Facebook is making a new push for its Instant Personalization program today, adding the first new partner since it launched last April. Flixster’s Rotten Tomatoes movie site is now showing reviews from their Facebook friends, movie and recommendations based on movies they’ve previously Liked, whether from Facebook Pages or clicking the Like button elsewhere on the web.

Facebook’s goal with the product is to make it easier for anyone to have a social experience on the web. It is essentially a more advanced conceptualization of how people already provide data access to third party applications on Facebook and on other platforms, like MySpace and Twitter. The idea is that when you show up to RottenTomatoes.com, your friends are already “there,” in the sense that Rotten Tomatoes is now customizing its user experience by automatically highlighting the content created and actions taken by your Facebook friends when you show up on the site.

But out of all the products that Facebook launched in late April at its developer conference, Instant Personalization unsurprisingly turned out to be the most controversial, because the product automatically shares some user data with third-party sites upon visiting. Between users wanting some of the shared data to be private, and confusion about what exactly was being shared, it became a main target for privacy advocates and users who were concerned about a wide variety of privacy-related issues.

We’ve covered them in detail already – but basically Facebook only shares “public” user data with these third parties, and it is very selective about who gets to be in the program. Facebook started requiring that certain user data – name, profile photo, and list of friends – be public by default as of last December, after previously not requiring users to make that data public if they didn’t want to. That change was based on Facebook’s vision for “making the world more open and connected,” as chief executive Mark Zuckerberg often says. Facebook wants to infuse a social layer across the web and any web-connected device, and it believes some user data must be open to allow it to create the most valuable products.

One question is how many users agree. Another is how well the company can communicate how the program is good for users, and not a big privacy violation. Privacy advocates and some politicians have been looking at closer regulation of how Facebook and other sites operate, and they are no doubt closely watching what Facebook does next with it.

Clearly, with the launch of the Rotten Tomatoes integration today, Facebook is forging ahead. But to improve the experience, and placate critics, it has already made a change to how the program works. It introduced a button in May that lets you turn it off for all sites.

The user experience now available is a new test for how well the program will go over. If you’re logged in to Facebook and you go to Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll instantly be greeted with your Facebook data, live and in action; if you’re logged out of Facebook, you’ll need to click a button to log into it from the Rotten Tomatoes site. And, if you’ve already told Facebook that you don’t want to be part of the program, you won’t see anything about it.

Facebook is taking an additional step, too. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a link at the top that you can follow to a promotional page to learn more, and you’ll see another link with a button to disable. That may not be opt-in like what some people want Facebook to offer, but it’s one-click opt-out, which is an easier process than the more nuanced interface that Facebook offered when the program launched.

Overall, the program is, as a product, a potentially powerful, simple way for users to get more value out of sites. But do they — and privacy advocates, and politicians — prefer that value to the privacy they do in some form give up? We’ll be covering as Facebook continues to roll it out.

Facebook has launched its location service Places in the UK. Now users from Japan, the US, the UK, and anyone using a remote VPN account can access Places through the touchscreen-optimized site touch.facebook.com and the Facebook for iPhone app. Details about how to user Places are available on a new Places home page. Facebook appears to be rolling out Places to countries with large user bases for the iPhone and smart phones which can access the feature.

The UK currently has the second largest Facebook-using population after the US, and has a higher market penetration than the United States. The UK’s Oxford University was also one of the first networks outside the U.S. to gain access to Facebook, so it is fitting that Places would also come to England before much of the world. Users there are already taking advantage of the new feature, with public Places like Westminster Abbey and Stonehenge racking up checkins.

Facebook’s new Places home page reveals some specifics about who has access to the feature. It explains that Places can be accessed through smart phones which “support W3 geolocation”. The home page also provides links to the Places FAQ and a user’s privacy settings.

Facebook will have to decide how far to roll out Places. Since much of the feature’s value depends on a critical mass of users, launching in countries without enough phones which support it could lead to a lukewarm response. However, holding the feature back from the world for an extended period of time could make some users feel like second-class citizens of Facebook.

[The stats from this article are excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Click here to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Among the latest postings to Facebook’s Careers Page, the company is looking to expand its Washington, D.C. offices and its Questions staffing. We’ve recently written about Facebook’s expansion in Sacramento, Calif. lobbying efforts and other recent jobs posts.

A job posting for Questions Community Manager describes the positions as one that will “kickstart our next major product initiative.” Some qualifications include being a “great” writer, creativity, engineering and startup experience and an understanding of psychology.

More interestingly, and this seems to signal the direction in which Facebook is looking to grow its Questions product, the manager will need to “devise creative ways to attract high-quality contributors, e.g. through the use of contests, corporate acquisitions, targeted advertising, incentive programs or anything else you dream up.” Working side-by-side with the engineering and product teams to “design user interfaces that attract high-quality contributions.”

As for the company’s latest D.C. job post, Manager of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., the full-time D.C.-based position is looking for someone to “manage legislative and regulatory matters primarily at the federal level.” This person will need to:  work to achieve Facebook’s public policy goals, build coalitions to that end, monitor legislative/regulatory matters affecting Facebook, represent Facebook in meetings with elected officials and be a spokesperson.

Additionally, this D.C. person needs an advanced degree in a related field, preferably a law degree, have 7-plus years of legislative, government relations or advocacy experience. And, interestingly, have “excellent academic credentials.”

Celebrity Birthdays, an app showing users which celebrities share their birthday, leads off this week’s list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users. It automatically posts to your wall, without asking permission — hence the strong growth.

Here’s the full list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Celebrity Birthdays	720,406	+719,793	+117,421%
2.	Ikariam – The free browser game	824,980	+651,192	+375%
3.	Profil Durumu	855,696	+495,426	+138%
4.	Critter Island	651,718	+475,893	+271%
5.	Księga Imion i zdrobnień	479,847	+474,255	+8,481%
6.	Kad Raya	634,392	+393,596	+163%
7.	小小戰爭	368,935	+367,880	+34,870%
8.	Madden NFL Superstars	404,956	+363,210	+870%
9.	PhotoFunky	367,020	+361,002	+5,999%
10.	Friend Facts™	962,904	+356,775	+59%
11.	CBSSports.com Franchise Football	433,590	+330,230	+319%
12.	Kad Ucapan dan Lagu Raya	343,946	+283,303	+467%
13.	FantaBook	431,923	+273,444	+173%
14.	Chucke la taupe	228,285	+224,890	+6,624%
15.	Free Flash Games	918,144	+187,982	+26%
16.	the button	157,533	+155,710	+8,541%
17.	Candy Shop	206,471	+155,572	+306%
18.	عيد على صحابك	150,257	+148,555	+8,728%
19.	Bubble Town: Party Planet	727,378	+143,313	+25%
20.	i Like Slots	320,636	+142,689	+80%

Ikariam – The free browser game is the second-fastest growing app, with impressive gains of its own. As we note over on our games list this morning at Inside Social Games, Ikariam actually goes back to 2006, pre-dating the social game genre.

Profil Durumu, a Turkish-language app, comes in at number three. We don’t speak Turkish, so we’re not entirely sure what’s going on with Durumu, but it appears to be a video guide to your Facebook profile — which makes it an order of magnitude more unique than most of the new non-game apps that appear on this list.

Księga Imion i zdrobnień is one of the few Polish-language apps we’ve seen; it appears to be a database of names and their diminutive forms. The foreign-language apps don’t stop there. Kad Raya and Kad Ucapan dan Lagu Raya, for example, are Malay apps celebrating the Muslim holiday Eid, and PhotoFunky is a French-language app for creating photo collages.

Finally, Friend Facts™, at number ten, is the latest fast-growing friend quiz, pretty much repeating the standard formula for that category.

Playfish’s Pet Society has implemented the Like button on virtual goods in the game — one of the first, if not the first such integrations by any developer after Facebook began allowing them to put Like buttons on specific content within their apps last week.

When users visit the Marketplace and view a virtual good, they now have the option to show it to their friends by Liking it. Playfish is utilizing this new viral distribution channel to entice potential users with in-game content before they install.

Previously, one could only Like a Facebook application as a whole, and not any specific content within the app. This prevented users from sharing virtual goods, mini-games, leaderboards, or other content. If another user clicked on the wall story generated by the Like button, they’d first have to install the app before seeing any content. Pet Society has been a top Playfish title for years, and it was an early adopter of Facebook Connect, employing it so user could play on its website.

Now if you click on a Like button within Pet Society, it posts a “[Your name] likes Cute Dalmation Plushie” story to your wall. If someone else clicks the story, instead of seeing the install prompt they’ll be brought to a special virtual good display screen which exists outside of Pet Society. There they’ll see options to Like the good, comment on it, or start playing the game, even if that person isn’t logged into Facebook. Comments can be posted to only that virtual good’s page, or also as a rich story to your wall. Users can show off a virtual good by distributing the stable URL of its display screen, even if they haven’t purchased it.

By freeing the virtual good from the confines of the social game, Playfish makes the good more valuable. Users could create a virtual good gallery by listing links to their goods or email them to those not on Facebook. By removing the install hurdle and displaying enticing in-game content next to a large “Play Now!” button, social game developers will use in-game Likes to gain new users and sell more virtual goods.

[Editor's Note: The following article presents a summary of the Facebook Quarterly Business Review, a comprehensive look at Facebook's business over recent quarters. The Facebook Quarterly Business Review is available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data and research service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world.]

Facebook is a fast-moving company, pushing out additions and modifications to its platform with a regularity that’s impressive for a company of its size. To keep up with all the changes, we publish our Facebook Quarterly Business Review every three months to Inside Facebook Gold subscribers, providing an essential view of what’s happening for advertisers, brands and developers.

Below, we summarize some of our findings from the most recent quarter.

Web Growth

During the quarter, Facebook announced that it had finally broken 500 million users worldwide. Every region except Europe experienced double-digit growth over that three month period; Africa, Asia and Latin America grew fastest, averaging gains 16.7 percent.

Those three fast-growing regions include many developing countries in which there are still only small groups of Facebook users, relative to the developed countries in Europe or North America. But in absolute terms, growth rates are high even in emerging regions; for instance, we found that in an average month, there are 20 countries in which at least one percent of the total population joins Facebook.

Facebook’s challenge going forward is cracking into a handful of tough markets. But over the quarter, sprouts of growth have already appeared in  previously intractable markets like Japan, South Korea and Brazil; only China and Russia look entirely unlikely at this point, but Facebook is even chipping away at the latter through mobile initiatives.

It’s also worth noting that Facebook has now been translated into over 100 languages.

Mobile Growth

Mobile is Facebook’s great frontier after the web. Already, 150 million users worldwide access Facebook through mobile devices. Over 75 million of those users are on between smartphones like the iPhone, BlackBerries and Android devices, according to AppData stats.

In many countries, however, there are still few smartphones. To break into these more difficult markets, Facebook has entered into over 200 partnerships with mobile carriers worldwide (all are listed in the full report).

The company also negotiated deals with 66 mobile operators in 56 countries to temporarily offer web access to the social network for free, without charging users for data.

In Russia, it’s trying to break into the market through mobile carriers Beeline and MTS, who will offer users access through 0.facebook.com, the text-only mobile version of Facebook. In India, another tough market, Airtel offered free access to m.facebook.com to 130 million customers in July and August.

It’s not clear how Facebook will evolve its mobile offerings. For now, the company still isn’t breaking down mobile usage by country, and has yet to create a mobile ad platform.

Products and Platform

Facebook has been unceasingly active in changing its platform this year. The early part of the year saw the introduction of the Open Graph, the Like button, instant personalization, and Community Pages about interests. The company also battled over privacy issues and made multiple adjustments to the new products.

In July, Facebook launched Questions, which prompted a feed redesign: users can now specifically share status, questions, photos, links or video. While several of those new fields were inspired by the success of Twitter and other services, Facebook’s reason for releasing Questions, and the potential of the service, remains unclear.

For marketers, several other changes that Facebook made are significant. In addition to the Open Graph launch, Facebook also added Insights tools to track interactions, helping to show the virality of specific pieces of content.

Separately, the right hand of the page now includes an Events box, which allows users to create private or public events. And Credits, the platform’s in-house virtual currency, also became much more significant over the quarter.

The biggest change taking place on Facebook may be nearly invisible to users — that it is something other than a destination site.

As we note in the report, Facebook has become strategically indifferent to whether its users engage and interact with its services on the Facebook.com domain or on external sites, so long as they connect back to the social network through the “like” button, social plug-ins or other experiences requiring a Facebook log-in. Hundreds of thousands of websites have adopted one of Facebook’s eight plug-ins, from Like buttons to boxes showing a friend’s activity on the site.

Advertising Growth

In the report, we look closely at Facebook’s four sources of revenue: performance advertising, brand advertising, Microsoft advertising and virtual goods.

Out of the four, only Microsoft advertising is decreasing. Our research indicates that performance ads are currently the company’s biggest share of revenue. Facebook has made four major changes and improvements that impact all performance advertisers:

• Broadened age targeting that blurs targeting boundaries
• Changes to favor CPC (cost-per-click) over CPM (cost-per-impression) ads
• Advertising Accounts that allow advertisers to more easily work with app developers
• Further development of the ads API, helping to create companies like AdParlor and Nanigans

Revenue

Facebook has now been “free cash flow positive” for exactly a year now, meaning that it can finance its own growth. As it heads toward the end of this year, Facebook revenues are continuing to ramp up strongly, we believe.

How fast? Earlier this year, we revised our estimate of Facebook’s 2009 revenue to $600 to $700 million. At that point, we estimated Facebook’s 2010 revenues could reach $1.1 billion.  However, its success in brand and performance advertising this year could put it well over that number.

The full Facebook Quarterly Business Review offers a condensed view of hundreds of individual changes and developments, from in-depth looks at the subjects mentioned to including strategy, investments, important executive appointments, competitors and acquisition activity. For full access, simply visit Inside Facebook Gold.

The full table of contents is below:

The annual DEMO conference presents demonstrations and launches of innovative technology products — and on display this year, more than ever, were products that integrated with Facebook’s platform. Here’s our look. See coverage by conference co-producer VentureBeat for more details.

Copia

Copia is a social e-reading network and family of devices. Along with traditional e-book marketplace and syncing options, Copia integrates Facebook integrates with Facebook and Twitter so users can join reading groups, share book highlights and annotations, and compare personal libraries with their friends or followers. The company’s bets that by making e-reading more social, users will know what book they want to buy next before they finish their current read, stimulating sales.

TouchRing

TouchRing lets users create an embeddable widget which when clicked, contacts them by voice. Users can set the widget to ring their desktop, mobile phone, or landline. Users can also post a link to sites that don’t support Flash. TouchRing will allow you to post your calling widget to Facebook walls to make it easy for others to call you without distributing your actual phone number.

Picksie

Picksie is a location-based dining and entertainment suggestion engine which factors in basic factors such as weather, and business open hours. The site and iPad app uses Facebook Connect for log-in, sharing the locations you discover, and to let you see the recommendations of friends.

Bump

Bump is a license plate-based social network and communication service that lets you claim your license plate, and list contact information so those who see your car can get in touch with you. Uses include meeting new people and informing someone that their lights or on or meter has expired. Users can connect Bump to their Facebook account to receive Facebook notifications when they’re pinged.

wayConnected

wayConnected lets users create a profile where they can list their contact information and screen names for all their web services, and select different sets of this data to be visible to certain categories of people. Users can then distribute their simple wayConnected ID name, and when a recipient visits their profile, the user can select how much info to show them. wayConnected lets users list their Facebook profile by ID number or vanity URL, and manage who has access to it.

Zappli’s MyShopanion

MyShopanion is an iPhone app which lets users bar code scan, photograph, or search for items they find while shopping and cross-check them against listings from other retailers to find lower prices. Users can also access reviews of the product, or send the listing to their Facebook-populated friend list within the app to get immediate feedback.

Cyncz

Cyncz synchronizes contact information from your email, mobile phone, social networks, and customer relationship management systems, and removes the duplicates. The subscription service will allow users to merge their Facebook friend list with other contacts, or keep different sources side by side. By saving all your contacts to the web, Cyncz could decrease the number of “I Lost My Phone” Facebook Events.

DoubleDutch

DoubleDutch creates white label, branded geolocation apps for brands and institutions looking to offer a checkin system. The HTML5 and mobile apps let users invite their Facebook friends and post checkins to their walls.

Foound

Foound helps users organize meet-ups with their friends by letting them post details and receive responses without separately text messaging multiple people. Users can automatically have the details posted to Facebook, Twitter, or make the hangout public.

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 6waves, Atari, Arkadium, iWin, and Brooklyn Packet.

• Product Manager, Growth & New Products (San Francisco, CA)

• Game Producer – Online and Mobile – Atari (Los Angeles, CA)
  

• Associate Analyst (New York, NY)
  
• Marketing Associate (New York, NY)
  

• Sr. Product Manager – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Sr. Game Designer – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Market Data Analyst – Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  

• iPhone Enginer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• UI Designer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Server Engineer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Social Game Designer – Mobile social games (San Francisco, 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.

Interspire has been providing a variety of online e-commerce and marketing software services since 2003, and for the past year, its e-commerce software subsidiary, BigCommerce, has been moving into Facebook. But instead of providing a stand-alone application for Page owners to market their wares through, it has integrated its app, called Social Shop, in with the rest of the product offering, thereby helping its customers integrate Facebook with the rest of their online sales efforts.

After paying a $24 to $299 monthly fee (depending on the number of items that may be listed), BigCommerce clients also gain access to a web site, eBay and email marketing apps, as well as a YouTube integration for the web sites. BigCommerce is also fully compatible with most mobile devices and iPads, allowing mobile users to write reviews, purchase, and browse.

It currently has about 7,000 clients and is adding more than 1,000 new clients each month, co-founder and co-CEO Mitchell Harper says. Most of the company’s business is coming from the U.S. and Canada and these small businesses are focused on apparel, health (such as vitamins and supplements) and computer hardware. Its clients average between $300,000 to $2 million in annual revenue overall. Around 250,000 small businesses start up each month in the U.S., so he thinks there will always be a supply of potential customers.

The Facebook integration is getting solid use from its customer base — 93% of them use SocialShop, with about 40% characterizing Facebook business as somewhat important to the bottom line.

The company is currently basing its North American sales, support and marketing operations in Austin, Texas, although its engineering offices are in Sydney, Australia. Harper says that BigCommerce’s Facebook integration is just in phase one, allowing Page admins to display products on Facebook and share them. Phase two will allow users to add Likes on their web sites and phase three incorporates Facebook Connect for reviews and posting purchases.

Now, here’s a quick look at using the product. Setting up your own BigCommerce Social Shop is a fairly easy and quick process.

First you have to create a Facebook Page. Then to set up your online store, open a BigCommerce account, select  your store name, upload a logo, pick a store template, choose from among 50 payment options (including PayPal) and upload your merchandise. There are also options for shipping, taxes, multiple admins with different privileges and the like.

Once that’s done, you add the BigCommerce Facebook app to your Page. By pasting the link to your BigCommerce store into the Facebook Social Shop’s admin interface and uploading your selected items, you’ll be directing your customers back to your BigCommerce-powered site. Your store will be located on a “Shop” tab. Users of these Facebook and online shops can either login with an account or as a guest and can save items in their shopping carts for up to seven days.

Harper tells us that BigCommerce doesn’t take payments directly on the Facebook platform because consumers still don’t feel comfortable forking over credit card information there. Small business owners still make most of their money from their web sites, he says, so they want to use Social Shop to drive traffic there. However, Harper believes that Facebook Credits hold a lot of potential to transform e-commerce on the platform, as well as the rest of the web.

“I see Credits as a direct competitor to PayPal. They’re using Zynga as kind of a testing ground; if you can get gamers comfortable with Credits, you can move it to sites like Amazon,” he says. “I think Facebook Credits will be the main player in the e-commerce space.”

Facebook’s Girls In Tech Dev Garage Hackathon aimed to stimulate third-party developers to use the Open Graph API and promote women’s place in engineering. A panel of female influencers from the tech space moderated by journalist Kara Swisher set the stage for a day of frenzied app development.

After opening remarks, Swisher led panelists Jocelyn Goldfein (Director of Engineering at Facebook), Sandy Jen (Meebo Co-Founder), Jennifer Pahlke (Code for America Founder) and Herdlick Catherine (Game Producer at Electronic Arts) in a talk that discussed how diverse teams that include women create better apps for a globalized user base. They also dismissed the idea that only women can design for women. The panel, as well as the rest of the opening presentations were streamed over Facebook’s video channel Facebook Live, and you can watch videos of the presentations here.

Following Facebook Platform software engineer Julie Tung’s run-through of Facebook’s APIs, attendants gave quick pitches of their potential apps to lure in new team members.

Teams coalesced around 5pm, leaving the developers around 16 hours before judging if they worked all night. In the morning, each team pitched their projects to the panel of judges, composed of Cat Lee (Facebook), Janet Zhou (Blue Run Ventures), and Dhana Pawar (Girls in Tech). The judges awarded the $2,500 prize to the Kuplia team for their social shopping app. Here’s a little bit more about it and some runners-up.

Kuplia: A social shopping web application. The site is not yet launched, but it’s accepting applications to the beta launch.

SocialRiver:  A desktop news feed reading client which also allows you to initiate video chat with your friends.

ExFinder: The app analyzes a friend’s wall to determine who their ex-romantic partners are. It cross-references words from the wall against a database of flirty words, and also factors in photo tags to return four possible matches, with one often being a real ex.

Yell Sesame: A social shopping site where users can post about what they’re planning to shop for and receive feedback and advice.