Facebook Pursues New Domain Name – Facebook filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization in order to obtain the name Facebook.me, currently registered to a man in the United Arab Emirates. Facebook has previously secured similar domains — .cn, .ir, .es, .com.au and .ie — and while .me is officially a Montenegro domain, it’s also used for personalization.

Facebook Engineers Talk Touch Interface – Facebook’s Engineering Team published a detailed note this week about touch screens. In light of the new Facebook integration in the iPhone/iPad operating system, might it be a sign that an official Facebook iPad app is on its way?

Sobees Offers iPad Facebook App – Sobees has created a native Facebook app for the iPad allowing users to view status updates, wall posts, pictures, videos, links, photo albums, manage events and birthdays in a calendar view, in addition to updating your own status, Like things and comment. Sobees also offers clients for Twitter and Windows, and is offering this iPad app free for the first month.

Visual Representation of Privacy – The New York Times created an interesting visual representation of Facebook’s privacy settings, and notes that “you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options” and that, at 5,830 words, Facebook’s privacy policy is longer than the U.S. Constitution. This is what granular privacy settings look like — and any change to them is bound to be confusing.

European Regulators Criticize Facebook – European data protection officials wrote a letter advising the European Commission stating that Facebook’s December privacy changes were “unacceptable.” They suggested Facebook should have default settings ensuring tighter control over who sees user profiles and what information could be accessed by search engines.

Facebook Exec Answers Privacy Qs – Facebook’s Vice President for Public Policy Elliott Schrage answered questions from 300 users in The New York Times this week. There was some mea culpa, “It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making” and some finger wagging, “Facebook users receive notices about our new products and whenever we propose a change to any policies…we have notified users.” But essentially Schrage just reiterated that the company simultaneously cares about user privacy and its own reasons for innovation (such as making the Open Graph as functional as possible).

SMASH Summit Slideshow Explains New Ads – SMASH Summit published an interesting slideshow explaining the new Open Graph, how it affects web sites/Facebook marketing and how companies can implement the changes quickly.

Facebook Hacker Identified – Facebook identified the hacker Kirllos who tried to sell the login information to 1.5 million Facebook accounts for $25-$45 dollars per 1,000 accounts, depending on the number of friends users had. It appears Kirllos sold about 700,000 accounts, and probably didn’t have 1.5 million, but Facebook and law enforcement have determined the Russia-based hacker’s identity.

Kirllos was identified through IP addresses, online accounts and other information probably through phishing attacks or with malicious code on users’ computers. Facebook said the users have had their passwords changed and were notified by the company.

Luxury Watches on Facebook – Maurice Lacoix, in partnership with eYeka, has launched one of the first big Facebook campaigns in the luxury watch industry. One characteristic of the Facebook campaign allows users to pose questions to watch a video where CEO Martin Bachmann asks users to post questions he will personally answer on the Page via another video. The process of this CEO Dialog is set to repeat several times, according to eYeka, in order to “enhance personal contact and strengthen relations” with luxury brand customers on Facebook.

fidipidi Offers Snail Mail on Facebook – Next week fidipidi launches with a service that allows Facebook users to create customized greeting cards with their Facebook accounts. The features allow users to pull friends’ photos for the greeting card or create their own, which fidipidi will then send via snail mail. The first 15,000 people to sign up can use a code to send their first card for free.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has created an interesting Facebook gimmick for fans in Europe that not only helps the company with its branding with the help of Icemedia, but also incorporates users’ Facebook photos. Using the company’s application FreeLuggageTags, users may create luggage tags from Facebook photos, pre-designed KLM tags or upload a photo for customized luggage tags featuring a KLM logo.

We’ve written about the marketing efforts of different airlines on Facebook previously, what we found was that most stopped short of selling tickets but engaged in a variety of other promotions. Southwest Airlines most notably has given away free tickets on Facebook before, and while KLM isn’t giving away tickets, the company does seem to take its presence on the social network very seriously. The Wall of KLM’s Page is cluttered with responses from administrators thanking customers, wishing them luck and giving them travel advice.

KLM seems to be heavily promoting the app, it’s currently the default tab when visiting the airline’s Page, and consequently we’ve seen some good growth both in the number monthly and daily active users.

The app is very easy to use and pretty self-explanatory.

Once you allow permission the app walks you through the step-by-step process of designing your luggage tag and view tags previous users have created. You can use a Facebook photo, one of KLM’s pre-designed tags or upload another photo. Then you have a chance to edit the photo, rotate or enlarge it for example and then you enter your information to receive the set of two tags in the mail (free shipping).

Unfortunately for people in the U.S., the tags are only offered to people living in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the United Kingdom. However, given that the Netherlands-based airline partners with the Paris-based Air France, it makes perfect sense that KLM is trying to spread luggage tags with its logos throughout Europe, where its biggest customer base is located.

KLM’s app seems to be a happy marriage between how a lot of photo companies are trying to profit off creating products with Facebook photos and good old fashioned free products with the company logo. In KLM’s case, however, the result seems to be particularly successful because it’s not only attractive and very pertinent to the services the company offers, but it’s also practical and so more likely to be used and seen by Facebook users’ (real life) friends.

New Facebook security systems focused on preventing unauthorized logins are now active in the Account Settings -> Account Security panel.

Outlined in a post to the official Facebook Blog, these tools come amidst a storm of criticism over privacy and security flaps regarding exposed chats and user data scraped from instant personalization which we addressed in a comprehensive guide to Facebook’s latest changes last week.

The features are designed to “help people keep track of their Facebook logins and keep malicious actors out of their accounts,” according to the company. The first system allows users to register the devices from which they access Facebook, and receive notifications by email or text if their accounts are accessed from an unapproved device. From these alerts, users can reset their password and remove devices from their authorized list, which requires devices to re-register on their next login.

However, this feature only functions for logins to Facebook’s full site. Logging in from Facebook Mobile, Facebook Touch, or the official Facebook iPhone app does not require device registration, and no record of the log ins appear in the user’s Account Security panel. Facebook needs to record and notify users of log ins to all versions of the site for this system to truly provide a more secure experience.

To prevent unauthorized logins before they occur, Facebook will now ask additional security questions to authenticate a user’s identity if they are accessing the site from a device deemed “unusual”. We’ve contacted Facebook asking them to clarify exactly makes a device “unusual”, and we’ll update this story when we receive a response. Questions used to verify that the person accessing the account is the true owner include identifying the name of a friend in a photo, giving a birthdate, or even more personal questions as seen below.

Update: Simon Axten from Facebook’s Privacy and Public Policy team clarified for us how the new verification question tool is triggered. “We show the extra verification step when the login is coming from a device that isn’t typically used to access the account, or from a location that seems unusual based on recent or normal activity.  For example, if someone logs in from Palo Alto, CA, and then several hours later, from a location halfway around the world, we’ll block access and ask for additional authentication.”

The FIFA World Cup is set to run June 11 – July 11 in South Africa and, by the time the football/soccer matches roll around, everyone everywhere will be held rapt by the games —  on Facebook. The company released its Goal! Leaderboard Thursday, created by Involver, on its Sports Facebook Page. The leaderboard allows Facebook football/soccer fans of the 32 national teams playing in the World Cup to bring some of their enthusiasm and competition to the social network in an interactive way. The leaderboard displays teams with their national flags, the number of Internet users per country, the number of likes each team has on Facebook and a variety of ways to view the results. There’s a Passion Rank, which measures a team’s Likes divided by the Internet population of the country, then there’s Popularity which measures the number of Likes and Intensity measures the week-over-week fan growth. There are also multiple ways to view the results, either by geographic region/sports association like Africa/CAF (Confederation of African Football) or by Group (sets of teams). And of course liking a team or interacting with its Facebook Page will create content for users’ news feeds. Goal! Leaderboard is currently the default tab when anyone visits Sports on Facebook’s Page. In a blog post Facebook said Involver’s application is currently available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Portuguese. So far the Sports Page has more than 213,000 fans.

Say hello to Profile Box; you may be seeing a lot of it in coming weeks. The profile modification app hit the big time this week, reaching the top of our list of emerging Facebook apps still under a million monthly active users.

Profile Box is a little piece of MySpace right on Facebook. The app purports to allow its users to embed a small box on their profile with custom HTML or text, as close to a profile re-design as Facebook is likely to allow anytime soon. It may not work perfectly, but that didn’t prevent over half a million people from signing on, more than than any previous similar app has attracted — although Profile HTML, down at number four, is hot on its heels.

Of course, both apps are probably repeating the Static FBML phenomenon, in which everyone who uses a Page with modified content also gets signed up, so take the growth with a grain of salt. Here’s the AppData top 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Profile Box	763,433	+564,078	+282.95
2.	Name Analyzer	732,099	+537,645	+276.49
3.	Nightclub City	897,950	+535,969	+148.07
4.	Profile HTML	688,707	+498,185	+261.48
5.	Collect Roses	862,850	+485,347	+128.57
6.	Monster World	420,621	+330,820	+368.39
7.	天書奇談 2.0	931,920	+250,455	+36.75
8.	My Tribe	767,546	+236,515	+44.54
9.	My Casino	643,371	+197,776	+44.38
10.	Friend of the Day!	826,778	+193,133	+30.48
11.	Bike Mania 4 Micro Office	258,963	+182,666	+239.41
12.	Jungle Life	439,391	+175,120	+66.27
13.	FreeLuggageTags	196,634	+174,390	+783.99
14.	Ranch Town	279,555	+167,820	+150.19
15.	Pet Forest Online	592,382	+143,090	+31.85
16.	My Vineyard	639,721	+142,803	+28.74
17.	Funfari	444,897	+126,019	+39.52
18.	¿Cuál es tu leyenda de amor?	507,744	+120,873	+31.24
19.	Мисуиш ли?	118,179	+117,962	+54,360.37
20.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	408,105	+117,855	+40.60

Name Analyzer isn’t too impressive; it just provides you a graphical presentation of your own name. Oddly, this isn’t the same Name Analyzer as the one that hit the top of the list last week, although both theme and execution are similar (and similarly simple) between the two. Call it a mini-fad, if you like.

Collect Roses allows its users to accumulate a sort of virtual flower garden on their profile, assuming they’re willing to splay big photos of flowers across their feed. The app’s graph went into a hockey-stick last Saturday, as seen below — probably something to do with Mother’s Day.

Passing over a few games (which we cover at Inside Social Games) we come to Friend of the Day!, which randomly picks a friend to be… well, the name says it all. And the last app we’ll mention is FreeLuggageTags for which, once again, the name says everything: it’s an app through which the airline KLM is giving away luggage tags, which an astonishing number of people seem to need.

Facebook debuted a Page for the U.S. Congress on Wednesday that intends to show “how Congress is using Facebook to govern and share with constituents.” This includes how members of Congress are using Facebook, a list of members’ Pages, and related news about Facebook and Congress.

The Page has a wall that’s open to fans, and a Links tab that lists the links shared on the Page by anyone. There’s also a Resources tab which includes information on how to use Facebook.

Perhaps the best features of the Page are the US House and US Senate tabs, which feature a collection of official Facebook Pages for politicians serving in these positions. Not all 435 members of the House or all 100 senators are represented, apparently because not all of them have official Pages?

In addition to actual politicians, there are a handful of Pages dedicated to a particular committee, such as the one for the Committee on Natural Resources, Republicans or the GOP Doctors Caucus, Fixing Senate Rules or Joint Economic Committee, to give a few examples.

Facebook has been trying to make inroads with Congress for some time. It has employees reaching out to members to try to get them using the social network more for things like voter outreach. It also has been building out a public policy team, stepping up its lobbying efforts, and facing new criticism from senators over its ongoing privacy issues.

Indeed, a venture capitalist active in Washington, DC tells peHUB that more senators are looking into Facebook’s privacy problems, “motivated to make a spectacle” of the company because of Congress’ own generally low approval ratings. Given the timing of the new Page, perhaps one goal is to remind Congresspeople about the value Facebook’s service offers them — not just its value as a target.

Facebook rearranged elements of the home page’s right sidebar yesterday, placing events at the top, pending requests near the bottom, and hiding upcoming birthdays behind the “See More” button under events. This update comes in a series of recent changes to the sidebar including the addition of a spontaneous events planner and RSVP manager to the sidebar.

When a user is invited to an event, attends, and enjoys themselves, Facebook’s value to their life increases. Events and their invitations expire over time, though, while friend requests, group invitations and Page suggestions do not. By moving events to the top of the right sidebar, Facebook is encouraging users to interact with them before they become dated.

Since the upcoming events box acts a social calendar, increasing the prominence of this box should reduce the chances of users forgetting about an event to which they’ve RSVP’d. For Facebook, ignored events and event invitations mean a loss of potential user engagement, making the emphasis on events lucrative to the site as well. The repositioning of stable pending requests, especially Page suggestions, runs contrary to moves like converting profile interests to likes which Facebook has made to increase the number of Pages to which a user is connected.

The upcoming birthdays sections, a part of the home page since the early days of Facebook, is now hidden unless users click the “See More” button at the bottom of their upcoming events — unless there’s nothing else to show. The previous inclusion of the birthdays of friends on the home page paved the way for one of the site’s most ingrained user behaviors: writing on a friend’s wall on their birthday.

By obscuring them behind an additional click, more users are likely to forget about birthdays and the practice may decline.  This alteration to a longstanding feature may create some unrest, but as of press time we could not find any protest groups or Pages decrying the change.

Despite the rapid interface changes we’ve seen this week, the updates to how users share application content and app invites, promised for May 2010 on Facebook’s Developer Roadmap, remain to be seen. Further changes to how the inbox will sort app requests remain scheduled for 30 days after the update to sharing. These changes may influence app retention and conversion rates, so developers should keep a close watch.

From privacy settings changes to new product launches, Facebook’s recent moves have brought on intense criticism from some users, press, privacy groups and politicians.

The company’s own employees have not been quiet, either, from what we’ve heard. So it has decided to host a meeting for them at its Palo Alto headquarters today at 4pm.

Facebook’s statement on the matter: ”We have an open culture and it should come as no surprise that we’re providing a forum for employees to ask questions on a topic that has received a lot of outside interest.”

Don’t expect any announcement about privacy changes to come out of the meeting, in other words. The event is not open to the public (an irony that many have been quick to point out) so we’ll be covering it if and when we obtain more information

If you want to take a detailed look at each specific issue, from the profile information transition tool that directed users to make their interests public, to the new social plugins, to the Instant Personalization service, to related security issues and much more, be sure to check out our analysis from earlier this week.

[Facebook headquarters image via Fast Company.]

Erick Tseng, a senior product manager on Google’s mobile operating system, Android, has left for Facebook. He’ll be its new head of mobile products.

Android is managing to gain significant market traction on its own. It’s an alternative OS to the iPhone and other smartphone rivals that any manufacturer or carrier can use for free, and modify as they want. But Facebook’s mobile products are also booming. More than 100 million of the company’s 400 million officially-announced monthly active users (the actual number is likely more like 500 million) are using at least one of its mobile products.

Facebook mobile apps for the iPhone, Blackberry, and other devices are widely popular, and many carriers and manufacturers around the world have been integrating Facebook components (like SMS status updates) into their own systems; Apple itself looks to join its many rivals on this front with the launch of the iPhone OS 4.0. See our analysis of Facebook’s mobile efforts in our Inside Facebook Gold report for more.

Tseng has, among other jobs, held product management roles at Microsoft and Yahoo. He’s been at Google nearly four years. He most recently has focused on Google’s self-branded Android phone, the Nexus One.

His tweeted announcement about the new job, from yesterday:

The official statement from Facebook:

We can confirm that Erick Tseng is joining Facebook as the head of mobile products. Erick has a long track record of building engaging experiences for people on mobile devices. We are thrilled to have Erick join us as Facebook continues to help build products and features that enable people to share and connect at anytime, from anywhere.

[Image via The Sydney Morning Herald.]

The Middle East added about a third more monthly active users to Facebook in April than it did in March, or more than 1 million new users, according to our latest Global Monitor report.

Egypt led the charge, sending in some 392,080 new users. As we mentioned last month, the atmosphere actually isn’t entirely comfortable for Facebook in the country, with an opposition group called the April 6 Youth Movement using Facebook to organize. The protesters, or at least the visibility they are giving Facebook, could be a significant growth driver; the April 6 Page is now up to 77,345 members.

Growth for Saudi Arabia was fairly steady from March to April at 190,340 new MAU. Following Egypt, this is one of the countries in the region with lower penetration, now at 8.6 percent. But both countries seem to be consistently growing now, so that won’t be the case for long.

Both the United Arab Emirates and Israel are also reliable growers, and added about equal numbers of users in April. As you can see, Israel has a higher penetration and lower growth rate; the country is probably within a few percentage points of reaching its peak penetration. The UAE, though, isn’t far behind.

Lebanon and Jordan are also neck-and-neck, but we didn’t see Lebanon on the list last month, and Jordan’s growth more than doubled. Finally, Kuwait also snuck on, despite having a smaller population than any country in the region besides Qatar. Here’s the list:

The total gain among the seven listed above was 1,114,500, while unlisted countries like Iraq and Oman would add a handful more for the region. As always, this data is sourced from Facebook’s advertising tool, which runs at least a few weeks behind.

Our full Global Monitor report covers almost 100 countries and includes the metrics you see above, as well as forward projections for every country and region. It’s part of our Inside Facebook Gold subscription service.