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 Ubisoft, Pileated Pictures, Villain and NaturalMotion.

• Web Operations Architect (San Francisco, CA)
• Analytics Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• Network Engineer (Telecommute)

• Vice President, Social Game Design (Cary, NC)

• Designer – Social Games (Oxford, UK)
  

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.

Today, Facebook unveils instant personalization for online television recommendations engine Clicker. When you visit the site while logged in to Facebook, you’ll see suggestions of things to watch based on your Likes and the Likes of friends. The instant personalization pulls relatively benign data, namely your publicly available basic information, as well as your friend list, the interests of friends, and any info you make available to everyone, such as your own interests. All sharing options default to opt-in, preventing surprise wall posts.

The integration successfully removes the obstacle between users and significantly improved recommendations by automatically providing information users probably would have authorized access to anyways.

Facebook has slowed down the roll out of instant personalization which began at f8 but encountered some initial backlash and minor security issues. It’s only offering the integration to “great websites that offer naturally social experiences”, most recently Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Scribd and Flixster’s Rotten Tomatoes film reviews site. At the Bing instant personalization launch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the program, explaining that only what you share with everyone is available to partner sites. He asked “Anyone can go to your profile and view your public information, why shouldn’t applications be able to do that to give you an awesome experience?”

Clicker makes a sensible choice for instant personalization, because since it indexes so much content — 1 million TV episodes, 30,000 movies, and 90,000 music videos — information about user preferences is necessary for it to provide accurate recommendations. Clicker was founded in 2009 and has taken $19 million in funding from investors including Jafco Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. It released social features including asynchronous friend following as well as a mobile app in July.

As with all instant personalization integrations, Clicker displays a notification of its data access near the top of the home page the first few times you visit, offering options to learn more or disable instant personalization. This notification isn’t at the very top , and instead blends into the site’s design, so you could miss it. However, Clicker always shows whether you’re connected through your Facebook account and provides the option to log out in a prominent blue box in the top right corner.

The main area of the home page is filled with video recommendations displaying the pictures of friends who Like that content, or your Likes of similar content. Clicker suggests music videos by artists many of your friends Like, which is an easy way to discover content you might not have explicitly searched for on a TV content site. When I visited Clicker, I saw recommendations of new episodes of my favorite cartoons on Hulu and Amazon VOD, while without instant personalization, I was suggested episodes of reality TV shows which are generally popular but which my friends and I hate.

Within the profile page, you’ll see that your Likes have been imported and mapped to shows, movies, and musicians on Clicker. You’ll have also automatically followed any of your Facebook friends, populating your Recent History feed with their added interests, dislikes, playlist additions, and more which you can comment on or respond to with predefined buttons including “Awesome!”, and “Meh”. This relieves you from having to use the Facebook contact importer to start discussions.

The Sharing tab of the profile settings lets you opt into posting Clicker activity to Facebook and Twitter, while the Privacy tab lets you make your Clicker account private. To disable instant personalization from within Facebook, you have to go to your Privacy Settings and either change what you share with everyone, or go to Applications and Settings and opt out of instant personalization entirely.

Overall, instant personalization works well with Clicker. The experience is much better, privacy implications are low, and the partnership brings exposure to a quality website. While critics will look for something to harp on, when used in a controlled manner with reliable partners, instant personalization helps users by following Facebook’s stated goal — making the default social.

There are some huge gains to be seen on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users. The first is CityVille, whose 10.5 million new DAU is more than the gains of the other 19 apps on the list combined:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	11,555,697	+10,504,044	+999%
2.	Phrases	7,239,021	+1,162,459	+19%
3.	Phrases (new)	1,744,928	+783,353	+81%
4.	Zuma Blitz	769,683	+748,594	+3,550%
5.	Causes	1,349,374	+453,855	+51%
6.	Badoo	935,634	+317,583	+51%
7.	Windows Live Messenger	10,809,791	+305,983	+3%
8.	Hey I Like	981,696	+268,998	+38%
9.	Give Hearts	1,415,399	+196,136	+16%
10.	@Hugs	1,139,426	+186,182	+20%
11.	@Hearts	1,050,206	+179,326	+21%
12.	Horoscopes	3,024,249	+166,019	+6%
13.	@Smiles	1,139,096	+162,750	+17%
14.	Monster Galaxy	187,912	+161,825	+620%
15.	Café World	3,742,255	+160,199	+4%
16.	Quiz Planet	997,714	+135,405	+16%
17.	The Fortune Teller	602,514	+124,932	+26%
18.	德州撲克(中文版)	1,321,500	+108,683	+9%
19.	Likelicious	336,004	+104,628	+45%
20.	Christmas – Natale – Navidad – Noel	121,833	+101,668	+504%

As we note this morning over on Inside Social Games, several of these apps are new and growing rapidly, which creates a prematurely inflated view of DAU. CityVille’s actual gain of over six million DAU is impressive enough, though.

Phrases is just as interesting. The app has mostly recovered from a dip that was likely produced by its being blocked in the United States, coming close to its previous highs. If it keeps growing, it could easily become Facebook’s largest app by monthly active users again, though in terms of DAU it has no chance against FarmVille, the current leader.

As you can see for yourself, Phrases is joined by Phrases (new), which is also by developer Takeoff Monkey. Combined, the two nearly identical quiz and quote apps have a total of almost nine million DAU, all among international users.

Zuma Blitz, at number four, is a new Popcap casual game that’s worth a try, if you’re into arcade action. It’s followed by Causes, which is enjoying a short-term spike in growth.

Finally, Badoo is offering a Hot or Not-style dating app on Facebook. It’s trying to be a bit different, though, by mimicking the data analysis that OKCupid, a larger web dating portal, does. But where OKCupid digs in data for the fun of it, one gets the feeling that Badoo has marketing in mind; its latest report on the best pick-up lines is currently winging around the internet, having made it into high-level publications like Reuters.

Facebook for Android v1.5, the latest version of the Facebook mobile app for Google’s platform, is now available in the Android Marketplace. It adds Chat and push notifications, two features sorely lacking from previous releases and heavily requested by users. We’ll go over the new features now, and will update with screenshots and a discussion of usability soon.

This update closely follows version 1.4 which was released December 3rd, and gave users access to Facebook Places and Groups. Android phones also recently received single sign-on, which reduces login friction for third-party Facebook integrated apps. Facebook for Android now only lacks a few minor features available on the iPhone, namely photo tagging, Facebook Deals, and advanced Places functionality including photo check-ins and the ability to add tags of friends to an existing check-in.

The added Chat functionality eliminates the need to use a third-party, Facebook Chat-compatible mobile app such as Go!Chat. Chat for Android runs properly in the background, which the announcement says allows users to”receive chat messages while using other applications”. Chat can thereby simulate SMS, which can help users save money.

The new push notifications will help users stay aware of activity on their Facebook accounts in real time, reducing the need to constantly check the app when awaiting a wall post or message. It will also prompt less engaged users to occasionally open Facebook for Android, which could lead to a growth in daily active users.

Comments on the announcement of the app are overwhelmingly positive and appreciative of the progress the app has made — a strong shift from the comment reels of previous release announcements which were filled with complaints about the lack of Chat and push notifications. If the Facebook for Android team can keep up this pace of updates, the app may soon rival Facebook for iPhone for the title of most advanced Facebook mobile app. That would be a big shift which could drive Facebook power users to the Google platform — something that could aid the launch of Google’s upcoming social product which may be more mobile focused.

Performance advertising rates in the largest countries on Facebook are showing some mostly unsurprising trends. Ads in North America and Western Europe cost the most per click, up to around $1.00, with uneven but significantly lower numbers in most other markets. Perhaps most strikingly, advertisers have driven up rates in some key emerging markets.

The five largest Facebook markets by monthly active users illustrate this trend. Based on data sampled from Facebook’s advertising tool in mid-November, available in our Inside Facebook Gold report, the US is clearly Facebook’s single most valuable market. It not only has the largest audience — today above 145 million monthly actives — but its ad rates come in nearly on top as well. Ads targeting women costed an average of $0.94 per click, with men slightly lower at $0.89.

The second-largest country by size, Indonesia and its 31.4 million users, is unsurprisingly far less expensive to advertise in. CPC rates were $0.14 for men and $0.19 for women.

While, rates tended to go up and down over the course of the fall in Facebook’s largest markets around the world, based on our data, large European countries typically ranged from $0.25 to above a dollar, while developing countries went as low as $0.10 or so. India and Brazil were notably strong. Men and women in the former country costed $0.35 and $0.29 CPC to reach, respectively. The latter country was the most expensive to advertise in out of all of Facebook’s largest markets. CPC rates for men were around $1.20 and for women $1.40.

Both of these countries have wide income disparities, with wealthier citizens far more likely to have internet access. The high rates suggest that a significant number of advertisers have picked up on this fact.

For full access to our ad rates data on major Facebook markets, including country breakdowns by relationship status, age and sex, be sure to check out our Inside Facebook Gold subscription service.

Data management company Tiger Logic recently released PostPost, a custom real-time internet newspaper made up of links a user’s friends and Pages have shared on Facebook. It makes it easy to consume, Like, share, and comment on longer form content such as news articles and videos. PostPost is designed to feel like a socially curated version of popular editorially aggregated news site The Huffington Post.

Real-time social streams are becoming the preeminent way to receive information. Products like Flipboard for the iPad, and website Paper.li bring content from social channels including Facebook and Twitter into a new interface. However, these services require either special hardware or only update every 24 hours. Facebook clients like RockMelt and Wowd add filtering or custom feeds, but don’t lay out Facebook content in a unique, visually stimulating way. PostPost is web-accessible, updates in real-time, and focuses on rich content instead of simple status updates and activity.

Once users login through Facebook Connect, PostPost takes a few seconds to convert the stories published by their friends into a layout of dynamically-sized boxes. PostPost utilizes the latest JavaScript SDK for Facebook, JSON, and Masonry to directly link Facebook and a web browser. This pushes database and processing responsibilities onto Facebook, relieving Tiger Logic of much the server costs.

PostPost’s search feature is powered by Tiger Logic’s own yolink technology which deep searches behind links to discover keywords  across the full-text of any article or website without indexing. These elegant technologies make PostPost load quickly and produce very accurate search results. Sharing buttons on every story and a multi-friend selector inviter help PostPost gain exposure amongst new users.

User can sort their newspaper by content type using tabs for links, videos, and photos, or view them combined. Videos play in-line, and stories by Pages show their existing Like count. One issue is that since Facebook doesn’t provide access to the list of friends a user has hidden from their news feed, they’ll see posts from these low quality content producers. However, an ‘x’ button on each posts lets users hide all posts from that author or which link to that site, allowing lists of hidden friends to be rebuilt on site over time.

In future releases, PostPost plans to release a mobile app, allow story sorting by Like count; and provide filters to only see posts by friends, Pages, or Groups. PostPost creator Peter Yared says monetization will depend on a prospective Open Graph social ads plugin which we speculated that Facebook is preparing. Yared agrees that “that’s the model for Facebook building out its footprint across the web”.

Yared sees PostPost as the natural evolution of content consumption. “Instead of displaying what an algorithm on Google, strangers on Digg, or an editor on The Huffington Post surface, we show what your friends think is interesting.” Socially curated news is more relevant to users, offers enhanced opportunity for discussion, and could therefore usurp traditional news destination sites.

Facebook posted a blog today revealing the top 10 status update trends over the past year. Interesting, many of these pertained to youthful fads like Justin Bieber and the acronym HMU (“hit me up”) but also there were several that reflected Facebook’s increasingly global reach with references to the World Cup, Haiti and the Chilean miners.

The status update trends show what terms grew the most in updates this year as compared to last in 236 countries.

First on the list was HMU, or “hit me up,” which started to gain traction last year until the phrase had 80,000 mentions a day by the end of the summer. Second was the World Cup, with 1.5 million mentions at the start and 1.3 million mentions at the end of the games. Interestingly, during important moments during some of the games as many as 50% of status updates pertained to the World Cup.

Movies were third on Facebook’s list, particularly “Toy Story 3,” “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” “Inception,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Iron Man 2.” In fourth place were the iPad and iPhone 4, which were mentioned in 25 million updates this year. Haiti was the fifth most mentioned status update, peaking at a rate of 1,8000 updates a minute earlier this year.

Teen singing sensation Justin Bieber took sixth place with mentions growing throughout the year. Facebook games were the seventh most mentioned status update; FarmVille and FrontierVille were particularly prominent. Next were mentions of miners or mineros (in Spanish), referring to the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped underground for 69 days.

Airplanes were mentioned often, coming in ninth place, mostly because a a popular song by B.o.B. called “Airplanes.” Finally, mention of the year 2011 made tenth place and have been mentioned more frequently as the year nears its end.

[Image Via Facebook]

The United Nation’s Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, created a Facebook application called Help a Child. It allows users to care for a virtual child, through buying virtual goods that it requests.

The difference from most games is that this money is actually a donation towards UNICEF projects in the real world — the organization works to meet the long-term needs of children and women in developing countries.

The app allows you to either select the continent, country, sex, name and age of your virtual adoptee or randomize these characteristics. Then it adds your surname to your adoptee and publishes to your Wall.

After you create your adoptee, the child begins to have needs similar to what a real world UNICEF adoptee would have. For example, the app tells you that your adoptee needs food, so the user can select the types of food to give the child, paired with prices, and has the option to donate the actual sum to UNICEF using PayPal. You can also publish the gift of food or vaccines to your adoptee on your Wall.

Money collected this way on Facebook will go to help actual UNICEF projects around the world.

The application is currently just getting started, with 901 monthly active users and 25 daily active users, according to our AppData service.

There was a wide variety of Pages on our Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages list this week, based on datafrom our PageData service, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page each day. It took between 390,000 and 948,300 Likes to make our list this week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Shrek	4,082,204	+943,276	+30.05
2.	Harry Potter	12,529,062	+931,307	+8.03
3.	Rihanna	18,859,071	+634,760	+3.48
4.	Facebook	30,132,716	+591,225	+2.00
5.	Texas Hold’em Poker	29,967,601	+564,139	+1.92
6.	The Simpsons	16,651,259	+554,885	+3.45
7.	Eminem	23,697,470	+541,938	+2.34
8.	Toy Story	11,245,729	+488,685	+4.54
9.	Shakira	16,474,439	+469,905	+2.94
10.	The Offspring	1,128,704	+468,762	+71.03
11.	Wikileaks	1,303,958	+464,089	+55.26
12.	YouTube	24,767,648	+453,268	+1.86
13.	Manchester United	5,922,254	+450,449	+8.23
14.	Disney	14,940,446	+440,265	+3.04
15.	Official Blink-182	2,749,662	+437,030	+18.90
16.	MTV	12,322,959	+418,350	+3.51
17.	Black Eyed Peas	7,643,417	+413,497	+5.72
18.	Cristiano Ronaldo	16,281,967	+405,705	+2.56
19.	Linkin Park	18,941,170	+397,150	+2.14
20.	SpongeBob SquarePants	14,709,480	+389,973	+2.72

There were a handful of movie-related Pages on the list this week. First place went to the “Shrek” Page, which added 943,300 Likes to pass 4 million total after promoting the sale of the newest home release last week. Then “Harry Potter” came in at number 2 with 931,300 new Likes, passing 12.5 million, after the Page mostly promoted the recent release of the latest installment of the franchise. Number eight went to “Toy Story,” which added 488,700 Likes to rise to 11.2 million. Finally, Disney’s Page, at number 14, added 440,300 Likes; the company recently announced the milestone of 100 million Likes across its Facebook Page properties.

Television also made the list briefly, including “The Simpsons” at number 6 with 554,900 new Likes, making a total of 16.6 million by promoting the show’s episodes. Then MTV made number 16 by adding 418,400 new Likes to pass 12.3 million by promoting its programming. Rounding out our list was “SpongeBob SquarePants” at number 20 with 390,000 new Likes to pass 14.7 million without many updates.

Media companies made the list, too.

Facebook was fourth with 591,200 new Likes to pass 30 million. Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker made fifth after 564,100 new Likes and special game promotions. Wikileaks’ Page added 464,000 new Likes to surpass 1.3 million, riding the scandal following continual disclosure of classified U.S. diplomatic documents. Finally, YouTube’s Page was twelfth with 453,300 new Likes to pass 24.7 million.

A few sports-related Pages were on the list, too. Manchester United’s Page added 450,500 Likes to come in just under 6 million; perhaps partly due to a landing Page asking visitors directly to invite their friends to join. Then Portuguese football/soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo’s Page added 405,700 Likes to reach 16.2 million; his team won a game recently.

Finally, musicians made up a big part of the list, as they tend to do.

In third place was Rihanna with 634,800 new Likes to her 18.8 million; she’s been promoting her new album on the Page. Eminem’s Page made number 7 with 542,000 new Likes and performance promotions. Number 9 was Shakira with 469,900 new LIkes to reach 16.4 million; she’s on tour.

Both The Offspring and Blink-182 seem to have benefitted from a sizable official Page consolidation. The Offspring was at number 10 on the list with 468,800 new Likes, 445,500 of which were added on Wednesday, to make a total of 1.1 million. Blink-182 made number 15 with 437,000 new Likes, 2.7 million total, and a 352,300 jump on Friday; the and also had an interesting landing Page from Bompa allowing users to interact with the band’s tour by requesting songs, confirming attendance, retrieving venue details and seeing who else was attending.

The Black Eyed Peas made number 17 with 413,500 new Likes, reaching 7.6 million and Linkin Park was at number 19 after adding 397,200 Likes to reach 18.9 million after having sold merchandise on the Page.

Customer feedback solution startup UserVoice today launched a tab application for Facebook which allows users to enter suggestions and vote up the best ideas. By focusing users on submitting actionable feedback instead of just their opinions, UserVoice allows companies and organizations to collect valuable data on what their customers want. UserVoice also released a version of its service which can be embedded into iPhone apps — part of the company’s strategy to reduce friction in the feedback process across platforms.

As all types of real world entities create Facebook Pages and drive users there instead of to proprietary websites, Facebook also becomes the best place to offer customer support and feedback channels. Get Satisfaction worked with Involver to release a customer support tab application in March, and Parature released a tab app focused on around questions in August. UserVoice, however, appears to be the first centered around working towards solutions instead of registering complaints or inquiries. Without it, feature suggestion can lead to clogged inboxes or unruly forums which make it difficult to determine the consensus of users.

The company launched in 2008, has eight employees, and is based in San Francisco. It has taken $800,000 in funding in a round led by Baseline Ventures. UserVoice has registered 52,000 admins, and has collected feedback from over 16 million people across it’s different sites, apps, and widgets. The system can be licensed as a free trial or for $19 a month for minimal customization and admin capabilities, or up to $589 a month or more for a custom, white-labeled design.

UserVoice’s Facebook tab application allows those who visit a Page to submit feedback through a composer reading “I suggest you…” and a prompt that states “Enter your idea (new feature, suggestion, etc)”. This helps clients harness user feedback to improve their products or services. Users can decide how many of their limited allotment of votes they want to lend an idea, and the ideas with the most votes rise to the top. This makes it efficient for admins to determine the most urgent requests, and prevents especially active users from drowning out the ideas of others — something common on standard forums.

A client’s dedicated UserVoice feedback site and Facebook tab app are synced, displaying suggestions or comments from either on both. Votes on the a UserVoice website can easily be shared to Facebook or Twitter.

In the Admin Console, ideas can be assigned a status such as “under review”, “started”, “completed”, or “declined” to inform user that the company is listening. When a suggestion is closed (completed, or declined), users receive their votes back for allocation to remaining suggestions. Admins can also leave notes on ideas for other admins, and UserVoice is testing a new ticket system for assigning responsibilities. When admins reply to ideas, their comments always appear expanded, giving them increased prominence and visibility within discussions.

Setting up the UserVoice tab application is relatively simple, even though the site’s new user flow is slightly awkward. Once a user signs up for a UserVoice account, they customize the look and settings of their dedicated site, and register which Page they’ll add the tab to. What’s confusing is that the Launch step of the flow doesn’t include a direct link to the installation instructions which are buried in the Documentation sidebar tab. These instructions provide the general UserVoice Facebook app’s URL where users must click “Add to my Page” to actually install the configured tab app.

UserVoice’s new iPhone app integration lets clients embed a piece of code in their app, allowing users to submit suggestions, view ideas, and vote. Unique to the integration is a prompt to rate the currently used application. If the user rates it four or five stars, UserVoice provides a link to the App Store where they can submit an official rating. Accumulating positive ratings is crucial to discovery in the crowded app store, making UserVoice a valuable tool to iPhone developers.

UserVoice allows for market research in reverse, where customer feedback find companies and naturally clusters into actionable ideas. While originally designed for web services, it has been used by the city of Santa Cruz to vote on budget options, the city of Vancouver to propose green initiatives, and a record label to find new bands to sign. UserVoice doesn’t aim to replace a traditional customer support system, but does allow feedback to be funneled in a way that’s satisfying for users and functional for clients.