Facebook has added a topics manager to its Q&A product Facebook Questions. A prompt for the manager explains, “Welcome to Questions. We’ll show you more interesting questions if you tell use what you’re interested in.” The manager lets users select from general topics or topics from specialized categories, and replaces the broken topics navigator which launched with Questions. The topics manager is an essential step on the path to Questions becoming a valuable and tightly integrated product worthy of rolling out from its small current tester base to all of Facebook’s users.

Until users save their topics settings they’ll be brought to the topics manager upon clicking the Questions link on the home page or a prompt at the top of answer pages. The topics manager asks users, “What are you interested in? We’ll show you questions about the topics you select below.” There they’ll be able to influence what kind of Questions they see in their feeds and Questions home page by selecting topics connected to community Pages. Users can pick general topics such as food or technology, or dig deeper into categories like arts to find topics such as poetry, animation, or interior design. There isn’t a strict hierarchy, as some topics including running appear under general as well as in subcategories such as athletics.

No official Pages, such as specific television shows, appear as topics in the Topics Manager by default. They can be searched for and selected using the search bar at the bottom of the manager. While the category interface is reminiscent of Facebook’s new Page Browser discovery tool, the topics displayed to each user don’t appear to be automatically personalized according to existing Likes, Likes of friends, or demographic information.

The topics manager replaces the Questions topics navigator which would frequently return errors stating a topic had no Questions in it when on the same screen it would list as having multiple questions. This made it very difficult to find a specific topic within which to browse Questions. It also appears that the Trending Topics and Related Topics sidebar panels has been removed, and the home page sidebar now displays Suggested Topics with “Follow” buttons next to them.

Adding a topics manager instead of a repaired navigator shows that Facebook is focusing on integrating Questions into the existing user experience, helping users receive relevant Questions in their feeds rather than promoting browsing within Questions itself. Support for both use cases will likely be necessary to make Questions a popular part of Facebook when it’s rolled out to everyone.

An early virtual goods monetization service provider, Peanut Labs, is announcing today that it is selling to traditional online survey and sampling provider Research Now for an undisclosed amount. The company began life as a social network called Xuqa in 2005 then morphed into a surveys and CPA offers provider over the last several years.

Now, it plans to double down on the survey business, providing Research Now client inventory to users — with Facebook’s help, potentially.

The company’s surveys, for those unfamiliar appear as a form of advertising offer within social apps, typically allowing users to fill out information in exchange for virtual currency in games.

A test partner in Facebook’s initial experiments with offers back in April, the company tells us today that it will likely be working with Facebook directly again. It anticipates running its surveys within the Facebook Credits offers interface, alongside the current offers provided by Trialpay, a company spokesperson says.

Overall, San Francisco-based Peanut Labs, cofounded by executives Murtaza Hussain, Ali Moiz, Prosper Nwankpa and Noman Ali, will become a business unit with the acquirer, retaining the same organization and structure as before. With a caveat: the company’s Seattle direct survey-selling office will be integrated with Dallas, Texas-based Research Now more directly.

Regarding the undisclosed terms, the company only says that they “made the initial investors very happy.” The deal will officially close in October.

The company’s various offers product will stay mostly untouched. Its local deals product, Cherry Deals, will continue. Its CPA offers business will, too, albeit Peanut Labs will stop taking a cut of the ads and instead give the revenue to developers — an attempt to undermine other offer providers, and lure in more developers to try out its surveys. CPA offers, which include some types of surveys, have in the past included deceitful or otherwise low-quality content — something that the industry has been taken to task for on Facebook, and has tried to clean up as a result. Given Facebook’s moves to tightly control all offers through Credits, a Peanut Labs survey deal here seems a good way for the company to transition.

For recently rebranded Research Now (until today, called e-Rewards), the company will be getting access to the millions of Facebook users that Peanut Labs reaches through its client relationships. Peanut Labs gets the benefit of high-quality survey inventory and an established brand — good for inking deals with Facebook, and appealing to developers.

Peter Thiel, Facebook’s angel investor and board member — and top entrepreneur and hedge-fund manager — said today that Facebook is one of the “least overvalued or most undervalued” tech companies. And what is the valuation? Around $30 billion, he said.

Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference happening this week in San Francisco, he spoke more broadly about the state of technology and investing. A staunch libertarian futurist, he encouraged Silicon Valley to invest in technologies that can make the world a better place in the coming decades, noting that median wages had stagnated in the US for the last 37 years.

What about the Facebook movie, “The Social Network.” Interviewer Sarah Lacy noted that the trailers, at least, portrayed Zuckerberg as an evil genius. Thiel said that’s not how anyone who has worked with Zuckerberg “tended to view him.” However, he thinks there could be a positive side for the company from the Hollywood attention. Paraphrased, he said:

Silicon Valley is about positive sum game where all the stakeholders can benefit — founders, stakeholders and public at large. Hollywood is a zero-sum game where everyone is trying to stomp on each other. One very good thing about the move is that it encourages young Americans to think that they can start new businesses. The Wall Street movie was far more negative in the 80s, but encouraged people to go into Wall Street. If this movie gets more people coming to Silicon Valley and building companies, great.

Thiel is also launching a fund to encourage people to “stop out of school” to pursue a big-idea company.

Newly launched shopping incentive platform Ifeelgoods today announced that it will help retail websites to give away Facebook Credits as rewards to customers. Users can earn Credits for making purchases, sharing with friends, clicking ads, signing up for email updates, or for redeeming loyalty program points. Facebook Credits have a low cost but a high perceived value, especially to social gamers who are often online shoppers, making them a more cost-effective incentive than discounts and rebates. These so-called “micro-incentives” could become a powerful way to entice customers to follow a call to action.

Retail websites first add some simple javascript code to display messages such as “Buy this dress and get 25 Facebook Credits” or “Post to Facebook and get 3 Credits.” Users then click a Facebook Connect button, allow the Ifeelgoods app access, and the Credits are automatically deposited in the user’s Facebook account. The integration will only be lightly branded as powered by Ifeelgoods.

The company is part of Facebook’s app2user program which enables apps such as ShopKick and Rixty to help merchants and loyalty program operators offer their customers Facebook Credits in lieu of other rewards. This effectively creates another payment method for Credits where users pay or create value for retailers who in turn pay Facebook. The Ifeelgoods team comes from Shop.org, PayPal, Google, and French media agency AGORAD, and has received $1.1 million in seed funding from Tugboat Ventures, Kima Ventures, Quest Venture Partners and angel investors. A number of undisclosed retailers are ready to implement the incentive program upon launch.

The company’s VP of Product Suchit Dash explains that Ifeelgoods has purchased a pool of full-priced Credits from Facebook, and one possible business model would be to sell them at-cost to retailers along with a set up fee for implementing the integration. Later, the company hopes to get discounts from Facebook for bulk Credits purchases, netting it a margin on each Credit sale.

Dash says ifeelgoods Credits incentives are similar to offering “free shipping where the perceived value to customers is seven or eight dollars, but the cost for retailers is three or four dollars. Five Facebook Credits are worth more than their actual value to someone heavily invested in FarmVille. We’re aligning ourselves with a currency which has potential. As users begin to be able to buy online books or music with Facebook Credits, the perceived value of the Credits expands.” By providing a low cost way to encourage users to spend money, give up contact information, and distribute marketing messages, Ifeelgoods shares the buying power of social gamers with online retailers.

Venerable philanthropic app Causes has put in a second week of gains to head this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users. Although the app has topped 30 million MAU in the past — it’s now at 21 million — this is the first time it has shown a consistent climb past 20 million MAU in several months.

Here’s the full list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Causes	21,113,584	+3,293,608	+18%
2.	Quiz Planet	13,819,724	+2,400,820	+21%
3.	Marketplace	5,206,432	+2,193,390	+73%
4.	It Girl	2,377,021	+1,826,614	+332%
5.	Phrases	35,014,103	+1,509,053	+5%
6.	Friend Facts™	2,940,183	+1,409,441	+92%
7.	Give Hearts	10,177,014	+1,335,530	+15%
8.	Frases Diarias	6,372,734	+1,123,502	+21%
9.	FarmVille	62,352,754	+1,079,776	+2%
10.	Millionaire City	8,447,317	+1,015,897	+14%
11.	Pop Boom	1,555,748	+898,203	+137%
12.	Happy Pets	9,418,437	+895,938	+11%
13.	Café World	20,829,079	+879,539	+4%
14.	Happy Aquarium	12,581,006	+868,026	+7%
15.	Birthday Calendar	8,035,696	+849,722	+12%
16.	Texas HoldEm Poker	35,398,710	+829,450	+2%
17.	Are YOU Interested?	8,886,903	+817,814	+10%
18.	iHeart	12,990,192	+776,712	+6%
19.	BandPage by RootMusic	4,880,817	+764,047	+19%
20.	City of Wonder	10,709,004	+690,514	+7%

Following Causes’ 3.3 million MAU gain, Quiz Planet has added a respectable 2.4 million. This CrowdStar app isn’t growing alone; the games It Girl, Pop Boom, Happy Pets and Happy Aquarium are all from the same developer. We’ll cover what’s happening with these and other games this morning over at Inside Social Games.

Marketplace, like Causes, hasn’t showed up in a while. Although it’s Facebook’s standard-issue auction app, it lost users steadily since a big gain due to sweepstakes earlier this year. Its current growth could be explained by a bump in email marketing.

Phrases, Friend Facts™, Give Hearts and Frases Diarias are all apps we might have expected to stop gaining users so quickly after Facebook’s Tuesday changes to feeds and virality — but they’re still growing as reliably as ever (the four often show up on our lists). It may take several weeks to judge the true effects of the changes.

Finally, BandPage by RootMusic is still on its way up; the custom-Page utility for bands is on the verge of hitting five million MAU.

A little over a month after Facebook made its long-awaited entrance into the location space with Places, experiments from advertisers and local businesses looking to market via check-ins are starting to emerge.

In one of the more creative takes on Places, Nike recently gave “Destroyer Burritos,” or fake burritos stuffed with branded athletic jackets, to fans who checked into a Portland-based Korean taco truck.

Other examples of Places marketing have been a bit more conventional, involving discounts for check-ins. A Silicon Valley shopping mall offered a 15 percent discount on clothing from Betsey Johnson or a chance to win a pair of Jonas Brothers concert tickets to customers who checked into the mall’s Facebook Places page.

But there are many more possibilities, as location-sharing could fundamentally change accountability for advertising.

Basic use cases:

1) Deals in exchange for a single check-in to virally market a business to new customers. This is fairly standard and was pioneered by earlier location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. In exchange for a single check-in, a local business offers a free good or discount. In turn, the check-ins enable local businesses to experience the same kind of viral marketing that helped fuel the growth of less tangible services like social games and apps on the Facebook platform.

2) Deals for multiple check-ins to earn customer loyalty. Foursquare’s mayorships were a pioneer for this. If a user checked in enough times, they’d win mayorship of a local business and were sometimes entitled to free goods or discounts like free drinks. With Places, a business could turn a “Buy 10 Get One Free” card into a “Check in 10 times, get one free” offer.

3) Timed check-in deals to help make store traffic more stable. A store could incentivize customers to check in during hours of the day when foot traffic is weak.

4) Group check-in deals to fill a business with a crowd. We haven’t seen one with Facebook Places yet. But using Foursquare, a tea shop in Brighton, England, awarded a deal if enough customers appeared to trigger the swarm badge, which you get if you and 50 people check-in simultaneously. One could imagine hyperlocal variants of this — a happy hour deal triggered at a nearby bar if more than a certain number people check in on Facebook.

More complicated, but intriguing:

1) Using Facebook’s public friend lists and check-ins to track referrals in a social circle. If a friend gets, say, three of their friends to subsequently check in, a business could offer a discount.

2) Sending local deals from nearby businesses when a Facebook user checks in. Yelp already has a version of this in their mobile app where users can see “Nearby Offers” when you search for places to go. But we could imagine richer variations of this provided the market is saturated enough with local advertisers. You could imagine that Facebook — knowing your tastes and the friends you’re with — might be able to push local deals that match your interests the instant you check in.

3) Cost-per-check-in advertising: A local businesses could pay for advertising based not only on impressions or clicks but on actual visits or a certain number of visits. A local coffee shop could buy an ad that reaches out to nearby residents and users of Facebook and pay only if those users turn into customers who “check in” at least once.

It could also get more sophisticated, tracking whether a customer ultimately become a loyal one. Some cost-per-install advertising networks for social games and apps already track conversions to a greater extent — e.g. does a user who clicks through on an ad eventually become an avid player of a game or level up to a certain point?

The same idea could be applied to local advertising so that businesses only pay for an ad when a customer becomes a loyal one with multiple visits.

4) Changing the emerging social buying market.

In the span of a year and a half, a cohort of social buying companies have emerged, allowing people to find local deals if enough people sign up. One of them, Chicago-based Groupon, has even snagged a valuation of more than $1 billion.

“Places is going to open up a whole new different types of daily deal,” said Jim Moran of Yipit, a startup that aggregates deals from more than 130 providers. “Businesses want transparency around whether a deal brings in repeat customers.”

Right now, customers of these social buying startups use either printed vouchers or codes displayed on their phone screens to redeem their coupons. The local businesses and the social buying startup usually split proceeds.

Some social buying startups are beginning to incorporate check-ins into the redemption and payment process. One startup called ScoutMob offers deals free to consumers (unlike Groupon and LivingSocial, which charge users upfront), and then charges the local businesses only when a user checks into the restaurant on its app to redeem the deal. Another location startup, SCVNGR, partnered with social buying startup BuyWithMe to reward extra behaviors like taking a photo or sharing an update about the place after checking in.

5) Integration with virtual goods. Again, we haven’t seen anything yet involving both Places and virtual goods but other startups in the space have experimented lightly. San Francisco-based Booyah offered branded H&M virtual sweaters in exchange for check ins, for example.

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, September 20th, 2010

• Swiss Developer Games2be Launches Spoing on Facebook
• CrowdStar Pushes Hard on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Meteor Games Plans a Switch to Deeper Gameplay
• Gameloft Launches Green Farm on Facebook

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

• Niche Network IMVU Takes on Social Gaming
• Russian Developer Progrestar Gets into Facebook with Digger
• Last Week to Pre-Order Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market 2010-2011
• Pocket Frogs Adds Amphibious Fun to the iPhone and iPad
• Facebook Making Big Changes to Discovery, Virality in Games Today
• Following Facebook’s Most Recent Changes, Developers Worry About Virality

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

• Candy Shop Grows on Facebook
• Millionaires and Monsters on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• I-Jet Media Looks for Western Social Game Developers to Distribute in Europe, Russia
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Kabam, Lolapps, Blue Fang, & More
• Arkadium and Merriam-Webster Launch Writer’s Blox on Facebook

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

• MocoSpace Takes $3.5 Million Softbank Investment, Turns to Web-Based Mobile Games
• Pechanga Resort & Casino Gets into Facebook with Slot Wars
• New Hires In Social Gaming: 6 Waves, CrowdStar, Digital Chocolate, & More
• Developers Should Take Advantage of Latest Facebook Changers – as Zynga Has Done Before

Friday, September 24th, 2010

• Browser Based Game Ikariam Breaches 1 Million Users Through Facebook
• Madden Leads This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• How ZipZapPlay Saved Itself With a Hit Facebook Game
• Zynga Bets on HTML5 With Dextrose Acquisition
• DeNA Acquires Another Developer, Astro Ape
• Zynga Signs on for a Big San Francisco Expansion
• Social Gaming Roundup: KISS, RockYou, Ngmoco, & More

Canada Ends Facebook Probe, Govts Work on Privacy – The Canadian government’s probe into issues surrounding the way third parties gather Facebook user data has wrapped up. Meanwhile, the privacy agencies of governments around the world — U.S., Canada, several in Europe, Australia and New Zealand —are working to launch the Global Privacy Enforcement Network to help them facilitate international enforcement of privacy laws.

Zuckerberg Donates $100M, Presents on ‘Oprah’ – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was valued at $6.9 billion this week making him the thirty-fifth person on the Forbes 400 list of rich people. Consequently, and just before the premiere of the uncomplimentary ‘The Social Network’ movie, he donated $100 million to the public schools in Newark, New Jersey as his first large scale philanthropic act.

Places in Canada – Facebook’s Places launched in Canada today, the fourth country after the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. But some are still worried about privacy.

Facebook Opens Office in Singapore – Facebook’s Singapore office opened this week with Stephen Dolan heading up the office as Commercial Director for Singapore and Southeast Asia.

Eventbrite Deepens Facebook Integration – Eventbrite, an online ticket hub, has deepened its Facebook integration. This new level of integration allows you to login with your Facebook account, shows you the Eventbrite events your friends are attending, and lists recommendations based on your Facebook network.

Stanford is Facebook’s Landlord – Interesting notes about Stanford University cashing in on tech companies like Facebook via its extensive land holdings, according to GigaOm. Facebook, like other tech companies, is housed in Stanford’s Research Park in Palo Alto, Calif. However, some of the locals are not too fond of Facebook employees’ shuttles and taking up their parking spots.

Facebook Gets Facebok.com – Facebook was successful in getting rights to the domain name Facebok.com. A supposed German with a pseudonym had rights to what was a probable popular typo and a site that advertised Apple products; other sites that link to the web site include Facebooj.com and Faceboook.com.

1M Likes to Raise $1M – A Canadian charity campaign for Free the Children is asking Facebook users to Like the Facebook Page and for every Like, sponsors will donate $1 to sponsor international development projects.

International Pirate Day 2010 – This year’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day came and went, we’ve written about it last year and the year before. Argh.

Stride Gum Turns You Into a Rodeo Clown – Stride gum launched an interesting Facebook app, Change your Flavor, Change Your Life, to promote its latest gum flavors. The gum changes flavor and sandwiched between two videos from a rodeo clown is an app that allows a user to upload an image and receive an entire album of their transformation into a rodeo clown. The album is published to a user’s stream.

RockYou Launches Deal of the Day for Apps – Social game developer RockYou has launched a Deal of the Day integration for Facebook app developers. The DOTD will present players with opportunities to interact with brands while playing games in exchange for virtual currency and goods, such as watching short videos, completing brief polls or playing mini-games, an extension of the incentive ads that the company has been running since last year, and similar to what other virtual monetization companies have been rolling out as well.

Rotten Tomatoes Has Security Issues - The new Rotten Tomatoes instant personalization integration had some XSS vulnerabilities this week, allowing hackers to get access to Facebook users’ credentials. The problems have since been addressed. These same problems were present for Facebook’s other instant personalization partners, but were also addressed.

[Editor's Note: The following article presents analysis and data excerpts from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service tracking Facebook's traffic growth and demographic landscape in global markets.]

Older users gained ground in some of Facebook’s most important emerging markets in September. According to data from Inside Facebook Gold, users aged 35 to 44 grew by nearly 20 percent in India this month, in a sign that Facebook is maturing and expanding beyond its usual stronghold among younger users.

Older users often follow teens and twenty-somethings into joining the social network as it spreads. The trend was also notable in Facebook more mature markets, with users aged 55 to 65 leading the way in the United States, Canada and Argentina.

That said, younger users aged 18 to 25 still dominate overall, which is typical for Facebook and is partly helped by the fact that populations in both Mexico and India naturally skew younger.

India’s Facebook population grew by 8.7 percent in September to 13.5 million, the fastest rate among all 16 of the major markets we tracked in the Facebook Global Demographics Report. India is an important market for Facebook, as it is one of the last major markets where Facebook had lagged a competitor, namely Google’s Orkut; the country has huge potential, with a growing economy and more than 1 billion people. Unique users visiting Facebook.com in the country recently surpassed those visiting Orkut, according to Google Ad Planner.

However, market penetration is still extremely low with the social network reaching just 1.2 percent of the country’s 1.1 billion people. Despite its reputation as a technology hub halfway around the world from Silicon Valley and its newly launched Facebook office, India is a highly unequal society and only has 81 million Internet users, according to the Economic Times of India.

Without significant help from 0, Facebook’s new low-bandwidth offering for basic feature phones in developing countries, it may be hard for the company to even reach double-digit penetration. Facebook signed a deal with Bharti Airtel in July to bring free access to http://m.facebook.com so local users won’t have to use up their credits for logging onto the site.

Facebook has brought its Page discovery system “Page Browser” back online. The tool, which helps users find Pages to Like, debuted earlier this month but was quickly removed after going live, for unclear reasons. It also appears to work the same as before.

Users can navigate to Page Browser via a link at the bottom of the Likes and Interests section of their profile, or by visiting the URL http://www.facebook.com/pages/browser.php. The tool is currently available to all logged in Facebook users. It could help spur Page growth, but may disproportionately aid Pages which already have large numbers of Likes.

Page Browser seems to show users Pages based on which are popular in their country, amongst those in similar demographics, amongst one’s friends, and are similar to Pages a user has already Liked. Users can mouse over a Page’s name to see its hover card complete with Like count and Page category, or mouse over the icon itself to see a Like button for that Page. Users can view a selection of all Pages or use category buttons to narrow the selection to only games, celebrities or other types of Pages. A country drop-down menu lets users weight the display to Pages popular in that nation. The right sidebar contains a list of your 25 friends who have the most Likes in common with you.

By using a profile with no Likes or friends to access Page Browser, the algorithm determining which Pages to display could only rely on IP address geolocation and required information like gender and age. A 25 year old American male will see Pages such as Barack Obama, ESPN, Lil Wayne and South Park. A 45 year old American female will see Pages including Maya Angelou, Dancing With The Stars, The Animal Rescue Site, and also Barack Obama.

Since the algorithm promotes sites which have many Likes, whether amongst your country, demographic, or friends, Pages with few Likes are less often surfaced in Page Browser. This could help Pages which are already popular stay that way, while increasing the gap between them and less popular Pages. Facebook has not disclosed any specifics about exactly how the algorithm works, but incorporating factors such as Likes per post / total Likes for the Page, Facebook could use the Page Browser to aid discovery of the best Pages, not just the biggest.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip]

Update: Facebook’s blog has now published a post formally naming the product “Page Browser”. Facebook’s Ben Blumenfeld explains that the tool is designed to “help people more easily express shared interests and keep updated about those interests”, and that the idea came from him browsing movies to rent online.