Amazon launched a new integration with Facebook today allowing users who link their accounts to receive purchase suggestions based on their Facebook interests, see gift recommendations for friends with upcoming birthdays, and browse items popular among  your social network.

The integration pulls data about movie, music, and book preferences from you and your friends’ profiles and uses Amazon’s recommendation to suggest similar products. Curiously, there are not currently any additional sharing elements to communicate the social shopping experience back to Facebook.

Once a user signs into their Amazon account, or creates a new one, and allows Amazon access to basic, profile, lists, contact and friends’ information at any time, they are brought to “Your Amazon Facebook Page.” Their own profile interests are listed down the left side of the screen, including a direct link back to Facebook’s profile editor, making it easy to update one’s likes. In the center of the screen, three types of social content are available: Birthday and Gift Suggestions for Your Facebook Friends, Recommendations Based on Your Favorite [interest type] on Facebook, and Popular Among Your Friends.

Birthday and Gift Suggestions shows icons for your friends, default ordered by nearest birthday. It might be too late to send today’s birthday boys and girls gifts, but Amazon still shows them first. Clicking “See gift suggestions” brings up that person’s Amazon Facebook profile and lists items Amazon’s recommendation engine says are similar to items listed in their interests. For instance, if someone likes T.I. on their Facebook profile, Amazon will suggest you give them the latest Lil Wayne CD as a birthday gift. Clicking “Why is this suggested” brings up the stated preferences that generated the suggestion.

Recommendations Based on Your Favorite [interest type] on Facebook shows separate lists for favorite music, books, and movies. It feeds your own likes into the recommendation engine to give you Amazon’s quality suggestions without ever having used the site. Utilizing existing stated preferences instead of making you list and rate products you own on each shopping site you use is a huge step forward for e-commerce.

Popular Among Your Friends lists the items liked by the most of your friends. Each item has the number of likes in your network below it, along with mini-thumbnails of these people’s profile pictures. This feature makes it easy to determine what products are trending in your network and ensure you aren’t missing out.

These lists are reminiscent of Facebook Pulse, a early and now deactivated feature of Facebook which showed you the most popular items in different interest categories within your network. Even if one isn’t interested in purchasing anything, this data is entertaining and could use a way to be shared back to Facebook.

Overall, the social shopping experience still has a long way to go. The ability to aggregate interest data not just from one’s own profile, but from across all the social spheres represented in your friends creates recommendations that are hard to ignore. The fact that these preference summaries aren’t readily available on Facebook also indicates a gap. Yet, never before has it been so easy to ask all of your friends to suggest an album to buy and purchase it, without directly interacting with anyone.

After shooting up to become one of the largest developers on Facebook’s platform, Pencake Limited is getting all of its hundred-odd quiz apps disabled, including massive ones like Create your Quiz and Elements Analyst Creator. The reason appears to be policy violations, which we covered last week, although we don’t know which specific violations resulted in the ban.

From Facebook:

We recently disabled applications created by the developer of ‘Create Your Quiz’ for violating Facebook Platform policies. We enforce these policies regularly and will continue to take appropriate action against applications we find do not provide a trustworthy experience for users.

Other third-party developers on Facebook’s developer forum have been criticizing Pencake and documenting its platform activities. The company had amassed more than 44 million monthly active users to date, according to our AppData measurement service. But the story’s not over — Facebook says that Pencake itself is not banned, meaning that it could be back on when Facebook decides it is fully complying with platform policies.

As we’ve noted before, one of the most interesting things about Pencake is that it got so far at this point in the evolution of the developer ecosystem. Facebook has an open platform, meaning it allows developers to build for it without first having to get individually approved, in contrast to how some others operate (Apple’s iOS platform being an obvious example). The advantage to being open is that anyone can quickly build and iterate their own applications, but that’s also the downside. Anyone can also build apps that spam users, as Pencake appears to have most recently done.

Facebook has at times struggled to contain the sheer volume of anti-user actions taken by less scrupulous developers. In fact, the company has spent the last few months shutting down other quiz applications, but most of those were in English, that we saw. Pencake may have been able to stay quiet in part because many of its applications are in other languages.

New enforcement mechanisms are coming to Facebook, too, as chief technology officer Bret Tayler recently said. The company is working on an automated system that aims to preclude all spam-like communication. From the interview:

So rather than saying you’re not allowed to do X, Y, and Z with a dialog box in your game, if you’re sending useless messages from your game, we just won’t deliver them, and we’ll give you that feedback. And then you can change the way you send messages to send higher signal-to-noise content.

Most of the biggest developers have practiced spammy tactics at points since the platform launched in 2007, but they have managed to provide enough value to users, or at least reform before Facebook cut off their platform access. In the last few years, Facebook has also kept modifying and removing communication channels to preclude widespread abuse. The platform today is far less “viral” than it used to be, but the quality of the applications — and the user experience — has also gone up. The running battle between Faceboook’s platform enforcement team and some developers has, despite all the pain, produced a vibrant new ecosystem.

Ford used the Facebook Page of its iconic Explorer to reveal the 2011 model to the public. The campaign has been building for awhile — the company has been posting teaser photos and videos to the Page after it first announced the launch in early June.

Scott Monty, Ford’s Multimedia Communications Manager, tells us that launching the totally redesigned Explorer through Facebook was the most effective way to get the word out about the new model, and the numbers from the first day of the launch back that up.

The Ford Explorer Page began the day with about 42,500 fans, and Monty was hoping to end the day with 50,000. The Page passed that mark, increasing its fan numbers by about 25% to more than 53,000. The launch of the redesigned model also included individual reveals around the U.S. and Canada, all documented with an often-updated Flickr stream that was linked to the Page.

“We wanted lots of engagement,” said Monty. “The Reveal tab had a lot of action, and we had live participation as well as on demand content for people that missed [the initial reveal].”

New car and truck models are traditionally revealed at large auto shows, where any one new model can be overshadowed by the hundreds of other new autos in the shows. Monty saw a bigger problem with using the auto show stage to introduce a redesign of the Ford Explorer.

“Typically at an auto show, with any auto show scenario, we’re talking to ourselves. We needed to step out of that bubble to get that message out there. This is the 100% reinvented Explorer – we needed to reinvent how we get out to the people.”

The Explorer’s Facebook page was used to reveal teaser photos and videos of interviews with designers and engineers in the weeks leading up to the reveal. While the new Explorer was featured in a segment on NBC’s Today Show, the Facebook audience was the first to get a look at the redesigned 2011 model a few minutes earlier, as well as a full day of videos, live Q&As, and more surrounding the model.

The blanket coverage on the Facebook page speaks to Ford’s overall strategy on the social network. At first glance it appears that the auto manufacturer has much lower fan numbers than some of its competitors, but Ford has made the conscious decision to segment its Facebook presence into particular model pages instead of under one large brand umbrella. Monty feels this is an important element to the Ford approach to appealing to the Facebook community, giving the brand the ability to customize content based on what fans want.

Ultimately, choosing Facebook to reveal the redesigned Explorer was an easy decision for Monty. When it comes to choosing the most effective avenues to reaching the largest audience, his approach is simple: ”Our fans tell us where we need to be.”

Global brands joined a band of celebrities and musicians on this week’s list of Top 20 Facebook Pages, compiled by our PageData tool, counting the number of fans joining a Page on any given day. In order to make the list this week Pages had to acquire between 1.1 million and 518,300 new Likes.

Top Gainers This Week

Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	YouTube	9,105,143	+1,127,486	+14.13
2.	Facebook	14,234,219	+888,703	+6.66
3.	Lady Gaga	13,690,189	+817,782	+6.35
4.	Family Guy	13,451,027	+793,141	+6.27
5.	Coca-Cola	8,664,011	+785,276	+9.97
6.	Bob Marley	7,381,216	+766,719	+11.59
7.	House	10,824,937	+714,771	+7.07
8.	Eminem	8,262,643	+699,808	+9.25
9.	Linkin Park	8,994,938	+641,159	+7.68
10.	Vin Diesel	12,309,003	+630,930	+5.40
11.	South Park	8,914,566	+621,207	+7.49
12.	The Twilight Saga	10,257,766	+605,544	+6.27
13.	Starbucks	11,056,832	+597,424	+5.71
14.	Cristiano Ronaldo	8,911,429	+586,248	+7.04
15.	Shakira	5,591,895	+579,678	+11.57
16.	Michael Jackson	17,058,493	+550,254	+3.33
17.	Red Bull	7,021,774	+544,560	+8.41
18.	Oreo	7,202,917	+539,091	+8.09
19.	Lil Wayne	8,563,543	+538,582	+6.71
20.	Katy Perry	5,617,561	+518,320	+10.16

First was YouTube, adding 1.1 million fans to pass a total of 9.1 million Likes. Overall, the growth seemed pretty steady, although there appeared to be some official Page consolidation last week that affected many of the Pages on our list this week.

In the global brands category, Facebook came in second place, adding 888,700 Likes to reach a total of 14.2 million, perhaps in part to news of the hitting the half billion user mark. Coca-Cola came in fifth place, adding 785,300 fans to grow to surpass 8.6 million inw aht seemed to be partly due to Page consolidation.

Starbucks took the number 13 spot, adding 597,400 fans, growing to 11 million. Red Bull was at number 17, adding 544,600 fans, pulling in a total of 7 million Likes by promoting sporting events. Next was Oreo at number 18, adding 539,100 fans to pass 7.2 million Likes; the company continues to promote a contest for international fans to become the Page’s profile picture.

Celebrity, in several forms, made up a chunk of this list this week, too; this includes television shows, movies and stars.

In fourth place was television show “Family Guy,” adding 793,100 Likes to grow the Page to 13.4 million; the makers of the show made appearances at the recent Comic-Con event in California this week. Medical drama “House” was seventh, adding 714,800 fans to reach 10.8 million total; the show had big growth this week and won big at an awards show.

Action star Vin Diesel’s Page added 630,900 fans to grow to 12.3 million this week. Next, “South Park” took the number 11 spot, adding 621,200 Likes to a total of 8.9 million. “The Twilight Saga” followed in twelfth place, adding 605,500 fans, passing 10.2 million total, and also putting in an appearance at Comic-Con. Finally, Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo added 586,200 fans to his 8.9 million total to take fourtheenth place.

The rest of the list was occupied by musicians.

Lady Gaga was third, adding 817,800 fans to her 13.6 million. Bob Marley’s Page took sixth, adding 766,700 fans to a 7.3 million total, though there wasn’t much happening on the Page. Rapper Eminem was eighth, added 699,800 fans now with 8.2 million Likes; he’s promoting his new album. Linkin Park was ninth, adding 641,200 fans to come in just under 9 million fans; the Page is promoting the band’s new album in various ways, including by offering a pre-order on the Page.

Shakira added 579,700 fans to take number 15, coming out with a total of 5.5 million Likes; her Page has been promoting her award nominations, merchandise and tour dates. Next was Michael Jackson at number 16, adding 550,300 fans to pass 17 million total Likes. Rapper Lil Wayne was at number 19, added 538,600 fans, grew to 8.5 million in part by releasing a new music video and sharing another letter from prison. Finally, Katy Perry came in at number 20, adding 518,300 LIkes to now boast 5.6 million; she’s also promoting a new single.

Facebook launched a Page for media properties yesterday that includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook. The Page launched earlier this month and currently has more than 1,100 Likes.

The media Page joins several other company-run Pages Facebook has launched in the recent past, including the Comedy Page, Politics Page, Global Relief and U.S. Congress Page.

In a blog the company announced that it’d conducted an analysis of the 100 top media sites utilizing Facebook’s social plugins and developed a list of best practices.

Some of these include publishing earlier or later in the day for higher engagement, including thumbnail photos of a user’s friends for three-to-five times higher click-through rates, placing the Like button at the top and bottom of news items and using social plugins above the fold on multiple web pages to increase clicks up to ten fold. Also, stories that revolve around visceral topics or big sports events see two-to-three times more activity than other stories.

As for how media properties should manage their Facebook presence, the blog  suggested that posting simple questions or encouraging users to Like a story increased activity two or three fold. These types of insights are sure to be useful to media companies, which as we previously reported, have begun to see increases in traffic as a direct result of Facebook’s social plugins.

The Media Page includes information for developers, such as tips on how to drive engagement, as well as advice for journalists on how to drive traffic on Facebook. Many more insights about driving Facebook traffic can be found in the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible.

Today there are several moderately successful dating apps on Facebook, but conceptually they’re not much different from previously efforts on the web. A startup called Triangulate thinks that it can use Facebook’s data to do more.

Although Triangulate’s dating app, Wings, has been around for a few months and has reached 39,080 monthly active users, the company is only officially announcing it today. “We’ve been building a mathematical model of compatibility for a while now,” says Triangulate CEO Sunil Nagaraj.

Wings’ leap forward in dating technology is all about feeding data into those models. A new user visiting for the first time will enter all the usual facts about themselves, like age, interests and sexual orientation, but they’ll also be asked to give Wings permission to access their profile data, as well as from Foursquare, Netflix and Twitter if available.

In the background, Wings takes this data to build the rest of the profile. Part of this process is obvious — on most dating sites, for instance, it’s common for potential couples to compare their favorite movies.

But Wings also begins matching up the data to its own models of successful matchings, which are drawn from real couples. For instance, Nagaraj said, it’s easy to see whether two users rate classic movies highly on Netflix — but if both actually spend their time watching trashy action movies, Wings may use that data instead to predict a good match.

Triangulate’s core technology is actually applicable to more than dating. “The big piece here is that what people do is more valuable than what they say,” says Nagaraj. “We can personalize the user’s world and make recommendations about a wide variety of things.”

For now, though, the company is focusing on Wings, from which it can draw more information to power its models. The name Wings actually refers to the core mechanic for doing so — users are also encouraged to invite in their friends for the purpose of helping make matches, as with the popular concept of a wingman.

There are a few other features to Wings, but the data component is the “secret sauce”. What remains to be seen is whether automatically scraped data can offer a high level of accuracy; the idea of finding out random facts about a user isn’t new, as OKCupid, for example, does the same thing with short multiple-choice questions. Wings’ competition on Facebook is Zoosk, Are You Interested, and a few others.

Triangulate has also drawn a small amount of funding in a $750,000 round led by Trinity Ventures and participated in by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson.

Today, Facebook unveiled Facebook.com/FBSafety, an official Page focusing on keeping users informed about issues regarding objectionable content, cyberbullying, privacy, and security. It acts as the publishing arm of the recently launched Safety Center, a knowledge base of answers to safety related questions — similar to other official pages including Security and Congress On Facebook, Facebook Safety is a likable Page which pushes stories to the news feeds of people who like it.

The demand for better safety information became more intense after the November rape and murder of a 17 year-old English girl by a 33 year-old sex offender posing as a teenage boy on Facebook. While that sort of crime can happen over any web site or other communication service, the focus was directed at what Facebook could do to prevent abuse.  Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOP) released an app, which when installed made it easier for children to contact the authorities to report predators. Providing knowledge that can prevent these kind of tragedies is crucial to Facebook’s continued growth amongst younger demographics whose parents can limit their access if they think the site is unsafe.

Since the Facebook Safety Page launched on July 18th, it has posted stories featuring links to research and statistics on cyberbullying, discussions of social media’s place in education, suicide prevention tips, and prompts to customize one’s privacy settings. The wall includes a box introducing the Facebook Safety Advisory Board, a set of internet safety organizations which exemplify the Page’s mission to “provide you with updates and information to keep you and your family safe while using Facebook or surfing on the Internet.” The Experts tab lists third-party sources of information from the SAB as well as FEMA, MTV’s A Thin Line project, ChildrenOnline.org, and various government agencies. The Video tab hosts tutorials and PSAs produced by Facebook and others that provide tips and points to discuss with loved ones.

The Page’s success will depend on it providing information targeted at all types of users. Currently, the Page primarily offers resources aimed at educators and parents, but it will need to include more kid-friendly content, as they are the most vulnerable. The “Cyberspace Rules of the Road” video from popular Disney cartoon Phineas and Ferb is a good start. If Facebook Safety can distribute educational content that goes viral amongst children while providing adults with detailed information, it could help protect the site’s users.



This week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users is unusual for more than one reason. First, it’s actually for a period longer than a week, since Facebook didn’t update its stats for a nine-day period leading up to Saturday; thus the top 20 list below covers 11 days, and growth will look a bit higher than usual.

Second, Create your Quiz, the leader of the list, hit a major milestone by topping 28 million MAU to become Facebook’s second largest app — but only for a day, since Facebook banned it immediately afterward.

More on that below. Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Create your Quiz	28,261,475	+5,917,635	+26%
2.	Element Analyst Creator	8,030,272	+5,318,440	+196%
3.	QuizBone	2,423,136	+994,200	+70%
4.	Kingdoms of Camelot	3,746,121	+715,382	+24%
5.	Millionaire City	4,627,217	+693,631	+18%
6.	FrontierVille	21,386,522	+651,368	+3%
7.	Appbank	3,278,060	+649,431	+25%
8.	Bejeweled Blitz	11,414,930	+628,098	+6%
9.	Windows Live Messenger	3,472,066	+605,642	+21%
10.	Baking Life	4,087,511	+601,044	+17%
11.	Fanglies	840,065	+572,002	+213%
12.	Entrevista tus Amigos	14,044,434	+532,485	+4%
13.	Fashion World	2,867,104	+527,306	+23%
14.	Pirates Ahoy	555,814	+499,907	+894%
15.	SuperFun Town!	1,895,303	+467,063	+33%
16.	Gift Creator	5,029,207	+428,113	+9%
17.	Resort World	1,759,144	+385,245	+28%
18.	Games	4,545,849	+329,516	+8%
19.	Nightclub City	4,840,116	+328,896	+7%
20.	Jewel Box	337,107	+326,393	+3,046%

We’ve written a lot about Create Your Quiz lately. The quiz creator, by Pencake Limited, flew up the charts in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, it was followed by a comet tail of complaints from users and developers about spam-like tactics. Last week we pointed out a Chinese-language article in a Hong Kong magazine, posted in Facebook’s developer forums, that allegedly contains an admission of spamming by Pencake.

Create Your Quiz is now gone, along with some other Pencake apps — although the company’s second-largest app that we know of, Element Analyst Creator, is also a fast-growing quiz creator and is still operating. As you can see above, it almost reached Create Your Quiz’s level of growth.

We’ll also be covering Pencake in a bit more depth soon.

Proving that quiz creators are a hot genre, QuizBone comes in third, with about a million new monthly active users, and Appbank, which does more or less the same thing, is fourth among non-game apps. Entrevista tus Amigos and Gift Creator also make an appearance; they aren’t quiz creators, but use many of the same mechanics.

Quizbone and Appbank are divided by three prominent games — we’ll be covering those in more depth over at Inside Social Games. Also note that Windows Live Messenger, which has been on the rise for several weeks, is still headed up.

Facebook users are now better protected from unauthorized password changes and suspicious logins thanks to a new set of security features. The first: if a user enters an old password that has since been changed, Facebook now tells the user when the password was changed and asks if the user remembers doing so. If they don’t remember, they are asked to verify their identity, and are prompted to reset their password or use the hacked account self-recovery tool.

The other change: if an account is logged into from somewhere distant from its usual login location, the person accessing the account will also be brought through the identity verification flow which instead of changing passwords involves identifying friends in photographs.

However, it’s not perfect. Some users have friends they can’t recognize by photo, or are prompted to identify people in photos that only include logos, pets, or other indistinguishable images — and they have been mistakenly locked out of their accounts by this identity verification method.

As Facebook has grown to more than 500 million monthly active users, it has faced more and more identity-focused attacks. One way users lose control of their Facebook accounts is by visiting phishing sites which looks like Facebook’s login page but are really hacker-designed pages made to trick users into providing their login emails and passwords. Once they have access, these hackers change the password, stranding the account’s legitimate owner. Now, instead of confusing a user by telling them their password is incorrect, Facebook recognizes that they are entering an outdated password, and notifies them of the date that the password was changed. This will either remind the user that they in fact changed it themselves and can login with the new password, or that it was changed without authorization and they need to recover their account.

The other change is more visually interesting. Simon Axten of Facebook explained to us when the last round of security features was added in May that logins from distant locations in a short period of time trigger Facebook’s security system. If a Facebook user almost always logs in from California, and their account is suddenly accessed from Singapore, the user might just be on vacation, but their account may have been compromised. The verification flow can be a nuisance to frequent travelers, but helps protect users from having their account stolen from overseas.

If a login attempt triggers the location-driven security features, Facebook needs to verify the user is the original owner of the account before allowing them access or the ability to create a new password. The answers to typical security questions used by most websites might be found in a hacked user’s profile info or email records, so Facebook utilizes the user’s own social network to create a verification system that is hard to fool. Users are shown a profile picture of a friend, and given six names of who the photo could be. Out of seven photos they can only skip two and must not answer any incorrectly. While gender can be used to disqualify some incorrect answers, unless the hacker is within one’s social circle, it is unlikely they would be able to pass the test.

While this security feature is innovative, it can cause problems because profile pictures do not always show the face of the user they represent. Childhood photos, favorite sports teams, celebrities, landscapes, and pets are often used as profile pictures. If more than two of these indistinguishable photos are included in a user’s verification questions, or if they wrongly guess which friend has a Boston Red Sox logo as their pic, a user can be denied access to their account. Some users also have many friends they can’t recognize by face, such as those they meet on forums or while playing social games. This security feature could reduce erroneous account suspensions and lock outs by only asking users to identify people that they have been tagged in photos with, and by using photo recognition software to ensure test photos always include a human face.

Users can learn all about safety on Facebook at the new Safety Center page, which includes instructions for recovering accounts, and sections for general users, teens, parents, educators, and law enforcers.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is using Facebook to promote the government’s humanitarian efforts around the world. The Page has about 5,000 Likes and incorporates Notes, videos, photos and discussions to share its message; posts usually only receive several dozen comments or Likes.

We’ve already written about several ways governments are using Facebook to conduct business. The U.S. Census Bureau created an application to help spread the word about filling out census forms, some governments use Facebook to distribute information about elections or promote parks, mayors use Facebook to communicate with their constituents and police may receive crime tips via Facebook.

USAID posts daily, sometimes more than daily, about its mission and work around the world. This often includes government videos, photos, web sites and blogs, but also news stories about global health and development, but also issues like family planning, Haiti and HIV.

The Notes section includes what appear to be press releases and blog posts from USAID’s web site. A Travel tab includes a Where I’ve Been app integration and a travel question of the day. There are also some discussions, photos and videos on the Page pertaining to USAID’s work.

USAID’s aim seems to be spreading the word about the positive projects the U.S. government provides around the world; the department also has a Twitter account.