Email marketing first Constant Contact announced today that it had acquired NutshellMail, an fbFund REV company, which created condensed email alerts from social networks for users.

NutshellMail allows subscribers to receive customizable updates from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace on one email as often as they choose.

After 10 years of email/event marketing and online survey tools, Constant Contact said today it’s taking the next step into social media, allowing the company to “make social media marketing simple for small businesses,” according to a press release.

The company counts more than 350,000 organizations as clients and already provides social media tools such as “Join my mailing list” Facebook apps, a share bar for newsletter subscribers and tweet-able events, among others. With the new acquisition Constant Contact is set to add more social media tools in the near future, in addition to opening a Bay Area office and consequently has begun hiring.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

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, May 17th, 2010

• Family Feud Takes the Lead On This Week’s List of Fastest Facebook Gainers By MAU
• CrowdStar Takes On Former AdMob Exec Niren Hiro As New CEO
• Wooga’s Jens Begemann on Facebook Social Gaming: An Insider’s View from the Outside
• Playing the Gambling Business on Facebook in RockYou’s My Casino

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

• Scoreloop Sees Big Growth with Social Gaming Platform for Android
• Tagged Releases Second Social Game As It Turns to In-House Development
• Facebook and Zynga “Enter Into Long-Term Relationship”
• Playdom Acquires Game Developer Acclaim

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

• Nightclubs and Game Portals Lead This Week’s List of Fastest Facebook Growers By DAU
• ESPN Drafts Playdom to Build Social Games
• Playdom Combines City-Building, Quests and Nature in Treetopia on Facebook
• Digital Chocolate Launches Millionaire City on Facebook

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

• Prevent or Cause the “Rockapocalypse” in this Facebook Role-Playing Game
• Zynga Buys Chinese Social Game Developer XPD Media
• Building Your Own Jurassic Park on Facebook
• Kongregate “Tests” New Android Flash Implementation With 100+ Games

Friday, May 21st, 2010

• A Look at Simple iPhone Puzzler, 180
• Castle & Co: Facebook City-Building Gets Meieval – and Cute
• MySpace Invites Developers to Work in Its Offices With Games Lab Program
• Social Gaming Roundup: Booyah, Pre-Paid Cards, iPad, & More

Pakistani Developers React to Facebook Ban – Pakistan has blocked Facebook due to an offensive Page, as we covered earlier this week — it’s also busy banning other popular sites, like YouTube, for similar reasons. Local blog Green & White had an interesting interview with Pakistani Facebook social game developer Hassan Baig, to the effect that the disappearance of the local market will not slow them down. “This short-term hiccup is inconsequential to Facebook developers in Pakistan. For example, Facebook is completely banned in Iran and China but users who want to access it are still able to do so thanks to proxy servers and such. In other words, developers are still free to develop for the global market.”

Photo Editing Options Shift – The options Page administrators have to arrange their Facebook photos into different galleries has changed. Users no longer have the option when editing a photo to select to move it to a different gallery, tipster Tai Freligh tells us (his illustrated screenshot is above).

Nestlé Changes Course After Facebook Campaign – After an aggressive Facebook and YouTube campaign to encourage Nestlé to use environmentally safe palm oil, Greenpeace seems to be declaring victory. CNET reports that Nestlé announced a partnership with the non-profit Forest Trust this week, the group helps businesses sustainably harvest forests, in this case Indonesia’s.

The issue came to a head when Greenpeace encouraged Facebook users to take to Nestlé’s Facebook Page, when Nestlé tried to crack down on Facebook users the subsequent backlash became a PR problem for the company. For Nestlé’s part, its announcement this week didn’t mention the Greenpeace campaign but set a goal to make its palm oil products 100% sustainable by 2015. McCarthy does point out, however, that given Nestlé is only 18% sustainable right now, the whole thing could just be posturing.

Norton Anti-Virus Goes to Facebook – Symantec, the makers of Norton anti-virus software, recently surveyed some of their users on social network safety and found:  44% of users surveyed have been victim to a cybercrime perpetrated on a social network; 17% of men and 12% of women have shared their passwords on social networks. The company is not disinterested. It has recently launched the Norton Safe Web app for Facebook which scans a user’s news feed to check for unsafe links.

Babble Raises $3M – Parenting magazine/online community Babble raised $3 million in Series B financing primarily from Village Ventures, Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital brining the company’s total funding to $6 million. Babble’s audience is urban moms and dads, who were also targeted for the Facebook app Connected by Kids launched recently; the company is set to use the funding for expansion.

Fontself Launches Facebook App – Fontself, a Switzerland-based software company, launched a Facebook application this week that allows users to send text communications with different types of fonts. The company is backed by the Index Ventures Seed Fund in addition to other leading European angel investors, and said in a statement that allowing users to send messages that appear to be handwritten provides for a more personal experience. Users may use pre-designed text and smileys or create their own.

Shutterfly: Print Facebook Pics as Book – Shutterfly announced this week that Facebook users can now use the company’s service to create photo books from their photo albums on the social network, without having to leave the Facebook site. The new feature is part of Shutterfly’s Simple Path instant book, which creates the chronologically-ordered book for you but allows you to make changes. Simple Path provides 20 different backgrounds, you can arrange 1-4 photos per page up to 400 pictures and edit by adding captions; you can purchase the books in soft or hardcover ranging from 5×7” to 12×12”.

Third Parties Step in to Restore Privacy – In the wake of Facebook’s privacy controversy several third-party applications have emerged to help users reset their privacy settings. SaveFace is a browser bookmark utility that sets most Facebook profile information to “friends only,” ReclaimPrivacy.org scans a user’s privacy settings for public information and can then change the setting, see image for an example. [Screen shot via lifehacker]

FriendFeed’s Fox Leaves Facebook – Kevin Fox, formerly of Google and FriendFeed and recently of Facebook, is leaving the social network for “the next adventure,” he announced on his blog this week. He alluded to the fact that, after his “first real Summer vacation in 16 years,” he might want to get back into the startup community to develop/pitch some of his own ideas.

‘Openbook’ Mocks Facebook Privacy – Another site mocking Facebook privacy hit the Internet this week. Openbook appears to grab public Facebook statuses and make them searchable and includes a jab at CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The web site is meant to draw attention to the “information Facebook makes public about its users via its search API” with the goal of getting Facebook to restore private information. The site has generated about 3 million hits since Wednesday.

Balancing Privacy and Innovation – Leading Silicon Valley intellectual Tim O’Reilly came out in qualified support of Facebook‘s efforts to make the web more open, in the midst of the current privacy controversy. “The essence of my argument is that there’s enormous advantage for users in giving up some privacy online and that we need to be exploring the boundary conditions – asking ourselves when is it good for users, and when is it bad, to reveal their personal information,” he said.

While O’Reilly criticized Facebook’s handling on some issues, he highlighted the reality of more fundamental changes to privacy in the world today. “We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we’ll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.”

Facebook is, in some form, doing the world a favor by bringing these issues to the forefront in a world where technology changes faster than mores or regulation, as he sees it. The ideal is to find the “right tradeoffs.”

A rash of security bugs seem to have hit Facebook within the last several weeks, while a lot of debate continues over changes the company has made to user privacy features. So what’s going on? Is Facebook coincidentally just falling apart, all of a sudden?

Most recently, the Wall Street Journal reported on a way that Facebook and other social networks have accidentally shared identifiable user data with third-party advertising networks. Earlier this week, a researcher spotted a way to do a cross-site request forgery; and recently, a less damaging problem emerged, in that users “Favorite Quotations” sections could be accessed by anyone, regardless of privacy settings, albeit only via the iPhone app.

Some bugs are new, due the company’s many product launches and changes at the end of April. Bugs often come with new software, and so it’s no surprise to see the number of bugs have gone up with the number of changes.

But Facebook’s processes may be hurting it here. While bugs can be minimized in product launches through rigorous testing, and while Facebook does try to spot security problems, it has historically optimized for launching products early and often. The company has had various security-related problems for years, yet overall it does not appear to have a measurably worse record than other big and fast-growing web properties — especially considering its larger size, faster growth, the inherent complexity of its service, and the massive amount of private data it holds.

There may be another reason why all these new bugs are popping up: People are looking for them more than ever. Facebook’s size alone makes it an attractive place for security analysts and reporters to closely examine. Because nearly 500 million people use the service, there’s a good chance that web users will want to read a story about private information like their instant messages suddenly becoming public.

Privacy issues also makes Facebook more of a target — given how Facebook recently directed users to make more profile information public, it’s easier for people to conflate a purposeful change with an accidental security mistake (which we’ve seen starting to happen already). Perhaps the best example of this is Instant Personalization. Launched at f8, it lets a limited number of partner sites access “General Information” about users, including their profile photos and friend lists, without first asking for permission. Pandora lets you see songs that your friends like, for example.

That particular concept is controversial in and of itself. Some people don’t want Facebook sharing data without prior consent in this way, whether or not Facebook and its partners think it might be something they want. But Instant Personalization highlights the how the issues of privacy and security mix together. A researcher spotted two bugs in Yelp’s implementation recently, ways for a malicious site to harvest users email addresses and other personal information. The result is that people who don’t understand how Instant Personalization is supposed to work while maintaining security instead get the impression that the feature is fundamentally flawed.

Facebook already has many security challenges, but now more experts are trying to find problems, and more journalists are viewing any error on Facebook’s part as just more evidence of its lack of concern for user privacy.

So far, none of the bugs have resulted in widespread damage to users — the damage is instead to Facebook’s reputation as a safe place to share information. Whether or not Facebook’s existing MO has been the best approach for its users, the only way for it to ensure that it will not have any more problems would be to stop changing its products.

But many rivals are building social products, and user behavior is constantly evolving. It cannot stand still.

The choice for Facebook, now, is to innovate while not having any security problems. That’s a paradox it will likely have to solve by forcing itself to slow down on product development while increasing security testing. This move opens it up more to competitors, but the alternative looks even riskier.

Facebook is looking to increase sign-ups by adding a competitive element to inviting friends to the site. By clicking “Who’s here because of you? Track your invites” in the bottom of the right home page sidebar, users can now access Facebook Impact, a leaderboard that shows which of your friends have gotten the most people to sign-up for accounts on the site. Under the headline, “Facebook is best with friends”, the page also provides a custom invite link users can share to boost their ranking, and an “Invite More Friends” button that pops up the email contact importer and inviter.

Accessible at the URL http://www.facebook.com/impact/, as well as from the Get Connected section of the home page, this referral leaderboard takes cues from online poker sites which have long used referral bonuses and leaderboards to expand their user bases. Other social networking services have also provided similar features; with some effort, users of custom social network platform Ning can create referral leaderboards, for example. Facebook is making this feature easily accessible to everyone.

Impact shows you the profile pictures of your 9 friends with the most accepted invites sent and your ranking amongst your friends. Human silhouettes represent the number of invites you’ve sent, and profile pictures are displayed for those who’ve accepted your invites. Facebook hopes the desire to increase one’s rank and see those rows of icons fill up will encourage users to invite everyone they know. In areas where Facebook is widely used, this feature may initiate enough invites to wear down and convert the last hold-outs from the site. Simultaneously, in rapid growth areas like Brazil and the Pacific Rim where there are plenty of people to sign-up, Impact’s game mechanics might lead users to become addicted to inviting their friends.

In order to track these invites in greater detail, Facebook has also activated the Invite History feature at http://www.facebook.com/invite_history.php. Users can navigate to this feature by clicking “Who’s not on Facebook? Invite them now” in the Get Connected section of the home page’s right sidebar. Once on the Invite Your Friends page, users will see a “View All Invites” link that allows you to “See your entire history of invitations, including who has joined because of you”. There, users can see who they’ve sent invitations to, when they were sent, and whether or not those invited have joined yet. The page also allows reminders to be sent to those with outdated pending invitations.

Facebook’s recent focus on invites, demonstrated by their acquisition of the Octazen team, comes at a time when the world is watching their sign-ups and traffic rates closely in the wake of fallout from privacy issues. Impact, which can help boost these metrics, may be helping to offset any reduction in rate of growth due to the uproar surrounding changes to profiles, instant personalization, and the open graph.

The Delhi Traffic Police in India have launched a Facebook Page that is trying to help the city government better understand and address traffic problems, in part intended to help the city prepare for the Commonwealth Games in October. The Page has been active only a few days, already has about 2,500 fans, and seems to be seeing some meaningful early engagement.

We’ve written previously about the different ways Facebook can be used by police agencies in the U.S. to get tips, inform the public and create communication channels in general.

The Delhi Traffic Police Page administrator has been busy, not only posting sporadic traffic updates daily, but responding back to the many people posting questions and comments to the Wall, mostly in English but also in other languages. Aside from the info box, there’s really not a whole lot of information on the Page.

Yet, the people posting to the Wall seem to be pleased with the development, often using words like “great,” “good” and “thanks” in their responses. There are also a few photo albums containing photos of the police doing their jobs; these, too, have received numerous positive comments. As a matter of fact, these Facebook commenters were so enthused with the police’s Facebook presence after less than a week there are already several requests to create a Twitter account (it actually already has).

People have also positively responded to the Page as a forum for reaching out to government officials with concerns and suggestions, for example this comment, “Foot overbridge is badly needed at Savitri Nagar -outer ring road junction as it is just impossible to cross the main road.”  There were others noting parking problems and issues with corrupt police, for example. All of these, again, mostly in English but in other languages as well.

Rajan Bhagat, a spokesman for the Delhi Police, told The Wall Street Journal:

“We have launched this page to know the views of the public and establish a flow of communication with the residents of Delhi. We need suggestions to improve. Every comment cannot be an appreciation, thus we are looking into the problems faced by the residents of Delhi and this is a new channel.”

As we reported in our story about police agencies, bigger cities tended to be less interactive on Facebook than smaller ones. The main problem has appeared to be that the Pages of big police entities were impersonal or too general. That Delhi Police are already engaging in actual conversations on the Wall in a city of 12 million-plus people diverges from this trend we saw with U.S. police agencies, and may well prove to set an example for how bigger police entities should manage their Facebook presence.

While Zynga has been running generic advertising offers in FarmVille for years, it has also been dabbling in other forms of incentivized purchasing. In a deal with Microsoft from a few months ago, for example, FarmVille users could get 3 Farm Cash (the game’s virtual currency) in exchange for becoming a fan of the Bing search engine.

But now it’s getting into grocery stores, showing how social games and virtual goods are being tied in to more and more consumer products.

FarmVille players have been spotting a partnership with Zynga and vegetable company Green Giant, the game-focused FarmVille Freak blog notes. If you buy packaged tomatoes, salad, and carrots, for example, you can peel off stickers and get codes, then you enter them into the FarmVille site to redeem. It appears that purchasing the goods gets users around 15 Farm Cash or below, with a limit of three redemptions per account.

Other offers have typically given you a discount on purchasing a product or service in exchange for a large amount of Credits. This case is different, because the Farm Cash bonus is being used as an incentive to get users buying one brand at the grocery story (Green Giant vegetables) versus the others. Retailers have long used follow-on bonuses to make purchases look more enticing, so this use of FarmVille is an obvious extension for them; for another example of virtual currency being used to generate in-store sales, see Dr. Pepper’s deal with EA.

It’s likely that the Green Giant deal is a one-off promotion, but we’ll be tracking to see how else Zynga and other developers that use virtual goods work with consumer packaged goods companies.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, an internet phenomenon called Chatroulette has been getting popular lately. It does something lots of other services have already, which is to throw two random video chat users together for a session that either party can end at their convenience. It can lead to anything from great discussions between new people… to obscene content.

The developers behind desktop social aggregator Digsby have remade the basic concept on Facebook, in a service called ChatVille.

It’s built completely in the Google AppEngine and works exactly the same way as traditional Chatroulette in that it randomly places you into video conferences with other app users. Unfortunately, since the game was just launched today, there’s about a grand total of 10 monthly active users (including us), so the video screen the randomness is a bit non-existent at the moment. More time to get users will lead to a richer user base, of course.

Once you do get going, however, the game is advertised to incorporate the “gaming and viral mechanics of apps like FarmVille.” This is partially true, but the FarmVille reference feels used merely because it is currently the number one Facebook game. Don’t worry, ChatVille has zero to do with planting crops.

The similarities stem from unlocking various badges and achievements (such as the “Person of Interest” badge for chatting with someone longer than five minutes – sadly, a dashboard where these are viewable is not available yet), earning what are called “compliments,” from other users, and leveling up your profile through having positive experiences with other ChatVille users. Additionally, you can begin video chat with any of your existing Facebook friends directly through the platform itself, and post any screenshots you take to your Facebook feed.

On top of this, players are also capable of capturing video feed and even create bizarre images of themselves in what is called the “Photobooth.” In a nutshell, the feature allows users to take four photographs from their web cam and manipulate them using Photoshop-like filters ranging from fisheye lenses to posterization. It is actually kind of fun, but disappointingly, there doesn’t appear to be a visible means of sharing these photos (at least not from the Photobooth itself).

Of course, all the added bonuses are nice, but what really matters is that ChatVille takes away the elements of lewd and inappropriate behavior that litters Chatroulette at times. All of a player’s interactions are tied directly to your Facebook account, so not behaving evidentially has “actionable consequences,” in the fact that your real identity is involved. Facebook typically kicks off users who post obscene content, so in contrast to Chatroulette. Any transgressors on ChatVille could be putting their Facebook accounts at risk.

Whether or not Facebook intervenes, the developers can. Since actions are tied directly to your Facebook profile, they can ban an account permanently. In addition to this, they have also stated that there are systems in place that automatically flag accounts that are deemed “suspicious,” in that they have very few friends, or have just been created, and so on. These flags will automatically lower the threshold for getting banned, making it more difficult for people that just want to cause trouble to keep creating new accounts and continue causing it.

Frankly, ChatVille does look to be a nice, safe, version of the popular Chatroulette, but only time will tell if it becomes anywhere as popular. As far as the social game elements go, at the very least, they will act as nice extras and another means to virally attract new users. Nonetheless, as basic as they are, it is highly unlikely anyone will start playing the app for strictly those features. In the end, it’s going to be the allure of a “safer” place to play a round of Chatroulette. Everything else is just a nice bonus.

Which leads to one last question: Perhaps people want the risk of Chatroulette, in the first place?

Last month at F8, Facebook launched an updated version of their Platform Developer site that includes some changes to its documentation and tools.

This transition coincides with the movement away from Facebook’s older REST API to their new Graph API. Among the changes were a new Showcase page, a more rich Platform Live Status page, and most importantly new Platform Documentation. The Platform Documentation is currently being migrated away from the old Wiki style content to new static documentation as Facebook looks to deprecate the Wiki. To aide in the transition, Facebook has opened a documentation category in Bugzilla to collect all documentation-related “bugs” (omissions, errors, etc.) in one place.

Shortly after the update, many developers started noticing the absence of the Developer Tools in the new site. A bug was opened in Bugzilla to address the issue, and has since been resolved. Whereas the old Developer Tools resided on a central page, the new tools are spread through the documentation in the appropriate places. For example, the FQL Test Console is now located on the fql.query REST API page. Similar Test Consoles can be found for various old REST APIs. Note, the new Graph API does not have a Test Console as all data can be accessed via any web browser.

In an unannounced move yesterday, Facebook began requiring Page owners to have at least 10,000 fans or pay at least $25,000 in advertising in order to set application tabs as landing pages. But now it has reverted to letting anyone set a tab as a landing page, following widespread dissent.

[Update: A new statement on the change, from Facebook:

As of last night, we've removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.]

Pages are used by businesses large and small to reach Facebook users, and come with a variety of customizable features. Page owners can set application tabs to appear when a user first goes to the Page URL, a key way to promote sales or marketing campaigns to visitors.

BrandGlue‘s Jeff Widman quantifies the effect:

We ran an A/B test just four weeks ago to guesstimate the efficacy of a landing tab.  We drove visitors to the fan page of a major brand using ads. Those ad-driven visitors converted to fans at a rate of approximately 47% WITH a landing tab. When we turned off the landing tab, those same ad-driven visitors converted to fans at approximately 23%. A VERY noticeable loss in conversions over the course of the campaign.

Why did Facebook add the landing page restrictions change in the first place? Some have speculated that one motive may have been to force small Page owners to pay for advertising — but this would be a nonsensical rationale for Facebook to have, because many small businesses who use Pages wouldn’t be able to pay the amount anyway. The move actually encourages them to use Pages less.

The limitations Facebook added were more likely meant as barriers to preclude spammers and scammers from setting up their own tabs filled with low-quality or misleading content. We’ve seen an increase lately in activity amongst spammers using Page app landing tabs to mislead users into spamming their friends or fork over personal information.

In any case, the outcry of many Page owners and Page management companies seems to have prompted a quick reversion by Facebook, although the company hasn’t said much about what’s going on. Here’s its now-dated message to concerned people in its developer forum, from yesterday:

We apologize for not messaging this earlier. Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. If you are already working with an account representative, please contact that representative to begin the authentication process. If you do not work with an account representative, you can use this contact form to inquire about working with an account representative.