As part of the Developer Roadmap Facebook announced in October, Facebook described new Applications and Games “dashboards” all users will soon see by default in their home page bookmark menu. As we observed a couple weeks ago, the dashboards contain new ways for developers to publish content to users that don’t fit into the concepts of feed stories, notifications, or invitations. Today, Facebook has released new details on how exactly the dashboard APIs will work.

The Dashboard News API

With the new dashboard, Facebook is introducing the concept of “dashboard news.” By default, the dashboard will show the 3 games or apps you used most recently, as well as 3 games or apps your friends are playing. Within each of these listings, Facebook says it will show the 2 most recent “dashboard news items,” in addition to the counter for that app.

What’s a “dashboard news item?” Good question. According to Facebook, there will be 2 types of dashboard news items: global and personal.

• Global news items are sent to all your application users when you call dashboard.setGlobalNews.
• Personal news items are sent to users you specify when you call dashboard.setNews.

In other words, it sounds like Facebook is intending that application developers use “personal news items” as a partial substitute for user-to-user notifications, as these are indeed a new app-to-user channel. However, unlike notifications, 1) there is no unified inbox, and 2) only the two most recent news items are shown, meaning the read rate and conversion rates could be lower. For example, if you send a user two “personal” news items, and then publish a “global” news item, the first personal news item you sent will apparently be lost forever.

Each dashboard news item is displayed with an icon and action link in the current mocks. “There is no sandbox for the Applications and Games Dashboards, but you can test this API on your own servers,” Facebook says.

Ultimately, developers are interested to see how large of a role the new dashboards will actually play in application retention. In the past, because the notifications inbox was not split up per-application, and there was no cap on unread notifications, many users received dozens of app-to-user notifications per day, and many developers simply published as many as they could.

Facebook Connect is being implemented across many web sites, but Facebook has been pretty quiet about how big the service actually is. Today, it’s sharing a few more pieces of information.

More than 80,000 “web sites, devices and other services” are running Connect now, a big increase from the 15,000 that the company had previously disclosed. And, when matched with numbers from analytics firm comScore, half of the 100 largest web sites in the world and two-thirds of the largest 100 web sites in the US have implemented Connect. You can see an especially striking example of Facebook Connect on The Huffington Post news site.

And, more than 60 million people “engage” with Facebook Connect every month via external services, according to the company. Facebook says it defines “engagement” here to include logging in to a Facebook Connect site and sharing content via Connect, so it doesn’t include people who visit the sites but don’t use Connect.

Facebook has focused on improving Connect and pushing it out to more users. The core service launched around a year ago, with more recent features including Connect for iPhone and for desktop applications, for gaming consoles and most recently for mobile devices.

This morning, Facebook announced that it is rolling out new privacy tools to its 350 million users that it initially announced in July. Why the new tools? While Facebook is not requiring users to open up their privacy settings, it is strongly encouraging users to make a lot more content visible to everyone, not just their friends, or friends-of-friends.

These steps reflect the priority Facebook has placed on starting to open up the content that lives within its system by letting those users who want to share more openly do so. As a result, we’re likely to see big changes in the value of Facebook’s new “real time” search service, and the emergence of new Facebook SEO strategies.

More Content Flowing Through Facebook’s Public Timeline

In the privacy transition tool, Facebook is giving the option to every user to share the content they post to Facebook (status updates, links, photos, videos, notes, etc.) with everyone. Interestingly, Facebook is choosing to set the default-on option in the new privacy transition wizard to “everyone” for many users – a pretty aggressive move that it knows will earn it some backlash.

While we don’t expect most users to choose this option, some users will. And even those who don’t choose a blanket open setting may choose to share some content with everyone via the new “privacy” control inside the publisher. The net result? While Facebook Search has been relatively sparse to date, starting today, there will be a lot more content in the “Posts by Everyone” search results.

This means Facebook Search is likely to start generating much more traffic both to Facebook Pages and profiles, and publisher websites. In other words, while organic, “viral” clicks generated from friends clicking on links has represented most of Facebook’s outbound traffic to date, expect to see search playing a much larger role over the coming months. Optimizing for Facebook Search is now something marketers, publishers, and developers need to start thinking more about.

We will also likely see more interest from search engines in gaining priority access to Facebook’s public real time stream, as has been the case with Twitter. Two days ago, Google formally announced that it is partnering with Facebook to include content from its real-time stream in search results. Twitter charges search engines for priority access to its stream, but we doubt Facebook will follow suit any time soon, because it has other priorities.

Increasing Importance of SEO

There’s two aspects of “search engine optimization” that are changing with Facebook’s new privacy controls. One, the changing role of Facebook Search as a tool for content discovery inside Facebook. Two, the increasing amount of content that Facebook is making public and, we assume, indexable to search engines like Google.

10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know

Fundamentally, by sharing more content publicly, Facebook stands to gain a lot of SEO benefit by encouraging users to open up. As long as users don’t misunderstand the new privacy tools and share too much, today’s moves should improve the overall quality of the “profile stubs” that Facebook allows Google and others to index today, increasing the quality of Facebook profile stubs in Google’s eyes, and thus SERP rankings and resulting traffic.

Going forward, that means more of users’ Facebook identity will be public record. This is, of course, a hard tension that Facebook will have to continue to walk a tight line on. While a huge part of the trust that users place in Facebook comes from their understanding of Facebook’s privacy model, Facebook wants to also benefit from openness wherever possible. Fundamentally, though, we believe most people will never feel comfortable publishing many things for the whole world to see.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

Facebook is starting to walk its 350 million monthly active users through a new interface for privacy settings today. Each user will see a window when they log in to Facebook, directing them to a page that asks them to confirm a new set of options for who can see things like their photos and status updates.

The big picture here is that Facebook is trying to balance a complex set of use cases so that people will use it — and not other services — for all sorts of public and private sharing. One minute, the average user might want to share a status update with the world and the next minute they might want to share a set of baby pictures with just their family.

We should note that Facebook first announced most of these settings in July. But there are a few very big new aspects to the changes today. Here, we’ll discuss how it all works, and how the moves fit in with Facebook’s larger goals.

First, after clicking through the initial window, users are taken to the new privacy settings page. It shows a range of menu options, letting users decide what types of information will be shared with whom. The company has pre-selected a choice for each category. If the user has, in their previous Facebook privacy settings, selected a more restrictive set of options than what Facebook makes the new default, then Facebook will pre-select “Old Settings” in the new options.

Today on a call with the press, Facebook estimated that only 15 to 20 percent of all users have previously made changes to their privacy settings. This means that for around 280 million people, Facebook will pre-select the new options. And, in some cases, Facebook is tacitly pushing users to share more with the world.

Facebook Pushes “Posts I Create” to “Everyone”

In the first section of the new privacy settings page, users see the following categories: About Me, Family and Relationships, Work and Education, and “Posts I Create” (which includes status updates, links, photos, videos and notes). In this section, each user has two options: Either stick with their old settings or let “everyone,” as in everyone on the internet, see the information in each category.

The other information is pretty standard. The really interesting part is that Facebook has put “Posts I Create” into this category — there’s no option to, by default, share “Posts I Create” with just, say, your friends.

However, to balance this push, Facebook is also rolling out a new, more granular set of ways to change settings in the publisher (for those not familiar with the term, this is the big window for sharing things that you see at the top of the news feed on the home page, and at the top of each user profile). Even if you have all of your status updates, photos, etc. set to be shared with everyone, you can still decide to be more restrictive for each piece of content as you share it. As with the other changes, the core of this interface was announced much earlier this year.

Publisher privacy options, as the company discussed in July, will now include not only everyone, but “Friends of Friends,” “Only Friends” or “Customize.” The last option lets you choose a specific friend list or verified network to share the content with. So if you have a friend list of family or college friends created already, you can choose the list and only share your special photos with them.

Note that verified networks include workplace and school networks, and can only be accessed by people with email domains for those types of networks (like “ericeldon@company.com” or “ericeldon@college.edu”). Regional networks, as the company has been saying for a long time, are gone.

Another important clarification from Facebook today: Users under 18 years of age will automatically have “everyone” restricted to friends, friends of friends and verified networks.

Lots of Information Will Stay Private

In contrast to “Posts I Create,” Facebook is making other new privacy options naturally more restrictive.

The second section of the new page shows Photos and Videos of Me, Birthday, and Religious and Political Views with the option to share either under “Old Settings” or under “Friends of Friends.” In other words, Facebook is not trying to get people to share any of this information with everyone on the Internet.

The third section is even more restrictive. Email Addresses and IM, Phone Numbers and Address are either shared under “Old Settings” or with “Friends.” There’s no new option to share this information with Everyone or even Friends of Friends.

These section options show that Facebook both wants people sharing day-to-day content with the world, but keeping much of their vital real-life information private.

Other parts of the new privacy settings interface go through great lengths to explain everything to users. Each category of information includes a question-mark icon, which, if clicked on explains in more detail what exactly is contained within the category. The bottom of the page includes links to learn more about Facebook’s privacy policies, as well as a reminder about what sort of information is shared with third-party applications. (However, on the call today, the company made clear that its planned changes for app access to user data will be separately rolled out “early next year.”) After selecting options, each user is taken to a page asking them to confirm the choices they’ve just made.

One final tweak we should mention is that users cannot get out of going through these new settings. The first time the user sees the initial window about the settings, they have the option to skip it. But after 24 hours, they’ll no longer be able to skip it.

Conclusion: More Privacy, but Also More Content for Everyone

Facebook’s focus on having all shared content go, by default, to everyone is a crucial part of its bigger plans. Connect, the company’s tool for letting other services access Facebook user data and share back to Facebook, relies on a lot of this shared information being public. For example, the live-streaming widget lets users watch videos of events — like President Barack Obama’s inauguration or Michael Jackson’s funeral — and share their comments with everyone else watching it by updating their status. If lots of users were to put their sharing settings to only allow friends to see their status updates, there would be fewer status updates for everyone to read. This would decrease engagement on Connect.

So today’s announcement is really about Facebook trying to have it all: People’s real-life, very sensitive personal information and relationships, as well as their very public activity.

This week’s biggest Page movers and shakers were Facebook, ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas and (RED). As Page Data showed last week, Verizon also continued its steady climb towards a million fans (although it’s taking a little longer than we anticipated), and with his open letter to all of Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Page also saw an 11.42% up-tick last week.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Facebook 6,223,923 +418,552 +7.21 2. ABC Family 25 Days of Christmas 412,104 +282,491 +217.95 3. (RED) 417,131 +225,660 +117.86 4. Big Prize Giveaways 2,301,578 +199,996 +9.52 5. Verizon 773,202 +194,581 +33.63 6. Texas Hold’em Poker 4,875,439 +192,646 +4.11 7. South Park 3,242,698 +154,832 +5.01 8. Mafia Wars 6,038,981 +131,157 +2.22 9. Disney 2,502,332 +115,271 +4.83 10. New Moon: The Movie 1,039,204 +65,175 +6.69 11. Twilight 4,389,285 +59,991 +1.39 12. Alicia Keys 1,288,624 +49,990 +4.04 13. Modern Warfare 2 440,743 +43,713 +11.01 14. Justin Bieber 1,078,595 +41,371 +3.99 15. Celebs on Facebook 2,145,759 +40,775 +1.94 16. Mark Zuckerberg 372,266 +38,156 +11.42 17. Toy Story 350,401 +37,156 +11.86 18. Playfish 1,649,917 +36,839 +2.28 19. Lady Gaga 4,428,235 +36,653 +0.83 20. Starbucks 5,149,326 +35,514 +0.69

ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas Page has had strong growth over the last few weeks, including a gain of 159,283 fans on December 2 – which makes sense as that was the day following the first day of the programming. The Page continues to have high interaction among fans, and is far and away the fastest growing holidays-focused Page on Facebook.

(RED), which brings together a number top brands to help fight HIV in Africa, had an understandably positive gain in fans last week around World AIDS Day.

As a global platform for sharing information with family, friends, co-workers, and the occasional random contact, Facebook isn’t the simplest service for recruiters to make use of. But it offers some of the best opportunities for finding new talent. Why? With 350 million people, Facebook is much larger than any other social service on the web, and, it offers an increasing number of features that recruiters can use to find the hires they want.

Certainly, some recruiters have been making use of Facebook for years. But given the near-constant upgrades that Facebook gives features like its news feed and Pages, it’s important to stay current with the best practices currently available. Here’s our list, organized by feature type.

Add Industry Colleagues as Friends and Use Them to Find More Prospective Hires

Here are a few pointers for how to make basic site features more useful in hunting heads.

1. Your personal profile: Most people on Facebook use the site to only be friends with people they’ve met in real life. But there is still a lot of overlap with business connections in any industry; go to an industry trade show, for example, and you’ll probably get a friend request or two from people you got to know there. A recruiter can tap into these sorts of connections by actively adding others in their industry as friends (recruiters should make sure their own Facebook profiles are work-safe before doing this). Once you have some industry friends, you can use the “mutual friends” feature that Facebook provides anyone who is signed in to the site. You can see it any time you visit another user’s personal profile, or when they request to add you as a friend. Take the time to look at the mutual friends you already have with your existing Facebook friends, as you may discover connections you didn’t know you had. People who are friends with your friends will be more likely to trust you, because that simple connection increases your legitimacy.

2. Other people’s profiles: There have been plenty of stories about prospective employees who got job offers pulled because the employer saw questionable content on their Facebook profiles. These users typically do not realize just how much of their Facebook profiles they’re sharing with people they friend on the site (those users should take a close look at Facebook’s privacy settings). However, anything they make available through their privacy settings is fair game, and worth taking a look at in terms of trying to figure out how valuable the prospective employee might be. While the basic profile information — education, work, etc. — is obviously of interest, what they say and do on their walls can tell much more about what they’re like, day to day. (Again, for people who are considering being friends with recruiters, make sure that you’re comfortable sharing this sort of information with them.)

3. Engagement: Recruiters aren’t typically in the role of publicly promoting the companies they work for, so be careful about engaging with the things other people share. The focus should be on mining your friends engagement for new connections. Lets say you’re a recruiter and you’re friends with a thought leader in your industry — watch to see who likes and comments on the items they share, or who they get into discussions with in other people’s items. Then, check out what you can on those people’s profiles and consider getting in touch with them. However, actively engaging could also help recruiters become better real-life friends with potential candidates, as this example shows, leading to more long-term business.

Look for Relevant Pages, Groups and Status Updates

Facebook actually makes much of its site public, you just need to know where to look.

4. Pages: First off, employers looking for new hires should have an active Facebook Page. Regularly posting about the company and discussing it with users will, in part, attract people who want to work at the company. If the company does this, the Page can be a valuable place for any recruiter to look for leads.The company can do additional things like sending out status updates about hiring — fans will see these updates in their news feeds, and potentially respond. Also, page owners should be sure to provide contact information, at least, about career opportunities — if not a tab called something like “career opportunities” featuring more details as well as links to the employment section of the company site and any other resources. For larger recruiting outfits, it may be useful to have a separate Page, to use specifically for sharing employment opportunities. Recruiters should use Facebook Search to look for the Pages of competitors, and then check out the users who engage there.

5. Groups: Facebook intends groups to be non-commercial, more as places where people with similar interests can freely collect and discuss whatever matters to them. So there are almost certainly groups on Facebook related to any type of job that a recruiter is trying to fill. As with Pages, use Facebook Search to find groups about a particular topic, then examine the users who are active in those groups. You can also create a group about a topic related to an industry, but this requires more community engagement than you may have the time and inclination to do.

6. Search: Besides Pages and Groups, Facebook Search also shows you public status updates from users and from Pages. Look at these to find potential people or Pages that you hadn’t otherwise thought to look at, that are on-topic for the types of recruits you want to find.

Target Multiple Types of Hires with Facebook Ads

This single, self-serve product (here) lets you target ads based in all sorts of information, which lets you use it for more than one type of ad.

7. Companies and connections: The ad tool lets you select ads for people within specific companies, based on what workplace networks they’ve joined, and what companies they list in their personal profiles. Use this information to go after the employees of your client’s competitors. You can also target ads based to people who are connected to your Page, group, event or application (or, conversely, to the people who are not connected to any of these features). You can also broaden the previous options to friends of people who are (or are not) connected to your Page or to other features. Think of this sort of ad as being focused on users who have already expressed some sort of interest in your company or your general industry. Target the content in this type of ad specifically to what interested and informed people will be thinking, anyway. We go into more detail, here: 10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads That Every Performance Advertiser Should Know.

8. Demographic data: Facebook’s ad tool also lets you select by all sorts other options, like country, age, gender, school, college major, etc. As opposed to the campaigns, mentioned above, that target interested types of people, think about about demographic-type campaigns as being a broad sweep of Facebook. Engineering majors at colleges in the US, for example, may have no clue that they’d be interested in working at a hot new cleantech startup, nor might they have a clue that they might want to work at a big company working in the same area. So, make sure these ads capture the high-level points about the job, rather than pushing industry lingo and details.

Overall, you should test out a variety of Facebook ads that target different types of people you’re trying to recruit. Be sure to test specific criteria for each type of ad — try testing by certain states or cities, for example, or by other factors like the length of the campaign. You will probably not run the optimal Facebook ad campaign the first time around, but you probably will if you keep testing against the return on investment that you’re aiming for.

More In-Depth Resources from Inside Network:

• The Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
• Inside Facebook’s Best & Worst Facebook Marketing 2009
• The Facebook Global Monitor: Tracking Facebook in Global Markets
• Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010

Facebook has become an increasingly important platform for viral online video distribution, and now Facebook has added a small new feature to its video player that should increase the video viewers-to-page fans conversion rate: a “Become a Fan” overlay button.

The new “Become a Fan” button is a nice call to action that will encourage more people who come across Facebook Page videos to establish a longer term relationship with the Page. In order to see the button, you must mouse over the video player, and you must not already be a fan (or administrator) of the Page. When you mouse over the button itself, it expands to show the full “Become a Fan” call to action text. Here’s how it looks:

Overall, this new feature is an added perk that will encourage more Page administrators to upload more videos to Facebook. It should especially benefit musicians, TV shows, and movie studios, who make heavier use of videos for promotional purposes. It may make sense for some celebrities, producers, and brands to encourage fans to distribute their promo videos using the Facebook player, in order to get more Facebook fans wherever the video is embedded on the web. However, we haven’t seen any analytics from Facebook yet to enable you to measure how successful this new feature is.

To dig deeper into Facebook marketing, check out The Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook.

We have written in recent months of Facebook’s growth in Southeast Asia. As we near the beginning of 2010, that trend does not appear to be slowing down. Throughout much of the region (except in China, of course, where Facebook is blocked), usage continues to rise. Some countries have seen incredible growth – Taiwan, for example, has added 5 million new monthly active Facebook users in the last 6 months alone – nearly 25% of the country’s total population.

What’s driving this growth? Increasingly, we’re seeing more users adopt Facebook in order to – you guessed it – play games. But not just any games – in many cases, games built by the growing number of Asian developers and publishers deploying titles on the Facebook Platform.

Taiwan is an interesting case study. Six months ago, very few people were using Facebook in Taiwan (under 400,000, according to our Global Monitor report). Today, that number stands at over 5.4 million (!). Developers in the region say that nearly everyone joined Facebook in order to play games like Happy Harvest, published by 6 waves, Pet Society, and Restaurant City. We’ve heard reports of local restaurants giving out Facebook Happy Harvest coins to customers who eat there. There are relatively advanced systems for distributing virtual currency already in place, and these are migrating to Facebook quickly as well.

Increasingly, we’ve been hearing stories of Chinese development shops being recruited to build (or license) their games for Facebook – even though very few people in China can actually access the site. These developers started off building apps for Xiaonei, Kaixin, QQ, or others, but because of the “guanxi” business culture that makes it harder for developers to strike business deals with platforms, more Chinese developers are increasingly turning their attention to Facebook. These developers see more opportunity to build on an open platform like Facebook than face the often-brutal business terms offered by the Chinese platforms if they become popular. As a result, there is increasing demand for talent to build and port Facebook games in the region.

But people joining Facebook in order to play games are using Facebook differently than those elsewhere. Often times, users join Facebook for the sole purpose of playing “social” games – not sharing authentic information with their friends. As a result, we’re hearing about many cases of players adding thousands of Facebook friends who they don’t know in real life, just in order to play Facebook games with them. These users post less photos and less meaningful status updates, because they’re not using Facebook for communication with their real life friends as much.

That could mean mixed things for Facebook going forward. Obviously, Facebook is happy to be growing throughout Asia, where it competes not only with local social platforms, but also heavily with Yahoo, MSN, Orkut, and Friendster, which are popular in different parts of the region.

But fundamentally, Facebook has always articulated its value proposition as a more efficient way to share information in a trusted way. Personal data shared by Facebook users is what makes the News Feed – the core of Facebook’s information distribution system – so compelling to hundreds of millions of people. In cases in which the News Feed is filled with content from random gaming friends, it’s quite possible that Facebook could see much lower retention rates from its core features over time, instead more heavily relying on games to drive engagement and growth. If that were to indeed be the case on a wide scale, that could present some tensions for Facebook’s core product design – and business – over time.

More In-Depth Resources from Inside Network:

• Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010
• The Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
• Inside Facebook’s Best & Worst Facebook Marketing 2009
• The Facebook Global Monitor: Tracking Facebook in Global Markets

Facebook Page services company Involver is getting into the music business, in a sense, with the launch of a new app called Music for Pages. You can see it in action, exclusively streaming Alicia Keys’ new album for her fans on her Facebook Page. The app comes with a customizable streaming playlist feature, along with tour dates and a way for fans to share tracks on their profiles and news feeds.

The move puts Involver in competition with MySpace’s iLike, which came out with its own unofficial music pages in late 2007 — before Facebook Pages launched — and streamed its first major album last year for R.E.M. But Involver’s move makes sense, despite the established competition, because Pages have been becoming an increasingly useful part of Facebook. Recently, Facebook changed the policies around sweepstakes and promotions for marketers, requiring that they take place within an application canvas page or Page tab. And just today, Google said it would be featuring Pages in its real-time search results, meaning that Google real-time searchers might soon be seeing Alicia Keys status updates about her new album.

While iLike’s main Music app has more than 10.4 million monthly active users, Keys’ page has around 1.3 million fans, according to PageData. (Note: Facebook doesn’t currently publish monthly page traffic, at lease some portion of her fans will see the promotion today.)

Involver will make the music app another option for Page owners to use, as a premium product that it charges an annual subscription and service fee for, in exchange for setting up the application, developing custom features, and other services. In some sense, this also makes Pages more of a rival to MySpace’s music distribution services; and, the company recently bought iLike.

MySpace has repeatedly stated that it is making entertainment its focus, in a strategic move away trying to compete with Facebook as a social identity service. It has been pushing its own music site, with MySpace and iLike now appearing in Google real-time search results as well. It also plans to run music in iLike on Facebook, and it will likely make sharing MySpace music easy to do on Facebook, when it integrates Facebook Connect.

To be clear, MySpace is trying to offer a comprehensive, consumer-facing music service, especially with its flagship music property, MySpace Music, while Involver is just trying to make it easier for musicians to promote themselves on Facebook Pages (not, say, create a rival to MySpace Music). However, the two ecosystems will compete in terms of selling things like albums and schwag for the musicians and their labels. On Alicia Key’s page, for example, there’s a tab for an exclusive album that has you click on to Sony’s web site to buy it. You can bet Sony will be watching to see how well that tab drives sales versus its promotions on MySpace, and on other music services around the web.

For musicians, in any case, Involver’s app (along with everything MySpace is doing) shows that there are still improving opportunities to find new fans and make money online.

As part of Google’s wide-ranging announcement today about new real-time search features, it says it will begin showing the real-time results of public content that appears on Facebook Pages. This specifically means that any brand, famous individual or other Page owner who shares status updates or media like videos or photos from their Page will get this content showing up in real-time Google search results, which could increase SEO traffic for Facebook Pages.

Microblogging service Twitter recently announced a deal with Google to do the same, and today, so has MySpace. We don’t know if users who make personal status updates publicly accessible will soon be getting that content in real-time results as well.

Facebook and Google had said a deal was in the works during the Web 2.0 conference earlier this fall; then, Microsoft announced a deal to include all publicly-available status updates within its Bing search engine.