Wildfire launched a social media measurement tool called the Social Media Monitor today. The new service is set up on a web site to allow visitors to compare the performance of Facebook and Twitter accounts and will soon also include Places check-ins and overall fan/follower engagement.

In an example of the Social Media Monitor’s utility Wildfire recently ran a study comparing Target and Walmart. The Monitor showed that Target beat out Walmart in terms of captive Facebook audience during the summer, has extended its lead in recent weeks, particularly around Black Friday, putting Target 600,000 fans over Walmart.

Using the Monitor is very simple. A user just goes to the web site, enters the Twitter or Facebook URL for a particular company/brand and voilà, information that includes growth over the past 7 days, month and 3 months appears, along with a graph and the total number of fans/followers.

To help visitors to the Monitor take their social media reach to the next step, Wildfire also provides links to its other services along with these metrics. Learn more about strategies to increase your social media reach with the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible.

[Image Via Wildfire]

January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco. We’re excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs that are planning to attend!

The agenda for Inside Social Apps is now live online. We’re also excited to announce 3 new speakers today: Kristian Segarstrale, Founder & CEO of Playfish (now part of EA), Paul Bettner, the new GM of Zynga with Friends (formerly Founder & CEO of the just-acquired Newtoy), and Asokan Thiyagarajan, Director of Mobile Platforms at Samsung. They will be joining our full list of speakers below.

Finally, if you’re considering attending Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, this is your last chance to take advantage of early registration pricing. A limited set of early registration tickets are currently available at the Early Admission price of $299. This price will be good through Friday December 17th only, so we encourage you to register now.

Who’s Speaking?

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps.

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kristian Segarstrale Co-founder and CEO, Playfish (now part of EA)		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Paul Bettner GM, Zynga with Friends
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal		Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!

Facebook users got an early look at a new feature this morning called Memories which lets users browse Facebook activity for each year since they joined. One of the accidentally revealed prototypes, Memories utilizes a navigation bar to lets user jump between years and view counts of each year’s status updates, added friends, Likes, and Events. Details on the product are scarce since it was only up for a few minutes, but we also know a link to a user’s check-ins was temporarily available.

As many Facebook users have now been members for a long time and have built up lots of content and connections, innovative ways to browse this content are both satisfying to users and a good way to increase time-on-site. Facebook recently launched Friendship Pages which display all the mutual content and connections between two friends. While some users thought such a comprehensive and easily accessible view of their relationship with a friend was invasive, all the content was already available, and many others found the product to be enjoyable and a reminder of how Facebook has fostered their friendships. Users opinions on Memories may be similarly split.

The link to Memories appears beneath a user’s profile picture alongside links to their tagged photos. Clicking it reveals the navigation bar and that user’s content for one of the years they’ve been a member. Below the bar, users see a grouping of all their photos from the selected year. They can also browse their posted comments, status messages, add friends, and Likes. Memories could shown how a user has grown, or provide a snapshot of the way they wrote and the things they cared about during a certain period of their life.

It looks as if users can browse the Memories of any of their friends, though it’s possible that a user can only see their own Memories. One other new navigation link pushed was for Places, which would show a dedicated feed of all of that user’s checkins. This list is only available through third-party apps like PlacePop right now, as the Places link was also rolled back along with Memories.

A user’s Facebook content is so compelling, there’s potential to consume it in a variety of formats. Facebook will soon organize content chronologically as well as by the friends who co-own it, while Flipboard shows it big and pretty, PostPost focuses on the non-personal, and Wowd offers custom feeds and story search. Perhaps organization by traditional newspaper section categories such as sports, humor, or technology will be next.

Facebook has officially launched its new “registration tool” for third-party websites. This powerful plugin allows websites to insert a single line of code to create a registration form which pre-populates fields with a user’s Facebook data. We expect widespread adoption of the tool because it will reduce drop off during registration and provide sites with data including a verified email address which has been historically difficult to get users to provide.

Publishers can use the same registration form for users with or without Facebook accounts. A user’s name, email address, birthdate, gender, and current city are automatically filled in if they’re logged in to Facebook, and publishers can ask for additional information not included in the Facebook profile. Since users see and alter the data they’re submitting, unlike with Connect, there is enhanced transparency and trust. Facebook has provided extensive documentation on how the registration tool iframe can be implemented, and an introduction complete with examples.

Connect was first released at the 2008 f8 conference to allow users to login to third-party websites with their Facebook account. The Connect brand was officially retired and the Facebook Login social plugin was released at the 2010 f8. While these prevented users from having to create a separate proprietary account on third-party websites, it still left them looking at a daunting blank login or registration screen. Publishers also had to provide distinct login flows for Facebook and non-Facebook users, with the choice between the two creating a extra step which increased friction and reduced signups.

New Registration Flow and Implementation

The registration tool’s improved flow, which Facebook has documented and diagrammed, solves both of these issues. The Facebook-themed “Register” button publishers display on their sites leads to a single form which doesn’t pre-populate forms if a user doesn’t have a Facebook account. It creates momentum towards registration for logged in users by filling in many or all of the necessary fields, allowing them to quickly begin their Facebook-enhanced experience.

The code for a standard iframe of a registration tool is:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/registration.php?
client_id=113869198637480&
redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.facebook.com
%2Ftools%2Fecho%2F&
fields=name,birthday,gender,location,email"
scrolling="auto"
frameborder="no"
style="border:none"
allowTransparency="true"
width="100%"
height="330">
</iframe>

And the code for the “Register/Login” button is:

<fb:login-button
registration-url="http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins
/registration" />

If users aren’t logged in to Facebook when they visit a third-party site, the “Register” button will automatically read “Login”, prompt a user to enter their Facebook credentials, and then send them to the site’s pre-populated registration page. Users see a facepile of their friends who’ve also registered with the site at the bottom of the iframe, encouraging them to sign up.

Publishers are given the flexibility to append additional site-specific custom fields, such as “Favorite Movie” to the registration tool using a JSON string. These fields can use a variety of input methods including typeaheads which tap into an array of Open Graph protocol types, such as for cities. A security captcha can also be easily included. XFBML tags are support through the JavaScript SDK, and information is passed using secure signed requests.

By combining reduced friction sign up, support for non-Facebook users, and a social recommendation to join, publishers who implement the new registration tool are likely to see significantly improved sign up rates. FriendFeed, one of the beta partners for the tool where it can be seen in action, has already seen a 300% increase in Facebook sign ups. The registration tool will lead publishers to eliminate their proprietary sign up system, further increasing reliance on Facebook across the web. This in turn could prime third-party sites for integrations with direct monetization implications for Facebook which we speculated could be coming, including off-canvas Facebook Credits and an Open Graph ads plugin.

Today, many Facebook users saw several changes to Pages, most visibly a new layout which moved to the left side the navigation tabs for switching between the wall, info, and other in-house and third-party apps. Other changes included the removal of the option to set a default landing tab, and the added ability for admins to switch between designated accounts for the Pages they control. However, this was an inadvertent push of prototypes, and the site was briefly taken offline to rolled back the changes.

New layout:

Old layout:

The rearranged Pages interface functions similarly to the recently redesigned user profiles, Places, and merged Places Pages. All tabs, including third-party tabs, appear in a list of text links below the Page’s picture. The change makes these tabs less prominent, and could reduce the frequency with which users explore tab apps. This could anger Page admins who use Like-gated promotions housed on these tabs to drive growth.

The option to set a default landing tab in the Page admin interface was not present in the prototype. Therefore, users would always see the wall, and have to click the new sidebar navigation links to visit other tabs. Many Pages admins set the default landing tabs to show a link to their website, their latest promotional tab app, or the core functionality of their Page. The removal of this option could hurt the Page management industry which charges brands to design these tabs and apps, and slow Page growth due to the loss of potential affinity custom tabs generate. Facebook could have made the change in order to make the user experience more consistent.

Admins may be placated by the newfound ability to switch between their primary personal account and Page-specific accounts. This change allows admins to more easily manage multiple Pages, know exactly which account they’re posting as, and post as their personal profile to a Page they control. Previously, admins would sometimes create fake personal accounts and make them admins of different Pages to handle these cases. Facilitating multi-Page management without forcing admins to violate Facebook’s terms of service is important as it becomes more common for professional Page admins to work with multiple brands.

After the changes were pushed and the site was pulled offline, Facebook tweeted, “Facebook is available again after being down for a brief period. We apologize for the inconvenience… Also, some internal prototypes were exposed to people and resulted in us disabling the site briefly. It’s now back to normal.” This means any of these alterations in functionality could be modified or not rolled out.

We would be surprised if Facebook removed the ability to set default landing tabs, as while they do make browsing Facebook less predictable, they increase engagement and inspire Pages to buy ads which point towards them. Still, the layout change which is in keeping with new sidebar navigation layouts for many parts of the site is likely on the horizon.

[Thanks to Eti Surazon for the tip]

Today, CVS launched its CVS Express Photo App through a tab on its Page. It allows users to choose photos from their Facebook albums and have them printed and available for pickup at their local CVS in an hour. The app creates the fastest and easiest way to get professional prints of Facebook photos, and automatically prevents users from printing when a photo’s resolution is too low.

Facebook users upload more than 3 billion photos a month, many from powerful digital cameras. Only recently, though, did the site add the ability to upload high-resolution photos which are suitable for printing in larger sizes. Several apps and services, such as Gifted, offer to turn a user’s photos in posters, mugs, and mouse pads.

Kodak has installed kiosks in Target and CVS stores which allow users to log in and print their Facebook photos. However, standing at a kiosk and waiting for printing to finish is a much less enjoyable experience than this new applications which lets users choose photo packages from the comfort of their homes.

When users visit the CVS Page, they’ll see a Print Photos tab with a “Get Started button”. Once they’ve allowed the app to access their photos, they’ll see a overview of the necessary steps. A sidebar panel explains that the app will show a red exclamation mark next to sizes that wouldn’t produce quality prints because of the selected photo’s low resolution. This takes much of the guess work and worry out of sending away for prints, and the lack of this information is a major issue among photo printing apps.

Users can select from their photo albums or tagged photos, choose sizes that aren’t marked as too large, and use a store locator to find a local CVS to pick up the photos from. Each 4×6 inch print is $0.19, cheaper than $0.25 single prints available from the Kodak kiosks, though Kodak does offer discounts on large purchases which aren’t available here.

In a financially risky move, CVS does not require a user’s credit card information to place an order. Users are expected to pay upon pickup, but this could lead users to forget or abandon their photos, leaving CVS with the bill.

Now that most people have switched from film to increasingly high-resolution digital photos which Facebook accepts, Facebook photo printing apps could become an important revenue stream for businesses like CVS. The question will be whether users in fact become nostalgic for physical copies of their photos, or if they’ll be satisfied viewing them on sharp mobile devices and digital photo frames.

Page management software-as-a-service provider Buddy Media has launched Buddy Media University to educate clients on how to use it’s tools. The physical workshops which address topics including publishing and analytics will start at the company’s headquarters in New York City. By offering a more extensive, hands on training system, Buddy Media can improve client retention and cut down on customer service costs.

Buddy Media has grown to become one of the largest and most profitable Page management companies. It most recently released an upgrade to its Buddy Media Platform that improved the interface for multi-person teams and the management of multiple Pages. The announcement follows competitor Involver’s release of its Social Markup Language for streamlining application development — another innovation that could reduce the costs of scaling.

Buddy Media University is largely modeled off of Google’s AdSense certification program. Greg Roth, the head of the program, says clients come from across the Facebook competency spectrum, and Buddy Media wants to train them to reduce the amount of assistance they need and to turn them into evangelists for the software. Both these outcomes would help Buddy Media grow more efficiently.

The sessions will feature Roth and several other trainers hovering above clients, helping them learn the details of old and new features. The curriculum for BMU is as follows, with each approximately five-hour session being a prerequisite for the next:

• 101 Publishing and Moderation
• 102 Basic Sapplet Implementation
• 103 Analytics and Optimization
• 104 Advanced Sapplet Implementation
• 201 Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL
• 202 Buddy Media Platform Channel Administration

The first set of sessions will occur at Buddy Media headquarters in New York City, but BMU will then go on the road to bring training to other cities and regions, and offer private sessions for brand teams of the company’s larger clients, which include Target, Southwest Airlines, and Mattel.

Though the program will clearly benefit Buddy Media, it addresses a serious issue in the industry. Tech companies are racing to add new features to their tool suites, but these do little good if the clients licensing them only understand the basics. Roth explained, “we want them to be able to do everything so they can let go of our hand.”

Facebook has announced a new photo tag suggestions feature that utilizes facial recognition technology. When users upload photos, faces which match ones tagged in their existing photos will show a suggestion of who to tag. Similar photos are grouped for easy tagging. Users can opt out of being identified by the facial recognition software in their privacy settings.

The update, rolled out in the U.S. over the next few weeks, could lead users to be tagged in photos much more frequently. It also brings Facebook up to speed with other photo editing tools including iPhoto, which can already create Facebook tags through facial recognition.

Facebook has long been the most popular photo sharing service in the world, and it is this core app which drives time on-site and growth. Facebook began highlighting faces to assist tagging in July, while third-party apps sought to help users find untagged photos of themselves through facial recognition software. The Photos product received a major upgrade in September, with the additions of high resolution photo uploads, an in-line light box viewing mode, and bulk tagging.

When users upload photos, they are brought to a Tag Your Friends page. Here, users see a dialogue which explains that their photos have been grouped and names of friends have been suggested. Grouping photos which look similar and therefore likely contain the same friends makes it easier to tag multiple photos.

Photo tag suggestions appear in a blue box beneath the recognized photo. It appears that users must opt out of suggested tags, which allows for quick saving of tags if a user thinks they are accurate.

Users who receive the new feature will also see a new “Suggest photos of me to friends” privacy setting within the “Customize settings” link. When disabled, users won’t appear in suggestions, which will lower the chances of them being tagged.

Facebook explains that the update means “you’re more likely to know right away when friends post photos.” Really, this will reduce the likelihood that a user could be identified in a photo of them which they never knew about since they weren’t tagged and notified. Most importantly, photo tag suggestions may significantly increase the number of photos users get tagged in, increasing interconnections, and further cementing Facebook as the keeper of our memories.

Wowd, previously a Facebook news feed desktop client, today launches a web version of its free service. The company aims to reduce information overload due to filter failure by automatically generating smart feeds of the updates of clusters of a user’s friends.

However, while custom feeds, smart feeds, and news feed search capabilities offer some additional value, most users will likely still prefer using Facebook.com.

Many startups have attempted to provide a better way of browsing Facebook this year. The RockMelt social internet browser found some early praise, but anecdotal evidence suggests the novelty has worn off and users are returning to their standard web browsers. Flipboard offers an elegant reading experience but is only available for iPad, and Paper.li makes Facebook content look like Twitter posts but doesn’t update in real time. PostPost, a custom socially curated newspaper which launched last week, is an efficient way to consume links and videos posted by friends. It filters out personal content including status updates, though, showing it’s not trying to replace Facebook canvas.

Wowd added Facebook news feed browsing to its desktop software in August. The integration focused on feed searches which could be turned into custom streams. It also helped conceal application stories — something Facebook now handles for non-gamers. While compelling for some, requiring users to download and install software created a lot of friction, leading to only 500,000 total users and 70,000 daily active users. The new web version aims to eliminate this friction and provide a more powerful, though less interconnected, way to consume posts by friends.

When users visit the Wowd site and permit access to their accounts, they’re brought to a home page which looks similar to their Facebook news feed. However, Facebook only allows API access to the posts of a user’s friends, not the news feed algorithm EdgeRank which determines their prominence in the feeds. Wowd has developed its own Top Now algorithm, which is more similar to Google’s PageRank in that it takes into account multiple degrees of connectivity. This means a post by a friend who you rarely interact with, but with whom your closest friends heavily interact, will have greater prominence in Wowd’s Top Now than in the Facebook news feed.

Top Now is not as good at determining the most compelling posts, though. It regularly displays random wall posts or posts with few Likes or comments, while Facebook pulls up links with healthy discussions. Also, since Wowd does not offer other core Facebook apps which are often linked to in feed posts, users will have follow links to Facebook.com to see an uploaded photo or RSVP to Events.

The web version of Wowd retains the time period feeds (Top in 7 days…), feed search, custom feeds, and tag clouds, but strips out some features including browsing history which require the desktop software. New are Smart Feeds — auto-generated feeds of posts by different clusters in your network. For instance, Wowd created Smart Feeds for my San Francisco friends and my people from freshman dorm. The feature aims to one-up the manually started, often forgotten friend lists feature on Facebook.

Wowd CEO Mark Drummond says that due to information overload Facebook users are “past the point where the news feed feels empowering, and they start to feel squashed by updates”. Wowd therefore focuses on custom feeds and search. In the future, the service aims to also help filter Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, and release a mobile app for “info snacking”.

Though there are specific use cases for Wowd, personal Facebook updates weren’t meant to be consumed in a feature vacuum. When users click through to Facebook to view a photo or other core app, they’re not likely to return.

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange may have been the people’s choice for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award, but as the publication’s elaborate cover story reveals today, the editors instead chose Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Perhaps that’s fair given that Facebook has been a main way that Wikileaks has provided its trove of secrets to the world.

Most of the article is a detailed take on how Zuckerberg is leading Facebook today, plus background on his life and the company’s growth. But the article also has a couple apparently new, and interesting, statistics. One is that the company now has 550 million users. The other is that it is growing by around 700,000 new users per day.

Facebook isn’t commenting on the new numbers. Its official stats page still shows the 500 million user mark from when it announced that number in July and it doesn’t currently provide any daily growth stats. So Time appears to have done its own calculations to get the new results — the numbers look about right.

Based on the country data in our Inside Facebook Gold service, Facebook had 576 million monthly active users by the start of December. Two third-party data services indicate similarly: ComScore most recently showed 634 million monthly unique visitors worldwide in October; Google Ad planner was updated in the last couple of weeks to show 590 million.

Therefore, Time is likely a little behind on that number, but in the ballpark. In terms of daily growth rate, 700,000 new users per day since the July announcement implies around 85 million new users in total by today — meaning something like 585 million total, which sounds right.

All of these numbers should be read as estimates to triangulate from, not as facts. The trend, though, seems to show that Facebook is not yet slowing down.

Platform Growth

Following a bunch of other updates to its official stats page last week, Facebook has also quietly made another one today. “More than 2.5 million developers and partners from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform,” the page says today. It previously said one million did. That’s a huge jump, albeit not surprising to us or our readers.