Facebook announced a big overhaul of its Insights analytics tool earlier this week at its f8 developer conference. The new version is live now, and provides much improved analysis for Page, application and web site owners. Upgrades include a new dashboard, visualization tools, a lot of new data to look at, and an API so developers can extract and analyze data on their own. Here’s a detailed look at all the changes; you can also watch a video of Facebook engineers discussing the changes, here.

The first is the dashboard. The Pages and Applications Insights were separate before, but now you can see any Page or app that you’re an admin of by going to facebook.com/insights. In addition, you can add Insights for your web site by adding a meta tag in your root web page. This will allow you to track Facebook activity on your site; the interface for the tool, called “Insights for your Domain,” is also viewable from the dashboard.

Page Insights

Page owners now get more information about the activity related to what they’re publishing, within two subsections for each Page on Insights. The first subsection, Fans, shows a wide range of activity from fans. The second shows Interactions.

Here’s what’s on the Fans subsection, from top to bottom: a counter showing your daily active fans, daily new fans and total fans, including the growth rate for each versus the previous day. A top chart shows DAU while a lower chart shows new fans, removed fans, total fans, and users who have hidden your Page from appearing in their news feeds. In these graphs and all others we discuss below, you can toggle each data point on and off. DAU, by the way, is defined as “users who have engaged with your Page, viewed your Page, or consumed content generated by your Page.”

There’s also data about particular items that contributed to the DAU count. Insights shows the following sources of information to the right of the top graph:

• Daily Stream Story Viewers
• Page Visitors
• Daily Fans who Liked
• Daily Fans who Commented
• Daily Fans who Posted to Your Wall

If you mouse over each of these items, you can see the rate of change versus the previous day’s stats.

To the right of the lower graph, you can also see the percentage fan contributions brought in by parts of the site. They include:

• Fan Page
• Stream
• Requests

Beneath this section, there are a few other graphs with valuable data. A Demographics graph shows the percentage breakdown of fans by age and gender. A set of tables shows you a percentage breakdown of the top 20 countries, cities and languages that make up the fan base.

The next part of the Fans subsection shows Activity. The upper graph shows page views and unique page views. A section beneath this shows the percentage breakdown of various tabs. They might include, for example:

• Wall
• Information
• Photos
• Static FBML
• Static FBML 2
• Video

Next to this data you can also see the top web site traffic referrers to the page. These can include ad campaigns on Facebook, widgets that link to a Page, flash promotions, blog links, search engine marketing campaigns and other web marketing efforts, according to Facebook data engineer Roddy Lindsay.

The last graph shows Media Consumption, including Video Plays, Photo Views and Audio Plays.

The other subsection for each Pages shows Interactions. There’s not nearly as much data on this part. You can see the number and percentage change for Daily Post Views and Daily Post Feedback. The graph shows Daily Story Feedback, including Likes, Comments and Unsubscribes. The view of negative activity here could be especially useful for brands trying to understand what sort of content their fans appreciate. Some people might like and comment on certain posts, for example, and others might un-like the Page.

Then, you can also see a list of the 10 most recent posts, listing each Message, the time posted, the number of impressions and the percentage of fans who provided some form of feedback on it. You can sort the list by each of these categories.

The last part of Interactions, called Page Activity, shows a graph of daily mentions, wall posts, discussion posts, reviews and video posts.

Overall, this is a massive update to Pages. Before, for example, it showed only a couple of simple graphs, and didn’t show granular data about important elements such as likes and comments.

Facebook is trying to provide every single piece of basic data that the average page owner might need. While it is in some sense competing with third-party analytics services, Facebook is also making this data accessible via an API. The company’s intention, according to  Facebook data engineer Alex Himel, is to have third parties build more complex analytics service on top of what it offers for anyone that needs more detailed analysis.

Application Insights

This part of the tool is divided into three subsections: Users, Sharing and Performance. Here’s what they offer.

The Users subsection is similar to the Fans subsection for Page Insights. It lists DAU, daily new users, and total installed users by number and by percentage change. It shows the percentage contribution of key sources, such Daily Unique Logged-in Widget Viewers or the Games Dashboard. The top graph maps out DAU (as usual, the number of users who have engaged with or viewed the application).

The second graph, Daily New Users, includes application installs and application uninstalls, as well Total Installed Users.

In the next portion of Users subsection, you see demographics by age and gender, same as the Fans part of Pages, and also including the top 20 countries, cities and languages.

The last portion, Activity, shows a graph of Daily Permissions and a graph of Daily Blocks, which includes Block Adds and Block Removes. Facebook said yesterday that “everything that shows up is a permission that’s been requested by an app and accepted.

The next subsection, Sharing, shows the amount of content shared and the feedback per share at the top. Then there are three graphs.

One shows Daily Content Shared via Application, including Publish Story, Update Status, Post Share and Post Photos. The next graph, Daily Content Feedback, shows Story Comments and Story Likes. The third graph shows Daily and Total Content Hides.

The last portion of the app insights tool shows a graph of Requests, including Requests Accept, Requests Ignore and Requests Skip.

As with Pages, Facebook is providing all Insights data on applications to third parties via an API; an extended permission is required to apply Analytics to particular applications. You can read more about it here. We expect Kontagent and other analytics providers to take full advantage of the increased data accessibility.

Insights for your Domain

This last section allows you to track how much Facebook activity is happening in connection with your web site, which is crucial given Facebook’s Open Graph launch. That service provides a wide range of data and plugins to allow web site owners to integrate Facebook user data and features. Here’s more.

Facebook is planning to have all web pages on the internet become Open Graph nodes. They’ll be treated just like Facebook Pages and apps, so you’ll be able to see analytics for each page on the internet that uses Facebook.

First, though, you’ll need to install a meta tag for what you want to track, “a fb:admins or fb:app_id meta tag to your root webpage, linking it to a page, application or your personal account,” as the company explains in the domain-adding dialog box on Insights. You’ll need to install and sync the page to get started.

It tracks similar information to Page and Application Insights. These include DAU and various types of engagement (commenting, likes, etc.), daily shares, feedback per share, reshare rates. There’s a daily most shared chart, and a table showing the top 10 most shared web links, and a demographic graph.

This should allow web site owners to more closely monitor how Facebook users are behaving on their site, something that was previously not easily available.

Facebook is sending the clearest message yet that it intends to implement its own virtual currency, Credits, in a way that could be mandatory. This confirms months of speculation we’ve been hearing from developers. Because Facebook takes a 30% fee on Credits purchases, the decision could negatively impact the virtual goods revenue streams of some developers now — at least in the short term. If Facebook’s plan works like it intends, spending will eventually increase and developers will benefit.

At its f8 developer conference this week, company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that “‘there’s just going to be one currency that people use’ on all apps.” Later that day, Facebook’s Deb Liu was presenting about Facebook’s Credits plans, and she was asked if Facebook would continue to allow people to use third-party virtual currency services like Social Gold. She replied: “It’s still too early to tell, Credits is still in beta.”

Together with Zuckerberg’s statement, that sounds like it could be simply “no.” Another possibility is that third party virtual currency services can continue to exist, but will just be much less used than Credits, at least partially due to incentives Facebook will give to developers who use Credits – like free marketing.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

The top entry on this week’s list of emerging Facebook apps, measured as those still under a million monthly active users, is Name Analyzer, which doesn’t analyze so much as create a pre-determined anagram from the letters of your name. Each letter is associated with a word (C for Cheerful, H for Happiness, and so forth), and the result can be shared on your wall.

Name Analyzer links to appears to be associated with Friend Interview, an friend quiz that periodically gets banned, but we can’t tell for sure. Here’s the full AppData list of 20 apps:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Name Analyzer	559,557	+432,916	+341.85
2.	Fish Friends	934,240	+428,760	+84.82
3.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	331,613	+276,567	+502.43
4.	Akinator	789,626	+238,401	+43.25
5.	Car Madness	721,577	+187,783	+35.18
6.	Funfari	174,752	+174,743	+1,941,588.89
7.	Agatha’s Horoscopes	332,502	+168,566	+102.82
8.	FarmVillain	563,473	+158,459	+39.12
9.	Your Japanese Name	996,038	+151,742	+17.97
10.	Dailymotion Videos	385,559	+151,149	+64.48
11.	Friend of the Day!	448,117	+145,876	+48.26
12.	Battle Punks	206,542	+135,986	+192.73
13.	What is your spirit animal?	200,633	+130,515	+186.14
14.	Evony	329,882	+127,222	+62.78
15.	Pet Forest Online	245,655	+125,601	+104.62
16.	Write In Pictures	380,779	+122,056	+47.18
17.	Do you really know me?	512,847	+116,695	+29.46
18.	WPT Texas Hold ‘Em Poker	198,697	+113,127	+132.20
19.	Football Mania	118,219	+106,397	+899.99
20.	Kendi Benzerini Bul	241,868	+106,026	+78.05

Fish Friends, a Playdom game, isn’t far behind Name Analyzer. Despite having missed the fish game fad on Facebook by several months, it’s doing rather well. We’ll cover the rest of its category this morning over at Inside Social Games.

Akinator is the follow-up on a French-language app that plays a version of 20 questions. The English version has been growing steadily for several weeks. Both, of course, are based on a much older website whose traffic seems to have spiked right around the time the apps started becoming successful on Facebook.

Agatha’s Horoscopes is just what it sounds like. As with other recent horoscope apps, this one attempts to post its daily readings to your wall, where friends can see it. FarmVillain, the next app on the list, is also all about wall posts, but in this case they’re fake FarmVille-style messages. Following a couple bannings for bad taste, the app is humming along with half a million MAU.

As you can see, there are several more interesting-looking apps on the list. The only other one we’ll point out is Dailymotion Videos. This is the app version of Dailymotion, one of the few indie video sites that survived YouTube; its rapidly-growing app essentially recreates the site on Facebook.

Mexico once again led the pack in growth on Facebook in the month of March. Our numbers from February showed the country gaining 920,900 new users, and the rate has hardly diminished at all this month with an impressive 885,400 new monthly active users joining in March, according to the latest Facebook Global Monitor data from Inside Facebook Gold.

But the real star in March was Brazil, which broke out with 14.7 percent growth in its user base, adding 463,080 new users, some 179,400 more than in February . Fewer than two percent of Brazil’s population is currently on Facebook, but its growth appears to be accelerating — potentially bad news for Google’s Orkut, which is dominant only in Brazil and India.

Argentina also grew much more strongly in March. Unlike Brazil, though, Argentina has a high proportion of internet users — 22.3 percent, to be exact. Only Chile, which gained several times as many users in March than in February, has a higher penetration in the region, at 37.2 percent.

On the whole, every country within the Latin American region, including the Caribbean, either maintained or increased its previous-month growth. We’ve broken out the top 10 below:

Latin America now has over 50 million users out of its total population of over 400 million (including Mexico and the Carribean). That gives it a penetration of around 10 percent, which is expected to nearly double over the coming year. Note that this data comes from our Global Monitor report, which provides in-depth info on 98 countries, but its original source is Facebook itself, which often runs on a delay of several weeks.

One widely expected component of Facebook’s new plugins didn’t launch with the 5 others yesterday. Instead, the so-called “Social Bar” will be available “in the coming weeks,” Facebook tells us today.

The bar, which Facebook director of product Bret Tayler described as the “kitchen sink of social plugins” at f8 yesterday, includes essential Facebook features: likes, the activity stream, and Facebook chat. From the presentation:

Because of its form factor, it will pretty much work on any web site. It docks to the bottom of the screen under almost any UI. If you’re looking to socially enable your site but don’t know where to put all the buttons? Use the social bar to socially enable your site with one line of HTML.

This is somewhat similar to the persistent bar that Facebook removed from its site with the new home page redesign in February, except that bar had third-party applications. Check out the blurry screenshot that we grabbed from the presentation video to see how it looks.

News first leaked out about the Facebook social bar at the end of last month. It’s not clear why there’s a delay on this plugin versus the others. Meanwhile, a range of other companies, led by Meebo, launched their own version of a social bar earlier this week. Meebo has actually offered a similar social toolbar since 2008, that lets people chat across IM platforms, and share information. Earlier this month, it partnered with Google and a range of other companies to let users access those sites from the bar, too. Facebook and Twitter aren’t participating with the new product, based on the new “XAuth” standard. Facebook will shortly begin competing directly against it.

One important note for developers, publishers, and marketers from yesterday’s announcements at f8 is that Facebook has officially retired the “Connect” brand. The name and the service officially launched at the last f8 in 2008, and the term was used to collectively describe the company’s off-Facebook.com Platform services.

Why the name retirement? Facebook basically says the term was confusing people into thinking the data and privacy models for Facebook apps were substantially different when implemented on Facebook.com canvas pages versus third party websites.

Another reason for the change was likely that Facebook Connect was so multi-tiered in its implementation options, from the very simple to the complex, that it was too hard to explain as any one product to most publishers and brands.

So, it took the opportunity yesterday, simultaneous with the launch of many relatively easy-to-implement website plugins/widgets, to officially retire the Connect branding. In fact, FBML and FQL are now relegated to the “Advanced APIs” section of Facebook’s new developer site. For example, according to Facebook,

We don’t recommend FBML for new developers. If you aren’t already using FBML, you should instead implement your application within an iframe, using the JavaScript SDK and social plugins for client-side integration with Facebook services.

Now, Facebook just has a bunch of different plugins, APIs, and SDKs . The new developer site pushes visitors to the simplest options as much as possible, including getting started guides for websites, apps on Facebook.com, and mobile apps.

While there’s still a variety of different Platform products out there (see below), Facebook’s Platform product marketing team is hoping the removal of the “Connect” brand will make it easier to communicate the value proposition of the Facebook Platform to potential partners without getting so caught up in explaining the difference between apps on Facebook and the rest of the web, and what exactly “Connect” means.

For reference, here’s the current set of Facebook’s API and SDK products for developers:

Core APIs

• Graph API
• Social plugins

Facebook SDKs

• JavaScript SDK
• PHP SDK
• Python SDK
• iPhone SDK
• Android SDK (unofficial)

Advanced APIs

• Facebook Query Language (FQL)
• Facebook Markup Language (FBML)
• Old REST API

Television shows dominated this week’s list of Top 20 Facebook Pages, a list we compile with the help of our PageData tool, which counts the number of fans joining a Page weekly. Six of the 20 spots were taken up by TV shows, the top two by Zynga, a couple by chick flicks, three each for sports and politics and a few other Pages helped by consolidations on April 15 and 21 were also mixed in.

On a side note, we delayed the publication of our list this week due to f8 coverage, so the list covers the last 7 days.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas Hold’em Poker	17,323,551	+329,222	+1.94
2.	Mafia Wars	11,895,159	+181,629	+1.55
3.	Family Guy	3,017,587	+136,552	+4.74
4.	LETTERS TO JULIET	161,893	+135,722	+518.60
5.	Antanas Mockus	390,290	+110,883	+39.69
6.	Eat Pray Love	235,707	+104,673	+79.88
7.	Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III	1,341,938	+98,294	+7.90
8.	Partido Verde	312,840	+96,395	+44.54
9.	Lady Gaga	6,076,521	+94,070	+1.57
10.	House	3,353,507	+83,882	+2.57
11.	South Park	3,768,249	+68,360	+1.85
12.	Starbucks	6,529,952	+68,281	+1.06
13.	Türk Bayrağı	3,527,183	+66,930	+1.93
14.	Two and a Half Men	1,839,701	+62,902	+3.54
15.	The Office	1,398,797	+62,020	+4.64
16.	Anything About Guns	200,903	+61,009	+43.61
17.	Manny Villar	1,241,794	+60,723	+5.14
18.	Lost	1,998,328	+60,000	+3.10
19.	FC Barcelona	1,600,524	+54,477	+3.52
20.	GALATASARAY=1905	391,759	+54,044	+16.00

Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker and Mafia Wars still reigned at the number one and two spots, respectively, this week. Growth of these fan Pages for Zynga’s popular games has not gone unnoticed by the company, which thanked fans on the Poker Page on Saturday for helping to make it the largest fan Page on Facebook.

Poker added 562,500 fans to its 17.3 million tally on April 15, but had otherwise steady growth even as the game was giving away camcorders and iPads to fans. Mafia Wars is now pushing 12 million fans and also experienced a spike on April 15, of 148,400 fans.

In third place on the list was the popular satire “Family Guy” which added more than 136,000 fans as of a week ago to surpass 3 million fans; many of these came from a 39,300 spike on April 15 and another spike of 92,200 on April 21. Medical drama “House” was tenth on the list, adding almost 84,000 since this time last week to have more than 3.3 million fans now, almost 63,000 on April 21. The show also debuted an iPhone app on April 12.

More television shows followed.  “South Park” was at number 11, experiencing big jumps of almost 57,000 and 36,000 on the aforementioned days, although on April 14 the show aired its 200^th episode, too. Comedy “Two and a Half Men” came in at fourteenth place, experiencing a jump of about 73,000 combined during the two consolidation periods, although the show’s star Charlie Sheen has been making appearances in the gossip rags due to martial problems recently.

“The Office” took the number 15 spot, growing more than 63,000 between the jumps to almost 1.4 million fans and “Lost” came in at number 18, growing almost 66,000 with the consolidations and almost passing 2 million fans.

There were plenty of politics or politics-related Pages on this week’s list, too, because big elections are set for May.

Colombian presidential candidate Antanas Mockus’ Page was fifth this week, experiencing a huge spike of 134,400 fans on April 15, adding a big chunk to his total fan base of more than 390,000. Mockus is the former mayor of Bogotá, a candidate with the Green Party and has a really well-designed Facebook Page that rivals many others we’ve seen. The Colombian Green Party’s Page joined the candidate on our list this week, taking the number 8 spot, adding more than 96,000 fans in the past week to its 313,000 total, probably partly due to anticipation of the May 30 election.

Filipino politicians Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III, the frontrunner in the May 10 presidential election, took the number 7 spot, growing steadily after a 91,500 bump on April 15, adding to a total of more than 1.3 million. His rival, Manny Villar, took the number 17 spot, receiving a nudge of more than 79,000 fans on the same day with a slightly lower tally of 1.2 million fans.

And a Page called Anything About Guns took the number 16 spot, adding 43,700 fans on April 15, growing more than 61,000 in the past week but with just 201,000 fans. The Page is part of a gun club in Columbia, South Carolina that is now a social forum for people to share their opinions about firearms and hunting.

Two chick flicks took some of the top spots, too, with “Letters to Juliet” at number 4 and “Eat Pray Love” at number 6. Both films are romantically themed and feature popular female actresses and have been aggressively running ads on Facebook home pages for several weeks.

In the case of “Letters to Juliet” it was interesting to note that the Page, which added the bulk of its 162,000 fans during the past week or so, has been promoting its MySpace page to Facebook users to register to win a trip to Italy.

It’s curious this promotion wasn’t offered on Facebook, perhaps speaking to one of MySpace’s few advantages over Facebook currently: entertainment. “Eat Pray Love” also added a big chunk of its 236,000 or so fans in the past week, despite the Page’s creation in early March.

Finally, sports and Turkey made up an interesting component of the list this week. Not only was the Turkish flag Page, Türk Bayrağı, at number 13 with steady growth after an April 15 nudge of 51,700 fans, but the Turkish sports club and football fan Page GALATASARAY=1905 took the number 20 spot. The flag Page added more than 67,000 fans to its total of 3.5 million fans and the football club added more than 54,000 to grow to almost 392,000. Another football club, FC Barcelona, added 54,500 fans to a total of 1.6 million.

Two popular Pages that also made the list this week: Lady Gaga at number 9 and Starbucks at number 12. Gaga was busy this week with concerts and other projects and added more than 94,000 fans to surpass 6 million fans.  Starbucks added more than 68,00 fans with pretty steady growth.

The announcement was glossed over during Facebook’s many launches at f8 yesterday, but the company has introduced ways for developers to conduct a variety of searches for content in its Graph API. This could benefit any number of search companies and other developers who are looking for lots of public data to aggregate and organize.

The Open Graph allows applications, Pages, web sites and other software services to add Facebook features, like the “Like” button, to their own sites. Taking actions on other sites results in those actions being shared with your friends on Facebook, and may allow friends on those sites to see what you’re doing, too.

Many users have their privacy settings configured to allow status updates, likes and other activity to be public. Its terminology for this data is “public objects.” The generic search format is: https://graph.facebook.com/search?q=QUERY&type=OBJECT_TYPE.

Here are the specific types of searches that can be done:

News feeds of individuals can be searched, too, but you’ll need authorization. Here’s an example:

News Feed: https://graph.facebook.com/me/home?q=facebook

This search is restricted to public data about users and their immediate friends (not, say, their friends of friends), in keeping with Facebook’s existing data-sharing policies.

As part of Facebook’s announcement around its new Open Graph yesterday, it says it is changing how user data access permissions work for third-party applications and web sites. It’s getting rid of the multiple dialog boxes that developers have had to implement in the past. Now there will be just one box, and developers will need to ask for the specific types of data they want to access, rather than asking for users to share all of their profile data.

Governmental and non-governmental privacy organizations around the world have pushed Facebook to make data-sharing a more granular process, and this interface change is a step in that direction. In the sample screenshot below, you can see the “Cool Social App” asking for access to public information, email and photos.

The new format otherwise includes all existing data that developers could previously request from users — the change here is in how users share data with developers, not what they share. This includes name, profile picture, gender, access to the stream, friend information and email addresses.

The change reduces the number of windows and clicks a user needs to do, which should make the permissions dialog easier for people to use.

Otherwise, the system will work as before. Developers can ask for the same range of extended permissions, including access to granular profile data like birthdays. And as before, developers can only get basic profile information about users’ friends unless they request additional permissions.

The new interface uses the OAuth 2.0 protocol for sharing data to authenticate that users are who they say they are, and to allow the authorization.

Although we’ve seen some indications over the past few weeks that Facebook’s mobile growth is speeding up, this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by daily active users provides the most solid evidence yet toward that thesis.

Facebook for iPhone, Mobile and Facebook for BlackBerry are all within the top ten with DAU growth of around five percent each. Those are the best gains for the mobile apps in at least two months. It’s also notable that all three, constituting Facebook’s major in-house mobile apps, are coming up so strongly at the same time.

Next week, of course, the growth rates might fade a bit, as often happens. But longer-term, the trend seems to be clear. Users who already have the apps installed — already a significant portion of all smartphone users — aren’t using them more. That either means more new smartphones, a higher likelihood that smartphone users will want to access Facebook, or both.

Here’s the full list of 20, via AppData:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	7,166,630	+2,783,169	+63.49
2.	FarmVille	29,344,187	+2,145,163	+7.89
3.	Facebook for iPhone	16,832,775	+703,384	+4.36
4.	LivingSocial	662,130	+501,101	+311.19
5.	Mobile	8,006,392	+408,785	+5.38
6.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	9,989,898	+393,298	+4.10
7.	Family Feud	728,799	+314,140	+75.76
8.	Social City	2,928,313	+299,292	+11.38
9.	Café World	7,941,782	+294,876	+3.86
10.	Hotel City	2,932,326	+293,829	+11.14
11.	Country Life	3,013,934	+279,287	+10.21
12.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,791,894	+243,716	+9.56
13.	Causes	1,380,769	+233,109	+20.31
14.	Garden Life	267,432	+178,260	+199.91
15.	Status Shuffle	770,460	+166,653	+27.60
16.	Mall World	297,763	+166,291	+126.48
17.	iHeart	1,591,506	+155,523	+10.83
18.	Tiki Resort	1,088,916	+148,844	+15.83
19.	@Smiles	463,509	+112,051	+31.88
20.	Mafia Wars	6,069,199	+111,689	+1.87

Treasure Isle, of course, is the leader overall; we noted the new treasure hunting game’s fantastic growth on our Monday MAU list. As if to rub in its dominant position, Zynga also took the number two spot with FarmVille — although that game nevertheless has fewer DAU than it did a month ago. We’ll cover the rest of its category over at Inside Social Games.

LivingSocial is an older app that helps users share interests and find local deals. It had dipped below a million MAU and 40,000 DAU early this month, but the company appears to be pumping money into advertising following its $25 million round in March.

Games mostly fill the remainder of the list. But at number 15, you can pick out Status Shuffle, an app by Oz Solomon that allows users to share and vote on amusing status messages. Give this app a little time, and it might even get its own TV show.