Facebook recently updated its official company Statistics page with some new data points about how people are using the service. The single biggest update is that the company now says that more than one million web sites have integrated with its developer platform, whether via its new social plugins or other features. Facebook has also removed or re-described some information that it used to share. Here’s a quick look at all of the changes.

The stats page is divided up into a few different sections. The top one, called “People on Facebook,” still says that more than 400 million people are using the site every month, like it did in February, and it still says that half of them log on every day, and that the average user has 130 friends. It also says that people spend more than 500 billion minutes per month on the service.

Facebook has also moved detailed stats on features like status updates, photos, events and Pages to the next section, “Activity on Facebook.” And while it previously listed out details on specific features like status updates, events, photos and Pages — see our February writeup for more on that — it has now grouped them together. The company says there are more than 160 million “objects” that people interact with; objects are defined as Pages, groups and events. The average user is connected to 60 of these objects, and creates 70 “pieces of content” each month (definition: “web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.”). Overall, it says that more than 25 billion pieces of content are shared every month. In February, it said that 5 billion pieces of content were being created each week — assuming that it means the same thing by “created” and “shared,” the number of pieces of content have grown from slightly above 20 billion a month to 25 billion. That increase isn’t surprising considering that Facebook has continued to gain millions of new users every month.

Skipping over the “Global Reach” section — data here hasn’t changed aside from its name, which used to be “International Growth” — we come to the Platform section. It has some big new numbers. The first change isn’t that big, though, as the number of active applications has grown from 500,000 to 550,000.

But next, instead of 80,000 web sites having implemented Facebook Connect, the company now says that more than one million web sites have integrated with the platform. This difference is due, in a large part, to Facebook’s launch of the Like Box and other social plugins in late April; the company said this week that more than 300,000 sites have already implemented the plugins, and the number appear to still be climbing. These sites aren’t just small personal blogs, as CNN and many other online publications have been successfully experimenting with the plugins.

And that’s not all. While Facebook previously said that more than 60 million people “engage with Facebook Connect” on other sites, it now says that the number is up to 150 million. Note that we’re assuming, based on Facebook’s phrasing, that this means actually using Facebook on other sites rather than just happening to load sites that have the Like Box. The reason for this qualification is that widget companies are notorious for purposefully conflating these sorts of numbers.

Big squads of social game developers are battling for World Cup fans on Facebook, but we’ve seen less action among non-gaming developers. 4bit Social Solution out of Istanbul, Turkey is the exception. It has created a very simple app, fittingly called 2010 World Cup Jersey, that lets users pick digital soccer (football) jerseys from a variety of countries around the world, then add their own names and post the results to their stream and profile wall.

The concept is not new, but people are obviously quite passionate about soccer right now. That seems to have propelled the app to reach 8.81 million monthly active users, most of whom have joined in the last few weeks.

The interface itself is quite plain. The canvas page includes a multi-step process for selecting your team of choice, your name, and the option to post to your wall. There’s only one font for your name, regardless of what jersey you choose. The developer includes a couple social plugins, including the Like Box and the Comments plugin, and intersperses ads from a third-party advertising network in with the content.

This sort of visual-focused app had its heyday when Facebook’s platform allowed developers to run content in profile boxes. Those days are long gone. It’s not surprising to see this app’s daily active user traffic on the decline. Perhaps the interesting point here is that so few other non-gaming apps have successfully taken advantage of the World Cup theme.

Back in February, as speculation built over how Facebook was going to work with PayPal (or compete with it), the two companies announced a formal partnership. Facebook would provide PayPal as a payment option in its Credits virtual currency, and it would do the same for its performance advertising system.

Now, the Ads payment integration is rolling out for all customers. PayPal is used by millions of people around the world, presumably including a good number of people who manage Facebook advertising campaigns — the news today will make paying easier for them, and maybe even get them spending more money.

For more on PayPal, Facebook, Credits, and payments, be sure to check out this guest post from early PayPal executive David Sacks.

Twice before, Chase Community Giving has had high points during which it claimed over two million MAU. More recently, it has had fewer than 100,000. But Chase is on the way back up on this week’s list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users.

Following Causes, Chase is one of the few philanthropic apps we’ve seen survive well in the long term. It’s the top non-game app reported by AppData, below, with 310,570 new MAU:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Verdonia	775,927	+763,669	+6,229.96
2.	Fashion World	934,094	+404,652	+76.43
3.	Chase Community Giving	499,918	+310,570	+164.02
4.	Zoo Kingdom	588,227	+246,149	+71.96
5.	Millionaire City	773,922	+240,746	+45.15
6.	Profile Picture Analyzer!	347,522	+204,514	+143.01
7.	Phrases	938,393	+145,907	+18.41
8.	Mahjong	777,658	+139,106	+21.78
9.	Trivias Locas – Trivias, encuestas y tests	269,740	+130,211	+93.32
10.	NanoStar Siege	639,776	+128,206	+25.06
11.	Maya Pyramid	197,270	+127,408	+182.37
12.	Sweet World	487,668	+115,916	+31.18
13.	Goooaaal	237,316	+112,921	+90.78
14.	¿Qué tan fanático eres de Toy Story?	123,774	+108,775	+725.22
15.	scoremaster	120,132	+108,549	+937.14
16.	sProphet	212,404	+102,562	+93.37
17.	- Clicks Racer Challenge	501,866	+101,291	+25.29
18.	Photobucket	935,770	+99,371	+11.88
19.	Riksdagsvalet 2010	215,995	+97,563	+82.38
20.	Become the Avatar	253,560	+96,943	+61.90

The two games on top, by the way, are pretty interesting — especially Verdonia, which is one of the few intensive strategy games that we’ve seen really take hold on Facebook. We’ve got more coverage on the whole category over at Inside Social Games.

Profile Picture Analyzer!, at number six, randomly assigns numbers to your picture for beauty, sexiness, coolness and intelligence; it has been growing for a few weeks. Random number generation has been popular of late, as well as quote and phrase of the day apps, which is where Phrases, the next app down, fits in.

Spanish-language apps are doing well this week. Trivias Locas – Trivias, encuestas y tests is a quiz creator, although it also stresses trivia, as the name suggests. ¿Qué tan fanático eres de Toy Story? is an individual quiz about the movie Toy Story.

Down at number 15, scoremaster is a fantasy soccer app benefiting from the World Cup. That’s probably also the case for sProphet, in with the s stands for “sports”. Finally, a non-Swedish speaker might look at Riksdagsvalet 2010 and assume it’s also soccer-related. On the contrary; it’s a prediction app for the Swedish parliamentary elections, which must be especially exciting this year.

Facebook’s online video traffic is continuing to grow in the US, according to web measurement firm ComScore, rising from 41.3 million unique viewers in April to 45.5 million last month. The average number of videos viewed per Facebook user stayed about the same, falling slightly from 5.6  to 5.4.

The company also notably cracked comScore’s rankings for the 10 largest US online video sites by views, appearing for the first time with 245 million views in the month, or roughly 0.7% percent of the US market. Of course, Google dominates the list because of YouTube, and brought in a total of 14.6 billion views for 43.2% of all US video views during the period.

While still relatively small, Facebook’s video presence has boomed along with the site’s growth over the past few year. Reasons include its efforts to improve its uploading and sharing features, along with broader trends, like the increasing prevalence of mobile devices with video-recording capabilities.

However, as NewTeeVee points out, comScore’s numbers don’t quite line up with what Facebook is seeing internally — the company recently said that there are now more than 2 billion video views happening per month through the service. One reason for the difference is that Facebook is referring to its worldwide traffic while comScore, in this case, is only looking at US traffic. More than 70% of Facebook’s users are located outside of the US, so comScore’s numbers here only reflect a minority of Facebook’s overall video traffic. Other reasons Facebook’s numbers diverge likely include methodological differences between how Facebook and comScore count traffic. For what it’s worth, a Facebook spokesperson tells the publication that  ”Our internal stats for our monthly video uploads and views. We don’t comment on third party data so I can’t speak to how Comscore measures [its stats].”

Whatever numbers you look at, the trend here is that as Facebook — and the ubiquity of digital videos — continues to grow, so too will Facebook’s video traffic.

Facebook’s performance advertising system provides buyers with a wealth of targeting options, but not the depth of control or analytics to effectively take advantage of the opportunity. To allow companies to build more powerful tools for managing Facebook ads, the company began allowing a select few developers access to an ads API last fall. Here we’ll explain the functionality and strengths of the different products built on top of the ads API, beginning with Techlightenment’s Alchemy.

The browser-based service allows users to manage and analyze large, complex Facebook advertising campaigns. Techlightenment — a bootstrapped 30-employee social media agency based in London with $7 million in annual revenue — created Alchemy to help scale its social media advertising management business. Today, there are roughly 60 clients using the system from industries including direct response marketing, e-commerce, lead generation, segments such as health care, consumer products, social gaming and online entertainment and companies like Skype, Nissan, and GlaxoSmithKline. Alchemy typically works with companies spending over $500,000 a year on Facebook ads, providing its service in exchange for a percentage of total spend, with no-set up cost.

Users begin by entering location and targeting parameters as well as headlines, copy, and images to create a cascading set of ads from selected permutations of the variables. This permits users to create hundreds of ads simultaneously instead of one by one.

Alchemy also suggests additional keywords based on those you enter to enlarge the size of an ad’s audience. Once the ads are created, users can tag their campaign to allow analytics of groups of similar campaigns, place different bids depending on location, choose whether Alchemy will optimize for CPM or CPC, and define how revenue and margins are calculated.

Once ads are running, Alchemy provides an analytics program for tracking results. Graphs can be viewed by metrics such as Costs Per Action, by creative element, or by targeting parameter, showing buyers exactly what city or photo performed best. Alchemy also creates tracking URLs for the different ads and integrates with popular analytics systems to both push and pull data, allowing users to see the direct influence of the ads on conversion rates and ROI, all within the service. These analytics can be exported into a variety of formats, ensuring clients can use it for their own purposes.

Users can utilize the data to edit existing ads and campaigns without having to start over, or clone ads for use in new campaigns. Performance breakdowns by CTR permit A/B testing, helping to find and expand the use of the best performers while halting underperforming permutations. Alchemy lets users create rules such as “If when this ad hits 100,000 impressions the CPC is higher than .31 cents then lower bid to .25 cents” to automatically optimize ads as they fatigue. A notable feature is optimization recommendations, such as telling you which ads it thinks you should pause.

Techlightenment’s Ankur Shah believes clients are seeing the advantage of the product, with “60% [making a] generally consistent month on month spend increase through the system”. He also reports significant drops in CPC cost for clients despite their fees, and large conversion increases for ads which directly link to entertainment media and games.

Shah predicts a massive ramp up in Facebook ad buys, but doesn’t think Facebook will be quick to make the ads API public. He says the most useful thing Facebook could do to improve the API would be to allow counting of impressions served which would aid in tracking branding and the warming up of consumers instead of only tracking actions. Other changes on Alchemy’s wish list include day parting, the ability to place ads for fractions of a day, and an increase in transparency around Facebook’s ad quality score algorithm, which causes ads that perform well at first to be showed much more frequently than initially slow ads within a large campaign.

Overall, Alchemy is a step up from Facebook native ad buying tool or the bulk uploader, trading on it’s cascading ad creation tool, powerful analytics, and increasingly sophisticated auto-optimization features. While it was one of the first companies to start using the API, it now faces many more competitors, including established advertising optimization companies — stay tuned for more profiles in this emerging area.

Facebook’s rapid growth and regular product changes — especially around privacy — have brought new attention from politicians and regulators in the US and around the world. So the company, which as been gradually filling out a team of public service veterans over the years, has good reason for its latest hire today.

Marne Levine is leaving a White House staffing position to be the company’s new vice president of global public policy. Based out of Facebook’s public policy offices in Washington, DC, she’ll “oversee and coordinate our interactions with governments and non-governmental organizations working on key policy issues around the globe” and “help scale efforts to build out our policy teams in Asia, the Americas and Europe.”

Timothy Sparapani, Facebook’s public policy director in DC, will continue to focus on Congress and the US federal government; Richard Allan will continue in his director role working with European Union. Both will report to her, and in turn she will report to Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications, marketing and public policy. (See Facebook’s current executive team lineup, here).

She leaves her position as the chief of staff at the White House National Economic Council, where she had worked under long-time mentor and current council director Larry Summers. She previously was his chief of staff when he was the president of Harvard University; like Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, she also worked in the US Department of Treasury. Immediately prior to joining the White House, Levine the director of product management for Revolution Money, and director of business development and strategy at Cibernet Corporation.

Beyond congressional attention on Facebook’s recent privacy changes, the company faces a number of legally-undecided policy questions, including how it (as opposed to government agencies) might be responsible for third party applications on its platform. For more on app policing and other public policy issues, check out this timely interview with Sparapani:

Five Q’s with Timothy Sparapani, Facebook from Rob Haralson on Vimeo.

[Editor's Note: The following stats are excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Click here to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

In this month’s language stats, we’re focusing in on Indonesia, which recently became Facebook’s third-largest country by monthly active users and is poised to pass the United Kingdom for second place. Because it’s growing quickly, Indonesia’s importance for marketers and localization of apps is quickly rising.

We recently looked at country-by-country language data on Facebook. While each country with a presence on Facebook tends to have its own primary language, it’s also common for countries to have a number of less significant, secondary languages in use. In the United States; for instance, between one and two percent of users, totaling over 1.6 million users, access Facebook in Spanish.

Beyond the US, the shares of secondary languages quickly become much larger, with English usually remaining a significant presence.

In particular, language demographics become rather complicated in Asia, where users often choose to surf the web in English. That’s certainly true for Indonesia’s Facebook audience:

Although English usage fell over the month from 21.7% to 21.34% of Indonesia users, that’s still a huge chunk, much larger than we’d typically see for a secondary language in Europe. For example, English is only used by 5.2 percent in France, Facebook’s fifth-largest country.

But it turns out that Indonesians are cultural stalwarts in comparison to others in their region. Here’s how Indonesia’s percentage of Facebook users who load the site in English compared to four neighbors:

This data is not perfect; for instance, we can’t tell whether users are choosing to interact with Facebook in English, but communicate with their friends and family in their native language. This could be a habit developed while using the mainly English-language internet over the years, and simply preserved on Facebook.

However, there are a few more things we can tell about this large population of English users. Here’s how they break down by age, just in Indonesia:

These splits between age groups tend to reflect Indonesia’s predominantly youthful audience. However, there’s an interesting phenomenon to pick out: it’s actually Indonesia’s older users who are more likely to use the site in English. Up to the age of 25, some 17 percent of Indonesians are using Facebook in English, while 30 percent of those over 25 use the site in English. The likelihood of using English increases as the age group gets younger or older.

For a country like the Philippines, in which almost all users are already accessing Facebook in English, it is difficult to get a clear picture of how language demographics are changing, if at all. Indonesia’s stats, though, suggest that the Asian audience will likely move to using their own languages over time as more young users join the site.

All of this article’s metrics on population, age, language and more come from our data subscription package at Inside Facebook Gold. Learn more about this service at gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook.

Here’s our latest look at people who Facebook has hired in the last week, as shown by LinkedIn. The new employees come from a range of backgrounds in the public and private sector including a few well-known technology companies.

• David Baser: Now a Monetization Analyst at Facebook and previously worked as an economist at Compass Lexecon, consulting on antitrust matters, class certification and damages.
• Nina Choudhuri:  A new staffing manager of U.S. specialized operations at Facebook, coming from being an international staffing lead and manager of staffing at Microsoft; also she previously worked as director of staffing at Russell Athletic.
• Lauren Deaton:  Now working in online sales operations at Facebook, comes from working as a recruiting services coordinator at the University of Texas at Austin’s Communication Career Services. She previously worked as an AdWords account associate at Google and a photo editor at the Michiganensian.
• Lamis Diwan: The new design and user experience recruiter at Facebook. Diwan is coming from working as a university/technical recruiter at Cypress Semiconductor and prior to that worked as a merchant specialist at Wells Fargo.
• Harrison Fisk:  Joining as a MySQL Database Engineer; he previously worked the same job at Oracle and as a consultant at FTI Consulting.
• Kelly Graziadei:  On board as a brand agency strategy and account management employee. She previously worked as the managing director for global account management and operations and a managing director at Yahoo! Prior to that she was a director of interactive marketing at 90octane, a strategic account manager at AltaVista Corporation and an associate director of product marketing at SBC Communications.
• Raman Grover: A new engineering intern at Facebook. His previous educational experience has been as a staff/graduate student researcher with a database research group at the University of California, Irvine. Professionally he previously worked several positions at Adobe and as a software engineer at BayPackets.
• Kathleen Hebert:  A marketing associate intern at Facebook. She comes from a job as a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group.
• Matthew Johnston:  Taking a position as an analyst for platform operations at Facebook; previously he worked as a freelance multimedia designer at Goo Design, a web developer at Bodytonicmusic.com and in windows operations co-op at Intel.

Twitter has revamped its friend-finding features today to make it easier for Facebook friends to follow each other. However, the feature isn’t completely working and the reason why is unclear.

First, how it’s supposed to work. If you’re coming from Twitter’s site, you’re presented with the option to sync with Facebook by clicking through to add Twitter’s Facebook application. You’ll need to install the app, thereby providing Twitter with access to your basic information as well as your personal interests.

The app then lets you sync your profile photos between the two sites, as well as status updates from Twitter to Facebook (which the app has allowed you to do for years). You’ll also get the option to find friends on Facebook who have also installed the app; if your Facebook friends are on Twitter but have not installed the app, they won’t appear here.

The app shows you which Facebook friends you’re already following on Twitter, and which ones you haven’t. If you want to follow new people, you can either do so directly or else create a list. The latter option gives you an easy way to see what all your tweeting Facebook friends are up to, and it defaults to private, meaning that unless you make the list public, those friends won’t know that you’re following them.

Right now, however, the find-Facebook-friends functionality isn’t working. At first, Twitter described the problem as an intentional block from Facebook, but now both companies are saying that they are working together to solve the problem. Given that the Twitter app is using the Facebook platform in the same way as many other third parties, we expect the problem — whatever it is — to be resolved. In the meantime, Twitter is has stopped directing users from its site to its Facebook application.

The fascinating history between the two companies adds a new dimension to this product, and its problem.

Twitter has emerged as Facebook’s leading social service rival in the last couple of years, although Facebook is more focused on private, real-life connections and Twitter is more focused on public sharing (on a related note, it’s not clear why Twitter is asking for Facebook users to provide it with their personal interests). Facebook tried to buy Twitter in late 2008 and started to compete with it more directly — even altering its algorithmic news feed to be a raw stream of status updates in early 2009, although it then switched back later last year. In hindsight, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tells us that he “paid too much attention to it.” Check out our recent interview with Zuckerberg for more on that.

Although Twitter’s traffic has been climbing slowly for the last 12 months or so, it continues to expand around the world — and it also appears to have attracted a significant number of Facebook users. A recent update to Facebook’s publicly available application traffic showed Twitter (along with a wide variety of other apps) to be far larger than previously visible. It has 6.7 million monthly active users, according to AppData, rather than the few hundred thousand it had previously shown.

Assuming the Twitter app works as intended, the result should be more Facebook users getting more value out of Twitter. While this is unlikely to affect how people use Facebook, the two companies are both actively evolving their products; whether or not they become more direct competitors is something that even they appear to be unsure about. Regardless of how the companies see each other, many users themselves seem to be getting value out of both: Twitter tells TechCrunch that the ability to find tweeting Facebook friends has been the number one support request for some time.