Global credit and marketing services giant Experian has acquired Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant and Facebook Ads API beta participant Techlightenment. The acquisition will add social media advertising, brand monitoring, polling, and social CRM services to Experian’s portfolio that includes internet competitive intelligence from the previously acquired Hitwise, and email marketing. Experian can now offer an integrated web and social marketing solution to brands.

The acquisition signals that major marketing companies may be ready to make investments in the future of social media advertising. The field requires special technologies that can be difficult to develop internally, so marketing companies may look to instead purchase existing tools. Hitwise indicated that Facebook was the most visited website of 2010, making it obvious that Experian will have to offer Facebook advertising services if it wants to stay competitive.

Our profile of Techlightenment’s Facebook Ads API tool Alchemy found it to have a powerful system for quickly creating thousands of ad creative and targeting variants, and running multi-variate testing to determine the best performing ads. Spend can then be shifted to these top ads to produce highly efficient and successful campaigns. Users can set up rules in the tool such as “if when this ad hits 500,000 impressions the CPC is higher than .36 cents, then lower bid to .30 cents” in order to optimize spend as click through rates shift and ads grow stale.

We’ve profiled nearly a dozen Ads API tools and Alchemy is one of the best ways to manage Facebook advertising spend, making Techlightenment a great choice for an acquisition. The tool is intuitive, which will make it easy to train Experian’s marketing services division that Techlightenment will be joining.

As of June, Techlightenment had 30 employees and a $7 million in annual revenue. Experian reports that Techlightenment’s revenue has grown to $7.9 million for the year, and its gross assets at the end of 2010 totaled to $3.9 million.  The majority stake was acquired from Techlightenment’s founders, including Ankur Shah, co-founder and co-CEO, who said that “combined with Experian’s global scale and data expertise, we are perfectly positioned to take the benefits of our products and services to a wider audience.”

In this week’s look at interesting new marketing campaigns on Facebook, Redbox used a Facebook application to draw in fans while Westfield Valley Fair used discounts and Places check-ins, Equinox gyms used photos and MET-Rx nutritional supplements went with video.

Redbox’s Movie Awards Facebook App

Goal: Fan engagement; network exposure; Page growth; sales growth.

Core Mechanic: Facebook application that allows a user to select their own winners for movie award shows, then publish their choices to the stream.

Method: The Movie Awards Facebook App, located on the Award Show tab,allows users to make their own movie award picks, invite friends to play, and “compete” with movie critics to receive a “score” once the shows air. The app is sponsored by Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn and people who win through the app may be eligible for a free year of movie rentals, in addition to the app’s badges that are awarded for different app actions. For example, locking in your selections garner you the “Golden Lock” badge, which then posts to your stream. The Movie Awards app runs from the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards on January 14, through the Golden Globes on January 16, to the Oscars on February 27.

Impact: According to our PageData tool, Redbox has added more than 13,000 Likes this week alone, leading up to the first actual awards show that forms part of the app.

Westfield Valley Fair

Goal: Drive actual sales at physical stores; network exposure.

Core Mechanic: Rewarding fans with discount coupons when they use Places to check-in to the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara, Calif.

Method: Working with Fan Appz’s Places integration, Westfield Valley Fair began to offer coupon discounts to patrons who checked into the mall. By checking in fans can unlock coupons to different stores located within the mall. Fan Appz’s software allows users to change these offers regularly.

Impact: We first reported this Places integration in September and since the mall’s Facebook Page reports more than 4,000 check-ins; that’s about 1,000 a month.

To see the rest of campaigns, check the Cases section of Inside Facebook’s The Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook has begun allowing developers to ask users for their mobile phone number and home addresses in a move that will show the best and worst of the Facebook Platform. Most critics have immediately focused on how greedy developers will request the data in order to spam users, which is a valid concern. But the access will also enable the creation of apps that keep friends connected via SMS and facilitate ecommerce by pre-populating delivery details.

Though the risks are high, Facebook should not impede innovation for fear of spammers, but instead push forward while minimizing negative outcomes by helping users make more informed decision.

Reduce Risk through Clarity

The biggest problem with access to contact information is that the permission requests for these highly sensitive data fields are not distinguished from requests for more benign data like a user’s Event RSVPs or privileges like publishing to their stream. Some apps ask for a stack of a half dozen permissions, so users have learned to blindly click “Allow” to speed through to the desired application rather than read them all, assuming they aren’t giving away anything too valuable, or can revoke access later.

Facebook should slow users down and convey the dangers of permitting access to contact info more clearly by making this request a separate step with a bold warning, rather than a quiet, uniform addition to the list of permissions users are familiar with, as we suggested upon seeing the announcement. This would reduce the threat without forcing Facebook to adopt an unscalable system such as approving developers’ access to this part of the Graph API on a one-by-one basis.

Meanwhile, the change could prompt unscrupulous developers to build apps that intentionally ask for a lot of permissions in order to mask that they are pulling the contact information from unsuspecting users. If they succeed, users will become inundated with spam, blame Facebook for this negative experience, and leading to a drop in quality and trust in the Platform.

It’s important to remember that Facebook has long prohibited developers from sharing any user data with third-parties. Users have been granting permission to some kinds of valuable data, including their current location and email address, without widespread problems.

When there have been issues, such as when data broker Rapleaf and developers were caught buying and selling User IDs that did not even contain private data, Facebook has policed accordingly. Data privacy is an inherent problem with developer platforms, but the issues are balanced by the benefits generated by the fun and useful apps that live on them.

One troubling fact is how Facebook announced this major change. Instead of in a dedicated post with mention of the potential risks, it was merely part of a weekly dispatch about bug fixes and migration deadline extensions — with no commentary on its impact. It was published on Friday evening of a three-day weekend,  at 8:16pm PST, diffusing immediate feedback, and later the post’s timestamp was changed to 6:00pm. If people are going to trust that the site has their well-being in mind, Facebook needs to concentrate on mitigating risks for users, not minimizing backlash to itself.

The Rewards of Mobile Phone and Address-Aware Apps

There are many benefits to allowing developers to ask users for their contact information. Mobile phone number access could power apps that act as up-to-the-minute communication hubs between groups of friends, allowing members to be notified by SMS when friends are nearby, want to plan an event, or upload new content. Home address access could let ecommerce sites pre-populate delivery details during checkout, leveling the playing field so smaller merchants can compete with established giants like Amazon that have already forced users to type in their address manually.

Other potential apps could allow you to share an electronic business card with others; get text message updates about group deals, news, or game activity; discover businesses that are close to home, or instantly sign up to receive physical catalogs or coupons via snail mail. While Facebook’s hasty development might challenge the beliefs of some, it doesn’t make sense to delay these useful additions in an attempt to protect users.

Many technologies come with associated risks. Airplanes crash and medicines have side effects, but these advances as well as platforms like Facebook’s, are the future. The user base will need education so they understand how to recognize and assess risks for themselves, and this first incarnation of mobile phone number and home address extended permissions doesn’t provide it. However, Facebook is doing the right thing by giving users the choice of what to share, even if it is currently doing it in the wrong way.

Three apps pulled in huge numbers of new users on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users: CityVille, Badoo and Marketplace. Growth was also significant for a range of other apps and games.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	100,256,070	+3,678,154	+4%
2.	Badoo	19,138,845	+2,212,809	+13%
3.	Marketplace	16,190,490	+2,112,495	+15%
4.	Causes	25,219,707	+900,009	+4%
5.	FarmVille 中文版	2,832,729	+823,326	+41%
6.	BandPage by RootMusic	13,597,130	+726,436	+6%
7.	Prosperous New Year To All My Friends :)	15,372,155	+615,990	+4%
8.	Farmandia	1,776,561	+567,823	+47%
9.	Monster Galaxy	5,503,284	+540,745	+11%
10.	Las personas que mas revisan tu perfil	411,075	+410,958	+351,246%
11.	GodsWar Online	848,335	+388,094	+84%
12.	Komşu Çiftlik	1,909,885	+384,072	+25%
13.	It Girl	7,671,328	+362,992	+5%
14.	Windows Live Messenger	14,716,742	+353,504	+2%
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,337,038	+332,647	+0.92%
16.	Friends photomontage	446,737	+328,937	+279%
17.	Что твои друзья думают о тебе?	578,964	+310,354	+116%
18.	寵物戰爭	657,795	+300,872	+84%
19.	TheFacepad	638,458	+270,708	+74%
20.	Likes Likes	1,038,785	+270,148	+35%

Zynga once again gets top billing with CityVille, but the new game’s growth has slowed from over two million new MAU per day to around two hundred thousand. However, Zynga also makes the list with its Chinese-language localization, FarmVille 中文版. Interestingly there are two strong farming games on the list including Farmandia; we look at both a bit more closely this morning at Inside Social Games.

Badoo is the real story, at least among non-game apps. The Hot-or-Not style dating app has taken the title as Facebook’s largest in the category, and the seventh-largest app overall by MAU. The interesting detail is that competitor SNAP Interactive, which has 14 million MAU with Are YOU Interested?, just raised $8.5 million in a venture funding. Watch for the single user acquisition wars to begin.

Marketplace is the third app to grow significantly. The Facebook-sanctioned auction app is now at an all-time MAU high. The flipside of this is that its stickiness is at an all-time low, with just one percent of users returning as daily actives, so its MAU should fall in fairly short order.

Most of the remaining apps are returning. The one most worth pointing out is BandPage by RootMusic, which has picked up again; at this point, the app is Facebook’s clear leader for music pages. That’s a trend that should continue as the company adds features, something it just took on $2.3 million in new funding to do.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, January 10th, 2011

• Atari’s Faeries vs. Darklings is a Magical Journey into Match-3 on Facebook
• CityVille Slows Down on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Platform Clients Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Mobile Apps Connected to Facebook
• Poking Fun at the Monotony of Work on Facebook with Office Daze

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

• Players Try to Make Games with Game Studio Story on Facebook
• AppPrizes Adds Tournaments to Lightweight Social and Casual Games
• EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge Comes to Facebook
• Facebook’s Big Credits Push Shows Itself in CityVille, Other Top Social Games

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

• Numulus Brings Cross-Platform Puzzling to Facebook & iOS
• Large Developers, International Apps Own This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• Super Rewards Parent Company Adknowledge Raises $200M Round for Broad Advertising Expansion
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Ubisoft, NaturalMotion, & More
• CityVille Edges Past 100 Million MAU – Over Half Are International Users

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

• Care for Facebook Fuzzballs with Fuzzits!
• RockYou Buys Playdemic, Aims for More Social Gaming Expansion
• Viximo Signs New Partners, Predicts Strong Growth Off Facebook
• Only a Handful of Tickets Left – Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 on January 25th
• New Hires in Social Gaming: Appssavvy, Atommica, Digital Chocolate, & More

Friday, January 14th, 2011

• Preview: 6 Waves to Publish Spartacus on Facebook
• Playdom Veterans Move On Into Mobile Startups
• GodsWar, Pet Fighting, Poker and More on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Neonga and Mad Otter Plan a More Ambitious MMO for Facebook
• Social Gaming Roundup: New CrowdStar CEO, Bigpoint Acquisition, & More

Saturday, January 15th, 2011

• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: A Bit Lucky, Arkadium, Menue, & More

In another part of its effort to become the main artery for social data, Facebook is now allowing developers to ask a given user for their physical address and phone number within the user object of the Graph API. This information, announced as part of this week’s developer blog post update, helps anyone from game developers to mail and phone marketers reach directly to where users are at all times.

Because it’s so sensitive, Facebook requires developers to ask for a separate set of permissions within the main “Request for Permission” interface. Now developers can build applications that leverage this new access to user data, though note that developers can only be granted access to the address and mobile phone number of the user authenticating the application – not that user’s friends as well.

Given this new sharing option, users should be even more careful about reading what they see on the permissions page, rather than just clicking through. While quick sharing makes for a more seamless user experience, we could see Facebook itself providing an additional prompt asking users to confirm that they want to share this information, in order to help prevent accidental sharing.

This change to the Graph API will enable the development of a new generation of mobile and location-based applications.

The other piece of news from the post this week: Facebook has added a long-requested way to subscribe to the “edge.remove” to track when a user unlikes a page. This will Page admins immediately recognize if something they’ve done, like post a controversial status update, is causing users to unsubscribe. Facebook recently added an easier way to unlike Pages through a button on news feed stories, so admins should subscribe to “edge.remove” for real-time data on user departures.

UK’s The Independent Allows Granular Facebook Subscriptions – In a blog post this week the UK paper The Independent announced that its web site will now allow users to Like a particular football team or authors on its Page in order to follow that content back on Facebook. It’s another step in making Facebook a central information-consumption service.

The First Facebook Phone? – If you recall, last fall there was a big hoopla about Facebook developing its own phone. Well, Pocketnow reports that the INQ Cloud Touch is the first of two “Facebook phones,” as it has deep Facebook integration. The phone in question is the next version of a model that has had Facebook integration for years.

Facebook’s Rosenthal Leaves, Built Mobile Carriers to 300 – Alison “Ali” Rosenthal from Facebook’s business development team is leaving the company this week. She worked primarily on mobile business development recently, especially in overseeing and growing Facebook’s relationship with 300 mobile operators globally.

Best Times for Pages Posts – SocialFresh published a set of conclusions on the best times for Facebook Pages to post updates, using data from Vitrue’s blog and Facebook’s Data team’s Page. Specifically, the best times include 3 p.m. EST when the largest number of users are active on Facebook. There is also a morning peak at 11 a.m., and an evening peak at 8:00pm EST. Despite the 3 p.m. peak, the morning probably is due to the fact that nighttime gives posts time to accrue Likes and comments before the night’s drop in engagement. Vitrue said morning posts were 39.7% more effective than afternoon posts. Monday is when the most users are posting and Wednesday when the most users are commenting. Avoid Saturday and Sunday when engagement is the lowest.

Facebook Purchased FB.com for $8.5 Million – We reported last year that Facebook’s employees were going to be using the fb.com domain name internally, and not it’s come to light that Facebook paid the Farm Bureau $8.5 million to do so.

Pentagon Manages Its Own Social Media – Although The Pentagon previously hired people to teach staffers how to use social media, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs now is having his staff of 100 or so does the job in-house.

Mixpanel Analytics Grows 40% Monthly - TechCrunch reported that Mixpanel, an analytics startup, is its data volume 40% each monthly, tracking more than 1 billion actions a month and is set to add to its current data set the ability for users to create “custom email digests of data” either hourly or daily and bookmarks that allow users to track “visitor retention by source.”

Winklevoss Twins in Court Again - The twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who have been carrying on a legal dispute with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, are back in court. They’re now trying to get a better deal on a 2008 settlement currently worth around $140 million in Facebook stock, claiming that Facebook had misrepresented the value of the company at the time and as a result gave them less stock than they feel they deserve.

Facebook Participating in IPv6 Upgrade – Facebook, along with other major Internet companies, has agreed to participate in the first global trial of IPv6, the upgrade to the Internet’s primary communications protocol, IPv4. The test will run on June 8.

Stanford Students Created Facebook-Like Site in 1999 – Whatever the Winklevosses may claim about the originality of what they were trying to build this past decade, The Stanford Daily has a story this past week about a social networking website created at Stanford University in 1999 by students that combined information from the Stanford directory with photos from the university’s “Facebook.” The university ultimately shut down the site. [Image Via Stanford Daily]

SNAP Interactive Raises $8.5M for Social Dating – SNAP Interactive, which claims 30 million installs for its social dating app across its platforms, including Facebook and iPhone, is set to raise $8.5 million in a “private placement transaction.” TechCrunch reported that the company has agreed to sell about 4.25 million shares of common stock in the deal.

Influence Measurer Klout Gets $8.5M – Startup Klout, which measures influence across the social web, raised $8.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins’ sFund. Bing Gordon will join the board. This brings Klout’s total to $10 million.

Facebook Struggles in Japan, Thrives in Taiwan – Although Facebook has yet to take command of Japan’s online audiences, users in Taiwan are increasingly flocking to the social network. comScore reported that Facebook’s visitors in Taiwan almost beat Yahoo’s Wretch.cc social network there and the company hit 9 million users in January. In Japan meanwhile, there are less than 2 million users.

MySpace to Lay Off 500 – MySpace is set to lay off about 500 workers, about 47% of its workforce, and is also entertaining potential purchase offers.

Next Video is an app that aggregates the most frequently shared comedic YouTube videos on Facebook into a content channel that offers a relaxing, laid back viewing experience. Independently developed on top of the Graph API by a 20 year-old Rutgers student, the simple interface lets users skip to another video, save favorites, and share interesting videos to their news feed.

Next Video is an example of the compelling products that can be created using Facebook’s publicly available user data.

Developer Thomas O’Malley was unsatisfied with YouTube’s native browsing interface. He saw Facebook as the determinant of whether a video went viral, and believed that “the first thing you do when you find something interesting is go to Facebook and share it with friends.” So he developed Next Video in the span of three weeks to allow users to discover and comment on videos without leaving Facebook.

Next Video searches the stream of public Facebook posts for links YouTube videos accompanied by keywords that indicate the video is humorous, such as “funny” and “hilarious”. The videos that have been shared the most over the past few days are collected and streamed through the app sequentially, relieving the users of the burden of choice.

The app uses Facebook’s Comments social plugin to allow users to express their opinions as well and attract new users, since it defaults to publish a user’s comments to their profile along with a link back to the app. Since Next Video constantly features new content, users will likely continue to tune in once they’ve installed it.

Next Video’s model could easily be applied to other styles of videos or types of media. Someone could create a version that displays “cute” or “weird” videos, or that aggregates links to songs on SoundCloud, photos on Flickr, or news articles on CNN.

While we believe Facebook’s recommended privacy settings — sharing posts and photos with everyone — are too cavalier, they facilitate apps like Next Video. If Facebook suggested that users restrict the visibility of their posts, there might not be enough data to accurately gauge the popularity of different types of content. In this way, Facebook’s recommended settings risk the safety or reputation of some users in exchange for creating value from the public data for the entire world.

O’Malley’s goal isn’t to immediately monetize the app with ads, but to build its user base and add features such as a feed of the original posts about the video currently being shown, and a way to see what friends have watched. The app is currently bootstrapped, but O’Malley says he’d consider taking a small amount funding in order to accelerate development.

Next Video demonstrates how the Facebook Platform helps to offer a relatively open playing field, where one person with an idea can invent something great. While in the past kids might have played guitar in their bedroom dreaming of becoming the next Rolling Stones, now they can build apps and dream of becoming the next Zynga.

Facebook’s deliberate approach to designing and launching its long-anticipated iPad app has created an opening for enterprising developers.

Two of them, Loytr and Oecoway Inc., have racked up two million monthly active users between themselves and hopefully, made a little money too. Loytr’s Facepad (shown at the bottom of the story) has gained 546,931 monthly active users up from none at the beginning of the month when it launched. Meanwhile Friendly for iPad (shown above), which is older and came out in July of last year, has accumulated 1,494,593 monthly active users according to AppData. A third Facebook iPad app called Touch HD currently has 26, 125 monthly actives.

Both Facepad and Friendly have free and paid versions, which are currently $0.99. Facepad’s paid counterpart comes without advertising, while Friendly’s free version lets you try before you buy.

Although Facepad seems to be quickly catching up to its rival, its DAU/MAU ratio, a measure of stickiness that compares daily active users to monthly actives ones, falls short compared to Friendly. Facepad’s DAU/MAU has tumbled down to below 20 percent, while Friendly’s has hovered steadily around 32 percent for the past month.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.