Over the last few days, Facebook has turned off its new Facebook Questions product for a significant portion of those who’ve had access since its beta launch on July 28th. Those whose access has been rolled back now see the old status publisher above their news feed, and no longer see the Questions navigation link in the home page left sidebar or the recent Questions panel in the right sidebar. While Facebook frequently turns on and off new products and features for small, unwitting tester bases, this large-scale roll back of a relatively widely used product is unusual.

When reached for comment Facebook tells us that “we’re currently still testing Questions with beta users and iterating on the product based on user feedback. We’ll be rolling out to more users as soon as possible” and separately, “We turn it off for some users based on the test we are running. You and your friends may be in the group that has it turned off.”

Reports of the rollback span across networks. Anyone with rescinded access who tries to follow a Facebook Questions permalink like this one is kicked back to the “Sorry, we’re not ready for you yet” page — same as what those who’ve never had Questions access see when trying to use the product.

Upon launch, some criticized the new status publisher that accompanied Questions. It hides the “What’s on your mind?” update prompt behind a row of buttons, reducing the prominence of the publisher as a whole, and forcing users to choose in advance whether they’d like to update their status, ask a question, upload a photo, or post a link. The new design prevented users from indiscriminately dropping a URL into the status field to automatically morph the status publisher into a link publisher. We thought the new publisher might reduce status update frequency while encouraging the other types of publishing, and that it also made link posting more difficult.

The rollback may just be some downtime while Facebook integrates changes or new features into Questions. Alternatively, it could be to test how the different publishers affect frequency of different update types. When Facebook restores Questions or we find out more details about the rollback, we’ll be here to keep you informed.

Update: Facebook Questions Product Manager Blake Ross has informed us that Questions has only been rolled out to 0.05% of the Facebook user base, or roughly 250,000 users. Therefore, even a rollback from a significant portion of these testers “is much smaller than many of the tests that we turn on and off every day.” The temporary rollback has now ended, and Facebook has reactivated Questions for all who have previously had access.

He also explains that while the new publisher was originally rolled out alongside Questions, the two products are not officially linked. “[The new publisher] will be rolling out more broadly on its own timeline in the near future, independently of the Questions rollout. Furthermore, we’ve run tests on it and found that it does not increase sharing.”

Facebook may be searching for a redesign of the publisher which does increase sharing, as those with restored access to Questions are seeing a slightly different version of the new publisher. A Video button has been added to the publisher options, and the titles of the existing buttons have been shortened.

Editor’s note: The following data is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service covering Facebook’s platform and advertising ecosystem.

Last month we reported that three languages were leading growth across Facebook: Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. The field has now narrowed even further, with the growth rate for Spanish falling, Portuguese holding, and Arabic racing ahead.

Most of the other top languages, including Chinese, German and English, have more or less held steady with July’s growth rates with the exception of French and Italian, which fell to a crawl:

The rapid growth in Portuguese and Arabic is just the latest sign of the change taking place on Facebook.

While the growth of languages like English remains highest by absolute numbers, the market has more or less peaked for the moment. Meanwhile, the major European languages are more or less tied to the growth of highly-penetrated countries, like France.

The case is different for emerging languages like Arabic and Portuguese. The latter, of course, is entirely driven by Brazil, whose 191 million native speakers far outweigh the 10 million found in Portugal itself.

Brazil is still dominated by Google’s Orkut, but as we wrote last week, Facebook is growing strongly in the country and appears to have a good chance of becoming a serious contender.

Arabic is a rather different case. Despite its growth, Arabic is still by far the smallest of the top 10 languages. However, there are actually 280 million Arabic speakers in the world, but as with Spanish speakers, they’re widely scattered throughout a large geographical region.

It’s difficult at this point to pick out a strong growth trend for any specific Arabic-speaking country, of which we track over a dozen on Facebook, but the language itself is clearly establishing a foothold that will help bring more speakers from individual countries onto the social network.

There’s one more notable trend to pick out this month: English, which has long claimed a majority of users on Facebook, has now fallen below 50 percent of the total.

As you can see above, the smaller language groups still don’t hold a candle to English, or even Spanish. However, with over 500 million users now on Facebook, each of the top 10 still offers exposure to millions of users.

Brand advertisers may further benefit from reaching out to users of a language like Arabic, whose users are geographically diverse. Meanwhile, there are now eight languages with over 10 million users, which is a good threshold for investment by application developers.

The full Facebook Global Language Report is available through a membership to Inside Facebook Gold, which also includes monthly data on total global audience growth and demographics. To learn more or join, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Facebook’s job listings this week continue to emphasize new positions in India and Dublin for its European, Middle Eastern and African operations, as seen on Facebook’s Careers Page.

Ad sales positions in Dublin, especially, continue to be numerous and include posts for specialists in many different languages.

The company is also seeking many recruiters across its offices. And, of course, it is continuing to recruit across key engineering and product areas, including for its new mobile push — it is looking for a mobile product manager, for example.

There are a few interesting new jobs this week: one in its Design and User Experience cluster was for a User Sentiment Researcher; a seemingly similar position in Facebook’s Online Operations cluster was for an Audience Researcher.

All this growth is coming as Facebook continues to grow its traffic and revenue. Our stories last week, and the week before showed its company and worldwide hiring efforts.

Lastly, for jobs in the industry, be sure to check out our Inside Network Job Board.

Recently, we launched the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at MeYou Health, Mighty Play, Lolapps, ohai, Moblyng, Storm8 and Digital Chocolate.

• Facebook Product Manager (Boston, MA)

• Game Designer (San Francisco, CA)

• Server Engineer, Scalability (San Francisco, CA)
• Flash Architect (San Francisco, CA)

• UI Designer (San Francisco, CA)

• Software Developer (Redwood City, CA)

• Social Game Designer (Redwood City, CA)
• Senior Game Production Artist (Redwood City, CA)
• Users Relations Associate (Redwood City, CA)

• Senior Server Programmer (Barcelona, Spain)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Places has potential to be more than just a Facebook version of a 3rd-party location service. By integrating Places into other core products like Events, Photos, and the home page, Facebook can build on one of its founding assumptions — people care about what’s in close proximity to them. Crucial to this will be enabling different types of content, pages, and profiles to be tagged with Places.

Home Page and Communication

Most urgently, Facebook needs to design a way to allow users of the web version of Facebook.com to view the most recent check-ins of friends from the home page. Facebook for iPhone and touch.facebook.com both can display lists of friends who have checked in nearby, but this depends on the phone used to geolocate the user. Even if the list merely showed a stream of check-ins of your friends regardless of proximity, this would help users at home find friends at a nearby park or bar, encouraging meet-ups. You can see current check-ins of your closest friends on the Events home page, but a full list would fit well in the empty space below the “Friends Online” chat list in the home page’s left sidebar.

So you’ve determined 10 friends are scattered at a few Places nearby, but how can you get in contact with them? The ability to private message or invite to an event the people within a certain proximity would let users purposefully converge, instead of just dropping in on the Place of a friend unexpected.

Events

Before Places, Events was Facebook’s most location-minded in-house application. To find an Event, though, users needed to be invited, have a friend who had RSVP’d, or click through a feed story to an Event page. Facebook could help users find appealing events, even if none of their friends are going, by introducing a Nearby Events feature. Admins could tag their events with a location, and users could then view current or upcoming events within a defined distance of themselves. Perhaps none of your friends are that into art, but the new gallery down the street is having an exhibition. Nearby Events would help you find out about it (this would, of course, only apply to public Events).

Similar to how organizations can merge their official Page with a Places page, Event pages could benefit from gaining Places functionality. Instead of assuming someone who RSVP’d positively will actually be at an event, Facebook could add a “Here Now” panel. It could show a stream of check-ins by friends who are actually at the Place where an event is being held. A total check-ins counter could also help users gauge the overall popularity of an event.

Photos and Other Content

While Places lets users check their friends in, simply saying you’re somewhere with friends isn’t nearly as compelling as photographic evidence. Facebook could add photo uploads to the check-in screen to let users simultaneously tag friends as being in the photo and at the Place. Friends elsewhere could then see just how long the line is at the bar, or just how sunny it is in the park.

Enabling photos, videos, notes, or other content to be tagged with a Place would allow Facebook to make content recommendations based on your location. Imagine walking down a city block while browsing photos of the back patios of nearby cafes, or reading notes of poetry inspired by a nearby vista point. Further, if the person uploading the content made it available to everyone, Facebook could enable a Places page admin to link to the content from their Places page. Places could even become a factor in EdgeRank, Facebook’s news feed algorithm, helping determine what content appears in your news feed based on its proximity to you.

Each person’s network generates so much content, developing Places and proximity into a new trait for determining relevancy could help Facebok ensure its users are engaged as possible with its core products. Third-parties are scrambling to develop innovative apps around the new Places APIs, so Facebook should use this lead time to define its own intentions by integrating Places across its existing services.

Facebook has released a new design of its mobile site m.facebook.com, most notably moving notifications, requests, and birthdays above the news feed. The relatively low-bandwidth interface is part of Facebook’s multi-pronged mobile strategy designed to ensure users have access to the service regardless of their handset or the strength of their data connection. M.facebook.com fits between more data intensive mobile applications like Facebook for iPhone and mobile site touch.facebook.com, and the minimal-bandwidth interface 0.facebook.com.

When users visit m.facebook.com they’ll see a trimmed down version of the status publisher above the new notifications, birthdays and requests panel. From here users can respond to friend requests, see that day’s birthdays, and click through links to view all of their latest notifications or their pending event invitations and other requests. This change refocuses the mobile interface on viewing and responding to the actions of others over creating new content.

Below notifications users will see Top News or Most Recent views of their news feed. Options to view only status updates or photos have been relocated behind the See More Stories button at the bottom of the Most Recent feed. There users will also find options to view feeds of only Link, Note, or Event stories — options not available on Facebook.com. Comment and like buttons are now in-line with news feed story timestamps, giving a more streamlined look with less empty white space. At the bottom of the feed is a People You May Know panel similar to the one seen in the right sidebar of the web version of Facebook.com’s home page.

At the bottom of the home page, the Bookmarks panel has been split with Notifications, My Pages, Events, and Photos remaining above the fold; and Links, Notes, Groups, and SMS hidden behind a More button.

This redesign is primarily aesthetic, and doesn’t give m.facebook.com users Places functionality like touch.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone have. Though some traffic comes from m.facebook.com being used to direct people to download their handset specific Facebook app, m.facebook.com had almost 10 million daily active users and almost 50 million monthly active users by mid August. Keeping this user base engaged through redesigns is important as Facebook waits for them to have access to more full-featured apps and interfaces which increase overall usage.

Max Levchin, who was the chief executive of Slide and a PayPal co-founder, has landed a new title at Google as a vice president of engineering, we’ve confirmed with the company. It’s the latest leadership adjustment since the search giant bought the social developer for a reported $182 million plus $46 million in retention bonuses.

The position makes Levchin equal in title to Vic Gundotra, who was said to have been leading the search giant’s social efforts and who has been taking a visible role in championing the company’s mobile products.

Both will report to senior vice president of operations Urs Holzle, who sits on the company’s all-powerful operating committee. That committee is the final arbiter on major product releases and is made up of several of Google’s earliest employees. Bradley Horowitz, a vice president of product management who has been said to be taking more of a leadership role on Google’s social products, reports to senior vice president of product management Jonathan Rosenberg.

Even though Levchin has scored a senior title, he will still have to prove himself as the company hasn’t historically been all that hospitable to outsiders who come in at a higher level. Levchin “will be working on social products with a variety of teams,” according to spokesperson Andrew Pederson.

On the day that Google bought Slide, it also demoed an earlier iteration of its forthcoming Facebook competitor to associate and more senior product managers. Called “Google Me,” that product is early-stage and is changing constantly, from what we’ve heard, so an accurate description of it today may be off-base compared to what is finally released. The earlier version, at least, amalgamated many of Google’s more social products. It is our understanding that Levchin is now leading the development of the latest iteration.

For more, be sure to check out our previous analysis of the Slide acquisition and how it might fit into Google’s social plans.

Editor’s note: The following analysis is based on data from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service covering Facebook’s platform and advertising ecosystem.

Today we look at Facebook’s second-largest language market, Spanish, which reached 71.4 million users this month according to data from our upcoming Facebook Global Languages Report.

We’ve previously discussed Facebook’s growth by country market — many readers now recognize the United States, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, and Turkey as Facebook’s top countries.

But what about language markets? For advertisers, marketers and developers creating content for Facebook that they hope will reach beyond the US, UK, Canada and Australia (some of Facebook’s most expensive ad locales), language markets are as relevant as country markets — if not more so — because linguistic translation is the first, and in some cases, only step in content localization.

In a recent interview with Inside Social Games, Wooga’s Jens Begemann noted that some audiences outside the US are using Facebook in English to such a wide degree that they’ve discontinued app localization for those market’s other languages. In Indonesia, for example, the audiences that matter are using the site in English anyway. This same logic applies to marketing and advertising campaigns on the site — if the users that matter to a given brand reasonably reachable via English, then costly localization efforts become moot.

However, this is where Spanish diverges from Indonesian, Tagalog, Hindi or other languages that predominate in emerging markets. Different countries, as we’ve previously noted, have different degrees of linguistic homogeneity. Latin America’s nations happen to have a high degree of Spanish-language saturation, according to our per-country language data. In other words, Spanish language is the gateway to users in dozens of Facebook’s fastest growing markets.

Not localizing to the site’s second largest language results in a jarring user experience at best, and missed acquisition opportunities at worst.

As noted earlier, Facebook’s Spanish-language market has now grown to encompass 71.4 million users worldwide. The Spanish-language market holds a unique position: it has grown to a size that’s almost three times larger than the next closest contender, French, and has already achieved a third the reach of English,

Interestingly, growth in the Spanish-language audience on Facebook has taken a markedly different trajectory than it did for English-language audiences on the site. While Facebook began as a college-oriented site sparked in American institutions, it has since spread more evenly through most of Western society, reaching both young and old. But among the many Asian and South American countries that are driving Facebook’s growth now, youth is the driving force.

Some 56.9 million of the total 71.4 million Spanish-language audience on Facebook are users under 35. That equates to roughly 80 percent of this language market being categorized as ‘young’ users. When we compare this split to Facebook’s prototypical country market, the United States, we see that the under 35 group comprises just 61 percent of the total.

One challenge in creating content for the Spanish-language market as a whole is the high degree of both demographic and national fragmentation of this audience. The market itself includes over 20 countries spanning four continents. While many of these countries are part of Latin America, some notable ones — Spain and the United States — are not. As a result, the countries that create Facebook’s Spanish-language market end up encompassing local markets with divergent degrees of economic development, Internet penetration, and Facebook penetration.

Only six of the Latin American countries can individually offer up more than a few million users.

The Spanish-speaking world has long since resigned itself to dealing with this national fragmentation, of course. The commonality of language has the potential to enable any content creator — advertiser or otherwise — to reach a vast number of far-flung local markets.

Facebook users in the countries noted above have language in common, but what other characteristics do they share? Could age demographic substitute for nationality for the purposes of marketers and developers on Facebook? Insofar as that question addresses taste and preference, the answer is probably yes. Advertisers, marketers, and developers should know that they are not just targeting Spanish-speakers on Facebook, but also, and almost by default, Spanish-speaking youth.

One way to prove that youth is indeed the driving force in Facebook usage for most Spanish-speaking users is to look at preferred social games.

While it would be inadvisable for us to make a direct comparison between player preferences in the United States and the various Latin countries, there are some general trends that we can pick out with the help of past coverage.

For instance, a game like FarmVille, which trends to older players, has relatively few fans in our sample of five Latin countries — achieving just 11.4% of the United States’ total fan base. However, Hotel City, which we recently found trends to young players, has a much stronger base, proportionally, with the Latin countries offering up 83.5% of the US’ total fan base for that title.

Many top applications like Farmville or Hotel City boost traffic through paid acquisition channels like Facebook’s self-serve ads. For these developers, user acquisition costs versus traffic value is a key question that is taking on new dimensions as Facebook’s major markets approach saturation.

In our next article in this series, we’ll take a look at some average CPC and CPM rates for the Spanish-language market on Facebook, and see how advertisers can use fragmentation to their advantage.

Comprehensive demographic and growth data for all of Facebook’s major language and country markets is available through Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service tracking opportunities in the Facebook ecosystem. To learn more, or join the membership, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Chris Morrison contributed research and analysis to this article.

Chat is one of the “most widely used tools on Facebook,” the company says today about its in-house instant message service (although it’s not sharing exact usage numbers).

But the main news is this: Chat has been getting some technical upgrades intended to resolve long-standing stability problems. And, Facebook is following in the footsteps of an increasing number of other web companies in telling users to ditch an archaic web browser, Internet Explorer 6. From the company blog post:

The biggest improvements come from changes that aren’t supported on older web browsers. After evaluating the alternatives, we’ve decided to make rapid improvements and provide the best Chat experience possible, which means we will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 browsers.

To give people time to update their browsers, we plan to make this change on Sept. 15. If you’re using Internet Explorer 6, you can learn more about downloading a newer version here.

While it’s not specifying the technical upgrades to Chat, Facebook is giving users yet another reason to get a modern browser. IE6 was released in 2001, and it is still in use on many computers around the world, in part because companies have discovered that if they don’t upgrade, their employees are unable to use a wide variety of popular web services, like Facebook Chat.

Altoids, makers of breath mints, has launched a free application for desktops yesterday allowing the user to create a special stream of Facebook friends and “Tune Out” everyone else on Facebook. Tune Out was previously available for iPhones and iPads and can be downloaded at the Altoids Facebook Page on the Tune Out tab — it’s one of the cleverer branded Facebook apps we’ve seen to date.

Altoids is promoting the app as a way to help people filter through the many “friends” most users have on Facebook these days so they don’t miss out on hearing from the people they actually care about.

The way it works after download is, it prompts the user to login to Facebook. Then you search for Facebook friends you want to add to the Tune Out list, Altoids recommends no more than 16; updates to each profile are noted with stars. From that point on, Tune Out users will only see updates from these friends in their customized stream, although the list remains alterable.

Using Tune Out allows Facebook users to continue to comment and interact with friends’ profiles, but helps to focus attention on the profiles of their Tune Out list.

The app also works with Twitter.

Altoids only has about 11,300 Likes on its Facebook Page at this point so the app may be meant to help grow the Page’s audience, although the Wall doesn’t reflect much excitement from fans or the admin about the app.