Facebook introduced a way for users to share individual pieces of content with specific types and lists of their friends, back in December. Today, it has extended the same feature from the Publisher tool to applications. Now, developers can add the same controls within applications and Facebook Connect integrations, so users can share items from an application with a specific group of friends.

The interface will look like the existing controls. A drop-down lets you choose to share an item with everyone, friends of friends, only friends, or a customized selection. The last option lets you choose specific people or lists who will or won’t be able to see the item.

The controls are available for developers to use in the Publisher and Feed forms, as Facebook details. Privacy settings default to whatever the user has already set, although developers can ask users to set alter these settings for specific pieces of content in specific situations. These include publishing to the stream, uploading videos and creating new albums.

Because the controls apply across the platform, sites using Facebook Connect, desktop and mobile applications can use the feature.

As more web traffic measurement firms release their January traffic data, the results are all point to the same trend: Facebook is continuing to gain more monthly users in the United States. Compete updated its site with January statistics today, and the numbers show that it is also gaining on big web rivals.

Facebook grew from 132 to 134 million monthly active users over the course of the month. That’s not the fastest growth the firm has shown for Facebook, but it’s notable because Yahoo fell slightly to 132 million over the same period. Google still has the most, at 148 million, but its growth is happening more slowly. The other big piece of data, as Compete notes on its blog today, is that Facebook continues to increase its share of overall attention among US users, coming in at 11.6%. This is possibly at the expense of sites including Google and Yahoo, as their share of attention fell slightly to 4.1% and 4.25%, respectively.

Nielsen, a Compete rival, also recently released its January data, and showed a similar trend around user and attention numbers. Facebook came in at 116 million monthly active users, below Google and Yahoo; in terms of attention, however, the report showed US users were spending more time on Facebook every month, and less time on many other big sites.

In October Facebook joined the Peace Dot effort from Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, an effort to promote peace and connect peace-minded people across the world via an online directory of organizations with peace.dot sub-domains. Within 24 hours of Facebook’s Peace Dot launch, the Page’s 1,600 status updates reached more than 200,000 people and was being translated to 65 languages.

Peace Dot was a project that fits well with Facebook’s goal of making the world more open and connected, Facebook engineer Mark Slee tells us, who explains that tracking the way people engage in peace is very feasible with Facebook’s user database.

The page has four main features: a photo slideshow of protests around the world, a widget for users to share thoughts on peace and two graphs. One graph tracks whether people in different countries believe in world peace and another tracks connections between people from two sides of conflict, such as Israel and Palestine. Users can adjust the graphs to see results from different countries or connections made between opposing sides in conflict areas. The idea is to show how people are becoming friends (on Facebook) and also becoming more positive about world peace.

Slee tells us that the page has continued to see good traffic since its launch, despite the fact that it hasn’t really changed much — although plans to do so are in the works. It currently receives 25,000 to 50,000 hits per month and 47,000 unique users have participated by posting to the widget on the right-hand side of the page, he says.

Facebook’s effort with the Peace Dot project has been well received because the page’s design has allowed for data collection that adds a measurable dimension to the ambiguous concept of “peace,” Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab researcher Jordy Mont-Reynaud tells us.

“The concept of peace has a brand problem, it’s considered nebulous,” he says, explaining that Peace Dot attempts to get at the metrics of peace, such as increased empathy or an increased tolerance for different languages. Facebook was a good place to take Peace Dot because it’s where people go to learn more about other people, potentially increasing empathy, he said. Eventually, the project hopes to take Facebook’s metrics-based vision of Peace Dot and run with it, Mont-Reynaud added.

Facebook’s Slee agrees. “Our goal is less to drive traffic to the page than have people keep interacting as, with the whole spirit of the Peace Dot project in general. Our goal is to have it be a catalyst to get other people thinking, ‘What could I do to get involved in this?’.”

Facebook is planning on ways to create more data from its Peace Dot page by tweaking polling functions, for example, as well as figuring out how to make this data available for peace-related research, Slee says.

B.J. Fogg, Director of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, adds that right now Peace Dot is working on ironing out technical kinks associated with growing from 20 to 50 organizations in the directory, as well as do launches on every continent. He also hopes that, eventually, data will be a big part of the project.

Games often dominate this weekly AppData list of top gaining Facebook apps by new daily active users (DAU), but not so this week. As a category, games posted remarkably weak gains, so the top spots are all held by other app types.

However, take what you see with a grain of salt. Facebook has been experiencing some reporting problems recently, something the number one app, Slide FunSpace, gives perfect evidence of: despite its claimed gain of almost three million DAU, it’s unlikely the app has gained many new users at all of late, judging by the app’s number of monthly active users.

Luckily, most of the remaining apps appear to be trouble-free. Here’s the full list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Slide FunSpace	3,080,289	+2,896,432	+94.03
2.	Food Fight	1,294,997	+1,294,892	+99.99
3.	iHeart	3,144,659	+1,118,174	+35.56
4.	Photos I Love!	1,219,765	+1,083,697	+88.84
5.	Mobile	6,667,292	+667,792	+10.02
6.	Marketplace	856,812	+368,342	+42.99
7.	Static FBML	1,615,595	+342,057	+21.17
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,033,218	+311,497	+5.16
9.	MindJolt Games	2,853,133	+234,366	+8.21
10.	Causes	1,402,729	+196,058	+13.98
11.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	8,277,617	+184,848	+2.23
12.	Movies	422,123	+134,450	+31.85
13.	SPP Ranch!	216,500	+123,019	+56.82
14.	Demande à tes Amis	225,509	+121,352	+53.81
15.	Facebook for iPhone	13,809,315	+117,335	+0.85
16.	Graffiti	311,928	+113,210	+36.29
17.	Tarjetitas	249,700	+108,032	+43.26
18.	Hero World	365,729	+107,157	+29.30
19.	Island Paradise	2,075,752	+106,337	+5.12
20.	My City Life	461,588	+106,307	+23.03

Food Fight is brand new, at least under that name. But underneath the cafeteria brawling theme, it’s just another poke-style app, almost identical in operation to many others.

You can skip over iHeart and Photos I Love!, as their updated stats suggest that their DAU gains are fleeting. Mobile, the next app on the list at number five, grows pretty consistently, although it was nowhere to be seen last week.

Next up is Marketplace, Facebook’s default classifieds app. We’ve been watching it rapidly pick up new users with a sweepstakes that it’s running for prizes that are, honestly, pretty low in value (smartphones, gaming systems, etc.) in proportion to the number of users streaming in for a chance at winning them..

But it’s not the value of the prize that’s bringing in more would-be-winners. We took a moment to check out the app, and found that it’s offering a nice little bribe to entrants: bring in more friends, and your chances to win increase.

Finally, Static FBML, the app for using custom HTML on Facebook, is continuing the steady growth it has enjoyed for several weeks. If nothing else, this app’s success is proof that modified Pages are becoming more common on Facebook.

Out of the 203 million people who used the web in the United States last month, more than 116 million were on Facebook, according to Nielsen. That’s a 5.8% percent increase over what it reported in December, and roughly on track with the growth rates it and rival firms have been seeing lately.

The more interesting part is how much more time people are spending on Facebook versus other sites.

Most users on other properties owned by the 10 largest web companies on the web saw an average of, at the most 2 hours a month. Facebook’s users spent 7 hours on the site, on average. That’s not all. The average time spent on all of the other top 10 properties fell versus the previous month, but Facebook’s rose by 9.7%. Nielsen has divided up its top 10 rankings by both the top “parent companies/divisions” on the US web — the stats, above — but it has also broken out rankings by individual sites. The same trends are clearly visible, either way.

Another interesting point here. Facebook’s latest self-reported statistics say that the average user spends 55 minutes a day on the site, which implies nearly 30 hours a month. That average includes Facebook’s international traffic, which comprises more than 70% of its 400 million monthly active users, it says. So perhaps US users have typically spent a lot less time than their international peers on Facebook, but are starting to spend more time now?

However, it’s not as if Facebook is taking over everything on the web, though. Its service intends to keep people engaging with it as much as possible, doing things like looking at photos and using applications. Other major internet properties, like Google’s search engine, are intended to help people find other sites they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Many of the others on the list also have more utilitarian purposes. A more significant way to look at this traffic is by the amount of money it generates — on that front, Facebook still has a lot of growing to do.

Peanut Labs is best known for providing surveys and offers to social application developers and other companies that use virtual currencies. But the San Francisco company will be launching a new service later this week that moves it into a new market. It will begin running local advertising coupons within its offers, letting people earn discounts on food, merchandise and other local real-life goods while also earning virtual currency to use within their favorite games.

The service, launching later this week on apps from RockYou and TheBroth, will show users local ads based on their IP addresses. To gain the offer, a user clicks and goes to a separate page — under a new brand, called Cherry Deals — purchases the item at the discount, then receives the currency. The sample discounts today come from businesses including a cupcake company, a hand-bag maker and a tax firm.

As with many other discounted online deals, Cherry Deals typically expire in a day or so, meaning users who see a deal they like will need to act fast.

Peanut Labs cofounder Ali Moiz tells us that the company has so far been business-facing, plugging its monetization services in with other monetization companies and developers; the Cherry Deals brand is what it is now pushing to consumers

The way these deals works is not new, conceptually. Peanut Labs had a staff of 20 salespeople hitting the streets of 6 cities over the past 5 months, negotiating deep group discounts at local businesses and guaranteeing the low rates in exchange for bringing each client lots of customers. This is similar to how offline coupon book companies have offered discounts for decades; the same group-discount mechanism is how big European e-commerce companies like vente-privee.com, and US ones like Gilt Groupe. Companies that offer online group discounts for local businesses include Groupon and LivingSocial, both of whom are also active on Facebook.

But for Peanut Labs, this is about providing another way to monetize virtual currency through its existing service, rather than trying to take on other types of coupon companies. The 200 other companies that it works with will be getting Cherry Deals in the next week or so, Moiz says, from online gaming sites to dating to blogs. In his view, this is about raising the quality of offer-driven monetization for developers — some users may be finding value in its surveys and offers, but it’s likely that more of them will appreciate getting big discounts at local places they might be shopping at anyway.

While Moiz isn’t sharing any details about revenue potential, he says the percentage payout to developers will be the same as what it already has with surveys and offers. However, he adds, these coupons can be four times as lucrative as current offers. The first cities to get the service include San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago and New York, with expansion to Canada and the United Kingdom coming later this year.

Zooming out, Moiz says his company is working on 3 to 4 more new ways of monetizing virtual currency, beyond surveys, offers and the new local coupons. This is part of an industry trend. We’re seeing a wide variety of virtual goods monetization companies exploring new ways of bringing in more money, from big-brand offers to pre-paid cards to online work.

With the rise of social applications and virtual goods on Facebook and other social platforms, established competitors are moving in to do business. The latest is Mopay, a decade-old European mobile payments company. It’s opening a new US office in Palo Alto, near to Facebook’s headquarters and many developers of social games.

Mopay is competing directly against companies like Boku and Zong by making it easy for people to charge their phones and pay for small amounts of virtual currency in games and other apps. While it has developed a range of mobile messaging and payments interfaces, the Mopay process is similar to its competitors in terms of what you’ll see on Facebook. A user picks Mopay as a payment option within an app, typically in an offer wall, provides a phone number, receives a mobile payment confirmation number via text, and enters that number in the app to receive the currency.

The company already has deals in place with European game developers, including Bigpoint, Gameforge, Innogames and Sulake. The move to the US is both intended to bring in new customers for existing clients, and help Mopay partner with more US-based developers who have users in Europe and around the world. Overall, Mopay has deals in 65 countries and reaches more than 500 million people worldwide.

We’ll keep tracking the space as competition heats up to power mobile payments inside Facebook apps and social games.

As more and more people use Facebook from locations around the world with poor internet and mobile data connections, the company has been trying to customize its products to better reach them. The latest move is a not-yet-launched mobile site called Zero, that Facebook plans to fully introduce in the coming weeks.

Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya mentioned a little about it at the Mobile World Congress happening now in Barcelona, Spain. While he didn’t provide many details, TechCrunch‘s Robin Wauters gleaned a few, and took the top screenshot: “it’s basically a text-only version of the Facebook service that carriers can offer to their subscribers at no charge. If a user then decides to switch from text-only to multimedia (e.g. view photos from their friends), mobile operators can start charging them for ‘premium’ data service.”

A Facebook spokesperson tells us a little more: “‘Zero’ is a light-weight version of m.facebook.com that omits data intensive applications like Photos. It will launch in coming weeks and we are discussing it at MWC as an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage.”

Zero could help people around the world use Facebook even when their data services aren’t working well, from someone in an especially rural part of Siberia to an iPhone user in downtown San Francisco.

The overall point here is pretty clear. Facebook recently said it had reached 400 million monthly active users, with more than 70% of users located outside of the United States. Meanwhile, its number of mobile users has climbed to 100 million, or a quarter of its total user base. Facebook’s strategy is to make at least some parts of its service as widespread as possible.

For people with weak internet connection, it introduced a greatly trimmed-down version of its web site last year, called Lite, that cut out applications, groups and other data-intensive parts of the site. In terms of mobile, the company has been developing native applications for some devices, or working to help phone manufacturers and carriers create their own versions; it has also enabled text-based interactions on Facebook, together with more than 80 carriers in more than 32 countries.

The domain zero.facebook.com is currently live, but for those of us with mobile carriers who haven’t added support, we’re just seeing the screen, above.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas Hold’em Poker	11,282,508	+967,243	+9.38
2.	Mafia Wars	8,647,694	+459,556	+5.61
3.	Dr Pepper	1,363,919	+332,885	+32.29
4.	Vancouver 2010 Olympics	663,141	+282,103	+74.04
5.	Oreo	3,883,538	+215,835	+5.88
6.	BRING ME THE HORIZON	199,065	+147,798	+288.29
7.	Barack Obama	7,529,344	+147,124	+1.99
8.	Coca-Cola	5,028,623	+140,264	+2.87
9.	Megan Fox	5,815,906	+130,172	+2.29
10.	The Bible	1,587,640	+130,019	+8.92
11.	Michael Jackson	10,925,266	+128,731	+1.19
12.	Facebook	7,263,898	+122,308	+1.71
13.	Türk Bayrağı	2,935,515	+119,327	+4.24
14.	Starbucks	5,817,165	+104,525	+1.83
15.	Zoosk	418,626	+96,899	+30.12
16.	The Ellen DeGeneres Show	1,643,350	+91,843	+5.92
17.	The Artifice	2,144,877	+91,481	+4.46
18.	Lady Gaga	5,241,031	+91,273	+1.77
19.	Twilight	4,967,469	+90,738	+1.86
20.	Skittles	3,777,990	+90,407	+2.45

Still holding the number 1 and 2 positions on this week’s list are Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker, with more than 11 million fans, and Mafia Wars, with 8.6 million. Both games had some pretty trippy Valentine’s Day-related gifts, with lucky gift poker chips and a Cupid Hit Squad, part of Mafia Wars’ violence-themed Valentine’s celebration that culminated with a “Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

At number 3 was Dr. Pepper, a soft drink that recently hit the 1 million fan mark and was celebrating by pushing a photo upload contest, as well as a series of new commercials. Fourth with 663,000 fans was the official Vancouver 2010 Olympics Page, which grew by leaps and bounds on the day of the opening ceremonies — February 12.  And Oreos had an Oreo-themed Valentine’s Day application that, coupled with the Oreo/Ritz NASCAR victory this weekend, landed the Page at the number 5 spot with 3.8 million fans.

Some recent regulars of the list rounded out the middle of the list. President Barack Obama at number 7, Coca-Cola at number 8 (perhaps aided by its charity/Super Bowl campaign), Megan Fox ninth, The Bible at number 10, Michael Jackson eleventh and Facebook 12.

The Turkish national flag (Türk Bayrağı) Page is back at the number 13 spot this week, although it seems to have been aided by an 85,500 jump in fans on Sunday; the page has almost 3 million fans now. Starbucks saw an increase of 57,000 on Sunday to land at number 14 this week.

Zoosk, the self-proclaimed “#1 dating application on Facebook,” was number 15 this week, aided by a few likely page consolidations of 45,000 and 33,000, but maybe also by Valentine’s Day? The Ellen DeGeneres Show rolled in at number 16, likely because last week was her first night on as a judge on “American Idol.”

The Artifice continues to grow, now with more than 2 million fans, which is quite a feat considering that they don’t even have a Wall. Lady Gaga took the number 18 spot for being Lady Gaga, but also because of a jump of 42,000 fans on Thursday. Number 19 was the Twilight Page, which may have been aided by tweens in love on Valentine’s Day, when it jumped by 49,000 fans.

Finally, Skittles, which had a pretty interesting Valentine’s Day activity — creating Valentine’s Day messages for a parking enforcement officer — landed at the number 20 spot.

While still distant behind search engine leader Google, Facebook grew its US search traffic by 13% in January, according to a recent report from comScore that examined search activity on leading web sites. In December, the analytics firm tracked 351 million search queries on Facebook in the US, and in January it counted 395 million.

Overall, Google still had 65.4% of the US market last month with more than 14 billion queries, and rivals like Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask had most of the rest. Their portions stayed pretty flat overall, and many other sites saw query volumes fall, so the fact that Facebook saw some growth is interesting, especially considering other search-related moves it has been making.

A redesign that Facebook introduced this month makes the search box more prominent than before, expanding in size and moving from the top right-hand side of the site to the top middle. Facebook also recently announced an expansion of its partnership with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. While the engine has already been displaying web search results for Facebook searches, it will soon begin incorporating more data from Facebook users in order to deliver better results to them; Microsoft will continue running search ads in these results.