Apple’s recently launched iLife ‘11 software suite includes new integrations between iPhoto, iMovie, and Facebook. It’s now easier to share photos albums and videos directly to Facebook. Users can also see Likes and comments on those photos within iPhoto, choose basic privacy settings for photos, or post them to the walls of friends. However, the new iPhoto appears to be incompatible with the existing Facebook Exporter for iPhoto plugin.

Despite Facebook and Apple’s iTunes being unable to put together an integration in time for the launch of Apple’s music social network Ping, Facebook CTO Bret Taylor says a partnership is in the works. The enhancements to iLife show that Apple understands the value of Facebook integrations to its users.

To share photos to Facebook in the new iPhoto ‘11, users simply highlight the photos, click “Share” at the bottom of the screen, and select Facebook from among other choices including email and Flickr. Users don’t have to create a new album, and can instead choose to post to their wall, the wall of a friend, or make the photo their profile picture.

Photos posted to Facebook through iPhoto syndicate their comments and Likes back to the software, which users can see by selecting a photo and hit the “Info” button. Users can also view a record of what social sites that photo has been shared to, or tag Facebook friends.

Unfortunately, users can’t reply to comments or otherwise interact with Facebook photos through iPhoto. Users can choose whether to share the photos with the basic privacy buckets of friends, friends of friends, or everyone, but not Groups, lists, or specific people.

Regardless of whether an album was posted to Facebook through iPhoto, users will see all of their Facebook albums in a special section of the iPhoto album view, alongside collections from Flickr or Mobile me.

Lastly, iMovie ‘11 include an option for posting videos directly to Facebook, as well as Vimeo and YouTube.

Facebook has been revamping its own photos product, allowing high-resolution uploads and downloads, a special viewing mode, and drag-and-drop photo and album reordering. As both Facebook photos and iPhoto improve their native interfaces and become more popular, we’ll see whether future integrations take the form of software updates, official plugins, or third-party solutions.

Facebook is running a prompt on the profiles of users with few Likes encouraging them to add more Pages. Page updates can fill out a user’s news feed, keeping them engaged with Facebook until they accumulate more friends and are socially tied to the site.

Facebook recently launched a Page discovery tool called Page Browser, made new Likes of friends generate rich feed stories, and began showing your Likes in common with friends in hopes of getting users to connect to more official entities.

The prompt explains that visiting Pages lets you “see what people are saying about things that matter to you, and discover the people who share these connections with you.” A link in the prompt leads you to edit your profile, but oddly brings you to the “Basic Information” and not the “Likes and Interests” section.

Facebook’s viral nature brings in new users, but until they connect with friends and Pages, the value of using the service is less clear. These users are also the least familiar with the service. By giving them simple instructions for how to enrich their experience, Facebook can mature them into long-term, heavily engaged users — and use the additional Likes and Interests information to charge advertisers more to target them.

The most lucrative area for developers on the Facebook platform has been social gaming to date, but the companies that provide marketing products for businesses on Facebook have been telling us that they’re having a great year. Buddy Media is one of the larger ones, having established itself as a provider of Page management software to major brands. It’s now riding a new wave of brand marketing spending on Facebook, and it just raised $23 million third round of funding to help it expand.

Based in New York City, it has grown its brand and agency client list from 100 to 300 companies, including seven of the 10 largest marketers and “a lot of the top 100,” chief executive Mike Lazerow tells us. It has been increasing its headcount to match, from 30 last year to around 100 today across its sales and development operations.

Buddy Media provides tools for managing pages, like comment moderation, applications for Page tabs, and analytics software, and intended for larger organizations with 10 or more Pages to manage. You often won’t see its branding on its products, but chances are you’ve used one — like its vitaminwater market survey game or its Mattel Hot Wheels interactive car customizing app. It has focused on providing a set of services that clients can select from for their own needs, while some competitors have focused more on custom work for clients, or other market segments, like small businesses.

The overall market is still much smaller than social gaming on Facebook — we expect the US virtual goods market to bring in $1.6 billion this year — but some larger brands and are spending tens of millions on Facebook advertising and marketing, and Buddy is profitable, growing revenue 15% a month, and in position to catch future growth as more brands continue to increase spending.

The new funding will go towards expanding its business on Facebook, including more development for clients looking to use the Graph API to build Facebook features more deeply into other sites and applications, and mobile applications. It is also looking to grow its Twitter and Youtube offerings. It is also looking for developers from the Bay Area, and Lazerow says he’ll pay the moving costs and first month’s rent for anyone they hire who goes to join at headquarters.

Institutional Venture Partners led the round with existing investors Softbank Capital, Greycroft Partners and Bay Partners participating. Other Page management companies that have raised money in the last year include Wildfire, which raised a $4.04 million first round in late April and Involver, which raised an $8 million third round earlier this month.

The top entry on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those growing strongly but still under a million monthly active users, is Instant Jam, which is a close cousin to Guitar Hero. The game features music from your own computer and even allows players to use a guitar controller, if they should have one.

Various non-game apps, including the profile stats apps mentioned in the title, follow:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Instant Jam	689,892	+646,373	+1,485%
2.	Chi Ti Segue	563,697	+446,861	+382%
3.	BRAAAINS	547,561	+322,354	+143%
4.	My Most Used Words	946,677	+278,168	+42%
5.	Wheel Of Fortune	641,360	+244,899	+62%
6.	Citizen Sports	647,537	+221,796	+52%
7.	My Photos	280,360	+219,175	+358%
8.	dtac one D.I.Y.	444,520	+207,737	+88%
9.	Jungle Jewels – The Temple	284,877	+194,033	+214%
10.	Most Mutual Friends	392,032	+192,549	+97%
11.	SONEPHONE	502,696	+189,360	+60%
12.	Jersey Shore	847,936	+187,181	+28%
13.	PM Welcome Tab	836,194	+184,941	+28%
14.	Quiz World	500,039	+184,292	+58%
15.	Coffee Bar	384,349	+183,175	+91%
16.	Your statistics	528,591	+181,926	+52%
17.	How old do you look?	656,204	+169,926	+35%
18.	PANDORA Bracelet Designer	615,118	+169,711	+38%
19.	Bingo Charms	502,727	+166,499	+50%
20.	Sim Hospital	163,788	+157,530	+2,517%

Chi Ti Segue is in Italian, but it makes the same claim that many English-language apps have before it: that it can see who visits your profile. Facebook’s policies prohibit this ability, of course, but Segue can at least tell you who posts to your wall.

There are other profile analyzers on the list. My Most Used Words and Most Mutual Friends both do fairly self-obvious things, except that Most Mutual Friends actually measures which books, music, shows and so forth are most popular among your social group, not which friends. Down at number 16, Your statistics claims to do all of it at once.

Citizen Sports is an older title, but the sports entertainment app has just hit an all-time MAU high. Its previous high point was way back in March of 2009 (full historical data is limited to AppData Pro). Yahoo, the app’s owner, may be doing some seasonal advertising for it.

To get a rundown of the games, head over to Inside Social Games. The remaining non-game apps of interest this morning are My Photos, at number seven, which posts a daily photo with comment and share links; SONEPHONE, which is a bit like Skype for Facebook; and PANDORA Bracelet Designer, which allows you to design and share pricey bracelets.

Cartomapic‘s Mappr is an iPhone and web app which lets you publish check-ins to a specific Facebook Group you’re a member of. One of the first apps to integrate the Groups API, it allows users to select which subset of friends to share their location with on a check-in by check-in basis. The Mappr check-ins are not actual Places check-ins, but you can syndicate them to Foursquare and Twitter.

Mappr is useful if you don’t want to share your location with all your Facebook friends, either for privacy reasons, or because you don’t want clutter the feeds of some friends with irrelevant content. Users could share their check-in to a bar with their bar-hopping Group, or their attendance to a conference with their company’s Group. Posting one’s location to a Group can be a good way to stimulate meet-ups, as the post will send notifications to other members, unlike a Places check-in.

Once users select a location to check in to they are able to choose whether to publish to all their Facebook friends, or select a single Group they’re a member of. If published to a Group, the check-in will only appear there (and on Mappr if it’s an open Group), not on the user’s Facebook profile.

Users can search for Mappr groups and open Facebook Groups to view the check-ins of, or filter their map to only show check-ins by a specific Group.

Mappr’s privacy settings mirror those of Facebook’s, which dictate that only open Group content is public. Therefore, non-members won’t be able to see whether a closed or secret Group has had members check-in to a location, or discover secret Groups within Mappr search.

Cartomapic founder and former member of the Google Maps partnership team Bart Denny says that as soon as Facebook makes the Places API available to all developers, Mappr will be able to publish true Places check-ins, like Loopt does, and use the Places database to populate the app’s database of locations. Currently, Groups cannot be set as a distribution parameter for Facebook Places check-ins, so it’s not clear how the Groups and Places APIs would interact.

A user’s location is often only relevant to friends who are nearby and would consider also visiting that spot. However, many users currently share their location through Places or other apps with their entire network. Mappr solves this issue, so if you’re tired of friends on the other side of the world telling you they’re at locations you don’t care about, consider recommending this app to them.

The following is a brief excerpt from the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand on Facebook.

Groups is Facebook’s new lightweight web product that enables users to organize around a shared interest or community affiliation, and to easily connect and collaborate with others by using Facebook’s core communication features. It can be more than only a consumer product for clubs and associations. This excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible discusses how Facebook Groups can support business organization and productivity.

First, we’d like to run through a few caveats related to working with Groups. Facebook Groups does not include the security features and other options that many larger businesses demand. Additionally, some businesses do not want or permit their employees to use Facebook at the workplace.

How, then, does Groups function as a product for enterprise? The value of Facebook Groups to business productivity comes in the ways in which the product adds a social dimension to work collaboration and content sharing. While Groups is not the right product for every business, it can nonetheless be a useful part of how members of any organization — whether professional or personal — connect over work-related content.

As one example, Facebook Groups can be used to replace multiple other organization and communication systems such as email, shared calendars, wikis, and instant messaging. This helps reduce the amount of time spent switching between applications and checking for updates, leaving team members to focus on their work.

Sample Use Case: Create a Rich Media Discussion Board For Your Company Using the Group Feed

Groups can post text, photos, videos, and links to the Group feed using Facebook’s built-in publisher. Members of the Group can share and aggregate text content to review before a meeting, image content like graphs of statistics, or video content like a branded promotional spot.

One advantage that Groups offer over email has to do with rich content distribution. Members distributing rich content like images and links inside a company do not have to download attachments or open them in separate applications, and can instead review everything while still within Facebook.

More productivity use cases are available in the full Facebook Marketing Bible chapter on Groups. We have recently updated the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible to include detailed information on Groups, including how marketers can use the product to broaden the reach of their Facebook Page and increase engagement among fans. To learn if the Facebook Marketing Bible is right for your brand, please visit the Facebook Marketing Bible.

Authors of Facebook Places check-ins can now tag additional friends in an existing Places check-in through the Facebook web interface. Check-in authors can also remove tags of other individuals from the check-in without deleting the check-in itself. The change will help users cumulate friends as they arrive at a location into a single check-in story with high prominence in the news feed, or remove friends who didn’t want to be tagged.

Previously, if you had already created a check-in and more friends arrived at your location, they would have to create a second, separate check-in. These stories were sometimes compiled into an aggregated check-in feed story, but if all your friends are intermingling at the location, it’s more accurate to show the check-ins as one story. Tags can be added as long after the initial check-in as a user wants, so if the next day you find out more friends were at the same baseball game as you, you can add them to the story. Adding tags does not appear to extend the initial three hour “Here Now” duration of the check-in.

The author of a check-in can also remove other friends they tagged from a check-in if they later decided they didn’t want to be associated with someone, or if that friend didn’t want to be tagged. Any user can still remove themselves from a check-in. The added capability is applied retroactively, so you can edit check-ins made before the change was made.

To add or remove friends, view the check-in on your wall or the Places page of the location through Facebook’s web interface and click the new “Tag Friends” button next to “Like” and “Comment”. This brings up a multi-friend selector where users can add or remove friends through browsing or search. Once the edit to the check-in is saved, added friends will receive a notification, and removed friends will have the check-in story removed from their walls.

You can’t add or remove friends from a check-in through the Facebook for iPhone or m.facebook.com mobile interfaces — the only native interfaces from which you can create check-ins. This means users must either access the full site via a mobile browser, use a computer if one is handy, or wait until you get home to edit their check-in.

A final note: this change is one of the first made to the Places interface since the launch of the product. Facebook has been focused on releasing the feature in more countries, but now it seems ready to implement feedback and give users more control over how they share their location.

Kleiner Perkins may not have many investments in social web companies to date, but that’s about to change because the esteemed venture firm is committing $250 million towards these startups, together with Facebook, Zynga, Amazon, Comcast, Liberty Media and Allen & Company. Kleiner partner and Amazon and Zynga board member Bing Gordon will lead the so-called “sFund.”

But what will the fund focus on, considering that the web itself is increasingly social?

Consumer-facing applications, as well as infrastructure to support them, according to Kleiner partner John Doerr and executives from the other companies. That seems quite broad, considering that any web site with the Like button could be considered social. We asked Gordon for more specifics, and he said that “an entrepreneur who walks in with social slapped on will have a shorter meeting than one who has built social in from the ground up.”

The fund will be making investments ranging in size from $100,000 all the way up to $100 million. More details in our live blog post.

Here are some more details about what each partner company will be doing, from the press release.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide AWS Getting-Started Support for one year, priority access to worldwide Startup Events, and dedicated business and technical support.
• Facebook will contribute access to its platform teams, beta APIs, and new programs, like Facebook Credits.
• Zynga will host periodic sessions with sFund companies to focus on management and technical development, including open source collaboration.
• Comcast Interactive Capital, Comcast’s venture fund, will provide access to Comcast’s resources, teams, and relationships.

Liberty Media isn’t mentioned in the release but Gordon calls it a great “traditional media” partner during the press event at Facebook headquarters today. Allen & Co also isn’t mentioned but it will be chiefly providing financial support, he says.

The press release also notes that Kleiner will be focusing ten of its partners, including some of the best-known ones, on the fund. They include: Chi-Hua Chien, John Doerr, Eric Feng, Bing Gordon, Lila Ibrahim, Randy Komisar, Aileen Lee, Matt Murphy, Ellen Pao, and Ted Schlein. The press release also says that four partners based in Shanghai will invest for the fund in China.

Facebook spent $120,000 on lobbying in the third quarter this year, double what the company paid last quarter to reach government officials and elected representatives and roughly what it spent last year during the same time.

The social network lobbied the usual suspects — The Department of Homeland Security, The Federal Trade Commission, The State Department, and members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. It also reached out to the White House’s National Economic Council, which makes sense as the company recently poached the council’s chief of staff Marne Levine to be its vice president of global public policy.

It reported that its top priorities included federal privacy regulation, restrictions on Internet access by foreign governments and net neutrality. Facebook also focused on regulation and reporting requirements around the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

It also focused on the modernization of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which was last revised more than two decades ago in 1986 and governs how privacy protections are given to wireless and online communications. The company recently banded together with Google, Amazon and other big consumer Internet companies to form a Digital Due Process coalition to offer some ideas for how to update the bill.

Facebook has responded to the issue of applications inadvertently sharing user IDs through HTTP referrer headers by proposing a new system for encrypting the parameters passed to applications. This Canvas Encryption Proposal stipulates that UIDs would require the receiving application’s secret key to decrypt, preventing anyone else from reading information about the user.

The company is now soliciting feedback from developers on the proposal. It hopes to implement parameter encryption for iframe-based canvas applications within the next few weeks, add support for all of Facebook’s SDKs, and help applications transition to the system.

Facebook Platform engineer Mike Vernal explains in the post to the Facebook Developer Blog that, “while initial press reports greatly exaggerated the implications of sharing a UID, we take this issue seriously.” Facebook prohibits the sharing of user information with ad networks, data brokers, or anyone else not explicitly authorized by the user. The data being shared in this case is already public, but Facebook wants to assure users they are protected against even benign data leaks. See our previous coverage for more details.

Facebook says some of the iframe-based canvas applications which were sharing data have since devised their own systems including “redirects or ‘double framing’ to remove UIDs from the URL.” However, the site is looking to set up a Platform-wide solution.

The proposal explains that by using signed request parameters,“developers will now decrypt data instead of just checking the signature.” Developers can see psuedocode, sample code, examples, and explanations of how base64_url encode and decode works on the proposal page.

Here is how the parameter is generated and decrypted:

Instead of reading the current fb_sig_* parameters, your application will read only a single parameter, named request. This parameter is generated as follows:

• Encode the data in JSON format.
• Encode that JSON with base64url to make the package websafe.
• Encrypt the base64url using AES-256-CBC algorithm.
• Then, take the encrypted blob and add it to the envelope with key payload. The envelope is just another JSON array that describes the encryption, containing keys algorithm, iv, andissued_at.
• Encode the envelope in JSON then base64url.
• Take the entire blob, sign it with HMAC-SHA256.
• Prepend the signature, then a period “.”, then the blob, and you’re done.

To decrypt it, you do the reverse:

• Split the string on period, and get the signature and the blob. Check that the HMAC SHA256 of the blob matches the signature provided.
• Then, base64url decode the blob, and check the issued_at isn’t more than an hour old.
• Decrypt the payload using AES256, the iv parameter, and your application secret.
• Finally, you can use the data inside the payload.
  

Applications that aren’t iframe-based such as FMBL-based canvas applications, as well as Facebook integrated Open Graph web sites, mobile interfaces, and social plugins won’t be affected by the change. Facebook says it is “very open to discussions about using this scheme in OAuth2” but a protocol hasn’t been set yet. The proposal doesn’t address applications that were purposefully sharing or selling user data which may be of significantly greater danger to users than the UID issue.

We’ll continue our coverage as the Canvas Encryption Proposal evolves and Facebook begins the transition.