	+656,529	+94.21
6.	Snowball Fight	938,561	+447,107	+47.64
7.	Mobile	5,449,394	+420,579	+7.72
8.	Friend Quiz	1,237,220	+411,667	+33.27
9.	Pet Society	5,094,052	+369,350	+7.25
10.	Christmas Cheer	702,997	+365,899	+52.05
11.	FishVille	7,170,123	+363,752	+5.07
12.	Fish Isle	834,294	+356,148	+42.69
13.	Mafia Wars	7,021,764	+338,498	+4.82
14.	Texas HoldEm Poker	4,727,388	+334,836	+7.08
15.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	6,792,527	+324,346	+4.78
16.	Translations	317,812	+317,747	+99.98
17.	Christmas goodies	336,319	+285,395	+84.86
18.	YoVille	3,233,857	+219,647	+6.79
19.	Is Cool by cafe.com	663,493	+199,009	+29.99
20.	@Smiles	225,629	+170,944	+75.76

Translations, used to let Facebook users translate the site into other languages, rose by 99 percent this week to place at 17th, the week’s largest gainer overall. Developed by Facebook in 2008, 316,000 new daily active users found a need for the application this week, while last week had an average of 1,794. However, fluctuation is common for this app, which saw an average of 308,000 users two weeks ago before dropping to the before mention 1,794 — it’s not clear what is going on, exactly.

@Smiles, developed by @Apps, was the second highest growing non-holiday themed app at 75 percent. At 19th on the list, the service rose from 54,685 daily active users on December 2, to 225,629 yesterday. And, if comments on the developers page are a sign (and they are), this app has strong international support.

Good news was bad news for new and established apps as three Christmas-themed ones made their way on to this weeks list. Christmas Goodies, Christmas Cheer and Christmas Cards! jumped on to this weeks list, bumping last months Thanksgiving apps off the list and overall, upsetting the balance of the top 20′s lower half.

The strongest performing of the three was Christmas Cards at #5 which could be benefiting from an established user base from last year. Despite a two-star rating on Facebook, the app remains popular, increasing by 94 percent with a total of nearly 695,000 daily users from 620,000 daily active users last week.

Farther down the list, Christmas Cheer by Mob Science saw it’s user-base jump by 52 percent, or nearly 366,000 daily active users, to place at #11 in its first holiday week on Facebook.

Finally, Christmas Goodies was the second-fastest gaining app with 85 percent, but still placing 18th on the list overall with a user base of 336,319 yesterday.

Next week these numbers are likely to change mostly due to new Christmas-themed apps like Sexy Santa Helpers, Santa Yourself and Holiday Drinks (also by Mob Science) edging towards the top 20, propelled by Christmas cheer that should increase as the holiday approaches.

Facebook’s new privacy changes are not making everyone happy, including some users as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The two advocacy organizations have come out with hard-hitting and in-depth articles on the matter.

We’ve already covered many of the changes in detail, especially the ways that Facebook is now encouraging people to share content with everyone on the Internet. So here’s a look at the most significant criticisms.

“Publicly Available Information”

Facebook has exposed some personal profile information that was, for some people, previously private — and it has entirely removed the option of making much of this information private.

This “publicly available information,” as Facebook now describes it, includes profile name, profile picture, list of friends, current city, gender, networks, and pages. Users can choose to not let this content be indexed by web search engines, as well as limit searches for your name on Facebook to “only friends.” However, if users somehow navigate to a profile of somebody they’re not friends with — say, by looking at a mutual friends’ list of friends — there’s no way to hide most of this information from them.

Facebook’s argument, as it states in the new privacy explanation on the site, is as follows:

Making connections—finding people you know, learning about people, searching for what people are saying about topics that interest you—is at the core of our product. This can only happen when people make their information available and choose to share more openly.

When Facebook revised its privacy terms in November, the company changed some language to reflect that some information would be publicly available. Previous language had promised more privacy than what is now available. For example, it had said: “You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the Privacy page.” Like the news today, it explained November changes within a more general context of offering meaningful privacy features.

The EFF describes the term changes as “at best confusing and at worst simply untrue.” Certainly, any user had been using the heavy-duty privacy settings but had not carefully read the new terms must feel blindsided today. However, Facebook also said today that only 15 to 20 percent of users have ever adjusted the default privacy settings. So, of course, the many users who already make the above profile information public will not be affected.

The silver lining, for privacy-loving users who want to stay on Facebook, is that there are a few ways to limit some information. Many of the users who criticized today’s changes did so because they wanted granular control over who saw their full list of friends. There’s no long granular control, but you can edit your friend list on your profile to not show your friend list at all. If you edit your basic profile information, you can also choose to hide your gender and your birthday. All of these settings, as the ACLU notes, are buried in the profile editing options rather than the main privacy settings page, meaning users who care may not find how to make these changes.

Other criticisms include the fact that Facebook recommends that you loosen privacy, that the transition tool does not allow most people to strengthen privacy settings, and that third-party applications are now getting access to the “publicly available information” without having to ask explicit permission.

So Why Did Facebook Make These Changes, This Way?

The main criticisms hinge on the idea that users prefer stronger privacy settings than what Facebook offers. This assumption is certainly true for some people, but not clearly true for everyone. And Facebook, as it says in its privacy guide, views the core of its service as being less about privacy and more about open sharing.

The reality is that Facebook is a privately-controlled company, and it can do what it wants. Users can punish Facebook by not using it, which, besides petitions and public criticism, are really the only options available for anyone who’s not happy. Update: Facebook has also released a follow-up blog post explaining the changes in more detail, including how some of the new options work.

We assume that Facebook thought through all of the issues beforehand — the reactions of users, of privacy-focused groups and of some of the press, as well as the possibility of user attrition. The company must believe that all of the costs are worth it if the net result is more people sharing more information. That value, after all, is what helps drive the company’s growth and revenue.

Facebook has been posting more status updates on its “Live Status” page in recent weeks to let developers know when there are platform-level performance problems. Today, Facebook posted an update saying that it’s seeing some issues that will take a “few days” to resolve:

We’ve identified issues related to scaling that require solutions to be rolled out over the course of the next few days. API latency in your apps may be high during this period. We’ll update when maintenance is complete. Thanks for your patience.

No more information is available other than to say the impact will be high latency for apps.

On a separate note, Facebook said today that it’s making a breaking change for non-English applications querying the user FQL table. “In order to significantly improve the performance of certain FQL queries, in 60 days we will return only English strings for the relationship_status, gender, and affiliations.status fields in the user FQL table,” Facebook says. If developers have hard-coded values in other languages, they’ll need to change their code by February 8, 2010.

Finally, Facebook said it is adding a new family FQL table to, you guessed it, get information about a user’s relatives. Facebook is adding features that make it more efficient for apps to add familial context, which makes sense given the huge growth in users over 35 and over 55 Facebook has seen this year.