We’re here at Facebook’s headquarters as venerable Silicon Valley venture capital fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers launches the $250 million sFund. We’re live-blogging the event as we go.

It’s another fund that focuses on social products and applications. Bing Gordon, the former chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, is leading the fund. Ten U.S. partners and four ones based in China will be helping source and vet deals for the fund.

It sounds similar in structure to Kleiner’s earlier $200 million iFund, which focused on companies on the iPad and iPhone (see our post from yesterday for more on that).

Other companies involved include Amazon and Zynga, as well as boutique investment bank Allen & Company and telecommunications giant Comcast. Amazon is providing support to its web services for 1 year and access to worldwide startup events.

Kleiner’s partner John Doerr is joined on-stage by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon.

His presentation is about the future of the social web and he’s unveiling a new stealth startup Kleiner has invested in called Cafebots, founded by a Stanford University computer science professor Yoav Shoham.

He also points to Mike McCue’s Flipboard, a social magazine for the iPad that Kleiner invested in earlier, and Jive, an enterprise company. He also mentions Lockerz, a company focused at pre-teens and young people that helps them shop and connect.

“Our purpose is to find and fund the success of these new social entrepreneurs,” he said. Doerr said the impetus for the fund came about a year ago after seeing the growth of Zynga.

Zuckerberg takes over and says the usual talking points about making the entire web social. “The ones that are built from the ground-up as social applications are going to be better than the ones that just slap it on at the last minute,” he said.

Doerr asks Zuckerberg about what he would build today if he was leaving Harvard now.

“There’s a big opportunity to take any industry and reinvent in a social way. I’m personally interested in communication,” he said. “The thing we’re unambiguous about that in all these industries, there are going to be more social version of apps that are going to be disruptive and be better at monetization than their predecessors.”

Pincus comes in: “I think we are at this point in time where there are so many platform changes and disruptions happening at once. There is completely new consumer behavior and experience that is happening in front of our eyes. We are starting to build new expectations of what a service should be like. It should be logged in. It should know you. That’s new because everything used to be anonymous.”

“This is a period where VCs are actually behind the curve,” he said. “On the consumer facing side, I’m personally just bugged that there isn’t a great travel service. Why don’t I have an app that I can have on my iPhone, Blackberry that knows that I’m at the airport. It knows my flight is cancelled. It knows that I’m traveling with somebody and it’s already recommending the next option and it would be nice if it recommended a game I could play in the meantime.”

Bezos chimes in. He says he hopes a lot of the companies funded will use Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides the infrastructure and data services that power some of Facebook’s biggest applications. ”When social products hit, they grow quickly. Those play to the strengths of AWS,” he said. “All three of the top Facebook development companies are using it extensively.

Bing Gordon comes in. “When Zuck announced the platform, it was like an epiphany to me. I never imagined that an entertainment platform wouldn’t have silicon in it.”

He said the average friend count will go from 130 to 500, and the average post count will go from 1 to 10.

“I think people’s engagement on social graph is going to go from 15 minutes to 30 minutes to an hour per day per person connected to social. That’s because you can’t see your friends faces when you’re watching TV.”

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Long considered a bastion of the fading social networking site Hi5, Thailand appears to be on its way over to the camp of Facebook.

Among all countries listed in our monthly Global Monitor report, Thailand has the third highest 12-month growth rate, growing 320.5 percent since last September for a total of 5.4 million Facebook users at the beginning of October. Earlier this year, Hi5 reportedly had six million Thai users. At its current growth rate, Facebook will exceed Hi5 in Thailand by the beginning of next year, if not sooner.

Like other countries with an exploding Facebook presence, the social network has gotten attention from the local press, and citations for helping users even in remote areas to connect.

Most of Thailand’s growth occurred at the beginning of this year, trailing neighbors like Malaysia. Other nearby countries like Cambodia and Vietnam, however, have yet to follow for social and political reasons — Vietnam, for instance, blocked Facebook and, more recently, launched a government-owned social network, go.vn.

Having a more open government and society than some of its neighbors certainly helps drive Thai growth on Facebook, which is beginning to resemble more liberal, if also more distant, areas like Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose growth has stabilized over the past months. Facebook’s high growth rates in the Thai market indicate that the site is still near the beginning of its upswing in that country.

These countries tend to have high internet usage rates, which translates on to high market penetration rates for Facebook.

Thailand’s internet penetration is only 26.3 percent, which means that about 30 percent of its internet users are already online. The country has a total population of 66 million people.

But even if Thailand’s internet penetration only grows slowly, Facebook may have other ways of solidifying growth in the country. As listed in our most recent Facebook Quarterly Business Review, major Thai carriers AIS and Dtac both have partnerships with Facebook, while the latter has reached out to users through advertising and Facebook apps.

Full data on Facebook’s audience growth throughout Asia and in countries around the world is presented in the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Global Monitor report, available through Inside Facebook Gold. An Inside Facebook Gold membership also includes data on language growth, audience demographics by country, and user behavior stats for the Facebook business ecosystem. To learn more about membership, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Facebook is asking users with special characters such as ♥, ☮, and Ⓥ, or multiple languages in their names to only use regular characters and one language. Users with these irregular names are seeing a prompt on the home page explaining that the change is “to help reduce spam and increase authenticity in the Facebook community”. However, many users claim the symbols are a part of their identity and are refusing to change their names.

Some users are reporting that Facebook is disabling Chat and their new feed until they comply with the request, though this is unverified.

When users with special characters or multiple languages in their names log into Facebook, at the top of the news feed they see a “Please Update Your Name on Facebook” prompt. It asks them to remove the special characters, or use the Alternate Name field to list their name in a second language. The prompt includes a button leading to the name change panel within Account->Account Settings->Settings.

Those attempting to change their name will also see warnings about these new rules. Those changing their names too frequently may be prevented from making further name changes.

The name change request has angered some users, especially those using a symbol to denote their affiliation with certain life philosophies. The Ⓥ symbol can represent veganism or voluntaryism, and some have responded to the request with posts such as “[The Ⓥ symbol] is who and what we are. You wanted authenticity right?…therefore the vegan symbol is as ‘authentic’ as you can get”.

Facebook may be looking to power authenticated online identity systems, but this would require further limitations on expression. While users opted into Facebook’s standardized profile views from the beginning, changes to existing features and practices like the recent elimination of profile boxes, the upcoming removal of third-party profile tabs and this regulation of irregular names can generate ill will. Facebook will need to be cautious as they release new features to ensure it doesn’t offer users options they might get attached to, only to roll them back later.

[Thanks to Stewart Stepanski Ⓥ for the screen shot of the prompt.]

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 CrowdStar, Atari, Large Animal Games, KlickNation, Fuel Industries, and iWin.

• Business Intelligence Front-End Engineer (Burlingame, CA)

• Game Producer Online and Social-Atari (Los Angeles, CA)

• Senior Flash Developer (Sacramento, CA)

• Server Engineer (New York, NY)
  

• Flash Game Developer (Culver City, CA)
  

• Lead Back End Web Developer-Social Games (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Sr. Game Designer – 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.

Facebook filed three anti-spam lawsuits against two Long Island men and a Canadian advertising company for creating fake profiles or tricking users into signing up for mobile services that had recurring monthly charges.

One of the three lawsuits involves applications, which is rare because the company tends to focus on naming rights or trademark infringement, not how an actual application functions.

In three separate cases, the company sued Steven Richter, Jason Swan, and an affiliate marketing company Max Bounty, Inc. today in U.S. District Court in San Jose for violating Facebook’s terms of service. Facebook said that the defendants would either trick users into signing up for mobile subscriptions or spamming their friends.

For example, Max Bounty would create Facebook Pages that said the company would reward users with a free $250 discount on MAC Cosmetics if they completed a three-step process. Instead, the complaint says Max Bounty would refer them to a third-party offers site called Superb-Rewards.net. Another Page Max Bounty created claimed the company wanted free Apple iPad testers.

In Swan’s case, he had built seven applications that he used as part of his scheme, including one called Quiz.me that would access users’ profile information including their friend lists and contact details. The app would ask users survey questions which would eventually lead to a request for their mobile numbers. Facebook said that Swan would use this data to sign them up for premium mobile subscription services.

In another case, Facebook said Swan would promise free goods such as tickets to see Disney’s Alice in Wonderland movie only if users invited all of their friends to the Page.

Facebook has prevailed in earlier spam cases, winning a $711 million judgment against “Spam King” Sanford Wallace last year in what it called one of the two largest judgments in the history of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act. The other was an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital.

“We hate spam and phishing just as much as you do, and we work hard to keep it off Facebook,” the company said in a statement.

Using a new drag-and-drop interface, Facebook users can now reorder photos within an album without going to “Edit Album Info”, and can also change the order in which albums appear on their profile. Photos in which a user is tagged still cannot be reordered, nor can videos.

Drag-and-drop photo and album reordering, reportedly the #1 most requested photo feature, was built out in one night by Facebook feed engineer Andrey Sukhachev at the company’s latest Hackathon. Users can now relegate less flattering photos to the end of an album from the photo thumbnail view. Previously to reorder albums, users had to upload a new photo to an album to bump it to the front of the album list.

To reorder photos, open an album and hover over a photo. An icon depicting two crossed lines will appear in the top left corner of the photo thumbnail, signaling that users can drag the photo into a new position. Note that to can’t make a photo that album’s cover by dragging it into the first position, and will still need to go to “Edit Album Info”, click the “Edit Photos” tab, and click the “This is the album cover” button under the photo.

Users can not reorder tagged photos of themselves, which appear in reverse chronological order in the “View Photos of Me” link under their profile picture. Therefore, users will still need to remove the tag if they don’t want new unflattering or boring photos to be the first seen when other users click through photos of them.

To reorder albums, users will need to click into one of the albums, then click the “View Photos” link above the thumbnails to return to the album page. There, users can drag-and-drop albums into new positions. Note that when an album has a new photo uploaded to it, it will always move to the front of the album list, regardless of where it was previously dragged.

Other features worked on at the Hackathon include a “Photos of you and a friend” feature for showing you all the photos you and a specific friend are both tagged in, Ajax-enabled wall posts for posting to a friend’s wall without leaving your currently viewed page, and a Nintendo Wii interface for Facebook.

Another feature Facebook engineers worked on was an iPhoto importer, which may interface with the new iPhoto 11 that Apple announced today would allow users to “view photos with all the social-networking info about that photo attached to it, such as friends’ comments in Facebook.” It’s not exactly clear how this functionality will work yet, though.

Drag-and-drop reordering joins high resolution photos and the in-line light box photo viewer in a new informational video released by Facebook.

Kleiner Perkins is known for making early investments on some of the leading technology companies today, and more recently for its focus on clean tech and the iOS ecosystem  – but not so known for its internet bets. Yet it will be hosting an event at Facebook tomorrow.

“The media are invited to attend a special event with industry leaders about the future of the social web, hosted by KPCB partner John Doerr,” according to the email we received.

It’s hard to avoid thinking that it might be launching some sort of Facebook-focused investment program, similar to the iFund. Launched in March of 2008, the program was an early bet on Apple’s mobile ecosystem, that was blessed by Apple itself. It put $100 million into companies like mobile game developer Ngmoco — which recently sold to DeNA in a deal that likely brought Kleiner back enough money to repay the fund.

Also, the iFund got re-upped two years later, when the firm put another $100 million into it this past March.

So, are we going to see an, er, fbFund (or maybe fFund?)

Perhaps, but Kleiner is coming in later than it did with iOS. Facebook’s developer ecosystem has matured rapidly since launching in mid 2007. Kleiner has been relatively less involved, albeit with two very notable exceptions. It was a relatively early investor top social gaming company Zynga (some details on that Doerr investment, here), and more recently it has backed mobile/social developer Booyah.

So, we’ll see what tomorrow brings. Perhaps a fund dedicated to startups that focus not only on the Facebook platform, but on Connect and very new products like Instant Personalization? Facebook has already brought early-stage venture firm Y Combinator for that purpose.

The event starts at 10:30am Pacific Time tomorrow, and we’ll be covering it live.

Users looking to make physical copies of their Facebook photos can now print them at Kodak Picture Kiosks at Target retail stores. The kiosks are now equipped with “Social Network Connectivity”, allowing users to log in to their Facebook accounts and select photos to print instead of bringing their digital camera, USB flash drive, or memory card.

Users should be aware that until September 2010 when Facebook began allowing high resolution photo uploads, all photos were resized to either 604 or 720 pixels on the largest side, meaning photos printed at larger than 3 or 4 inches on the largest size will look grainy.

Kodak previously announced that Facebook and Picasa photo printing would be coming to Target and CVS. Meanwhile, Target recently began selling gift cards which are redeemable for Facebook Credits, though we’ve received some reports that the Credits are not properly being deposited in users’ accounts.

The Kodak Picture Kiosks can create products including photo books, calendars, greeting cards, collages or picture movie DVDs, and printing from Facebook doesn’t cost extra. The price for printing standard 4 x 6 inch photos in seconds is $0.29 per print regardless of quantity, or $0.25 per print for 1-30 prints, $0.20 for 31-99 prints, and $0.15 for 100 or more prints that are ready in one hour. Users can find the kiosks at most Target stores.

Target SVP of merchandising Mark Schindele says that Social Network Connectivity will give customers “the convenience of printing [Facebook photos] during their regular Target shopping trip.” Since users won’t have to plan on printing photos, but can instead be enticed on the spot, in-store placement and the ability of the kiosks to convey the new functionality will have a significant effect on sales.

There’s currently no word on whether Kodak plans to enable use of photos from other social networks or photo sharing sites such as MySpace or Flickr. The press release also makes no mention of privacy or security precautions the kiosks will take to protect users. Kodak Picture Kiosks could be a good use case for Facebook’s new One-Time Passwords, which offer enhanced security while logging on to Facebook using public machines.

While Facebook recently introduced high resolution photo uploading and downloading, the majority of the photos on the site are compressed to sizes which look alright online but are not fit for full-size photo printing. As more services allow users to print or manipulate their photos, users may request that Facebook provide a tool for replacing their degraded, existing Facebook photos with high resolution versions from their hard drives.

Facebook recently announced a feature that lets users download a copy of their profile and content, and now it’s becoming available for some users. In a downloadable zip file, users get html files which include their entire profile, wall, Event history, messages, Notes, a list of their friends, . jpgs of their photos, and .mp4s of their videos, as well as an index file for navigating the content. The data can be used as a diary, or  to replace other information from a hard drive crash or stolen computer — but not necessarily to switch to a different social network.

Downloading the Zip File of Your Information

To access the Download Your Information feature, go to Account->Account Settings->Download Your Information and click “learn more”. Users are then shown a description of what their download will include, a security warning, and a privacy warning stating that the file will contain sensitive information and that users should “take precautions when storing, sending or uploading it to any other services.”

Once users click “Download”, the button will change to read “Pending” and users are informed that they will receive a download link via email. For users with a lot of content, the wait can be several hours. Users will eventually receive a “Your download is ready” email from Facebook containing a link back to the Download Your Information page. Users are prompted to re-enter their password and possibly complete other security tests before being allowed to initiate the download of the zip file, which comes from a “bigzipfiles.facebook.com” URL.

Download Your Information Zip File Contents

Once downloaded, unzipped and opened, users will see folders of HTML files, photos, videos, a README.txt stating when the file was downloaded and by who (this info is appended to the bottom of each html page), and an index.html file. Inside the folders are the following parts of a user’s profile, which can be opened separately or navigated through the index:

HTML Folder

Profile

A complete read-out of a user’s profile including basic information, Facebook profile URL, contact information, profile picture, relationships, education and work info, Likes and interests, and Groups (including secret Groups) of which the user is a member.

Wall

A reverse chronological read-out of all wall posts and content uploaded by the user or their friends to the user’s profile, including status updates. Links are active and show the thumbnail and blurb of sites, but embedded content such as YouTube videos or mp3s will appear as external links. Photos and videos posted to the wall, including content the user is tagged in, link locally to the downloaded folders containing that content. Users can see Likes and comments to any wall post.

Friends

A text-only list of all of a user’s current friends, sorted alphabetically by first name. Names are not linked and contain no additional information, such as email addresses or phone numbers. Only a user’s current friends appear.

Notes

All of the Notes a user has created, including embedded photos and links. Comments are included below each Note, but Likes are absent. Notes a user is tagged in are not included.

Events

Event details and descriptions of every Event a user has RSVP’d to as “Attending” or “Maybe”. Each listing links to the original Facebook Event page. Event images, wall posts, guest lists, secondary hosts, privacy settings, personal invite messages, and a user’s own RSVP are not included, but can be viewed on the Event page.

Messages

A threaded read-out of all of a user’s sent and received messages, sorted reverse chronologically by the send date of the latest message in the thread. Attached content is shown as links.

Photos

Separate html files for each of a user’s photo albums, with profile pictures and photos a user is tagged in compiled into a “Profile Pictures” album. Each photo displays its caption, associated tags, and comments, but not Likes. Each photo in the album links locally to the corresponding downloaded photo.

Videos

All of the videos a user has uploaded. Videos a user is tagged in do not appear. Videos can be played within the html file as they link locally to the downloaded videos. Each video is accompanied by its title, tags and comments, but not Likes.

Photos Folder

The “photos” folder contains folders for each of a user’s albums. Within each album folder are .jpg image files of each photo from the album. Photos without captions are named with a long string of numbers corresponding to the album, causing them to be grouped by album when sorted by name. Photos with captions are named as the first 50 characters of the caption.

Videos Folder

The “videos” folder contains video files of all the videos a user has uploaded. Videos come back as .mp4 files regardless of the format in which they were uploaded.

What’s Not Included

The following types of content are absent from the download:

• Contact info of friends
• A list of installed applications or any content from within those applications
• A list of Pages a user is an admin of, or any content from within those Pages
• Groups content
• Facebook Questions data, such as a user’s asked or answered questions

At the launch event for the feature, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that users wouldn’t be able to download contact information of friends because “what we’re focusing on…is your information, stuff that you put into the site, you should be able to take out. Not your friends’ information, because that’s not your information.” However, Facebook says it will be gathering feedback on the feature, and it will improve over future iterations.

Conclusion

Users wishing to preserve the memories they have created on Facebook will enjoy the new-found ability to download a history of their content. While the ability to download phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information of friends would be useful, the capability would also open the feature to abuse. For instance, spammers could try to buy or steal a user’s Facebook information file.

What’s unfortunate is the lack of Likes on photos, videos, and Notes. Facebook has created a great system of distinguishing a user’s most compelling content, but has stripped it from much of the downloadable content. Many might enjoy the ability to see, or even sort by which of their photos received the most Likes.

The data in the file is designed for use by humans, and it may be difficult for users to use Download Your Information to migrate to a different social network. Still, the feature should help dispel the perception of Facebook as a company seeking to monopolize control of online identity. The questions remains whether third-parties will develop apps that use the data.

Windows Live Messenger leads this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing games by daily active users, but in percentage terms, that’s not a huge win; as Facebook’s largest non-game app by DAU, Live Messenger only needed to add 7 percent to its total to grow by 450,497 DAU.

Here’s the list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Windows Live Messenger	6,777,464	+450,497	+7%
2.	Quiz Planet	1,293,195	+374,865	+41%
3.	Give Hearts	1,536,661	+295,738	+24%
4.	It Girl	667,900	+265,230	+66%
5.	@Smiles	1,168,187	+253,874	+28%
6.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,437,660	+248,168	+4%
7.	@Hugs	1,086,615	+222,338	+26%
8.	Formspring	539,352	+201,796	+60%
9.	FarmVille	17,224,839	+192,627	+1%
10.	@Hearts	1,061,085	+183,806	+21%
11.	Monster World	912,297	+177,266	+24%
12.	Frases Diarias	1,132,980	+162,572	+17%
13.	Chi Ti Segue	165,875	+152,284	+1,120%
14.	Birthday Cards	552,635	+142,022	+35%
15.	iHeart	926,610	+137,490	+17%
16.	Mafia Wars Game	4,195,918	+127,431	+3%
17.	Is Cool	611,743	+125,482	+26%
18.	Millionaire City	2,313,093	+125,031	+6%
19.	Warstorm	257,367	+115,199	+81%
20.	Instant Jam	107,254	+104,541	+3,853%

Quiz Planet, by CrowdStar, comes in second with 374,865 new DAU. Like It Girl, a CrowdStar game, Quiz Planet’s rise in DAU is from increased stickiness, or the proportion of existing monthly active users who return on a daily basis. Slowdowns in growth could be causing this effect, as the apps settle down to the previous new users that they managed to retain.

Give Hearts, @Smiles, @Hugs and @Hearts are all molasses-sweet gifting apps that are doing spectacularly well — all four have shown that they can consistently hold onto over a million DAU, which used to be unusual for their category. The latter three, as you can tell from their names, are all by @Apps.

At number eight, Formspring is making major strides in DAU, despite not having gained any MAU on average over the past month. The question-and-answer website is well known among teenagers, but still securing its place on Facebook, where it asks users to install the application as a tab to send and receive questions as a more integrated part of Facebook.