Our weekly AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users, has a handful of seasonal and wall post apps, along with several interesting games:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Like This Like This	835,074	+336,481	+67%
2.	FarmVille 中文版	326,301	+326,171	+250,901%
3.	Famous Status Update	303,434	+296,639	+4,366%
4.	☻ ♥ ChristmaS BesT WisheS to YoU ♥☻	990,917	+282,667	+40%
5.	My Top Followers	655,348	+257,521	+65%
6.	·٠•●★●·Merry Christmas,Dear Friend ★ Blessings·●	678,244	+249,102	+58%
7.	Big Business	398,533	+232,216	+140%
8.	Snowball Smack!	281,821	+227,182	+416%
9.	Hero	560,354	+221,739	+65%
10.	Trial Madness 2	512,123	+205,181	+67%
11.	My Top Friends (new)	384,744	+200,332	+109%
12.	Paradise Life	449,422	+195,301	+77%
13.	The oldest user	288,072	+194,489	+208%
14.	Famous Celebrities That Share Your Birthday	527,237	+191,776	+57%
15.	My Vineyard	879,549	+190,961	+28%
16.	Galaxy X	608,596	+188,672	+45%
17.	O-Meter App Factory	301,633	+187,152	+163%
18.	Especially for You	739,857	+185,120	+33%
19.	♥ Only For You ♥	641,377	+183,899	+40%
20.	Crazy Cabbie	702,565	+180,022	+34%

The seasonal apps include ☻ ♥ ChristmaS BesT WisheS to YoU ♥☻, ·٠•●★●·Merry Christmas,Dear Friend ★ Blessings·● and Snowball Smack!. As you can see, developers have figured out that having the loudest name possible is important for most season’s greetings apps.

Like This Like This is an exact repeat of an app that we’ve seen several times, which has users vote through Likes on comments that they think are funny or original. Famous Status Update is pretty similar.

Some of the apps lower down on the list are a bit more interesting, including The oldest user, which compares the ages of people using the app but is actually in French, and O-Meter App Factory, which is a variation on create your own quiz apps, available in both English and Spanish.

The games are probably the most interesting apps on the list, headed up by FarmVille 中文版, which is a Chinese-language version and update of the FarmVille. We cover it over on Inside Social Games this morning, along with CityVille passing the original FarmVille in size.

Facebook today added an unmerge option to Pages which had been merged with Places. Facebook has allowed an admin of a similar official Page and claimed Places location page to merge these two entities since the launch of the Places location-sharing services in August, but offered no way to undo the combination.

Merged Place Pages are unable to set a default landing tab, frustrating admins who use custom tabs but had merged without knowing the consequences. The new unmerge option restores all the functionality of the separate entities.

We discussed a need for the option in our post on the disadvantages of merging earlier this month. Followers of the protest Page “Unmerge Places & My Business”, which has requested the option since early November, are currently rejoicing and thanking Facebook. Facebook’s move has successfully turn some outraged admins back into loyal supporters of the site.

Admins of merged Place Pages now see an “Unmerge all merged Places” button in the bottom left of their Page. When clicked, admins are shown the following confirmation message:

“Once you confirm this request, the format of this Page will be reverted to the previous format and location information will be removed. The Places that you merged will be restored as separate claimed Places that you also still own and must continue to manage.”

Admins of merged Places Pages which want to be able to set a landing tab or show a more familiar interface (at least until Facebook rolls out the Page redesigned that leaked last week) should take advantage of the option. Meanwhile, admins of Pages which haven’t merged, have a single physical location, and who want to focus on driving foot traffic can now experiment with merging without being stuck with the result.

[Thanks to Kim Bui of KPCC Los Angeles for the tip]

Occasionally, entrepreneurs create a great social product but don’t have the resources to accrue the critical mass of users necessary to demonstrate its worth. MixApp by Square Products Corp., a free web service in which songs can be played to everyone in a chat room simultaneously, has developed a small but dedicated user base who love to share and talk about music with friends.

However, MixApp is in danger of folding if it doesn’t receive funding or a surge of donations to pay for operational costs and development of a better way to onboard members of different social clusters.

Music listening in the physical world always had a synchronous social component until the popularization of headphones and mobile devices. Friends would attend concerts together or play records for each other while discussing what they heard. Yet most online music services separate these actions, playing songs to individuals without offering discussion mechanisms, like Pandora, or with asynchronous mechanisms, like Last.fm or Soundcloud.

MixApp ports the natural desire to say “did you hear that? I love that part” into an online environment where friends can respond, “you’re right, that was awesome. Thanks for sharing”, in real time. Development of a downloadable client version of MixApp formally began in 2007. It switched into a AJAX-powered, browser-based service in May 2010. Square Product Corp has now spent its initial friends and family funding but has been scraping by thanks to user donations.

When users visit MixApp, they see a facepile of friends who already use the service, and login through Facebook Connect. They can join any listening room with at least one friend in it or start their own room and distribute its unique URL to invite friends. Users queue songs to the room’s playlist by uploading mp3s or adding YouTube links. Everyone in the room hears the current song at the same time and can participate in the chat, edit the playlist, and manipulate their individual volume controls.

Early usage stats are promising. Those logging in four days or more a month average 35 hours on site per month — more than the average user spends on Facebook. Roughly half the service’s monthly active users average over 19 hours of listening a month. If combined with an AJAX-friendly advertising network, this type of prolonged usage could translate into significant monetization potential. The site could also serve as a recorded music-focused alternative to Ustream for musicians. MixApp has conducted successful listening parties for album releases and focus groups for artists looking for feedback on their works-in-progress.

But the synchronous experience of MixApp creates obstacles to growth. Since a user’s friends must be using MixApp at the same time as them to get the true value, it’s difficult to retain the first users from any social cluster. The MixApp team says a notification system for alerting friends when a user logs in and a room for users without friends online are two things they’d like to develop given more resources. Some users have been resistant to the exclusive use of Facebook Connect for login, so MixApp plans to add Twitter, email, and OpenSocial registration options.

Discovering, discussing, and listening to music with friends is a fundamentally enjoyable experience. MixApp has developed the technology to span this experience across physical divides. If it can attain the funding and stickyness necessary to survive, MixApp could redefine how we consume music.

While Facebook has its own URL shortener for mobile links, fb.me, it also works with third-party shortening services, like Bit.ly — that service provides a variety of shortened URLs, as well as analytics and other features. This allows users and Page owners to share their own, custom URLs in status updates and other links.

But today, the Bit.ly-operated j.mp URL has been blocked by Facebook.

Why? The reason doesn’t appear to be competitive, as expected. Facebook says:

As part of our effort to keep Facebook and the people who use our service secure, we closely monitor the content shared on the site for spam and malicious content. At the time we blocked j.mp, more than 70% of j.mp links pointed to spam or other security issues. We are working with bit.ly to resolve the issue.

Facebook has occasionally blocked third parties due to these sorts of issues, and as long as spammers and other ill-intentioned actors use URL shorteners to go after users, we expect it to sometimes do so in the future.

As we reported previously, Facebook is set to expand its Dublin, Ireland offices in the next year and this has been reflected in a big way by the postings on its Careers Page. The company has added a significant number of positions in recent weeks advertising positions in its Dublin offices, in addition to several new openings in its Communications office, a Head of Mobile Partnerships position and a Recruiting Coordinator, Facebook Internship Program.

Other positions that appear to have been filled include a Partner Development Manager position in Paris, a South Korea engineering position, the IP Counsel job we had written about previously, the Corporate Immigration Coordinator job and the Manager, Policy and Growth – Contract job in Vietnam. A half dozen positions in online operations and platform/product marketing were also filled in Dublin.

About a dozen jobs were added in Dublin for online operations as fraud and payment analysts; interestingly among these positions there were several advertised for Asian language speakers such as Cantonese, Indonesian, Malay and Mandarin.

A job for Datacenter Manager, Engineering Infrastructure Systems was added for Facebook’s new Forest City, North Carolina Rutherford Data Center. This person will do much of the work to ensure the future engineering infrastructure in the yet-to-be-built building will be completed as needed.

Several positions opened up for Communications and Public Policy over the past few weeks. Corporate Communications added an Associate position, France is seeking a Communications Manager, as is Russia & Eastern Europe — though the position will be based in London. Finally, the Brussels office is seeking a Policy and Privacy Manager, no doubt to help the company handle European governments’ ongoing interest in privacy issues and legislation.

A few new positions opened up in Platform and Product Marketing at Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters: Measurement Researcher and Manager of Partner Insights.

But perhaps most interesting was the add of Head of Mobile Partnerships, which would also seem to be based out of California. This position requires someone to build partnerships in the mobile industry with Facebook and to “support the continued growth and success of our partners and social mobile applications built on Facebook Platform.”

For more Facebook-related jobs, check out the Inside Network Job Board.

As part of our expanding coverage of Facebook marketing this will be the first in a regular series of posts examining Facebook Page campaigns. This week we take a look at seven different campaigns selling things as diverse as jewelry, football fandom, phones, airline tickets and candy that use a variety of methods to attempt to attract new Likes to their Pages.

Southwest Airlines and Make-A-Wish Foundation

Goal: Exposure to the networks of users

Core Mechanic: Places Check-Ins for Charity through Facebook Deals

Method: Southwest Airlines donates $1 to Make-A-Wish Foundation for each check-in to an airport served by Southwest. These check-ins are published to the stream, exposing Southwest and Make-A-Wish to a user’s network, increasing awareness, and generating good will towards Southwest for it’s donations.

Impact: According to our PageData service, Southwest’s fan count was about 991,200 when this promotion started on November 26; now it’s about 1.2 million.

Sony Ericsson

Goal: Exposure to the networks of users; Page growth

Core Mechanic: The creation of an avatar that publishes to a photo album and the stream and the promise of prizes

Method: Sony Ericsson’s Mini Magic campaign allows users to create miniature avatars of themselves — down to the type of jewelry they wear — publishes these to the stream and creates a photo album for these images and allows users to enter a contest to win company prizes.

Impact: According to our PageData service, Sony Ericsson’s Page has grown from 2.6 million Likes on November 26 to just over 3 million currently.

You can find more listings coming today in the The Facebook Marketing Bible. Check it out to see other new campaigns featured this week, including an engagement campaign by The Jelly Bean Factory, a campaign to increase foot traffic to CVS convenience stores, and a sweepstakes by jewelry maker Ritani.

Facebook is rolling out an update to the native data visualizations of its Page analytics tool Insights. The accuracy of counts for Page tab views and external referrers has been improved. Admins may now select a specific date range of which to view performance metrics in the native data visualization. These updates make it easier to quickly get an accurate assessment of Page performance without leaving the site.

Our sources indicate that the external referrers and Page tab views sections in the native Insights visualization previously showed too few views coming from each source and for each tab. Data was accurate when exported though, indicating the issue was likely a bug in the Insights user interface. The native visualization is now accurate.

Previously, admins could only control date ranges on-site by using less precise sliders. Specific date ranges could only be selected for exported reports, forcing admins off-site. Now, admins can use calendar drop-down menus to select a starting and ending date between which to view analytics. This facilitates quick, longitudinal check ups on a Page’s performance.

The changes will be especially useful to admins with less experience manipulating data in spreadsheet applications such as Excel, as they won’t need to export reports to ge accurate, flexible data. Making Page administration more accessible will lead more people to create and manage Pages, which in turn leads to more advertising money for Facebook.  Similarly, keeping professional admins happy by facilitating efficiency leads them to evangelize for increased advertising from their clients in order to bring attention to their work.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon and Lital Bleichfeld for the tip.]

The Inside Network Job Board is 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 Meteor Games, Kontagent, Games Cafe, wooga and Luna Digita.

• Director, Product Management (Beverly Hills, CA)
  
• 2d Artist w/ Flash Experience (Beverly Hills, CA)
  

• Enterprise Sales Executive (San Francisco, CA)
  

• Social Game Designer (Calgary, AB – Canada)
  

• Designer – Social Games (Berlin, Germany)
  

Luna Digita, Inc.

• Social Game Producer (San Mateo, 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. 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.

In its first privacy policy update since October, Facebook has rephrased parts of a section around how it makes suggestions. Beyond a couple wording tweaks, the purpose is try to clarify how it is making use of data provided by users to target friends suggestions, photo-tagging recommendations and other feature promotions.

While there doesn’t appear to be anything significantly new in the updated version of the policy (with one exception which we’ll get into below), we believe Facebook is trying to be clearer in order to appease concerned users, privacy advocates — and politicians and governmental bodies that have become increasingly focused on privacy issues.

But, before we get into the details, note that per the company’s longstanding policy of letting users comment before making the change, those interested can comment on the Facebook Site Governance Page.

However, the message appears to have been automatically sorted into the “Other” sub-section of the new Messages inbox for at least some users. That location is designed to collect spam and other unsolicited messages, so we’re not sure how many people have been aware of the change.

The message was sent on December 15th; given the normal seven-day commenting period that Facebook offers users, that means anyone who wants to share their opinion needs to do so by 5:40 pm Pacific Time today.

On to the changes. Here’s the existing version:

To make suggestions. We use your profile information, the addresses you import through our contact importers, and other relevant information, to help you connect with your friends, including making suggestions to you and other users that you connect with on Facebook. For example, if another user imports the same email address as you do, we may suggest that you connect with each other. If you want to limit your visibility in suggestions we make to other people, you can adjust your search visibility privacy setting, as you will only be visible in our suggestions to the extent you choose to be visible in public search listings. You may also block specific individual users from being suggested to you and you from being suggested to them.

And here’s the proposed version:

To make suggestions. We use your information, including the addresses you import through our contact importers, to make suggestions to you and other users on Facebook. For example, if another user imports the same email address as you do, we may suggest that you add each other as friends. Similarly, if one of your friends uploads a picture of you, we may suggest that your friend tag you in the picture. We do this by comparing your friend’s pictures to information we’ve put together from the photos you’ve been tagged in. We may also suggest that you use certain tools and features based on what your friends have used. You can control whether we suggest that another user add you as a friend through your “search for you on Facebook” privacy setting. You can control whether we suggest that another user tag you in a photo using this setting.

For reference, here’s a screenshot of the red-line version available on the Site Governance Page:

The one potentially significant change that we’re seeing here is that Facebook has removed this line: “You may also block specific individual users from being suggested to you and you from being suggested to them.” Many commenters on the document are interpreting the removal to mean that Facebook will no longer allow you to block users from suggestions. It’s not clear if Facebook is making that change or if it’s simply trying to phrase the description more generally. We’re asking the company what its plans are and we’ll update with more information as we get it.

With the removal last week of a single phrase in its policy around reporting security issue, Facebook has made it easier for “white hat” security experts to help it find vulnerabilities.

The policy, below, no longer contains this line: “and have not conducted research that would violate the terms of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” It now reads:

We encourage security researchers who identify security problems to embrace the practice of notifying website security teams of problems and giving them time to fix the problems before making any information public. To make researchers feel comfortable bringing issues to our attention, we have adopted the following responsible reporting policy: If you share details of a security issue with us and give us a reasonable period of time to respond to it before making it public, and in the course of that research made a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data, or interruption or degradation of our service, we will not bring any lawsuit against you or ask law enforcement to investigate you for that research.

In other words, Facebook is making it clear that experts who conduct terms-breaking research won’t be targeted simply because they broke a policy in order to discover a problem.

You can find more information on Facebook’s Security Page. It also provides this running list of individuals who have made a “responsible disclosure” to the company:

• Mat Henley
• Roger Thompson
• John C. A. Bambenek
• Alexander Sotirov
• Jeff Williams
• Kristopher Tate
• John C Mitchell
• David Bloom
• Chris Barton
• Patrick Maguire
• Arnaud Granal
• Neil Fryer
• Steven Adair
• Stephen Sclafani
• Edgard Chammas
• Ronen Zilberman
• Mike Bailey
• Juan Galiana
• Francisco Alonso
• Vikram Thakur
• Cumhur Onat
• Ivan Buetler
• Joachim De Lombaert
• Jim Wigginton
• Tal Be’ery
• John Jean
• Harlan Yu
• Nathan Whitmore
• Nir Goldshlager
• Szymon Gruszecki