[Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our new data and analysis membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth. Inside Facebook Gold presents weekly in-depth analysis articles exploring the most critical developments impacting the future of the Facebook ecosystem. Click here to learn more.]

Last week, Facebook announced updates to its advertising policies designed to improve quality by more explicitly prohibiting low-quality ads. While Facebook has in general been working to improve ad quality over the past year, in addition to the formal policy changes announced last week, we’ve been hearing more from the advertiser and developer communities this week that it is also stepping up enforcement on advertisers and third party ad networks.

First, our run down of the new rules Facebook has delivered to advertisers, developers, and ad networks…

>> Read more of this article at Inside Facebook Gold

In what amounts to a big new product push for the company, Facebook is turning previously static information in user profiles into links to 6.5 million new Community Pages. It’s also further clarifying the point of Pages, dividing out official ones for businesses, celebrities and other known entities from from the “community” ones.

These move will help Facebook more clearly identify what users care about — and help it achieve higher search engine results for Community Pages on any topic imaginable.

The company has also renamed how users interact with Pages, borrowing the term “Like” from the action of giving a news feed item a thumbs-up. As has previously leaked out, now users will “Like” a Page to become a fan of it; this is a conceptually different use of the term than before, and we’ll see how users take to it.

Facebook’s new conceptual term for all these Pages, as well as your friends lists, relationship status and other social information, is “Connections.” It has also made a number of corresponding privacy changes on this front, which we’ll get into once we explain the product changes.

The Community Page Push

Community Pages are intended to capture public-facing topics, concepts, themes and anything else that doesn’t fit either as something “official” or as a narrowly-focused Group. Examples can be anything from geographic locations to types of cuisine to whatever else you can imagine. Many unofficial Pages are being converted into Community Pages, with one key difference being that Community Pages don’t have owners if they get big enough. This also means they don’t get out into the news feed.

Right now, many Community Pages appear to include a note saying “Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Corvallis, Oregon, sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help.” But if you click “sign up”, you see another note that says “Thank you for wanting to improve this Community Page. We’ll let you know when we’re ready for your suggestions.” It’s not clear what Facebook will add here that might allow people to curate the content, although this appears likely.

The new Pages started going live on April 1, but the company didn’t reveal much about it then. Now we know more. Facebook has both designated some existing Pages as new “Community Pages” and it has also created 6.5 million on its own, it tells us. These new Pages include a live stream of all recent relevant Facebook information from your friends — as well as public status updates — in addition to relevant information about the Page as drawn from Wikipedia. There are a few other bells and whistles here; pages about locations, for example, often include maps.

Facebook is now prompting users to edit their profile information to link either to official Pages or to Community Pages.

Starting now, Facebook users who go to their profile pages will see a popup window that says “Link your profile to these [X number of] pages?” The pages you’ll see, judging by our test, include home town, current location, education, interests, and other items you’ve previously designated. You can select which of these pages will be shown publicly to people who aren’t your Facebook friends or aren’t logged in when they look for you.

Note that if you don’t feel like dealing with any of the changes now, you can choose to defer for 24 hours (but not longer) or “Choose Pages Individually.” The latter option, as you’d assume, lets you decide which information will be linked or not.

Once you’re done with this initial selection, you’ll see be asked to edit which other other information on your main profile pages will be linked. You’re specifically asked to confirm your location information, for example — links to Community Pages that Facebook has created for cities you’ve designated.

You can manually re-sort each item that appears in your interests, activities and other categories when you’re profile edit mode. So you can decide which musician to put first, for example. Facebook lets you hide all Pages from being immediately visible on your profile, but this is for aesthetics as other users can still view them by clicking “show more” on a profile.

Also, if you see that you have a lot of Pages that Facebook hasn’t categorized already, you’ll need to add them manually or manually “unlike” (or remove from being a fan) them in order to get rid of them. You can’t click to edit then en masse like you can pre-categorized pages.

Facebook has introduced hovercards here to make profiles a little more interesting: if you mouse over a linked item in a profile, you’ll see a box pop up showing a little more information about the item as well as the option to “like” (aka “become a fan”) of it.

Privacy Changes

On that note, Facebook has also remodeled its privacy section so that users can choose to hide friends lists and other important profile details from friends, and other granular options. It has broken out all potentially private social data out from personal information. The former is in a new part of the privacy settings page, called “Friends, Tags and Connections.” The latter is renamed “Personal Information and Posts.”

Facebook previously reconfigured this section in December, but tells us today that ” we got lots of user feedback that people want more control.” The December changes confused many, and sparked a user outcry, as well as close examination from the US Federal Trade Commission, other governmental organizations around the world, and privacy groups.

Now, users can provide greater limits on a number of areas. Most prominently, they can hide lists of friends from their Facebook friends. “We hadn’t anticipated that users would want to hide their lists of friends from their own friends,” Facebook says, but this has continued to be a top requested feature.

Facebook also reminds users throughout its Community Pages launch that these “Connections” are public. Even if you hide which Pages you “like” from your friends, the Pages themselves are public, and so publicly display all users who “like” the Page.

Conclusion: A Clever Move by Facebook

Facebook’s move here is very clever. On an individual level, every Facebook user now has a more visceral experience to non-commercial Community Pages on the site. These pages could serve as new hubs for sharing information, that no one ever thought to create before.

All existing Pages, meanwhile, could get big new boosts to their “like” counts — the transition tool is basically asking users to add a good many by default that were previously just listed as static text in user profiles. The company tells us that it’s not clearly dividing out which Pages are Official versus Community in the transition tool, so it’s quite likely that if you’re not a fan of your favorite musician on Facebook already, then you’re about to be once you make these changes to your profile.

Since links from profiles to Pages are public, this essentially means many more links between Facebook Pages for search engines to recognize per person. We expect all Pages to appear even higher within search results because of this change.

And, Facebook hasn’t just used the 3 million active Pages to plug in to profiles, but added more than twice that number. That means 6.5 million topical Pages that are now even more likely to hit at or near the top of search results. This is probably not what Google wants to see happen; indeed, its apparently unsuccessful Knol community page service was intended to do something similar.

We expect Facebook to continue tying Pages to everything it can. There are all sorts of rumors about the company’s pending launch of location-based services. We expect Pages about locations to be used here. Although we’re speculating, it’s easy to imagine a way to link some sort of check in at a location with a Page for that location.

AdParlor, a company that has long provided advertising services on Facebook, is launching a new product today that lets developers buy installs in bulk through Facebook’s performance advertising system. Like a number of other companies, it is providing this service through Facebook’s Ads API — but it’s adding its own app install conversion tracking features on top.

The company’s “optimization engine” creates hundreds of ads and adjusts bids for them to bring in high-quality installs at lower rates than otherwise. This isn’t a self-serve system. AdParlor views the ad creation component of the process as a key part of what makes it more valuable than rivals, and doesn’t disclose techniques it has developed for getting better results.

The system isn’t focused on all performance advertisers – instead it’s intended for developers who are looking to buy ads that help them bring in more users for their apps. Clients can purchase at a fixed cost-per-install (CPI) cost by country. The algorithm will optimize to get them as much volume as it can at that bid.

The minimum campaign budget to use this tool is $10,000 as AdParlor is targeting more sophisticated application developers who are already making a significant spend directly with facebook. Although the tool instantly begins optimizing and providing a lower CPI, this larger campaign spend gives the algorithm more flexibility to try multiple combinations and learn the optimal set of variables to bring an even lower CPI.

While AdParlor isn’t saying who’s using the new system, the company already counts Zynga and other big developers as clients.

Adknowledge is introducing a new way for developers to monetize apps: a cookie that will identify users and serve them the most relevant form of monetization, whether direct payments, offers or banner advertising.

The company is one of the few on Facebook to offer all three services — offers and direct purchase options are in its Super Rewards offer wall, while its banner ad network has been growing separately. Now, for users who buy virtual goods in a game with direct payments, they’ll see few or no offers or banners. If they don’t get any sort of virtual goods in a game, then they’ll see banners. Super Rewards data suggests that 75% of users never go to the offer wall in an app, so if a lot of developers implement this system, more users will probably start seeing banners.

“We’re seeing lots of data and getting lots of feedback indicating that showing all three [monetization options] to a single consumer all the time can often cause more attrition,” Adknowledge chief executive Scott Lynn tells us. His company view direct purchasers, offer takers and banner ad viewers as distinct types of users from each other; many people who take offers don’t buy directly, for example, he says. “So much time is spent in the ad community talking about relevancy, but there’s little talk about frequency or effectiveness.”

Here’s a little more on how the new system works. Most online advertising networks add cookies to users’ browsers to help identify and track their interactions with ads. That is what Adknowledge is doing in this case. It cookies and tracks users on or off Facebook apart from any app. So when a user goes from one app on Facebook to another by a different developer, Adknowledge will still know what monetization service to show them. Because the company is using its own cookie, it can also figure out what to serve users who first hit Super Rewards within another site on the web, then try out a new Facebook app, for example. As with other advertising systems, Adknowledge also needs to track new users for a certain amount of time to be able to predict how likely it is that they will prefer one form of monetization over others in the future.

A bigger issue here is that many users don’t want to be tracked by online advertising companies. For those users, options include turning cookies off in their web browser (which can affect performance on sites like Facebook), or selectively blocking cookies via their browser, or using ad-tracking software to block out advertising cookies. The present reality is that most forms of online advertising rely on cookies. This is an ongoing privacy issue that Congress is looking into more closely. Adknowledge’s approach to cookies is an industry standard that would only be affected by broader legislation.

For the time being, if a lot of developers implement the cookie-tracking feature, then Adknowledge could end up creating a lot more banner ad inventory. The company has carefully integrated the feature in with its advertising system, called BidSystem 3.0. That system includes a few related features tying Super Rewards’ offer wall together with banners and its other services. Developers can run banners in an app, for example, that direct users the apps’ offer wall. Or, developers can choose to hide banners but not the offer wall from new users, only revealing banners in the app once the user has been playing for awhile (and not monetizing the other ways).

The system also allows developers to set aside money they earn for CPI campaigns (or add more money directly). Adknowledge intends to get more developers running cost-per-install (CPI) campaigns in its banner inventory, meaning developers will be able to buy ads for their own apps that appear in other apps. Many developers are already running CPI campaigns, but mostly through Facebook’s own performance ad system or through other third parties like RockYou and LifeStreet.

Interested developers will need to link a Super Rewards offer wall account with Adknowledge’s Cubics ad network — obviously, they’ll need to create either or both accounts if they don’t already have one.

Cookie-related issues aside, the new service is smartly leveraging Adknowledge’s breadth of monetization services to grow its CPI banner ad business on Facebook. If Adknowledge gets a lot of developers implementing this new system, the most significant effect in the ecosystem will be better ways for its developers to make money, and a cheaper way for them to advertise to new users.

You’re no doubt familiar by now with Zynga’s newest game, Treasure Isle. The scavenger-hunt game was released a little over two weeks ago, and immediately took off. Its gain of almost seven million new monthly active users easily places it on top of this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by MAU.

The past week suggests a bright future for Treasure Isle. The rapid growth of its userbase means that the game isn’t yet ready to hit a plateau, like the first big success of the year, Playdom’s Social City. And at number 13 now and still moving, Treasure Isle will soon be among Facebook’s top 10 games overall.

Of course, Zynga is still supporting Treasure Isle with a significant marketing effort, which it could reduce at any time. We’ll look at Isle, Hotel City and the other games in more depth over at Inside Social Games. Here’s the AppData top 20 list.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	14,409,959	+6,862,487	+90.92
2.	Hotel City	8,663,088	+3,990,894	+85.42
3.	Static FBML	55,549,127	+1,095,314	+2.01
4.	LivingSocial	1,933,555	+977,654	+102.28
5.	Family Feud	1,929,908	+968,616	+100.76
6.	Facebook for iPhone	32,431,112	+865,325	+2.74
7.	Zoo Paradise	3,852,816	+711,269	+22.64
8.	Mall World	881,206	+676,705	+330.91
9.	Tiki Resort	5,221,827	+523,154	+11.13
10.	Bubble Island	5,724,107	+511,541	+9.81
11.	Your Luck [daily]	3,958,837	+482,655	+13.88
12.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	3,263,998	+452,623	+16.10
13.	iKarma	730,733	+422,967	+137.43
14.	Fish Friends	727,350	+407,082	+127.11
15.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	16,321,784	+353,827	+2.22
16.	Family Tree	5,082,283	+253,331	+5.25
17.	Kingdoms of Camelot	1,725,862	+207,800	+13.69
18.	Lover Of The Day	1,492,745	+200,053	+15.48
19.	Akinator	662,943	+197,658	+42.48
20.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	193,927	+179,445	+1,239.09

LivingSocial was losing users until recently, but it just began enjoying a large upswing in traffic, for no readily apparent reason. That could mean it has been doing more advertising, a possibility that’s supported by the company’s March raise of $25 million in venture capital. Now that semi-competitor Groupon, a collective buying site, is reportedly being valued at $1 billion, it’s probably reasonable to expect LivingSocial to keep pouring money into expansion.

Facebook for iPhone, which often shows up on these MAU lists, is once again enjoying higher-than usual growth. As we guessed last week, that growth is probably attributable to the massive press attention that Apple received from the iPad’s launch, and a concurrent lift in iPhone sales. Analysts are also predicting a strong quarter for Apple, with high sales numbers for the iPhone.

Your Luck [daily], an app from Appschain in the horoscope category, is getting rather large. Right below it, you can find iKarma, a significantly smaller app by a newer, eponymous developer. But note that iKarma’s new MAU growth is almost equal to Your Luck’s, and is still increasing, so it could someday catch up.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, April 12th, 2010

• Treasure Island Makes a Splash On This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• For 25th Anniversary, Tetris Gets Social Via Facebook
• In Search of Treasure Madness on Facebook
• RockYou Licensing Chinese Social Games to the World

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

• Taiwan’s Explosive Facebook Growth Could Mean More To Come In East Asia
• Evony is Live with Facebook Connect
• Tencent Investment in DST Shows International Confluence of Social Games, Social Networks, and Virtual Goods
• World Poker Tour Bets on Serious Players in New Facebook Game
• A Few More Tickets for Inside Social Apps 2010 Will Be Released Tomorrow

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

• New Games Dominate On This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games by DAU
• Metaplace Stomps Facebook Grapes in New Social Game My Vineyard
• Mall World: A High-Quality and Growing Virtual Fashion Store Game on Facebook
• Google Hires a Developer Advocate to Focus on Games

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

• Meromero Park Makes Facebook Pet-Caring Feel New Again
• The Resurgence of Gaming On the Open Social Standard
• Gameforge Launches Safari-Meets-Farming Game on Facebook
• Facebook Adds Offers to Credits Payment Options

Friday, April 16th, 2010

• Fish and Fashion on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Inside Social Apps 2010 Is Sold Out – See You on Tuesday
• MySpace User Home Page Test Shows More Plans for Third-Party Apps
• Social Gaming Roundup: Celestial Steeds, Dungeons, Korea, and More

Facebook Fans Worth $3.60 Each – That’s according to social media management services company Vitrue. The figure came from Vitrue’s estimate that the average fan base of 1 million fans generates at least $3.6 million “in equivalent media” in the course of a year via the news feed. Vitrue’s analysis came with data from its clients’ 41 million fans; the study also showed that brands usually got at least one more impression from each fan, although that was not true for every brand.

AdWeek has more: “Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month. Using Vitrue’s calculation, Starbucks’ 6.5 million fan base — acquired in part with several big ad buys — is worth $23.4 million in media annually.”

Social Gold Announces Partners – Social Goods, the virtual goods monetization platform, announced the launch this week of partnerships with direct payment methods paysafecard, Cherry Credits, and Ukash, as well as supporting Interac bank transfers. This will allow Social Gold to offer more payment methods in Canada, Europe, Asia and the Middle East across 20 local currencies.

Another Facebook Security Hole – Security engineer Joey Tyson discovered a security hole in the Facebook Platform recently, that would allow spammers or scammers to access a user’s profile information, photos, messages and Wall posts without requiring the user to do anything or give consent. TechCrunch reported that the hole had since been patched.

The hole was discovered when Tyson embedded Farmville into an invisible frame on his site, then as the report explained, “used some trickery with Facebook Platform parameters to pass all access rights Farmville had on to a malicious data harvesting application. In short, any of the many millions of people who had previously installed Farmville and visited the apparently benign proof-of-concept site would have their data invisibly harvested. If the user had granted Farmville additional permissions to access their Wall or messages, then the malicious app would have them too.”

Where I’ve Been Raises $750K – The people who brought us Groupon launched an investment fund recently that earned the travel app Where I’ve Been $750,000 in funding, in addition to the $1 million raised in 2008. The money came from Lightbank, which was started by Groupon investers/co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

WaTunes Gets Warner Catalog – Digital music company WaTunes came to an agreement with its third record label this week, signing a licensing agreement with the Warner Music Group; WaTunes previously had penned similar deals with Universal and EMI. Music from Warner and the others is set to make an appearance in WaTunes’ Facebook application, which allows people to purchase digital music in its store without having to leave Facebook. Artists such as The White Stripes, Madonna and Eric Clapton come along with the Warner deal.

Obama Administration Approves Social Media – The administration of President Barack Obama released guidelines for government entities using social media outlets to engage the public. Previously agencies who wanted to get public feedback had to endure a months-long bureaucratic procedure involving the Office of Management and Budget. The new policy allows government agencies to poll the public, run contests and implement open-ended questioning, but other information like age, zip code or specific series of questions will still require official OMB approval. The result could mean more government activity on Facebook.

Facebook More Popular Than Google At Work – Employees are more likely to use Facebook than any other site (even Google) while at the work place, according to a recent study from Network Box. Having studied 13 billion URLs used by businesses during the first quarter of this year, Network Box found that Facebook accounted for 6.8% of all business Internet traffic, double that of Google and triple that of Yahoo! Facebook also consumes 4.5% of all bandwidth.

Nestlé Addresses Greenpeace on Facebook – After a brouhaha stemming from a March Greenpeace campaign to get food giant Nestlé to stop using palm oil, the company finally responded on Facebook. We previously reported that Greenpeace activists had launched a Facebook campaign against Nestlé, claiming its palm oil contracts led to the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest.

Mexican Cartels Prompt Social Media Crackdown – Time magazine reported that the Mexican government is considering cracking down on Facebook and Twitter, as organized crime in the country has been utilizing such social media to stage kidnappings and other crimes. The cartels also use these social media to terrorize communities where they operating, shutting down schools and businesses recently in the city of Reynosa after threats of a shootout. One political party, the PRD, drafted a bill to: monitor and regulate the use of Twitter and Facebook, make sharing information that could be used to break the law a criminal act, create an online police force to monitor crime on social media and make the sharing of information about the actions of police illegal.

Facebook App Predicts ‘American Idol’ Winners – A Facebook app has been able to accurately predict which contestant gets kicked off of the ‘American Idol’ television show each week, according to All Facebook. There are more than 12,300 users, currently, and they have perfectly predicted the rejected cast members so far. This might be due to the fact that die hard fans of the show are most likely to play, and since they’re most familiar with the show’s mechanics, they’re more likely to make educated guesses who is most likely to win.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now officially sold out. We are very excited by the response to our inaugural event and to have so many industry leaders attending.

We hope everyone coming on Tuesday takes the time to meet many fellow attendees, speakers, and sponsors you don’t already know. From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you then!

Note: If you weren’t able to obtain a pass, we’ll be providing coverage here on Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games throughout the day – more details to come.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

At Inside Social Apps 2010, executives and experts from leading social game and app developers, payment services, advertising providers, and investors will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective. The event will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map). The full agenda for the day is available here.

The full list of speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010 is below:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Maha Ibrahim, General Partner, Canaan Partners
  
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
  
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Facebook’s first f8 developer conference in two years is happening next Wednesday, and it will feature big announcements from the company. Here’s our look at the latest hints and rumors about what might be launched.

Open Graph API: Facebook revealed its plans for this platform API last fall, during its big “roadmap” presentation when it layed out its platform plans to developers. Before we discuss it further, here’s the official description:

The Open Graph API will allow any page on the Web to have all the features of a Facebook Page – users will be able to become a Fan of the page, it will show up on that user’s profile and in search results, and that page will be able to publish stories to the stream of its fans….

Once implemented, developers can include a number of Facebook Widgets, like the Fan Box, or leverage any API, which enable the transformation of any Web page so it functions similar to a Facebook Page. For example, AwesomeTees might decide that strategically they would like to locate their brand identity at www.awesometees.com. AwesomeTees will install the Fan Box widget, which will allow any Facebook user to “Become a Fan” of AwesomeTees, thereby establishing an official connection to AwesomeTees. The user will then have AwesomeTees listed in their list of connections on their profile as Pages are represented today. Additionally, any content that AwesomeTees publishes on AwesomeTees.com will show up in the stream on Facebook like it normally would. And, any time the user searches on Facebook, AwesomeTees will show up in the typeaheads and prominently in search results.

The roadmap says that the Open Graph API is due out in the second quarter of this year. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that it will be specifically launched at f8; given that this fits with Facebook’s publicly stated timeline, that is quite likely.

As what would likely be part of the Open Graph API, TechCrunch wrote that Facebook is planning to let users “like” activity on other sites, thereby sharing that action back on to their profile and news feed for their friends to see: “One way to think of this, says a source with knowledge of the product, is this. Google spends billions of dollars indexing the web for their search engine. Facebook will get the web to index itself, exclusively for Facebook.” Meanwhile, All Facebook recently spotted code suggesting that Facebook is planning to extend its Insights analytics service to the web, as well.

Facebook Connect: We expect the company to clarify how Connect and the Open Graph API overlap. Broadly, they appear to be doing similar things. Connect, which has been around for years, lets third parties access Facebook user data from other services and share user communication back and forth with the site. Facebook recently made a big update to its terms of service, that specifically includes wording around giving select off-site partners special new access to user data. It sounds like an extension of how Connect already works. Here’s an excerpt:

In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website).

A probably-related report: Facebook is working on ways for third parties to store user data for more than 24 hours.

Location: Facebook has held off from launching location-based services, even though we and others have been hearing it has been running all sorts of experiments with it. The first sign that Facebook was making moves to provide geographic location information for users happened last fall, when the company updated information about location in its terms of service. The New York Times reported last month that Facebook will provide a set of location-based APIs so third-party services can somehow share user location data back and forth with it; the announcement is coming at f8, according to the report.

TechCrunch has heard about live demos of such a federated system in action; the publication also hears that users will be able to geo-tag status updates, similar to what Facebook does, and may also use QR codes. There are numerous angles to how Facebook might do location, from user privacy to location syndication, so see our in-depth look at the matter, here.

Stream API: Facebook has been gradually making user data more broadly available in bulk format. It already has deals with Microsoft and Google, for example, where status updates from Pages can be included with search result. Jesse Stay has an intriguing post about this from late February, suggesting that FriendFeed cofounder turned top Facebook engineer Paul Buchheit has been working on a large-scale project to make Facebook more available to the web. Perhaps this is it?

ReadWriteWeb has some additional informed speculation about a potential “firehose” of data that Facebook might make available to third parties:

It’s not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There’s far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago….

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger. We’re hearing that there will be no launch partners in the announcement, but the imagination runs wild thinking about all the mashup possibilities. We learned last week that user location data is coming to Facebook at F8, now picture all this rich data roaring like a river into the data digesting machines of a wide range of developers all over the world.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

Credits: Facebook’s virtual currency has been live and available to all users since 2008, when it was introduced in its Gift Shop. Third-party apps began getting access to Credits last May, with nearly all large developers beginning to test Credits as payment options within social games and other apps over the last several months. Credits is even the first payment option on Zynga’s hit game, FarmVille. Credits, as a platform product, is still technically in beta, but given the fact that so many people are already using it, the definition of “beta” seems pretty loose.

Just yesterday, the company said that it was adding offers as a new way of earning Credits, with tests going live on three of the largest social app developers on the platform.

Facebook updated its guidelines on what types of advertising cannot run in its performance ad network, last week. But we’ve since heard that a range of companies have been going back and forth with Facebook about what specific types of ads are acceptable or not. There has been some confusion in the market.

Facebook’s blog post referenced four general points about what ads shouldn’t do, but didn’t get into details or examples. Those points were: Unexpected User Experience, Unclear Recurring End Product, Unsubstantiated Claims and Unacceptable Business Models.

However, affiliate marketer Jonathan Volk, who is active on Facebook, posted the more specific version that Facebook sent out to him and others. For sake of helping people understand what not to do, we’re reposting his long excerpt from the document below.

Improving Ad Quality

Ad quality and user feedback have always been important considerations for Facebook Ads, and are significant factors in determining which ads we accept and display on the site. We’ve recently taken a close look at the ads that drive the most negative feedback, and identified four key themes behind ads that are detrimental to the user experience. As a result, we’re strengthening our Advertising Guidelines in these key areas to ensure that all Facebook Ads meet our high quality standards.

Unexpected User Experience

Advertised products may not generate any unanticipated user experience. This includes, but is not limited to:

1.  Computer performance changes, such as the unexpected installation of any secondary software or the overlay of advertisements on the user’s browser or operating system

2. Unanticipated recurring charges

3.  Undisclosed sale or distribution of requested user information. Any distribution of user information must be confirmed through user consent.

Unclear Recurring End Product

Advertisements must be clear and straightforward in describing any recurring end product to the user. The advertised offer must directly match the service being sold, and ads should provide the user with a clear understanding of what he or she is purchasing. Facebook Ads for products with recurring billing cycles should not:

1. Focus on an advertised “hook” without disclosing the core subscription-based service. Example: “Take a quiz!” (for a service that includes ringtones, wallpaper, or other undisclosed services).

2. Position a subscription-based service as a single product or billing interval. Example: ”Try now for $2.95” (for a service that includes monthly billing intervals)

Unsubstantiated Claims

Ads must not include unsubstantiated claims. Ads must clearly represent the offer, company, product, or brand that is being advertised. Unacceptable claims include, but are not limited to:

1.  Unrealistic prices or rates. Examples: “$0.50 LCD TVs,” “$10/month health insurance”

2. Use of current events or news reports to create false associations with the advertised product. Political events or images may not be
used for an irrelevant commercial agenda. Example: “Breaking News: Great car insurance rates”

3. Use of false qualifications to create a sense of relevancy. Example: “If you are right-handed, you qualify for low premiums”

4. Implication of dynamic ad content Examples: “7 minutes remaining,” “only (3) available”

5. Implied knowledge or passing of user data. Examples: “See who searched for you,” “you have been chosen”

Unacceptable Business Models

Ads will not be permitted in cases where a business model or practice is deemed unacceptable or contrary to Facebook’s overall advertising
philosophy. Unacceptable business models include, but are not limited to:

1. Lead generation offers which sell or distribute a user’s information to larger extent than indicated by the landing page

2. Offers that require a user to complete several hidden steps or make additional purchases in order to receive the promised product

3. Offers that require the input of user information for complete access to offer or product details

4.  Ads promoting deceptive recurring billing services

5.  Downloadable software that may affect the user’s computer or browser performance in unexpected or undesirable ways

To stay up to date on how Facebook’s changing policies will affect your business, check out Inside Facebook Gold – our membership analysis and data service on the Facebook business ecosystem.