Reports from Page administrators and data from our PageData service indicate that the launch of Places has decreased the prominence of official Page updates in the news feed. Significant decreases in impressions-per-post and new Likes per day for Pages coincide with the introduction of Places stories. This suggest an alteration has been made to Facebook’s algorithm that determines what users users see in their news feed. We suspect that the weight of Page updates has been decreased while Places stories have been temporarily given a relatively high weight.

The apparent reduction in the weight of Page posts in Facebook’s algorithm causes these posts to appear less frequently in the Top News and Most Recent feeds. This drop in impressions-per-post in turn leads to less likes and shares by users – the actions that drive traffic and new likes to Pages. The end result is that Pages will have to post more engaging updates and buy more ads to maintain previous growth rates.

We’ve received reports from a Page management company that impressions-per-post are down across all their clients and test accounts. One Page we have access to experienced at 40% drop in impressions-per-post since August 18th.

The result of the drop in impressions is a decrease in new Likes gained per day for most Pages, with the most popular Pages taking the biggest losses in growth. All of the top 10 biggest Pages on Facebook experienced an 50% to 65% drop in average new likes gained per day from their levels before August 18th, the day Places launched.

Michael Jackson’s Page, which was gaining an average of 75,000 likes per day from late July through mid August, has been gaining only 27,000 likes per day on average since August 18th. Facebook’s own official Page was gaining an average of 116,000 likes per day from late July through mid August, but that rate has similarly fallen to an average gain of 46,000 likes per day over the week since Places launched. The drop is not confined to large Pages, as smaller Pages with around 1.75 million likes such as Nutella Italy, BMW, and Incubus have also seen 25-50% drops in new likes per day.

In the past, Facebook has temporarily highlighted news feed stories generated by their newest product. When Questions launched in late July, many felt their news feed was being overrun with Questions stories, but soon saw them become much less prominent. Social game-generated stories dominated the news feed in the period following the launch of the Facebook Platform, but these types of stories were also dialed back over time. However, the prominence of a new story type has never come so clearly at the expense of another type as with the shift in visibility from Page posts to Places stories.

Interestingly, many Pages also saw a large dip in new likes gained per day on August 13th, followed by a spike on August 17th. Facebook may have been altering the algorithm on these days. One possible explanation for why Page updates were so affected is that Places pages have the potential to be merged with official Pages. This means Page posts and Places stories would both link back to the same merged Page/Places page in some cases.

Facebook may have increased the weight of all posts that could lead back to a Page before there were any Places stories, resulting in the pre-launch spike. Then the next day, the increased total weight and impressions may have been divided between Page posts and the new Places stories, resulting in the drop in impressions-per-day for unmerged Page posts.

Facebook has previously biased the news feed to temporarily highlight stories from new products. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Facebook Questions saw high visibility in the news feed in the days following the product’s launch, but then became much less prominent. Application stories have too been reduced since they dominated the news feed in the period following the launch of the Facebook Platform. If the decrease in weight for Page posts is also temporary, users can expect to see less Places stories and a reemergence of Page updates in their news feed in the near future. If the change is permanent, Page admins may need to seek alternative methods of gaining new likes. As when Facebook reduced the weight of application stories, this could mean spending more on Page marketing.

For more in-depth data on the Facebook ecosystem, check out Inside Facebook Gold – our exclusive membership service for marketers, developers, and analysts.

This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users includes the usual mix of quizzes, just-for-fun, messaging and games, with a couple interesting exceptions like Zoosk.

Here’s the top 20 list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Quiz Planet	998,462	+673,032	+207%
2.	Windows Live Messenger	4,148,398	+320,651	+8%
3.	Status Emotions & Animations	508,209	+218,187	+75%
4.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,105,240	+217,927	+4%
5.	Zoosk	552,433	+163,884	+42%
6.	開心魚塘	237,029	+153,128	+183%
7.	Car Town	690,567	+152,381	+28%
8.	幸運號碼	154,315	+138,058	+849%
9.	FarmVille	17,337,310	+116,768	+0.68%
10.	snsplus	139,771	+112,684	+416%
11.	Ideogram	105,993	+101,912	+2,497%
12.	Games	1,091,624	+89,858	+9%
13.	Marketplace	229,794	+87,529	+62%
14.	Baking Life	1,440,191	+79,849	+6%
15.	Besarte	170,792	+79,087	+86%
16.	My Top Fans	487,810	+62,470	+15%
17.	Fashion World	1,081,320	+62,174	+6%
18.	Phrases	4,513,388	+60,767	+1%
19.	Quiz Matic – Bilgi Yarışması	75,117	+60,078	+399%
20.	Formspring	705,741	+59,677	+9%

Quiz Planet, a quiz creation app, comes in at the top with what appears to be a large gain. Over a longer time period than a week, though, Quiz Planet appears to be losing users; its DAU peaked earlier this month at 1.1 million.

Windows Live Messenger is continuing its slow-but-steady growth; it now appears to be the largest messaging app on Facebook. Its growth actually did get a huge boost about a week back, which may have come from a new Microsoft feature that allows users to chat to Facebook friends from within the Live Messenger app.

Skipping Status Emotions & Animations, which is self-explanatory, and Texas HoldEm Poker, which may not have grown as much as appearances suggest (we’re looking into the issue), we find Zoosk at number five. The dating app appears to have found a way to bring back its existing users more often, as its DAU as a percentage of monthly active users rose by about half, to nine percent.

Finally, Ideogram is a foreign-language app in two ways: the app itself is in Italian, while its purpose is to publish Chinese characters with specific meanings (like “courage” or “ambition”) to the news feeds of friends. It’s growing fairly well, but appears to have issues hanging onto its new users.

In a small update that might be hinting at more changes to come, Facebook has altered how users select friends to add to their friends lists. Previously, when you approved a friend request, the interface included an option to add a friend to one or more lists. Now, you just see two buttons next to each potential friend’s name: Confirm or Ignore. If you click Confirm, you’ll then see the option to add them to lists. Click on it, and a window will appear showing your existing friend lists and asking you to toggle the ones you want your new friend to be listed under.

The previous list-adding interface was easy to miss. It appeared next to the other buttons, and if you confirmed, it simply disappeared. Now, Facebook has moved the friend lists choice menu directly into the approval process, in a way that is harder to ignore. Why? Because it wants people to use the feature more than they have been.

Facebook has tried to make itself more relevant to people’s lives at home, in the workplace and with friends from all walks of life. Meanwhile, it has encouraged people to share intimate details about themselves, like photos, interests and locations. The concepts naturally conflict, with the classic example being party photos — you don’t want your mom or your boss to see them, but you do want to share them with your friends.

To solve this problem, Facebook introduced friend lists years ago. However, it has had trouble getting the feature used much, we have heard, and observed anecdotally. In the latest set of redesigns, the company has made it increasingly difficult to do anything with lists. At this point, there is not even a clear way to publish certain content to just some of these lists. Although you can start typing in the names of these lists and enter them into the custom publisher that way, there is no wording indicating that this is possible. The main way to get value out of the lists, that Facebook currently makes obvious, is to read what people in the lists are sharing — navigate to the lists in the submenu of the home page left-hand navigation column, and view content from friends.

Competitors from startups to Google have been eyeing Facebook’s increasingly fused social graph, and trying to create more private alternatives. A recent presentation from a Google interface researcher working on social features highlighted this exact issue. While Google and other companies have not yet been able to chip away at Facebook’s social networking dominance, they see Facebook’s generic approach to friends as a weakness — and this change is likely a part of Facebook’s strategy to counteract that.

We wouldn’t be surprised to see friend lists make a bigger comeback across Facebook features, including in a home page redesign that’s rumored to be coming later this year.

Conversation is a marketing firm founded in New York City in 2008 by Frank O’Brien and now has offices in Los Angeles, Miami and London. The firm was created to try to unite traditional marketing strategies with emerging media and non-traditional marketing, O’Brien tells us, and works with companies and brands of all sizes.

Having reached profitability without outside funding, Conversation is a full-service agency — that created an internal division devoted to social media, called BuzzTxt, after Facebook-related projects grew to account for about one-fifth of its business.

Today, BuzzTxt is 80% focused on Facebook and 20% on other networks like Twitter, and manages more than two dozen social media accounts a month resulting in upwards of 10 million brand/consumer interactions a month, according to O’Brien.

Here’s our interview with him, part of our ongoing profiles of Page management and marketing companies; we’ve most most recently covered Big Prize Giveaways and Wildfire.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Conversation is a full service agency that bridges traditional and emerging media bringing the “mix” back to marketing. Facebook and social media is a major emerging component of this commitment to engage consumers through emerging media. Conversation provides social media campaign strategy, campaign development, management, and outreach. We feel as though social media is something that can and should be leveraged by all companies big and small across all industries. We’ve produced successful campaigns for several categories including consumer packaged goods, retail, pharmaceutical, skincare, and financial services. We believe that social media is platform agnostic and that social media has created a greater shift in consumer behavior. We help clients identify how to utilize social media to reach their core consumer group.

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook

The Children’s Place came to us in the Fall of 2009 looking to grow their fan base and engage existing fans. Conversation implemented several strategic recommendations utilizing the agency’s wide range of services to grow the client’s fan base from 18,000 fans to more than 500,000 in just under six months. The initial goal of 100,000 fans was reached in just three weeks.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

Conversation manages more than 10 Million brand/consumer interactions a month simultaneously running more than thirty client campaigns at a given time.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

Depending on client goals, success metrics vary. In most cases, fan count and daily engagement is used as a core metric.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

Facebook continually updates their platform, rules, and regulations. Aside from monitoring content and managing fans, it is important to stay on top of changes that Facebook makes before they make them so that you can proactively address changes in design and content management.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

Facebook’s platform changes continually help agencies and clients. Updates to the user Wall and removing restrictions around FBML development were major changes that helped us utilize the platform more effectively.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

Agencies need to be adaptive and aware of the world that they play in. There are always updates on the horizon that we need to be aware of and ready to address. That said, Facebook has not made any updates to date that have been detrimental to our company (and we are aware of a few that are on the horizon and poised to address them when they are made.)

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

Grant access to more information of users who have liked a Page or joined a group. Give the ability to target these users with segmented messaging and grant them the ability to provide more personal information such as their email address or phone number.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

Social media fits in with most of our client campaigns the same way traditional media or outreach does. We recommend using social media as a vehicle for obtaining impressions — it is ultimately up to us as an agency to develop a communication strategy that provokes an action.

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

We’re currently working on an end-to-end Facebook e-commerce platform and have plans to integrate Facebook more seamlessly with offline in-store applications.

This week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps from AppData by monthly active users includes an unsurprising mix of social games and simple applications, along with what appears to be a surge among mobile apps.

But first, a couple notes. First, Facebook has modified its reporting methodology for mobile apps, causing that category to suddenly appear to gain users — examples below include Motoblur and Nokia.  More on this below.

Second, there appears to still be some remnant effects from Facebook’s recent stats bug. A couple of developers have told us that Facebook is still reporting numbers that are too high for a few apps, and we’re flagging those apps which we believe to be potentially inaccurate in AppData. Facebook says it believes the recent reporting issues have been resolved but is investigating. For now, we’re not aware of any broader problem, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know more.

Those notes aside, the below AppData list has some interesting entries:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	SocialBuzz	9,019,959	+3,177,396	+54%
2.	Phrases	32,399,639	+3,102,751	+11%
3.	Status Emotions & Animations	2,291,379	+2,165,893	+1,726%
4.	Market Street	8,350,109	+1,621,294	+24%
5.	Mafia Wars Game	27,589,774	+1,590,825	+6%
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	37,257,850	+1,513,638	+4%
7.	Facebook for Android	12,000,901	+1,234,129	+11%
8.	MOTOBLUR™	4,900,429	+1,166,290	+31%
9.	Zoo World	13,110,007	+1,124,695	+9%
10.	Are YOU Interested?	6,212,902	+984,235	+19%
11.	Nokia	5,682,052	+935,307	+20%
12.	Windows Live Messenger	8,541,736	+932,433	+12%
13.	FarmVille	62,800,726	+897,178	+1%
14.	Car Town	3,064,396	+815,244	+36%
15.	Tattoo City	1,848,265	+797,922	+76%
16.	Give Hearts	8,258,497	+771,731	+10%
17.	Snaptu	3,382,246	+767,175	+29%
18.	Zapapa games	3,799,088	+754,745	+25%
19.	Status Shuffle	14,701,434	+724,086	+5%
20.	Nightclub City	7,088,331	+606,986	+9%

SocialBuzz comes in as the top app. While it may sound creative from the name, SocialBuzz is essentially a friend quiz, which asks users questions about their friends and then posts the results to their walls. It began to take off at the beginning of the month.

Phrases, the second app in the list, is not a quiz app, but it uses some of the same tactics. Its user-generated quiz app collections of quotes can be shared separately, taking on a life of their own (although the stats all aggregate back to the main app). Phrases is now about as large as any quiz app has ever become, but the potential exists for it to grow larger yet, since it seems to tap into the growing international audience.

Skipping down a bit, Market Street is a game that has grown quite large over the past couple months. We’ll cover that genre in more depth at Inside Social Games.

Following the games, we can see the first of the mobile apps, Facebook for Android and MOTOBLUR, while Nokia is a bit further down. These, and most of the other mobile connection apps, appear to have all grown hugely over the past few weeks. There’s a reason for this: Facebook has expanded the number of API calls that is uses to calculate mobile users differently. The largest, Facebook for iPhone, now reports over 100 million users, which seems like an overestimation; we’re checking with Facebook for more details, and will report back with anything we hear.

Music dominated this week’s list of the fastest-growing Facebook Pages, as counted with our PageData tool, tracking the number of Likes added to a Page each day. Nine of the 20 Pages belonged to musicians, the rest went to animated and live action TV shows, Facebook, YouTube, Megan Fox, Cristiano Ronaldo and “The Twilight Saga.” It took between 635,400 and 297,000 new Likes to make our Top 20 list this week.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Eminem 11,606,074 +635,401 +5.79 2. Justin Bieber 10,113,499 +473,066 +4.91 3. Lady Gaga 16,391,818 +467,325 +2.93 4. Facebook 17,092,038 +435,673 +2.62 5. Kurtlar Vadisi 470,089 +427,834 +1,012.51 6. Family Guy 15,968,324 +406,750 +2.61 7. South Park 11,454,464 +402,879 +3.65 8. YouTube 11,805,545 +401,116 +3.52 9. Lil Wayne 10,478,458 +371,161 +3.67 10. Shakira 7,351,463 +349,491 +4.99 11. The Simpsons 6,029,872 +346,514 +6.10 12. Linkin Park 11,064,009 +342,581 +3.20 13. David Guetta 7,600,282 +334,852 +4.61 14. Bob Marley 9,415,828 +315,489 +3.47 15. Megan Fox 12,337,506 +312,351 +2.60 16. Dr. House 9,999,521 +301,766 +3.11 17. Two and a Half Men 7,205,059 +301,671 +4.37 18. Cristiano Ronaldo 10,621,939 +301,564 +2.92 19. Rihanna 7,841,078 +301,020 +3.99 20. The Twilight Saga 12,041,737 +297,033 +2.53

Topping the list again this week is rapper Eminem, who seems to be still riding the wave of popularity from his recent single and music video. He added 635,400 Likes, has a total of 11.6 million now — and hasn’t really updated his Page during the past week. Justin Bieber followed in second, adding 473,000 Likes to a Page now 10.1 million strong; he’s been touting awards nominations, been on TV and touring. Lady Gaga was in third place, adding 467,300 Likes, garnering a total of 16.3 million and touring, posting photos of herself and moving ahead as the person with the most Twitter followers this week.

Rapper Lil Wayne took ninth place, adding 371,200 Likes to his 10.4 million; he wrote a letter to fans from jail and promoted a single on his Page this week. Shakira followed at tenth, adding 349,500 fans to her 7.3 million total; she announced new tour dates among other updates. Linkin Park came in at number 12, promoting their new single, its upcoming video and their album set for release next month. The band added 342,600 Likes and now numbers more than 11 million.

DJ David Guetta came in at number 13, seemingly riding his current popularity to the list. He added 334,900 Likes to his Page of 7.6 million Likes. Bob Marley’s Page followed, adding 315,500 Likes to the 9.4 million total; the Page has been promoting various Marley-related information. Rihanna came in nineteenth, added 301,000 Likes and grew to 7.8 million total; she’s been touring and posting photos asking fans to tag themselves.

A handful of television programs made up the better part of the middle of our list this week.

Turkish movie and TV show “Valley of the Wolves” came in fifth this week, adding 427,800 Likes in one day, Tuesday. The Page is heavily promoting the show.

The Pages of these U.S. shows promoted the shows, and their eminent fall premieres on the Wall this week. “Family Guy” came in sixth, adding 406,800 Likes, growing to about 16 million. “South Park” followed at 7, adding 402,900 Likes, growing to 11.4 million. “The Simpsons” came in at 11, adding 346,500 Likes to a 6 million total. The Page for Dr. House, main character from the show “House,” was sixteenth this week, but more likely than not because of a Page consolidation since there was not really any activity on the Page. And the Page for “Two and a Half Men,” was seventeenth with 301,700 new Likes, 7.2 million total and lots of promos for the new season.

Then there was a mixed bag.

Facebook’s Page was fourth, adding 435,700 Likes to a total of 17 million; the company launched its new Places service last week. Fellow tech company YouTube was eighth, adding 401,100 Likes to grow to 11.8 million. Starlet Megan Fox was at number 15, adding 312,400 Likes to grow to 12.3 million; she made an appearance at an awards show and her new movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Celebrity Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo came in at 18, adding 301,600 Likes to his 10.6 million-strong Page; he’s been posting photos of his training, sponsorship deals and updating about his games. Finally, “The Twilight Saga” Page added 297,000 Likes to grow to 12 million by promoting the movies’ stars and merchandise.

Facebook is now at the center of the American Red Cross‘ efforts to keep the public informed about disaster relief, especially after a catastrophic event like the Chile or Haiti earthquakes, says Wendy Harman, the organization’s director of social media. It was particularly after the Haiti earthquake that she says the Red Cross mobilized and created a procedure for how to respond on Facebook.

“It happened after Haiti, we have sort of a procedure in place now. We immediately put someone behind a Flip camera to get a situation update and we try to update as frequently as we have information,” she explains.

Facebook’s recognition of its own importance to disaster relief is evident in its creation of a Global Relief Page shortly after the Haiti disaster.

On Facebook the national American Red Cross Page has about 202,000 Likes and Harman says the organization uses that audience very pointedly by not bombarding them. Status updates are crafted to be value-driven, offer useful and pertinent information. More often than not this comes from the Red Cross Disaster Online Newsroom on the web site, where Harman says people are more likely to find it. She and another employee run the Red Cross’ social media team, which took to Facebook in 2006, and initially included Flickr, YouTube and blogs in its social media repertoire.

Nowadays, however, Harman tells us that Facebook is becoming consistently important to the way the Red Cross shares information. Specifically the status update is used as the Red Cross’ most powerful Facebook weapon, mostly because the organization’s 700 local chapters and 30,000 volunteers across the country have been brought into the fold to share these updates, and thus, boost virality. The same holds true for talking back to fans; although her office may not directly talk back, she says Red Cross volunteers often will step in to help out on the Page. Harmon says the share button on the Red Cross’ web site also heavily contributes to its Facebook presence, a strategy highlighted in our Facebook Marketing Bible.

One challenge for the Red Cross, as well as other disaster relief organizations, is what to do with all of the feedback it receives from Facebook and other social media outlets, Harman says. “We’re not first responders, we don’t take individual calls for help,” she tells us. The Red Cross can’t respond when someone posts to Facebook that their cousin is trapped in Haitian rubble. The organization isn’t set up to help, and also, that same message could be shared with 10 different agencies. It’s an issue Harman says the Red Cross and other similar organizations are working to address.

As far as fundraising on Facebook, Harman explains that the Red Cross has yet to fully track such conversions, but believes the impact has been significant. The focus on Facebook increased after the huge response to text message donations for the Haiti earthquake, driven largely by social media. Currently the Page focuses more on giving the public the tools to fundraise locally. The Red Cross just published its first in-house tab and application meant to help its fans find the nearest chapter and donate. Later this year Harman tells us the Facebook Page will evolve further with a more advanced app meant to help users market and fundraise for the Red Cross.

In what has become one of the most slowly introduced changes to Facebook’s platform, the company is beginning to implement a long-planned tab width reduction on Pages. The official transition begins today, Facebook said earlier this month, following delays that began shortly after the company said it would make the change last October.

Now, the maximum width for any Page tab is 520 pixels, down from 760 pixels. Applications and canvas pages will need to be reformatted or else they will appear broken.

The change has been rolled out slowly in part to let brands, agencies, page management companies and other marketers finish running campaigns that relied on the wider tab size. While Facebook likes to move fast, the change would have broken a key interface used by its increasingly large advertising client base.

Social ride-sharing hub Zimride today announced a new $1.2 million round of seed funding led by FLOODGATE and joined by K9 Ventures and angel investors Teddy Downey and Keith Rabois. The company won the 2007 fbFund competition for its Carpool app which helped users find other commuters to drive with using its proprietary ride-matching algorithm. The money will be used to help Zimride expand its user base, improve user experience, and revamp their mobile application.

Zimride’s revenue-generating subscription plan helps it to stand out from other rideshare-based start ups, as well as most Facebook applications. Up to 50 employees of any school or workplace can sign up for free, but the organization must then pay $9500 a year to maintain access for their network. Many organizations who’ve reached this threshold have subscribed, with 50 institutions from Wal-Mart to Harvard currently paying. Zimride is an alternative or complement to other rideshare programs like the private commuter buses offered from San Francisco to Silicon Valley for Google and Facebook employees, plus it’s free for the end user.

Facebook helps users meet other commuters by allowing them to see a photo and mutual friends of someone they’re considering riding with. This creates a huge advantage over popular but unmonetized sites like Craigslist where users have little way of knowing if they’ll get along with the person they might spend an hour a day with.

The funding comes with the addition of FLOODGATE partner Ann Miura-Ko to Zimride’s Board of Directors, and K9 Ventures founder Manu Kumar will become a board observer. “The holy grail of ride-sharing is figuring out how to engage users in a ride sharing program” Zimride Founder Logan Green told TechCrunch. The new $1.2 million means Zimride can experiment with new methods of stimulating this engagement, such as potentially using Places check-ins to suggest other users one could carpool with.

As the internet has evolved and devices have proliferated, people have begun discovering the benefits of real-time information sharing. To date, they have primarily accessed this information with real-time search tools, such as through Twitter, or lesser known Facebook search engines like Booshaka, OneRiot, and Open Facebook Search. Google itself has made real-time results a more prominent part of its search engine.

Facebook Places has the potential to change how people find and use real-time information. Instead of chaotically searching various location service venue pages, keywords, or hashtags, users can now find information about real-world events and locations on Places pages thanks to the Places API.

Here’s an example of how that works in action. The SF Street Food Festival was held in San Francisco this weekend, in the heart of a city full of social media users. Beyond featuring a wide variety of great food, it also showcased how people share and consume real-time information.

Waits at some vendors fluctuated from zero to 30 minutes in length through the day, much longer than in previous years when the event wasn’t as well publicized. While many knew the status of the lines at any given moment, finding the most up-to-date information online wasn’t easy. Foursquare and Gowalla venue pages had lots of check-ins, some of which included wait length information. Some people published to Twitter using the unofficial #sfstreetfood hashtag, others “at-replied” @sfstreetfood, while the less savvy simply wrote San Francisco Street Food in their tweet. But none of these sources had all the information.

Facebook Places will. Using the write API, data from across location services can be aggregated to a Places page. Unlike hashtags, which can easily differ from each other and thereby splinter the data, Facebook keeps everything tidy by suggesting the most popular instance of a Place if you try to create a similar one. While there’s no Twitter integration yet, someone could create an system that converts hashtags into Places API write calls. While Places check-ins are currently only visible to friends regardless of your setting, the fact that there is a privacy option to share check-ins with everyone means Places pages are equipped to become public repositories of real-time information.

Next year, users could instead find out about line lengths by viewing the SF Street Food Festival Places page, where they’ll see check-ins with descriptions of the lines from across services, aggregated as they happen. If the creators of the festival have claimed the Place page or merged it with their official Page, it could show official news as well. Since the Places page is a destination linked to from news feed stories, the “Here Now” and “Nearby Places” lists on mobile interfaces, and Facebook’s suggested match-enabled search bar, traffic will all flow to this one central page.

The norms of Facebook Places use are still developing. Many are currently making low-content, description-less check-ins, but warming up to deeper, wider sharing of location info will take some time. Judging by the millions who leave their status updates visible to everyone or publicly post about their current location to Twitter, there are plenty of people willing to create and share this real-time information. But we won’t need search to it.