More details have appeared about Facebook’s location plans: It will provide a way for you to share your location via your phone, and show you a list of nearby venues that you can check in to. That’s according to software code, below, that showed up in the version of the site designed for the iPhone mobile operating system, touch.facebook.com, as TechCrunch discovered yesterday.

This follows a long string of rumors and clues about the service. The most recent: McDonald’s is planning to include some form of check-in service in partnership with Facebook, AdAge reported last week, that would allow users to tell their friends when they go to one of the fast food chain’s locations.

The iPhone mobile site uses the location functionality available in the new HTML5 web markup language standard to get your location from your phone, showing you a new check-in part of the site called Places. Beyond latitude and longitude, the code also includes ways to record altitude, direction and speed — although these are generally part of the standards specification around what location data is shared, and won’t necessarily be included in whatever Facebook launches.

The code amounts to more evidence that Facebook will provide a way of checking in at physical locations, which hasn’t been entirely clear in the past. One can imagine a “check-in” appearing as a story in users’ news feeds, similar to a status update or anything else — and analogous to Foursquare and other location-driven games, like Foursquare, that use the check-in concept.

We continue to expect that Facebook will find other ways to integrate location into its platform, both giving location data to third parties and getting it from them.

Facebook could provide location in more general ways, though — perhaps some sort of geo-tag that gets included in a status update, as Twitter has done, for example. It already provides documentation for how developers can add location to their Pages as part of its Open Graph Protocol, as we wrote about last month. It’s not clear how this functionality will interoperate with check-ins. One way it could: Allow businesses to provide their own locations to appear in Places, especially in case people aren’t able to find the locations using their phone’s GPS.

Another clue for Facebook’s plans is that McDonald’s is providing the service through an application located in the tab of its Facebook Page, but not the Page itself. This suggests Facebook is enabling McDonald’s to access location information through an application API that it has yet to release.

[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.]

More than 70% of Facebook’s users now live outside of the United States. And yet, many of the site’s biggest brands marketers, advertisers, and developers have targeted their efforts to the English-speaking North American market. This makes sense when considering that the United States is Facebook’s #1 country in terms of absolute users, has high engagement rates, high market penetration rates, and is a lucrative and monetizable market. However, these same reasons make the US an increasingly saturated market. Marketers and developers looking to grow even more must mirror Facebook’s own growth – much of which is now happening in other countries around the world.

As Facebook continues to grow in markets outside the US, should campaigns and apps be tailored by language, region (Latin America), or country? Do localization and culturalization still matter?

Today, we take a look at the site’s growth in Latin America, a rapidly changing and growing set of markets for players in the Facebook ecosystem.

> Read more of this article on Inside Facebook Gold

Facebook’s most recent privacy-related changes have brought it new scrutiny from privacy groups, attorneys general and even some members of Congress. So the company has brought in a top anti-trust lawyer named Timothy Muris to help defend it to the federal government, according to the Financial Times.

“There have been some reports that Tim Muris has joined Facebook,” representative Andrew Noyes tells us. “Muris has not joined Facebook.”

Facebook works with a variety of law firms — one scenario is that the company is just consulting with Muris, who is a top lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers LLP. Another scenario is that it has looked at hiring him or is in the process of doing so, but is not yet able to confirm so publicly. Either way, the company is getting more legal help around privacy issues.

Muris has been in the thick of privacy issues and regulation in general for the past few decades, and he understands the FTC, the law and how to approach both better than most. The hire would build on Facebook’s already deep connections to Washington, D.C. — something it started moving on years ago, before many other Silicon Valley companies like Google did, in terms of its life cycle.

It has hired a wide range of executives with governmental experience. These include: current chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, a Google executive who had worked in the Clinton era Treasure department, vice president of global communications, marketing and public policy Elliot Schrage, also a Clinton staffer, and vice president and general counsel Ted Ullyot, a Bush legal adviser. It has also hired former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Timothy Sparapani to work on on its DC public policy issues.

It comes at a time when Facebook has made significant changes to how it treats user data, in a way that is bringing it a new round of criticism from privacy groups and members of the federal government. Four United States Senators asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into Facebook last month, and a number of leading privacy groups followed up with their own letter — and complained that the FTC had been moving too slowly on previous Facebook privacy changes.

Muris was President George H.W. Bush’s Federal Trade Commission-appointed chairman from 2001 to 2004. He both helped protect consumers and the industry, depending on the issues. He introduced the national do-not-call registry, which lets consumers provide their telephone number to a national database that marketers are prohibited from calling, for example. But as with many other Bush appointees, Muris pursued a non-interventionist policy in the private sector — like in multi-level marketing and online behavioral advertising.

He’s been a private sector lawyer when he hasn’t been in government, including at O’Melveny & Myers LLP. His clients, according to his current biography, have included: Verizon Communications, Inc, ExxonMobil Corporation, a major payment cards network, Citigroup, Inc., Northwest Airlines, Inc., a consumer products conglomerate, U.S. Telecom Association, major companies in the financial services industry, and a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical manufacturer.

He testified to a Senate commerce committee against a legislative proposal that would give the FTC more regulatory authority on privacy, as the Financial Times notes. The measure had already passed the US House of Representatives and privacy groups want to attach it to the financial overhaul making its way through the Senate. Muris, who otherwise declined to comment on the story, told the publication that his testimony included positions “he held for the past 35 years.”

This week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users contains some interesting apps and games, but nothing that really jumps out. The first obvious change from last week is that Treasure Isle, the newest Zynga, has finally slowed down enough to drop to number two — although arguably on a technicality, since Static FBML is an in-house technical app for Facebook.

For a while, the second strongest grower behind Isle was Hotel City, which has now dropped down. It has been replaced by Big City Life, the latest game from Playdom and one that appears to have real potential. Here’s the full AppData top 20 list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Static FBML	61,265,720	+3,569,532	+6.19
2.	Treasure Isle	27,574,650	+1,965,836	+7.68
3.	Big City Life	1,100,090	+732,601	+199.35
4.	Family Feud	4,288,196	+635,510	+17.40
5.	Frases Diarias	2,018,095	+573,331	+39.68
6.	Hotel City	13,765,019	+563,634	+4.27
7.	Bola	2,259,042	+539,633	+31.38
8.	Mall World	2,520,797	+521,739	+26.10
9.	Kingdoms of Camelot	2,922,232	+470,984	+19.21
10.	Profile Box	576,883	+466,604	+423.11
11.	Causes	26,176,810	+435,196	+1.69
12.	Quiz Planet!	4,791,026	+411,605	+9.40
13.	Facebook for iPhone	33,985,098	+409,588	+1.22
14.	Nightclub City	574,874	+404,859	+238.13
15.	@Smiles	6,473,172	+396,128	+6.52
16.	Name Analyzer	472,011	+295,527	+167.45
17.	Yearbook	3,593,939	+283,287	+8.56
18.	Monster World	251,457	+203,770	+427.31
19.	iKarma	1,665,805	+201,678	+13.77
20.	Jungle Life	337,089	+198,359	+142.98

Family Feud is quickly turning into Facebook’s biggest trivia game, a phenomenon that its publisher tried to explain last week. Looking down the list, there are several more interesting games, but we’ll save more coverage on them for our post on Inside Social Games.

Frases Diarias is the first non-game app that stands out; in Spanish, it follows the quote-of-the-day formula. A more interesting app is down at number 10: Profile Box, which first hit our radar last Friday. Profile Box is used to create custom HTML on user’s pages, but it’s not clear yet whether it really has that many new users or if, like Static FBML, it’s also signing up users who happen to see a modified profile.

Quiz Planet! is about a year and a half old, but it has had amazing longevity compared to most Facebook apps, hanging on to a fairly steady userbase for months at a time. The question is why it’s gaining now (it also added MAUs last week), even as competitors like Quiz Creator decline, as seen below. The answer could be new international users.

Lastly, we’ll point out Yearbook, which is taking over the limited market that created Facebook in the first place. Over the past month, it has added about a million new users. Look out, Classmates.com.

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 3rd, 2010

• Big Slowdown Across Most of This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Top 25 MySpace Games for May 2010
• Top 25 Facebook Games for May 2010
• Playing Classical Piano with Smule on the iPad

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

• Offerpal Launches Its Own Virtual Goods Currency
• RealNetworks Releases GameHouse Platform for Social Game Development
• Hunting Real-Money Prizes in Bounty Quest on Facebook
• Metrogames Grows a Jungle Pet Title on Facebook

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

• New Games Dominate On This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games By DAU
• Ubisoft Launches Another Social Game on Facebook: Horse Gaga
• Sony Online Entertainment Launches New Facebook Game: The Agency: Covert Ops
• StarCraft II to Get Facebook Integration

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

• Fatfoogoo Gets Bought By Digital River For $10 Million
• Manu Rekhi Leaves LOLapps to Head MySpace’s Game Platform
• Wooga Goes Facebook Farming with Monster World
• Facebook Developer Consortium Launches Applifier, the “Rebel Alliance” of Cross-Promotion

Friday, May 7th, 2010

• Enter the Urban Jungle on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Facebook Soccer Game Bola Scores, But Needs To Train More
• On5 Turns Pop Icons into Lemmings on the iPhone
• Social Gaming Roundup: Booyah, Kwedit, Capcom, & More

Visualizing Facebook’s Move Towards Openness — Whatever you think about Facebook’s relentless efforts to make its service more open and central to the web — and sneakily destroy user privacy, as some see it — you should be sure to check out this infographic of the company’s changes. Created by user interface developer Matt McKeon, it shows concentric circles of privacy, from your friends to the entire internet, segmented by feature type.

Each feature has become more open over time, and the graphic represents this by filling in the circular outline in dark blue. You can click through the year dates on the right to see the progression. Here’s what it looks like today:

Note to readers: We’ll be providing in-depth analysis of recent Facebook privacy and security issues this next week.

Topix.com Adds Facebook Plugins – Topix.com, the bulletin board discussion forum used across the country, has added Facebook’s social plugins to the site, as well as a Twitter location feature. Changes were meant to add social engagement, and the Facebook plugins were added to the topic and location pages, but not yet for story and article pages. There’s currently not a way to login into Topix with your Facebook login — but this makes sense because the site is often a forum for anonymous comments. The site receives about 125 million page views and 14 million unique visitors monthly with more than 50,000 news items published a day.

The ‘Unlike’ Option – Facebook added an “unlike” option to help users un-fan Facebook Pages via fan box plugins. Previously, it wasn’t easy to un-fan, or un-like, a Page on an external web site, which helped Page admins keeps their fan numbers high.

U.S. Govt Creates Page for Oil Spill – An oil spill off the coast of the U.S. state of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico has prompted government officials to create an official Facebook Page addressing the disaster. The Page, Deepwater Horizon Response, is a “unified command” of several agencies working together to address the leak and protect the environment; some of the agencies involved include the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency. The Page currently has about 12,500 fans and provides photos, updates, resources, press release and video related to the spill.

Parature Launches Support Tab – Accel Partners-backed Parature launched a customer service product for the Facebook Page amins which essentially creates an integrated and branded Support tab on the Page. This tab takes comments posted to the Wall and transforms them into service tickets that are attacked to that customer/Facebook user and these are in turn tended to by company employees. Parature also includes a frequently asked questions feature and a live chat feature available on the Facebook Page; thus far clients include Rosetta Stone, NPR and T Mobile.

Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!

RockYou providers developers with virtual currency and display ad monetization services.

Matomy is a provider of alternative payment solutions for social network applications.

Frima Studio develops social games for big brands.

Offerpal Media is a managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Zong is a provider of mobile payments serving the digital content, social media, and gaming industries.

LifeStreet Media is a performance advertising platform focused on social applications.

Super Rewards is a monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

AdParlor helps facebook application developers grow and monetize their applications.

SoftLayer provides managed hosting services for social application and game developers.

mopay is a global provider of mobile payments for web content.

Brands haven’t had much success in the Facebook app market. Although quite a few large companies have a successful Page for themselves or a product, it’s rare to see an app that has had any success at all working with a well-known name.

Which is why we’ve been watching Family Feud with interested since the app began quickly growing in March. Despite stemming from a brand over three decades old, Feud kicked the losing streak for brands and got users — almost four million of them at last count.

David Fox, the co-founder of developer iWin, got up on stage yesterday at the Social Gaming Summit in San Francisco to talk about what made the difference with the trivia app.

First and most surprising is that Feud’s growth may not be as dependent on nostalgia as you might think — Fox said that Brits and Australians have also been playing the game. Feud succeeds because it hits a sweet spot in its market; Fox called it a “trivia game for everyday folk.”

What really makes Feud work is having a brand that fits naturally into a social app. Feud isn’t just trivia, it’s cooperative trivia in which small, tightly knit social groups work together. On Facebook, players can’t synchronously work together, but iWin managed to translate the touch-points to still be satisfying for users. For instance, after playing a round you may be able to see answers that friends gave in the past, what Fox called a “moment of intimacy” that provides in insight into how people close to you think.

Picking a brand with obvious social connections was only half the puzzle for iWin, though. The other half was finding a brand owner that understood Facebook and was willing to provide support, not just licensing.

Having fulfilled those basic qualifications, though, iWin decided to go off the rails with many of its other features. Here are a few points from Fox’s list of Facebook “rules” that his company broke with the game:

• Long session times: Fox said that Feud’s playtimes run long for Facebook, but users don’t seem to mind.
• Gated content: Feud is a time management game with a vengeance, involving a 24 hour wait between plays unless you pay. Fox seemed to think the strict gating had to do with some people’s addiction.
• Not international: iWin hasn’t localized the prototypically American game, even for the easy British English market, but again, people come back anyway.
• Heavy keyboard use: There’s not much mouse-clicking in Feud, something of a central facet of most Facebook games.
• You can lose: Most Facebook games don’t have any real way for a player to lose.

Fox also mentioned a couple rules that the company initially broke, but had to change its mind on, including updating content (it turned out that players always have creative new answers and interpretations to be added to the database) and adding in some potentially viral components.

The big take-away is that Fox actually thinks that working with brand owners will be one of the vital methods left to smaller developers, going forward. “A brand is one of the few ways left to succeed,” he said, though adding that the idea of rule breaking is important too. “There are a lot of different things to be tried,” he said. “People often say that at conferences, but they’re not actually doing it. Organic growth is still possible.

Online shopping just became a little bit more social, as Bing Shopping has integrated Facebook and Twitter into its interface. Now while using Bing Shopping, Facebook users can post an item to their profile, letting them begin conversations with their friends about the potential merits of owning it.

In a blog post yesterday Bing Shopping managers Lawrence Lam and Sonam Saxena announced that, since 75% of shoppers ask for advice — even while online shopping — Bing wanted to make its shopping experience more social, too. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is integrated into Facebook’s interface.

The pair wrote in the post, “With a single click you can ask for advice from your friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter for their take on a product you saw on Bing Shopping.” Bing Shopping is a service similar to Amazon and eBay that allows the user to search for products, generates a list of new to used items at different prices with product descriptions and often a photo.

Using the new feature is pretty simple, all you have to do after searching for your product is click on the Facebook button to share it to your profile, the Twitter button to tweet it or click on email to send the link to a friend.

Developers building on top of Facebook’s new Graph Search API just saw delays in real-time content from Facebook, although the service is working now. Third party social search startups including OneRiot and Booshaka, for example, were unable to provide updates from Facebook in their services.

The API, as a reminder, lets third parties access all publicly available content on Facebook — like links that users are publicly sharing — then mix it in with whatever services they want to create. It is potentially useful for anyone looking to aggregate and organize lots of public data.

Facebook provided us with this statement about the issue:

Our engineering team investigated questions about specific search functionality of the API and confirmed that at no point did search or other aspects of the Graph API go down. It appears that indexing of new stream content was delayed for 12 hours, but this has been fixed.

So this was a small hiccup from a service that has been live for only a few weeks — the sort of bug that one often sees with a new product at a fast-growing company.  But Facebook will, of course, need to improve the robustness of this service in order for third parties to fully use it. We expect this to happen.