Facebook is testing a new rich feed story for when your friends Like official Pages. Instead of showing up as a simple one-line text only story, users see the profile picture of the Page and a description from the Page’s info. These stories are both significantly larger and more compelling, and could drive new Likes to Pages without the need for paid advertising.

The new stories only appear for Likes of official, claimed Pages, and not for Likes of  Community Pages. Users see the profile picture and description appended under the “[Name] Likes [Page name]” text which is identical to to the traditional feed stories for Page Likes. The description is taken from first section after Website in a Page’s info tab. Rich Page Like stories for business Pages show the Company Overview, and stories for musicians show the Biography.

By including the profile picture and description, users seeing the story get just enough information about the Page to be enticed to click through and learn more. Facebook recently released a Page discovery tool, showing the company is focusing on how to get users to both learn about new Pages and make their Likes more accurately reflect their real world interests. Offering the implicit recommendations of Pages by friends in such a central location is an efficient way to accomplish these goals, since those in your network probably have similar or intriguing interests.

Rich feed stories for Likes could have a big impact on marketers.  Many Pages buy ads to generate new Likes, but strengthening the news feed as a viral channel for Page growth would decrease the need for these ads.

Today Facebook begins rolling out multiple improvements to its photos product. Users will be able to upload and download high resolution photos, quickly view photos in a pop-up light box view without leaving the page they are currently viewing, utilize two bulk tagging features to tag one person in multiple photos simultaneously, and use a streamlined and more reliable Flash uploading tool. Despite the monetary cost, Facebook has made the changes to keep the world’s most popular photos product technologically competitive.

Five months ago Facebook acquired photo sharing startup Divvyshot, whose founder Sam Odio managed these product changes. He tells us that “we took a fresh look at the photos product, built a new vision, and this is the first step towards that vision. Facebook is building out a larger photos team, photos are becoming a priority within the company, and it’s something we felt like we should be doing for our users.” The new changes will only go live for a small random subset of users later today because of the 100 million photos Facebook takes in a day. However, barring any significant problems, the changes will be rolled out to 100% of the user base over the next few weeks.

High Resolution Photos

Users will now have the option to upload photos at 2048 pixels along the largest side as well as Facebook’s standard 720 pixels. This 8 times improvement in quality will cover the resolution of photos taken by most consumer cameras. Larger photos, such as those shot with DSLRs, will be re-sized down to 2048 pixels, or roughly 6000 kilobytes, on the user’s side just before the upload occurs. This means that if you try to upload a 6 megabyte photo, you won’t have to wait for that large file to be sent to Facebook. Users will still have to be patient, however, as the uploader notes high resolution photos take up to 10 times longer to upload.

Anyone will be able to view the print quality, high resolution photos on Facebook’s web interface, and there will be a link below them to initiate a download of a .jpg of the photo. The high resolution will allows users to print 5×7 inch photos at 300 DPI, or perhaps even 8x10s, without any degradation of the image. High resolution photos will also be available through the API, opening opportunities for print products, and high resolution photo experiences on HD televisions. Odio says he’s excited to see what the API partners come up with.

Facebook will still be using its Haystack storage infrastructure for high resolution photos. The significant drop in storage costs over the last five years makes the high resolution feasible, but it will still cost millions of dollars. Odio says, “Zuckerberg made the decision. He though users would appreciate high resolution. He looked at the tab and said ‘Let’s do it.’” Odio explained that all the other major photo sharing sites offer high resolution, including Divvyshot, and while Facebook had previously been focused on sharing memories, not pixels, Facebook is ready to “get with the times”.

Light Box View Of Photos

Soon, you will be able to click a photo anywhere on site, on the news feed or within albums, and the photo will load over a darkened background of the content you were viewing. You can then browse to adjacent photos, or click out or hit escape to close the light box and resume viewing the page you were previously looking at. The view will also include comments and Likes below the photo, only one advertisement instead of two, and the total amount of other text and distracting graphics will be minimal.

Light box view will also help photos load faster. Instead of sending a get http request for a whole new page which would have to be generated by the server and sent back, now Facebook will just construct the light box over your current page and immediately start downloading the image. The image may appear first, followed by the comments and Likes a tiny fraction of a second later.

The change should help users keep their desktops tidy. Previously when users wanted to retain their place in Facebook but view a photo, they would typically load the photo in a new tab. Odio say, “This seemed like a clumsy experience. The funny thing is that everyone is tracking page views. This change will probably cause a significant hit to page views, but we think it’s better. It loads much faster and you don’t lose your context in the content you were interested in.”

To navigate the light box view, users can click the right or left arrow buttons to view the next or previous photos, or click the escape button to close the light box. Users who don’t like the light box and prefer the standard photo view can click the refresh button on their browser to load the currently viewed light box photo in the standard view.

Bulk Tagging

When you go to any album page, you’ll be able to click “Tag photo”, enter a friend’s name, click the face of that friend in multiple photo thumbnails, and hit save to simultaneously tag that person in all of those photos. “People were doing an incredible amount of tagging, but it seemed like a terrible user experience to have to tag each individual photo separately”. Odio says it might sound difficult to pinpoint faces in thumbnails, but it’s actually quite easy.

The original uploader of photos will have access to an express bulk tagging system. Facebook will recognize the same face being present in multiple photos, and temporarily the group photos with the same face together making it easy to tag that person in all those photos simultaneously. This should alleviate uploader tagging fatigue, which frequently resulted in users leaving their friends to tag themselves.

Flash Uploader and Streamlined Flow

Facebook is implementing a new Flash uploader which increases reliability and takes advantage of the greater market penetration of Flash. Facebook has experimented with Java clients and browser plugins over the years, but rewrote the uploader in Flash for its ability to select multiple photos at once. The upload flow has also been streamlined. When you hit “upload photos” you’ll immediately begin selecting photos, and not be first asked to create and name an album as you were before.

Reliability is measured by how many users who at first click “upload” actually end up with new photos appearing on the site. Facebook expects at 5-10% increase in reliability thanks to the Flash uploader and streamlined flow. While users in the US with modern computers and fast connections might not see much difference, users in countries like Indonesia with older computers and worse connections will have a much improved upload experience.

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 CafeMom, Fuel Industries, OneRecovery, Storm8, Toy Studio, and Electronic Arts.

• Producer / Product Manager – Games (New York, NY)

• Data User Analyst (Culver City, CA)

• Senior Analytics Engineer (Del Mar, CA)

• Senior Game Designer (Redwood City, CA)
  
• Senior Game Artist (Redwood City, CA)

• Senior Flash Developer (Chicago, IL)

• Director of Technology – EA2D (Redwood City, CA)
  

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.

Facebook has rolled out its location service Places to France and Australia. The launch in both nations this week may signal an acceleration of the roll out. Facebook appears to be giving access to countries with a large Facebook audience, and at least some iPhone market penetration. The two nations join the United States, the UK, Canada, and Japan bringing the total number which can access Places via the Facebook for iPhone app or touch.facebook.com to six.

France has the fifth largest Facebook audience in the world, according to the Facebook Global Monitor, and a relatively high 4.08% market penetration for the iPhone according to AdMob via Nelso. It is the second non-English speaking country to gain Places access, following the technologically advanced Japan.

Italy has an iPhone market penetration of only 1.26% according to AdMob, the lowest of any country with Places access. However, it is the country with the sixth largest Facebook population, meaning Facebook may factoring in size more than iPhone penetration for determining the order of the roll out.

Now that Places has launched in Australia, the four major English-speaking nations all have access. Australia has a 6.96% iPhone market penetration according to AdMob via Nelso. It was one of the nations most eager to use Places, with many from the country accessing the feature via U.S.-hosted VPN accounts. Facebook also opened a sales office in Australia last year.

The launch of Places in Italy could mean other non-English speaking countries which have a large Facebook audience in Western Europe, such as Germany and Spain could be in line for roll out. The launch in France could mean others with high iPhone market penetration, such as Switzerland, Denmark and Singapore, might be the next countries to gain Places access. Ireland remains the only large predominantly English speaking country without access. Facebook may also be taking the same distribution strategy it used for rolling out access to Facebook itself, namely launching in the most trendy locations first. This in turn makes Places seem cool, leading to rapid adoption wherever it’s offered.

This article contains data excerpts from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service tracking Facebook’s traffic growth and demographic landscape in global markets.

[Thanks to Joffrey, James Norquay, and Vincenzo Cosenza for the tips]

Irish developer BetaPond has released two applications which integrate Facebook Places. LoyaltyBuilder is a branded multi-venue checkin leaderboard tab application which helps businesses encourage users to check in to specific Places. I Spy Places is a simple Places dashboard which lets users see a map and list of check-ins by them or any one friend at a time.

Along with the user interface for Places, Facebook released read and search APIs, with a write API on the way. Using the first two, developers can pull information from users about their checkins and use the data to power applications; BetaPond’s LoyaltyBuilder and I Spy Places are some of the first apps to make use of these APIs.

One issue with Places for multi-national brands or businesses with multiple physical locations is that they may have multiple Places to which they want to encourage checkins. Some Places leaderboards, like the ones made by Context Optional, only allow Pages to track checkins to a single Place. LoyaltyBuilder lets brands monitor checkins to multiple Places, and total checkins and points from across the different Places to gives users a score and ranking. Brands can add a description of their loyalty program or message of of encouragement within the app. By offering recognition to users who check in to a brand’s Places most frequently, the app incentivizes users to make the checkins, sharing their affiliation with the Places to their network.

Brands can also use the app to conduct rewards contests, for instance rewarding a prize or discount to whoever is at the top of the leaderboard at a certain time. BetaPond can further customize LoyaltyBuilder to client specifications in addition to the self-service app. Brands can get great exposure from users checking in to their Places, so apps which remind and reward users to do so are a smart move for businesses.

I Spy Places lets users see all of a person’s checkins on one screen. The default view and My Places tab show a user’s own check-ins in a list and as icons on a map. The Where Have My Friends Been button brings up a row of profile pictures of friends above the map. Users can click a friend to see their checkin history. The app lacks analytics and a current checkin feed provided by PlacePop’s power user dashboard, and only viewing one friend at once isn’t especially useful. Some users may enjoy the ability to quickly visit the Places page of any Place a friend has checked in to.

Developers are just beginning to explore how to use the Places APIs. To date, apps have focused mainly on tracking check-ins after they’ve been made, but we expect more which help users connect with others currently at the same Place to be released soon.

Facebook is looking for people to fill positions in content strategy, research, communication, commerce, intellectual property, a few positions in Latin America, online sales and market solutions, according to listings recently added to the company’s Careers page this week.

A couple Software Engineering positions point to Facebook’s growing Credits and e-commerce businesses. The Commerce Infrastructure and Commerce Platform software engineering positions will be based in Palo Alto. “Together with the accelerating digital goods and services industry, Facebook Credits usage is growing rapidly, so there will be plenty of challenges across the stack,” the listings say.

The Manager of Facebook Research is set to be part of the Design and User Experience team helping Facebook drive the “overall strategy and operations of the research team.” This person will oversee taking research to the next step by partnering with production development and “unlock the potential of Facebook.” Perks include an equity stake in Facebook and gourmet meals served thrice daily. Design and User Experience is also seeking a Manager of Content Strategy to help guide the company’s content management team based in Palo Alto, Calif.

The Communications team is looking for an Associate Manager of Policy Communications to work in either Palo Alto or Washington, D.C. This position is set to focus on policy, privacy, safety and security issues and work with government agencies, public officials and advocacy groups. Requisites include being strong writings, tech and political experience and press relations.

Facebook is also seeking an Associate Manager for Privacy and Intellectual Property – User Operations to help the company “build and scale” that part of the business. The person who’s hired will manage two teams of people managing incoming privacy and intellectual property violations.

There were also some interesting jobs opening up in Sales and Business Development. The Director for Online Sales and Operations, Asia-Pacific and Latin America to be based in Palo Alto and work on refining the company’s advertising model in these regions, specifically, to scale Facebook’s advertising system to fit these regions. Then, the Head of Online Sales Account Management, also based in Palo Alto, is to be asked to help guide Facebook’s strategy for its largest online advertisers and mid-market brands.

Finally, two Platform and Product positions based in Palo Alto are geared towards helping make Facebook relevant both as an advertising platform and venue for marketing for automotive and retail brands. The Strategist for Market Solutions (Autos) is set to position Facebook “as a critical element in the marketing mix” by partnering with Sales to provide solutions for auto brands, develop messaging and market strategies specifically for these clients and demonstrate the value of Facebook to these clients. The Retail Strategist for Market Solutions similarly partners with Sales to create venues for retailers to market on Facebook.

Facebook has released new statistics on its Facebook+Media Page about users who click Like buttons on Open Graph-enabled websites, as well as the influence of the Like button and social plugins on site traffic and engagement. They show that the “likers” have more friends and click more links on Facebook to external websites than those who don’t use the Like button. Sites implementing the Like button get significantly more traffic, and their users visit more often, view more pages and videos, and spend more time on site.

“The average ‘liker’ has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user” meaning they may be more active on Facebook, have denser real-world social networks, or have been members for longer. Likers click links to external websites found on the news feed, profiles of friends, Pages, and elsewhere 5.4x more than the average Facebook user. This means those clicking through to websites Liked by their friends are themselves more likely to click Like buttons and share back to Facebook.

Demonstrating the gap between online and offline news readers, the average liker on a news website is age 34, twenty years younger than the average newspaper subscriber. Users who click Activity Feed plugins on Open Graph-enabled sites generate 4x more page views than the average visitor to a media site. The note also explains that Pages can increase on-Page engagement by 1.3-3x by publishing compelling links or status updates to those that Like them.

Websites which have Implemented the Like button or other social plugins have experienced the following traffic increases: ABC News (+190%), Gawker (+200%),  TypePad (+200%), Sporting News (+500%). Facebook also published various statistics about how NHL.com has been affected by the implementation. “Visitors are reading 92% more articles, spending 85% more time on-site, viewing 86% more videos, and generating 36% more visits.”

David Swain of Facebook’s Product and Platform Communications team has also quoted CTO Bret Taylor as saying that “five months after f8, about 2 million sites are using social plugins”.

These statistics show the positive effect integrating with Facebook can have on websites. The experience of other sites and the ease of adding the few lines of code necessary to install many social plugins should encourage sites to at least experiment with the Open Graph API.

Facebook now allows advertisers to set a lifetime budget for their ad campaigns instead of only a daily spending limit. This helps pace a campaign’s daily spend to be even across the period of time the campaign is set to run for. The more control Facebook offers to advertisers, the more who will be comfortable spending money on its ads.

Facebook’s new Help Center FAQ on lifetime budgets explains “If you specify $100 USD [as the lifetime budget for a] 10 day campaign, each day theoretically will need to spend $10/day. If the campaign only spends $8 on the first day, the system will try to make up the missed amount at a later date within the campaign.”

Advertisers can set up a lifetime budget for ads by clicking “Create a new campaign” in the “Campaigns, Pricing, and Scheduling” step of the Ads Manager ad creator. They then click the budget drop-down menu, select “Lifetime budget”, and set an amount to spend. Lifetime budgeted ads default to run for a month from the day the campaign is created, but advertisers can change the run dates using the scheduling fields.

Campaigns which are already running can have their budgets switched to lifetime. To do so, advertisers can click to edit budget on the campaign view, revealing an “Edit Budget & Scheduling” pop-up. There advertisers can switch from per day to lifetime budget and set run dates. Note that switching the budget of an ad will reset its spend for that day and Facebook will allot an equal fraction of the lifetime budget to the remainder of that day as the rest of the days of the campaign.

Ads set with both a lifetime budget and a daily spend limit won’t exceed the daily cap. Bulk Upload Tool users can utilize lifetime budgets by downloading the new Excel template which includes a “campaign_lifetime_budget” column. Lifetime budgets will also be available through the Ads API.

By more evenly allocating spend across a campaign, advertisers can control for high and low traffic days and spend less time monitoring. Lifetime budgets could prevent Facebook from perpetually earning money off of unsophisticated advertisers who forget their campaigns are running. However, this will likely be offset by the increased spend associated with increased confidence in the Facebook ad platform afforded by lifetime budgets.

[Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip]

Facebook has increased the number of ads displayed in many areas of the site from three to four. In some cases the fourth ad is partially or completely below the fold of the page, meaning Facebook now serves ad impressions users might not necessarily see. This change could reduce ad click-through rates but it will also allow advertisers to access Facebook’s most valuable demographics more often. It will likely help grow Facebook’s revenue, which we previously reported would reach $1.1 billion in 2010.

By displaying more ads on each page, it’s harder for users to pay attention to each ad. But to help show the lift provided by social context information that Facebook can provide alongside ads, Facebook has recently begun providing social context metrics for ads showing the Likes of friends, and has launched a new ad unit for applications. Facebook also recently started showing domain names for ads that point off-site.

For users without especially large screens or low screen resolutions, the fourth ad on many Facebook pages won’t be fully visible unless they scroll down. This is most often true on areas of the site such as photos which display modules such as People You May Know, event invitations, or Photo Memories above the ads.

Advertisers may benefit from the increase in ad inventory available for highly sought after demographics, such as those in the United States and United Kingdom, or specific company employees. However, since most advertisers pay for clicks, not impressions, this change shouldn’t lead to drastic changes in bid prices.

Users will now see four ads in the right sidebar of the following areas of the site: personal profiles, official Pages, community Pages, applications, the photos home page, albums, photos, apps, the events homepage, the groups home page, groups, the notes home page, notes, messages, the friends home page, the applications directory, links, Invite Your Friends, and notifications. Facebook’s home page and the news feed show one ad. Areas of the site without ads include: events, requests, Questions, Impact, Find Your Friends, the Games dashboard, the Applications dashboard, account settings, and privacy settings, and the profile editor.

Facebook has been steadily increasing the revenue it brings in from advertising. We’ve estimated that Facebook’s performance advertising revenue alone eclipsed $350 million last year, and should show very strong growth this year.

Thanks to Mike Webb from social game developer iwi.com for the tip.

Facebook’s latest tight integration with a big third-party application could be coming soon — Skype is bringing Facebook to its calling, voice chat and SMS services, according to All Things D. The pairing is expected to roll out within the new version of Skype, 5.0, which is now in partial testing and expected to launch in the next few weeks.

The screenshot below, from the report, reveals a new tab in the Skype interface that shows Facebook friends. Each individual account includes the user’s phone number, with the option to call or text them.

There’s not a Skype chat option visible, though. Facebook has its own IM service, that may or may not be integrated here, while it has separately not appeared to move forward with its own video chat service. In other words, the two companies appear to be trying to complement each other in this integration, but not promoting competing products. That is different from what’s happened with two other communication service’s attempts to access Facebook data — Twitter and Apple’s Ping have both been blocked to date after trying to create their own integrations.

Facebook has previously given Skype some attention as well, in the form of trying to get its users to import their Skype contacts.

The Skype integration is not the first instance of a third-party communication application to benefit from Facebook. Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger has been finding millions of new users in recent months, according to AppData, with 5.45 million daily active users and 6.93 million monthly active users on Facebook as of today. By syncing Messenger and Facebook accounts, users can chat with Facebook friends, see their activities, and share status updates. Other third-party IM services, like Meebo, have also offered these sorts of syncing capabilities.

Facebook has more than 500 million monthly active users, around half of whom come to the site every day. Skype has a similar number of of total registered users, but substantially fewer monthly users — 124 million people out of 560 million, with a peak of 23 million of them online at any given time. Perhaps the Facebook integration can help Skype boost its engagement rates, especially as it looks to go public?