Facebook gave some very prominent home page promotion to its “friend finder” page today, placing a large upsell on many users’ home pages, in an effort to encourage more users to import their email contacts in order to invite new people to the site and find friends already on Facebook.

The in-house ad tells you about friends of yours who have used friend finder at some point in the past — which is many people, as the feature has been in various forms for years.

The destination page, if you’re not familiar, has a few different ways for you to find your friends. First, it encourages you to import contact lists from various email and instant message services, matching names and email addresses from those address books with people who are on Facebook. It also shows you the full selection of people who regularly appear in its “Suggestions” panel on the right-hand side of the home page. And, it includes links to searches for people in your networks.

The reason for this promotion appears to be that Facebook wants to stimulate growth as well as the number of friendships between people who know each other but aren’t yet connected on Facebook. Because these connections are real, they reinforce authentic identity within Facebook – people are more likely to provide real-world information about themselves rather than fake avatar information, as they do on other sites. We’ll be keeping an eye on growth numbers this month to see if this campaign produces an appreciable bump.

By now most people know that a catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti Tuesday. The reason people know is partly due to the ubiquity of Haiti-related posts, status updates and news stories on Facebook in the past few days. And now there’s a corresponding surge of interest in disaster relief sweeping the site.

Here’s a sample of what must be millions of results when you search Facebook for “haiti”:

Everyone seems to be getting in a word about Haiti on Facebook — from President Barack Obama to The New York Times to the Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services (Haiti is a largely Catholic country). Many of the updates individuals are posting every second on the service are soliciting donations to help the victims.

As with other disaster charities, it’s always a good policy to double-check which of these is reputable. Ultimately the best thing you can do to sort through them all is either use a search engine to confirm whether they are legitimate or rely on traditional aid organizations like the Red Cross or traditional media that have compiled lists of quality charities.

Haiti, which shares half an island with its neighbor the Dominican Republic, is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and this earthquake has done heavy damage to a Caribbean country that was poor to begin with and whose infrastructure was already incredibly lacking. The government currently estimates that the quake has killed more than 100,000 people.

The Causes application on Facebook joined in the effort via Oxfam America and had raised more than $10,000 dollars by midday Wednesday.

Two other fundraising campaigns appear to have gotten big on Facebook (and Twitter), both use texting to add the donation to your phone bill, from the Red Cross and Haitian musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti organization. Both organizations are soliciting donations via text messages adding either $10 or $5 to your phone bill.

Two Facebook groups have also been growing by leaps and bounds since Tuesday — Haitian Earthquake Relief and Haiti Needs Us, And We Need Haiti — where members share prayers, news, links to charity and other ways people can help. The aforementioned text-driven fundraisers are also heavily mentioned here, along with links to other charities.

Zynga announced that it was bringing back social advertising offers earlier today, after suspending them for two months while the company worked on new quality controls. Now, per a blog post by chief executive Mark Pincus last night, the offers are back. And they look more like normal coupons than the remnant-style advertising you see elsewhere on the web.

We covered the announcement in a little more detail over on Inside Social Games. But here’s a closer look at the first Zynga offer wall now in action (that we know of), currently viewable in PetVille. It’s provided by a company called SocialVibe, from what we can tell; it’s not one of the established offer companies, and instead it has spent the last couple of years creating social engagement advertising that caters to major brands.

This is on display in the offer wall, although there are only four advertisers at this point (typical offer walls have dozens if not hundres, albeit many of lower quality).

The advertisers in PetVille include Microsoft’s Xbox game Lips, apparel company Timberland, device-maker HTC and carrier Sprint. You participate in the offers to earn the virtual currency, PetVille Coins, then you can use them to buy goods in the pet-caring game.

There are a few key points about this offer wall that are worth looking at more closely, as they address past problems with offers.

First, each of the offers includes text that clearly explains what action the user will be asked to take. Other offers have not always clearly disclosed this information.

Second, each ad is clearly for a brand. There’s no secret plan here to get users to sign up for something they don’t want, such as a mobile ringtone subscription; there’s no sneaky survey asking them to reveal personal information.

Third, the top of the offer wall shows a button that says “Missing PetVille Coins.” Although other offer walls have this feature, many users who took offers have complained that they did not receive the coins they earned in a timely manner. In this wall, users can see what offers they’ve already earned and what ones they’re still waiting to receive points for. “If you have an activity listed below with a Status of ‘Pending’ please note that it can take up to 30 minutes for coins to be awarded,” a note in the interface explains. The 30 minute turnaround is notable because some offers have taken days — or longer — to be redeemed.

Now, let’s look at a sample offer: The Sprint ad.

It appears as a pop-up window, so you don’t get taken away from the app. The ad asks users to watch and rank a video proclaiming the greatness of Sprint, with the ranking scale going between 1 and 5 stars. Once you’ve ranked the video, you see another pop-up window asking if you want to publish the ranking to your Facebook friends, or skip that action — this is another opportunity for the ad to reach Facebook users, and a tactic that we haven’t seen in offer walls to date.

Then, once you’re done with the ad, you can see that you’ve taken the offer. Instead of a button that says “300 PetVille Coins” in bright green, it is now greyed out, and the text says “Completed!” Some offer companies have previously tried to get users to take the same offer more than once, an action that Facebook has prohibited.

This offer wall clearly has a better user experience than most others that we’ve seen to date: the offer quality is high and users are told exactly what they’re earning, and when and how they’re earning it. Zynga has put considerable time into ensuring that third-party offer providers treat users well; SocialVibe has created an experience that does this. We’ve also heard that Zynga is working with other offer companies, including a market leader, Offerpal. While we don’t see any of those walls live yet, we’re interested to see what adaptions these companies have made, as well.

The wall also shows what many people in advertising and social gaming have long understood: Offers are fundamentally valuable, when done right. Advertisers want to get in front of users who will otherwise ignore banner advertising. The fact that users are incentivized by social gaming offers to participate in ads is conceptually similar to, say, a TV viewer being incentived to sit through a commercial in order to continue watching a program. While brands may not use offer walls to sell subscriptions — although some will, like Netflix — the value they get is in being able to clearly see that people are engaging with their ads, then measure that attention against their other ad campaign goals. We’ve seen similar efforts by other offer companies, including gWallet’s videos, that have yielded positive results for brands.

With improvements like these, the offers industry is moving closer to tapping into the billions of dollars that brands spend on advertising every year.

While neither the full release of the Facebook Credits system nor the release of the full application programing interface to developers has yet to be announced, there have been a handful of games that have been testing the Facebook Credits integration.

As we reported back in mid-December, Happy Island, developed byCrowdStar, was the first game that exclusively used Facebook Credits for all in-game purchases. Recently, we’ve noticed that a “Payments Issues” link has been added to the footer of Happy Island, which provides a sneak peek at what options users will have to dispute payments for Credits going forward.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Facebook and McAfee announced a partnership last night aimed at protecting the more than 350 million users of the social network from a barrage of security risks to their accounts.

One part of the partnership allows Facebook users to download a six month subscription to McAfee’s Internet Security Suite software for free, then gives them the opportunity to continue the service at a 30% discount after the six months are up.

In a blog entry, Facebook recommended users take advantage of the six month subscription; the post also supplied computer security tips and noted that the company has developed a “unique” process for re-securing compromised accounts. This process has incorporated McAfee software, asking users of compromised accounts to run a scan on their computers before regaining access to Facebook.

The software offer is located on the “Protect Your PC” tab on McAfee’s Facebook page.

After becoming a fan and selecting your country from a list on the Facebook page you are prompted to enter your credit card information to McAfee’s web site, although the site says your credit card won’t be charged for six months. Unless you cancel by calling a 1-800 number your subscription to the security subscription will be automatically renewed at the end of the six months.

McAfee was selected by to enter the partnership from among several security firms to be the “exclusive provider of consumer security software” for Facebook; the social network noted that it’s “applying all financial incentives from this partnership to the benefit of its users and will not be taking a share of any revenue from user subscriptions.”

McAfee’s software protects against viruses, spyware, spam, phishing and also includes a two-way firewall, identity protections and parental controls.

The offer will be available to Facebook users in mostly western countries, but also in parts of Latin America, including: U.S., U.K., Australia, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Canada, Mexico, Brazil and additional countries are to be added in the upcoming months.

President Barack Obama’s administration is utilizing Facebook to participate in question and answer sessions on a number of topics, with White House and government officials making themselves available for live chats with Facebook users this week.

The White House Live application, apparently developed in-House, allows Facebook users to pose questions on a number of governmental topics. As with other integrations of Facebook’s live-streaming service, this one lets you chat with everyone else who’s watching on Facebook, or just your Facebook friends.

The administration is posting about each chat ahead of time on the official administration blog; halfway through the week, however, only 8,000 or so people have added the app.

The live chats are happening every day this week. EPA administrator Carol Browner led off the series Monday by answering questions about clean energy. Ben Rhodes of the National Security Council fielded questions about foreign policy and domestic security yesterday. The program continues today at 12 p.m. EST as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius addressing health care, a topic that could garner a massive deal of interest given the ongoing debate over health care reform — however, it looks like this one’s been cancelled due to what the White House site says is a scheduling conflict. Tomorrow, Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra will discuss ways in which President Obama has changed Washington with Norm Eisen, special counsel to the President for ethics and government reform. The series wraps up Friday at 1 p.m. EST when Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, speaks on the administration’s efforts to decrease unemployment.

However, the app is also showing live broadcasts of other White House press events, providing a way for users to talk to each other about ongoing news. We’re not sure if the app is going to stay live after this week concludes, but we hope and assume so.

The live chats are the latest use of Facebook by the White House. Obama saw significant traction on Facebook during his presidential campaign; and, his administration has been increasing its presence on the network since last March. The official White House Facebook Page currently has more than 430,000 fans and offers everything from candid photos of the president to video and slideshare presentations.

This week’s list of top Facebook applications by the number of new daily active users (DAU) continues the non-news trend of last week. Popular apps are continuing to grow and picking back up losers that went away during the holidays; meanwhile, there are no surprise additions and few apps that haven’t been on the list at some point in the past.

At the top of the list, Fishville has traded places with another Zynga hit, Farmville. We cover the rest of the movement in games over at Inside Social Games, and there’s more on the list’s non-game apps below. Here it is:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	27,898,912	+1,163,442	+4.17
2.	Facebook for iPhone	12,124,065	+721,153	+5.95
3.	Happy Island	2,276,246	+484,287	+21.28
4.	How Well Do You Know Me?	584,474	+421,868	+72.18
5.	Tiki Farm	1,010,569	+378,730	+37.48
6.	Pillow Fight	1,145,347	+373,256	+32.59
7.	Café World	9,880,979	+364,195	+3.69
8.	Country Life	2,315,020	+312,038	+13.48
9.	FamilyLink.com	1,026,238	+292,159	+28.47
10.	Mobile	6,180,705	+228,782	+3.70
11.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,398,574	+227,515	+4.21
12.	MindJolt Games	2,327,650	+217,035	+9.32
13.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	7,712,713	+201,499	+2.61
14.	Island Paradise	2,058,836	+191,322	+9.29
15.	Zoo World	1,475,773	+185,168	+12.55
16.	FishVille	6,889,169	+129,694	+1.88
17.	Mignon & Sexy ?	122,229	+121,957	+99.78
18.	PetVille	4,172,691	+103,520	+2.48
19.	Country Story	1,185,586	+99,569	+8.40
20.	My Town	204,169	+93,418	+45.76

Second place on the list, Facebook for iPhone, appears to be taking up permanent residency, as the device continues to become more common across the United States and other countries. Facebook for BlackBerry is also growing, if not as fast. If the Google Nexus does well, they may soon be joined by Facebook for Android.

Following the games on the list, there’s FamilyLink.com, a family tree tool that has almost 18 million monthly active users, but not much regular participation. Only six percent use it daily, though that’s better than the three to four percent it had during the holidays.

Likewise, there are How Well Do You Know Me? and Friend Quiz, two applications that have had a fairly steady user base for some time. Both appear to be headed back to the ten percent DAU range, where they were earlier in December, without much growth in overall user numbers.

The only really new non-game app to this week’s list is Mignon & Sexy, a French-language quiz that has been around for several months, but has only gained users in the past couple of days. It looks like a simple friend quiz, but oddly, after letting us know that we’re 77 percent Mignon (cute) the app immediately redirects us to Zoo World, a RockYou! game that came in slightly above it in our list.

Next week there should be more to report, as the holiday trends end and new growers appear on the list.

Facebook announced today that is now providing financial support to the open source-focused Apache Software Foundation, joining other leading consumer internet companies in their support of open source software. Although Facebook has already contributed software to the foundation, it is now donating $40,000 and joining it as a “Gold” sponsor.

The foundation supports open-source software projects “characterized by a collaborative, consensus based development process, an open and pragmatic software license, and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field.” Facebook has already open-sourced 20 projects, and contributed three to Apache.

Of the three big Facebook projects in Apache, one is Thrift, a framework for scalable cross-language services development. Another is Hive, a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Apache Hadoop, which is a Java software framework that supports data-intensive applications; Hive makes it easier to query and analyze large data sets stored within Hadoop. The third is Cassandra, a “highly scalable, eventually consistent, distributed, structured key-value store,” used by Facebook for showing results in its inbox search — and now used by other companies including Twitter, Digg and Rackspace.

Facebook has relied heavily on open-source software over the past few years and now it’s giving more back. It joins gold sponsor Hewlett-Packard. Leading web companies Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are the next level up, the $100,000 “Platinum” sponsors.

Pepsi’s Refresh Project is a charity contest set to donate millions of dollars to organizations throughout the United States in 2010. Located on an application in a tab within the company’s “Pepsi – Refresh Everything” Facebook Page and on its web site, the contest lets users submit and vote on the charities they think are most worthy of funding.

Pepsi partnered with four non-profit groups in the venture, who will award up to $1.3 million a month in several increments. Each monthly amount will be split up between two grants of $250,000 and up to 10 grants of $50,000, $25,000 and $5,000 each. Any legal U.S. resident over 13 may submit a proposal, either on their own or in conjunction with a non-profit or business, but the projects must be U.S.-specific.

With the motto, “Submit. Promote. Vote,” the contest opens this month as grant submissions will begin to be accepted from January 13 until January 24; thereafter submissions will run from the first through the 15 of the month, or until the first 1,000 applications are received, whichever comes first.

[Update: Refresh participants are reporting that the site is accidentally compromising personal information.]

Categories of the grants include health, arts and culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighbors and education and winners will be selected each month of 2010 by Facebook voters, in Pepsi’s words, “in a democratic way online wherein members of the public will vote for projects that they find the most compelling.”

While corporate giving is not a new concept, using Facebook to do so is, and the process is not without a few kinks.

JPMorgan Chase & Company had a generally successful crowd-sourced charity funding campaign on Facebook; but, a few charities said they were cut out as voting came to a close because their missions included legalizing marijuana and opposing abortion. In this app, some people will inevitably want Pepsi to fund charities that address issues Pepsi wants to avoid.

In any case, Pepsi’s Refresh Project is set to run throughout 2010, so despite any bumps along the way, they’ll have a lot of chances to get it right.

While you still can’t use email to do things like send private messages back and forth on Facebook, the company is making another email-based feature available to everyone today. When you receive email notifications about your friends activity — photos you’re tagged in, status updates, Wall posts, videos, etc. — you can send a comment back via email.

All you have to do is reply to the email notification, typing in your comment at the top of the message body. You don’t need to be logged in for it to work. Many organizations block Facebook in the workplace — something to do with “productivity,” we hear — so this is another way for people to stay in touch with friends, engage in flame wars, etc. in spite of their IT departments.

Facebook has been testing the feature since last month. You can adjust what email notifications you receive in your Facebook Account Settings.