It was a good week for many of the largest Pages on Facebook, particularly the three media personalities whose Pages surpassed 10 million fans. The data, of course, is gathered from our PageData tool, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page on a daily basis.

We also had a good crop of regulars on the list this week from musicians like Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson to shows like “South Park” and “Family Guy” and some Pages we haven’t seen recently like “Two and a Half Men,” Lil Wayne and “The Twilight Saga.”

Perhaps what was most interesting is the three Pages that surpassed 10 million fans this week:  Eminem, Lil Wayne and Cristiano Ronaldo. What’s interesting about this growth is that, aside from Eminem who just released an album and popular single/video,  there doesn’t appear to be any concrete reason for this growth. It’s interesting to note that, only a few weeks ago, Lady Gaga becoming the first live person with 10 million fans was a big deal, but now it seems that as Facebook’s audience matures, numbers like these will become the norm for stars and popular Pages in general.

Top Gainers This Week

Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Eminem	10,970,673	+1,156,877	+11.79
2.	YouTube	11,404,429	+810,777	+7.65
3.	Facebook	16,656,365	+806,237	+5.09
4.	Lady Gaga	15,924,493	+779,666	+5.15
5.	Family Guy	15,561,574	+745,516	+5.03
6.	Megan Fox	12,025,155	+732,831	+6.49
7.	South Park	11,051,585	+732,373	+7.10
8.	Vin Diesel	14,298,303	+714,258	+5.26
9.	Coca-Cola	10,597,631	+674,371	+6.80
10.	Linkin Park	10,721,428	+602,217	+5.95
11.	House	12,543,393	+593,453	+4.97
12.	Two and a Half Men	6,903,388	+588,106	+9.31
13.	Bob Marley	9,100,339	+585,208	+6.87
14.	Justin Bieber	9,640,433	+573,186	+6.32
15.	Michael Jackson	18,711,898	+569,116	+3.14
16.	David Guetta	7,265,430	+559,542	+8.34
17.	Starbucks	12,627,099	+552,215	+4.57
18.	Lil Wayne	10,107,297	+545,760	+5.71
19.	The Twilight Saga	11,744,704	+505,503	+4.50
20.	Cristiano Ronaldo	10,320,375	+498,478	+5.08

Speaking of which, Eminem took first place this week, still riding the popularity of his hit single and music video, “Love the Way You Lie.” His Page added 1.1 million Likes last week to grow to 10.9 million, passing the 10 million mark right around Wednesday.

This growth was nearly matched by two others on our list this week. Lil Wayne came in at number 18, adding 545,800 new Likes to grow his Page to 10.1 million this week, even as he’s currently incarcerated and a friend is updating his Page. Then there was Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo whose Page added 498,500 fans to grow to 10.3 million, passing the mark Wednesday as well.

The rest of the list was made up mostly by musicians, television shows, tech companies and global brands.

YouTube’s Page came in second place, adding 810,800 Likes to reach 11.4 million. Facebook’s Page added 806,200 to nab third place at 16.6 million Likes; growth may have been due to changes in the photo and notes functions or the premiere of Facebook Live. Coca-Cola took ninth place, adding 674,400 fans to just miss 10.6 million Likes; the company is running a summer photo contest for fans. Starbucks was 17 on the list this week, adding 552,200 Likes, growing to 12.6 million, mostly just by promoting its products.

Brands-as-individuals on the list this week included Megan Fox at number 6 with 732,800 new Likes and a total of 12 million; she’s been inactive on Facebook but starred in Eminem’s aforementioned music video. Vin Diesel followed in eighth place; he conversed with fans on his Page this week and hinted at hitting the 15 million mark soon, given that he added 714,260 Likes to grow to about 14.3 million total this week, that doesn’t seem impossible.

Lady Gaga ruled the musicians, coming in fourth with 779,700 new Likes and totaling 15.9 million. Growth was steady as she toured, appeared on TV, promoted remixes and won some awards.

Linkin Park was tenth this week, adding 602,200 Likes to hit 10.7 million; the band’s promoting their new single and upcoming album. Bob Marley’s Page hit 9.1 million fans this week after adding 585,200 by including interviews and promotions of the late musician’s children. Justin Bieber is never far behind anyone on the list; he came in at 14 this week, adding 573,200 Likes to reach 9.6 million total and has been promoting his music, tour, book, videos and singles. Michael Jackson’s Page followed at 15 with 569,100 new Likes added to its 18.7 million base. Next was David Guetta at 16 with 559,500 new Likes, a total of 7.2 million and general promotion of his music and merchandise.

TV and movies on the list this week pulled in “Family Guy” at number 5 with 745,500 new fans and a total of 15.5 million; the show’s creator has been promoting his own projects and the show in the media recently and the Page has been promoting the upcoming season. “South Park” was in seventh place, with 732,400 new Likes and a recent crossing of the 11 million mark.

“House” was in eleventh place with 593,500 new Likes and a total of 12.5 million; the Page has been promoting the show generally. “Two and a Half Men” followed in twelfth place with 588,100 new fans and 6.9 total; CBS has really been promoting the upcoming series premiere heavily on the Page. “The Twilight Saga” was number 19 this week,m adding 505,500 Likes to its 11.7 million audience doing what it always does, promoting the young stars, film-related news and merchandise.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

Facebook has been working on its location services for quite a while now, and we’ve been hearing with more frequency lately that it may be planning to launch them in the coming weeks. The new features might compete against other check-in services, but also might allow them to somehow use Facebook’s data in new ways. We’ve most recently heard that Facebook will offer a simple addition to the existing user experience, with features such as the ability to attach a location to a status update, or Like a physical place.

We might find out on Wednesday, when Facebook is planning to hold a press event at its headquarters around a new “service.”

The company is sending out invitations to a number of reporters today that reads: “You are invited to attend a news event at Facebook this Wednesday at 4:30pm. During the event, Facebook representatives will provide an update on the service’s features and products.”

We’ll be on location to cover it.

Facebook is busy hiring in the US and around the world, notably pulling in engineering and product leaders from Google and other companies around Silicon Valley. But a few well-known employees, especially early ones who have vested, are no longer with the company. Here’s a closer look at the recent departures:

Aaron Sittig — Few employees have had a bigger impact on Facebook’s look and feel over the years. Sittig, a veteran of Napster, joined Facebook in May of 2005 and led the design team’s work with large and small site changes, from the news feed to tagging. He is listed as the co-author on four of Facebook’s patent applications, including the systems and method for dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network, generating a social timeline, tagging digital media, and dynamically generating segmented community flyers.

Ruchi Sanghvi — A long-time Facebook engineer and product manager, Sanghvi was Facebook’s first female engineer, she led the launch of the news feed and new home page, the development of much of the platform, and key products including Profiles and Notes. She’s also on a few Facebook patent applications as a result of her work, including the system and method for dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network, providing dynamically selected media content to a user of an electronic device in a social network environment, and generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network.

Chris Putnam — A college student when Facebook launched, he landed an engineering job at the company by hacking the site — when Facebook engineers talked to him about it, his explanations helped convince them to hire him. Starting in April of 2006, he was a key engineer in a variety of areas, including security and products like Photos and Video. And in his honor, if you type “:putnam:” in Facebook chat, you’ll generate a special emoticon.

Monica Keller — A recent arrival, Keller (now Wilkinson) had joined Facebook in February after years of holding key engineering roles at rival MySpace. At the company, she was an open source and web standards program manager. Now, she’s left for a more hands-on product role, serving as the director of engineering at Socialcast, a company that provides activity streaming and microblogging tools for businesses. Her job will not take her far away, as she’ll be leading the integration of Facebook’s platform features for the company.

Facebook’s service is designed to be simple and intuitive enough for everyone to use. However, some power users want more flexibility to customize their experience in ways that might be too complex for the general public. Better Facebook offers this control through a free plug-in for popular internet browsers which alters the appearance and behavior of Facebook.com.

Better Facebook can be downloaded as a user script, add-on or extension for Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera. When browsing Facebook with it installed, users see a Better Facebook option panel in the top navigation bar allowing them to add or remove panels from the home page, create news feed tabs housing special news feed filters, hide feed posts a user has already read, and much more. It causes the Facebook home page to take a few extra seconds to load, but doesn’t result in much additional slow-down while browsing.

Developer Profile

Matt Kruse, a javascript developer for 15 years, created Better Facebook in November of 2009 as a off-time creative outlet because there were elements of the Facebook interface that annoyed him. He disliked seeing the same news feed stories each time he logged in, so he built Better Facebook and put it up on the greasemonkey script archive Userscripts.org. He then created a deployment script that converts the greasemonkey script into versions for other browsers. The project interested him because it was so challenging to reverse-engineer Facebook, and he thought others without his extensive javascript background wouldn’t be able to do it. Kruse runs the project on the side while maintaining a full-time job building internal web services in the financial industry.

Better Facebook is different from approved Facebook clients like Wowd because it doesn’t operate over the official APIs. Instead, it scrapes the meta-data that accompanies the html source for each Facebook webpage which identifies its unique ID, the type of post, and which users are included. By calling a specific URL –the one called when you start typing in the “Search” box that populates the search matches dropdown– Better Facebook can retrieve data from the servers like the logged in user’s list of friends, Pages, and groups. To generate panels like “Group Activity” on the home page, it loads that buried Facebook page in an iframe. When Facebook changes its interface code, it can cause errors on Better Facebook; in these cases, Kruse reverse-engineers the code and releases a patch.

Better Facebook now has roughly 30,000 daily users who help Kruse by notifying him of bugs, sending in screenshots of changes to Facebook, and in some cases assisting to debug code. After 4 days of using Better Facebook, users see a pop of explaining the genesis of the product and asking for a donation, which about 0.5% of users have given.

Product Info

Better Facebook has three main types of features and many minor options.

Alterations to the appearance of the home page surface content otherwise buried behind multiple clicks. Users can pin the notifications inbox to the home page so it is always open and visible. Most Recent can be permanently set as one’s default news feed, and right sidebar panels like Get Connected or Suggestions can be removed or replaced with ones that show updates to your groups or profile edits made by friends.

Users can opt to have “Mark Read” buttons placed by every news feed story which hide or gray out the story when clicked. This allows users to prevent themselves from seeing the same story each time they log in to Facebook. This is especially useful in conjunction with the standard Top News feed as posts in this feed often remain for multiple days.

The most complex feature of Better Facebook is the ability to create custom news feeds streams of specific content. Users can select authors or applications, story types, and included keywords and have stories that match those parameters hidden or moved to their own news feed tab. For instance, you could create a tab showing any post that includes the word “tonight” or move all stories from Cafe World, FarmVille, and Mafia Wars to your own custom “Zynga Games” tab. These options help users control what they see in their feeds without having to mute an author entirely.

Kruse says that Better Facebook doesn’t allow users to hide advertisements or silently make actions on Facebook by automatically removing notification of the action from a user’s mini-feed. Feed Filter, a fellow Facebook-altering user script, received a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook for including these features, so Kruse has purposefully left out this kind of functionality.

Creating For A Niche

As the only person behind Better Facebook, Matt Kruse says a large portion of his time is spent on support and debugging. Between all the browsers and their different versions, and the different beta tests Facebook quietly experiments with, there is always someone for whom a certain feature doesn’t work. This can be especially tough with slow product roll-outs, as he’ll get complaints on bugs he can’t see from his account.

Facebook users frequently post on its official help pages asking for new features, and Kruse will sometimes use their ideas in Better Facebook. For instance, many Page admins have asked for a way to receive notifications about actions taken on their Page, so Kruse plans to add that in a future release. His next big goal is make it easier for users to set a friend list as a distribution parameter for a status update, something Facebook also may be working on for an update to friend lists.

Facebook needs to concentrate on creating a service for hundreds of millions of people. It shouldn’t feel threatened by this type of browser extension unless its causing significant server strain, privacy concerns, or misrepresentation of impression counts to advertisers. Overall, Better Facebook offers nitty-gritty customization for the few people who really want it.

Facebook plans to update its Questions application to allow for the creation of polls with images as answer choices. Director of Product Blake Ross answered a user’s Facebook Question about the current lack of this functionality, saying “You can’t do this right now, but you’ll be able to in a few weeks.” Users will be able to let friends and the public vote on polls such as “which car looks cooler?”, “which furniture arrangement makes my living room more inviting?”, or maybe even “which person is more attractive?”

Currently, users can only place a single photo in the description of a Question, and poll answers must be text. User can simulate the functionality of the forthcoming update by using URLs of images as poll answers, though they won’t be hyperlinked.

An advantage of Facebook Questions over other question & answer services is the ease with which one can get answers from those whose opinions they respect, namely one’s friends. This update will further personalize the application because users will be able to take photos of themselves and their surroundings and quickly get their friends’ opinions on them. Polls which used to have to happen in real-time over webcam or in person, such as “which outfit is more appropriate for a job interview?” will be able to happen asynchronously and with a wider pool of voters. However, this might lead to the creation of Questions with less universal value than generalizable Questions like “What’s the best Peruvian restaurant in San Francisco”.

While at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg created an image-based attractiveness polling system called Facemash as a precursor to Facebook. The product brought him attention for how quickly its user-base and traffic grew, but also got him in trouble with the university. Seven years later Facemash’s functionality officially returns to Facebook — sort of — but it will be the users who decide what to do with it.

Facebook has bought bought semantic search startup Chai Labs, according to AllThingsD, which reports that the amount was “likely to be around $10 million and directed at acquiring talent,” although neither company has confirmed the deal.

Founded by former Google AdSense executive Gokul Rajaram — who we assume already knows at least some of the many ex-Googlers at Facebook — the company has raised $2.4 million, including from some very well-known Silicon Valley investors, including Facebook board member Marc Andreessen, Facebook stockholder Reid Hoffman and Google Ventures partner Joe Kraus.

What does Chai Labs do? From the web site:

Our semantic search platform uses proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web. Our goal is to give consumers the most comprehensive, unbiased, up-to-date information they need to make informed and confident purchase decisions. We are laser-focused on simplifying complexity due to over abundance of online sources about a specific topic, leading to information overload.

Our insights are:

Objective – created using AI-based computer algorithms
Real-time – computed and updated continually.
Comprehensive – created using millions of data points across tens of thousands of entities.
Highly visual – able to be presented in a highly visual and engaging format.

Rajaram, his team, and the technology the company has created sound relevant to a number of initiatives that Facebook is working on, from better targeting Facebook ads to providing more relevant search results, or even adding new content into Community Pages. And, Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol is already trying to create a semantic data set that third parties can use to better map out Facebook data as it relates to people and web sites, so maybe Chai Labs will go to work here. Or maybe he’ll work on the project that many outsiders have long suspected Facebook will launch — its own version of AdSense — something the company has avoided commenting on.

Google might not be too happy to see Rajaram end up at Facebook, given his expertise in creating one of Google’s key revenue sources. He departed the company in 2007, holding the title of Product Management Director for Adsense — he helped lead its development from the earliest days. In fact, Google threw him a big party when he left, even giving him a plaque with the signatures of hundreds of employees.

Big Prize Giveaways works with Fortune 5,000 companies to help them implement sweepstakes and other promotions on Facebook with the support of advertising on the site. Founded in 2009 by Jeff French and Dikran Yacoubian, the company found its way to promotions after dabbling in other areas of platform development. We spoke to French as part of our ongoing series of Page management profiles, which most recently included Vitrue and Wildfire. Here some more details.

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

Jeff French: We help clients build engaging and viral promotions for the Facebook Platform and we seed those promotions by sharing with our 2.8 million fans on Facebook. We then manage Facebook ad buys for the promotion to target the clients’ desired audience and drive maximum response. We basically do everything related to a promotion: Provide all technology, design all of the creative assets, handle the rules, prizes, bonding, Facebook approvals, media buying, etc. It really is a complete turnkey solution.

I’d say that about half of our clients come to us with a specific idea and we build a promotion around their concept. The other half come to us with literally nothing. We spend some time understanding what they do and their overall media goals. From there, we try to figure out how Facebook fits into the equation and then we develop a promotion that fits at a strategic level. Obviously some clients want promotions that just drive fans but many (especially our larger Fortune 500 clients) are more concerned with how the promotion fits into their broader multi-channel strategy. Things like earned media, like viral sharing are very important to these clients so we try to develop around these goals. We specialize in enterprise solutions for Fortune 5,000 clients but we also have various solutions for small-midsize businesses to promote sweepstakes on Facebook.

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

One promotion we did for General Motors Corporation was meant to maximize brand and earned media impressions, grow the Facebook fan base and educate sweepstakes entrants about the GM College Discount Program. We built a custom sweepstakes with a $500 gift card prize advertised on the Big Prize Page and with Facebook ads. We had 171,719 sweepstakes visitors, 68,583 entries, 8.9 million earned impressions and 81.6 million other impressions. Another example is a campaign we did to promote THQ’s release of its Beat City game, which included a Facebook app demo of the game, and also to promote the company’s Page. Ultimately we had 48,839 entries, 4.4 million earned  impressions, 31,000 game installs and 41,900 new fans.

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

JF: We have self-funded the project and we are profitable. We maintain a lean team of 12 full-time equivalents in Columbia, South Carolina. We have accepted over 20 million sweepstakes entries on the Facebook platform and we expect this number to more than double in the next 12 months. Our own Facebook Page has over 2.8 million fans that enjoy learning about new promotions when they are launched. This is a great tool to help seed the virality of new promotions and supplement the Facebook ad buys we execute for our clients.

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

JF: Some clients are looking for more fans while others are focused on the amount of “earned media,” for example, viral sharing in the Facebook feed. The success of each campaign is honestly driven by the client’s objectives and ROI is based on how well we meet their target results.

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

JF: The Facebook platform is rapidly evolving and just like other application developers we’ve had to manage these changes as our products iterate. We’ve learned to be flexible and our platform is modular — which helps us quickly adapt to new changes.

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

JF: The Facebook promotion guidelines have placed a premium on our skills. We are highly knowledgeable in administering custom promotions for the Facebook platform and we are able to execute for our clients while allowing them to focus on other aspects of their broader social media strategy.

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

JF: Just like other application developers it took us a while to iterate around the changes to the news feed and the deprecation of notifications.

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

JF: The upcoming change to the pixel width on Pages will force us to move more engaging promotions away from the Page and onto the Facebook canvas. This will inherently create some separation between the client’s Facebook Page and their promotion. We wish Facebook would change their mind on this one.

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

JF: We develop promotions exclusively for Facebook or on micro-sites promoted using Facebook. Since the last f8, many things blur the lines between on-Facebook and off-Facebook development. The vast majority of things that previously required a promotion to live inside the Facebook canvas can now be done on an external site. With all of that said, clients are still very slow to adopt the “open graph” concept and we are still tasked primarily with promoting Facebook Pages and Facebook applications.

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

JF: So far we’ve become a market leader at fan acquisition on Facebook but we want to do more for our clients. We also have a Fan Management Platform in closed beta that will help our clients manage their Facebook presence and maximize their long-term ROI from our promotions. In addition, we are constantly building new promotion types into our platform and expanding our capabilities.

[Disclosure: Big Prize Giveaways is a sponsor of Inside Facebook]

Why did Google buy social application developer Slide? A main line of speculation has been that the company wants to build a social gaming platform, and there are many reasons to assume that.

But we’re hearing that the search leader is focusing on creating general social products first, and it is still just at the start of doing that. Specifically, Slide founder Max Levchin will be personally responsible for leading the design and launch of a new social product, including some form of third-party platform around it.

Social games could become part of the plan later, and it’s easy to see why people are assuming that. They generate a substantial minority of Facebook’s site traffic and create substantial revenue in the form of virtual currency purchases. Gaming companies, other social networks, widget developers and everyone else has been trying to get in on this action already, as scarcely a day seems to pass without another self-described “social gaming platform” launching.

For its part, Google has shown many signs that it wants to get in, too. Within the last several months it has reportedly bought a stake in social gaming market leader Zynga, acquired virtual goods payments service Jambool and small widget and game developer LabPixies, and has been hiring product managers to focus explicitly on games.

The problem, as many other would-be platforms have already been discovering, is that the “social” part of social gaming has to come first. Then, games can be developed on top that use people’s social identities and the communication channels around them. Facebook has been able to create a social gaming ecosystem because it already convinced users to establish real-world identities and make online connections representing real-world relationships, all based around easy-to-use sharing features.

Google, we’re told, understands what the order of operations needs to be here. It is trying to fill the “social” product hole that it has until now either ignored or deprioritized. Somewhat-popular social network Orkut has not disrupted Facebook in most major markets, somewhat-used platform standard OpenSocial has not fully lived up to its potential, and none of Google’s social products overall have contributed significantly to Google’s revenue.

So what will this new social network thing look like? Google has not yet decided, and in fact the company has been busy sorting out the organizational structure around it. This was part of the reason that Google’s top executives decided to purchase Slide. But it was not just a talent acquisition.

Look more closely at Slide, along with the other social companies that Google has been buying, and you can see pieces of its plans coming together.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, August 9th, 2010

• SupersonicAds Takes $2 Million for In-Game Advertising Offers
• 6waves Publishes a New Facebook Game, Legacy of Rome
• Orkut Game Publisher Mentez Raises Funding from Insight Venture Partners
• Report: Google Buying Virtual Payments Provider Jambool for around $75 Million

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

• Deep Fry Stick-Men in Tesla Wars for iPad
• Teen-Oriented Social Network MyYearbook Opens to Game Developers, Starting With Omgpop
• Mixpanel Follows Up with Android Analytics Platform
• Zynga Pulls FarmVille Off MSN Games

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

• Next Up for Playdom: Branded Disney Games, Alternative Platforms, and Subscriptions?
• Win in Real-Time with New Facebook CCG Game CLASH: Rise of Heroes
• Playdemic Goes Farming with Gourmet Range on Facebook
• Report: Google Venture Puts Small Amount of Funding into Ngmoco

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

• London Goes to Hell-In-A-Hand-Basket with Echo Bazaar on Twitter
• How to Localize Games: An Interview with Orkut-Focused Brazilian Publisher Mentez
• Brazil Sees Facebook Growth in Key Demographics
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Kabam, ZipZapPlay, HeyZap, Meez, Blue Fang, & More
• Empire Avenue Draws Real Investment to Virtually Buy and Sell Friends

Friday, August 13th, 2010

• Highborn HD on the iPad Shows That War Can Be Fun
• Trip Hawkins on Digital Chocolate’s Social Gaming Focus
• New Hires in Social Gaming: CrowdStar, Kabam, Playdom, & More
• Social Network Veteran Owen Van Natta Takes Big Position at Zynga
• Jambool Confirms that It Has Been Bought by Google
• Note on Facebook’s Application Stats Reporting Bug
• Social Gaming Roundup: FarmVillain, gWallet, Cie Games, & More

Rumor: AOL, Facebook Talk Ad Alliance – The New York Post reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong have been discussing a “strategic alliance” that would boost the companies’ respective online ad businesses. Discussions have purportedly been on for months, and a deal might allow Facebook to tap into AOL’s online ad power and AOL to dump much of its content into social media, post-Bebo. AOL could potentially be named a “preferred media partner,” according to the story, but Facebook said it doesn’t comment on “market rumors.”

Facebook, Google Approach Data Centers Differently – An interesting piece in The Dalles Chronicle points out that Facebook and Google have taken radically different approaches to constructing their data centers in Oregon. The article characterized Google as standoffish, secretive and not always smooth with the locals on site whereas Facebook — headed by one of the former leaders of Google’s data center — has sent employees to meet with local leaders and disclosed construction plans early on. In other example, as we wrote previously, Facebook recently co-sponsored a local music event and pie bake-off at its site in Crook County.

Facebook Changes Notes – Facebook has changed its Notes app to allow people to bold, italicize, underline, use bullets, numbered lists or indented quotes without having to use the HTML tags. Users will now also be able to tag Pages in Note. Finally, a new menu on the left side allows for quick perusal of a user’s own Notes, Notes about you or Notes that might interest you.

CloudCrowd raises $5.1 M – CloudCrowd, which networks with workers around the world to bring labor into the cloud, previously raised $5.1 million recently and previously raised $1.5 million, according to TechCrunch. We wrote extensively about CloudCrowd’s business recently, the company bills itself as an on-demand labor-as-a-service crowdsourcing company which uses a Facebook application to assign tasks to workers, more at the link.

Appbistro Raises $550K – Appbistro raised $550,000 in funding recently from a variety of angel investors; the startup is essentially a market of apps for Page developers. Appbistro launched in May, according to TechCrunch, and so far 10,000 apps have been downloaded from the web site.

Rixty: Redeem Coins, Get Facebook Credits – Virtual currency provider Rixty is running a promotion from Aug. 9 through Sept. 7 that combines its Coinstar coin counting kiosks with Facebook Credits. the promotion allows users to redeem vouchers from Coinstar kiosks for Credits, up to 10 free Credits for redeeming their kiosk balance for a Rixty voucher. They can earn up to 105 more free Credits for exchanging these vouchers for Credits at the $0.199/Credit tax, depending on the value of the voucher.

Facebook Seattle Page – Facebook recently opened the Seattle office we wrote about in May and the company consequently published a Page for the office. Thus far the Page has about 530 Likes and Wall content, as well as a note including basic information and a photo of the view from the office.

Facebook Nears Saturation in UK – Hitwise’s numbers in the United Kingdom show that, while Facebook is still very popular, the social network may be nearing saturation. The amount of time people spend on the site decreased slightly and growth has slowed over the past six months. Check out our premium service, Inside Facebook Gold, for more information on growth by country.

eBay Thanks Like Button for Revenue – eBay has reportedly attributed part of its $2.2 billion increase in revenue last quarter to Facebook’s Like button. The Like button has been part of eBay’s Daily Deals or Fashion Vault promotions and company executive say Facebook’s social plugins represent some of the best marketing tools currently available.

Spotify Designer Joins Facebook – Rasmus Andersson, the former chief designer at Spotify, has left to join Facebook as a product designer. At Spotify, Andersson worked on creative and art direction, interaction and graphic design, brand identity and user interaction, among other things. He’ll be moving to San Francisco as part of his new job. On his blog he said that working with basic human needs, such as music and social interaction, has been the focus of his professional life. [Photo via]

Swiss Pharma Censured Over Facebook Info – Swiss drug maker Novartis ran into trouble with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week over a widget on the company’s web site promoting its leukemia tasigna drug. Under current laws drug companies must present the pros along with the cons of any drug in advertisements, but the widget allowed Facebook users to share information promoting the product without any of the warning information. We wrote about the thin line pharmaceutical companies are currently walking by promoting products on social media spaces; the government is still considering regulations for social media drug promotions.

Book Delta Flights on Facebook – Delta’s new Ticket Window app allows users to book flights directly on Facebook. The app is powered by Alvenda.

Shout Out with Shoutworthy - Facebook Connect integration Shoutworthy is set up to allow people to professionally recommend their Facebook friends by profession and broadcast a short message about this recommendation over Twitter and Facebook.

Hospitals Contend with Facebook – Hospital administrators in California, as well as other places, are having trouble controlling what employees post about their work on Facebook. This is a particular problem due to U.S. medical confidentiality laws, especially in hospitals in Southern California where celebrities often go for treatment. So far, hospitals have responded by firing staffers who break the laws by posting photos or other confidential information on Facebook and by mounting their own social media campaigns.

UK’s Panic Button a Success – The United Kingdom’s experience with the so-called “Panic Button” to allow children to report inappropriate behavior on Facebook has been deemed successful by authorities there. The application has been downloaded more than 55,000 times and the 211 reports generated from it were serious offenses, such as “sexual grooming.” More at the link.

New Jersey Police Post Mug Shots – The Evesham Township police have begun posting the mug shots of local offenders, like drunk drivers, on Facebook. CNET reports that, while this is interesting, it does open up a strange can of worms because the photos can be tagged, which could lead to mischief.

Ronaldo Gets 10 Million Fans – Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo passed 10 million Likes on Facebook this week, making him the first non-American person to do so.