A thread on Quora from Evan Priestley, an engineer with Facebook, outlines how the company has moved videos from its own separate tab to the photos tab on profiles. Pages continue to have a separate video tab with the new layout. The change may temporarily make videos difficult to find for some users.

Priestley responded to a Facebook user’s question about the whereabouts of their videos and with the new information.

Previously the videos were accesible via a link under the profile picture and a video tab at the top of the old profile. Now a user’s videos may be accessed by clicking on the photos tab, then “see all” then clicking on “video.” Here’s the new profile

Videos on Facebook are costly to serve, not tagged as often as photos, reduce cross-site browsing and are not as popular as photos, so burying them may be somewhat in Facebook’s interest. However, many users didn’t have any uploaded or tagged videos, so giving them a separate section needlessly cluttered profile navigation in some cases.

Priestley concludes his answer stating “this is an intentional part of our meticulously orchestrated master plan”, so the change could pave the way for a forthcoming change to media browsing.

Momentus Media has released a new tool called Insto.re that allows brick and mortar businesses to offer customers an in-store reward for Liking their Facebook Page via mobile phone. Business owners set up a deal such as “Free Cookie with Facebook Like”, then customers visit a unique Insto.re URL to view the deal, permit the Facebook app, Like the displayed Page, and show a confirmation screen to the clerk to redeem their reward.

Insto.re is a free, fast, simple but powerful way for local businesses to increase their Facebook fan count and collect email addresses.

Momentus Media has previously released several other lightweight apps to help businesses improve their Facebook presence, including Community Health Grader for analyzing fan engagement, and Badges.

Business owners visit the Insto.re site to set up their reward, select the Page they want to drive Likes to, enter their store’s name and the details of the deal, select whether they want to collect user email addresses, and create a suffix for their unique URL. There’s no rules for how deals can be structured, so businesses can offer a reward for just a Like, or a Like and a purchase.

Once an owner saves the offer, they’ll receive their unique URL and the option to print a table tent card that explains the deal. Owners coud put the table tent in their store, or create their own signage to promote the deal.

After users have begun redeeming the deal by visiting the URL, following its instructions, and showing the confirmation screen to the clerk, owners can export a .CSV file of email addresses of these users if they’ve chosen to collect them.

The whole process of setting up a deal is intuitive and takes less than two minutes. Other services such as Likify that require users to scan a QR code with their mobile device to Like a Page are more clumsy, and don’t let businesses provide an incentive for Liking.

Insto.re provides a low-cost way to acquire Likes. By converting existing customers into fans, businesses can connect and publish updates to people who they know are already interested in spending money with them. Insto.re has the potential to turn the occasional customer into a regular.

For more strategies and tools that can help your business gain fans, visit the the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing on Facebook.

A wide variety of applications composed our list of the top 20 growing Facebook apps this week. Most of the growth for the non-game apps came from outside of the U.S. Our list was compiled based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook, and covers apps that grew the most in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Badoo	3,558,672	+736,988	+26%
2.	flipboard	445,923	+351,998	+375%
3.	Windows Live Messenger	14,465,795	+318,610	+2%
4.	Monopoly Millionaires	535,313	+316,874	+145%
5.	Profile Top Banner	225,916	+211,403	+1,457%
6.	Daily Horoscope	602,675	+201,059	+50%
7.	Sanal Video	416,485	+159,666	+62%
8.	Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game	137,990	+137,852	+99,893%
9.	HTC Sense	4,795,539	+129,425	+3%
10.	Mafia Wars Game	2,323,704	+104,345	+5%
11.	The Fortune Teller	1,094,066	+103,206	+10%
12.	การวิเคราะห์สมอง	100,801	+100,785	+629,906%
13.	Zuma Blitz	1,109,259	+90,321	+9%
14.	Gowalla	113,458	+85,468	+305%
15.	Snaptu	1,213,135	+76,087	+7%
16.	Family Tree	274,439	+73,726	+37%
17.	Dragons of Atlantis	324,214	+66,967	+26%
18.	Yahoo!	6,493,267	+64,669	+1%
19.	Luck Daily!	515,717	+64,046	+14%
20.	Frases Diarias	638,293	+63,751	+11%

Dating app Badoo topped our list this week with 737,000 new DAU, showing this growth in Mexico, France and Italy primarily. Flipboard, which bills itself the “first social magazine” grew by 352,000 DAU this week. Then, Windows Live Messenger, a Facebook integration, saw 318,600 DAU this week with steady growth almost equally among France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Italy and Canada.

A few other Facebook Connect integrations included HTC Sense with 129,400 DAU this week. Gowalla saw 85,500 DAU. Then there was mobile app site Snaptu which grew by 76,000 DAU; users in Indonesia and Mexico seem to be excited about downloading apps such as Mashable, Facebook and Twitter to their phones. Yahoo’s Connect app grew by about 65,000 DAU.
There were a group of miscellaneous apps.

Profile Top Banner, another version of these types of popular apps, had 211,400 DAU this week; the app posts a photo album to the stream, tagging the user in each of the five photos. Daily Horoscope grew mostly in Turkey with 201,000 DAU. Another Turkish app, Sanal Video, an app displaying a variety of videos to be shared to the stream, grew by 159,700 DAU this week.

Frases Diarias (Daily Phrases) grew almost totally in Mexico by 63,800 DAU; the app posts quotes to a users’ stream. Finally, การวิเคราะห์สมอง is a Thai app that claims to analyze the brains of a user’s friends; the app saw about 101,000 DAU this week. Growth seems to come mostly from photos posted in an album to a users’ stream that tags their friends.

An interesting app on our list this week, Family Tree, has potential for growth mostly among a users’ family network; it grew by 73,700 DAU this week. The app asks for lots of permissions, but then asks users to add family members to their family tree; when this is done, a story posts to the family members’ Wall and sends an app request to them. The app also searches your network for family members, suggests them as adds, and posts another notification on their Wall. There are also game-like elements to the app, such as being able to earn badges for adding photos or commenting on photos.

Facebook is testing a major functionality change for its self-serve performance ad tool that would replace the specific Like keyword targeting with broad category targeting. If implemented, this change would make somewhat accurate targeting more accessible to novice advertisers, but severely limit A/B testing and eliminate many advanced strategies used by expert advertisers to attain high click-through rates.

Facebook might decide not to implement the test, or it could add broad category targeting as an additional option. But in the meantime, those in the beta test are stuck without keyword targeting, as Facebook has confirmed that no one can opt out of it.

Normally, advertisers can type the name of a Facebook Page into the Likes & Interests targeting field in the ad creator, and may then select from a drop down menu as well as a number of suggestions to decide who the ad will appear to. This allows advertisers to hone in on a very specific niche of users with whom their ad will resonate.

In the tested interface, users see a tree of two columns with very broad categories in the left pane, such as Activities, Business/Technology, and Sports, that open up into slightly more precise sub-categories in the right pane, such as Cooking, Literature/Reading, and Food & Dining.

Instead of being able to target users who Like the popular console video game Call of Duty: Black Ops, advertisers would have to target the broad category of Activities and the sub-category of Gaming (Console). In this case, an ad for a first-person shooter war-themed game similar to Call of Duty would be shown to users who Like a much wider range of games from puzzlers such as Tetris, to family-friendly platform games such as Super Mario Bros. This would probably lead to a much lower CTR for the ad than if it could be targeted to those who Like especially similar games.

Presumably the goal of the test is to make it easier for those without knowledge of the specific Facebook Pages that relate to their ad’s topic to create somewhat accurate advertising campaigns. In the case of advertising for something with broad appeal, such as a physical book store, being able to target users who Like a wide variety of books, authors, and words related to reading with a single ad targeted to the broad category Literature/Reading could be useful.

Instead of long keyword brainstorming sessions, advertisers could leave it up to Facebook to decide who will see their ads. In August Facebook tested and later implemented a feature that lets advertisers broaden their age targeting to reach a larger audience than they initially specified. However, many advertisers would be outraged and potentially shift ad spend away from Facebook if they could no longer choose their own keywords.

Facebook’s largest advertisers have been slowly moving to use third-party tools built on the Facebook Ads API, which allows advertisers to programmatically run huge, efficient advertising campaigns. Facebook could decide that expert advertisers should use one of these advanced tools while simplifying its own self-serve tool.

Still, the best option would be to offer both, perhaps showing the broad category targeting tool by default to cater to novices, and placing keyword targeting below a fold for experts to find.

Facebook today announced a major improvement to its analytics tool Insights. Page and Open Graph website admins will now be able to see real-time data about the performance of their Like button and Comments Box social plugins; the age, gender, language, and country demographics of their visitors, and which pages of their website are most popular. Admins of websites that aren’t integrated into the Open Graph can now claim their site and receive analytics about organic sharing of their content on Facebook.

The expansion of Open Graph analytics will allow web publishers to gain more actionable data about how to optimize their Facebook integrations, and will draw more sites to add Facebook functionality. Facebook will migrate all admins to this new version of Insights in two months, so all admins should export their existing data to retain access.

At the end of February, Facebook began generating a full news feed story whenever a Like button representing a real-world object is clicked instead of only generating a one-line Recent Activity feed story in some cases. By rolling the share button functionality into the Like button, Facebook paved the way for this update.

Facebook has also been steadily improving Insights, migrating users to a new version and adding real-time performance data on Facebook posts in January. However, these improvements were all for Page and application admins, and didn’t help the 2.5 million third-party websites that feature Facebook’s social plugins. Now Facebook has widened the scope of Insights to include all kinds of websites — both those with and without Open Graph integrations.

Insights for your Domain

Now, when admins visit http://www.facebook.com/insights/ they’ll see their Pages, apps, social plugins, and claimed websites. The new Insights for your Domain allows admins of claimed sites to see performance and demographic data about their Comments Box, Like Buttons, and “shares” — links to a site shared on Facebook by users who post a URL to the news feed or their wall through the publisher.

To claim a website, click the green “Insights for your Domain”, add your domain’s URL, assign the site’s admin privileges to a specific user or all the admins of a specific Page or app, copy the returned meta tag code and place it in the <head> of the root webpage of your domain, and click Check Domain to cause the domain to appear in your list. Subdomains will need tags added to each of them. Since only those with access to the website could add the meta tags, Facebook doesn’t need an additional method of verifying the admin’s identity.

Admins can then view the Website Overview, which contains summaries of several data sets. Site Engagements shows counts for Likes, comments, and shares on and of the site. This gives a broad view of what plugins are performing the best, and what social actions are being taken most. For instance, if an admin sees they’re getting fewer Likes than comments, they might consider moving the Like button closer to their Comments Box social plugin.

Distribution on Facebook shows the total impressions on Facebook of content linking to your site, and the same data sliced into impressions on Like, comment, and share stories. Referral Traffic to Site shows the total clicks, and a breakdown of clicks generated by Like, comment and share stories on Facebook that direct back to a website.

Deep Analytics for Like Buttons, Comments Box plugins, and Shares

Admins can drill down into specific metrics about Likes, comments, and shares. The Like button overview shows total impressions, clicks, and click-through rates of the Like buttons on a site, and the total impressions clicks back to the site, and CTR of the stories generated by the Like buttons.

Admins can also see demographic information in aggregate form about those who clicked Liked buttons or their stories, and a list of the most popular pages on their site ranked by Likes. This data helps admins determine the optimal placement and style of their Like buttons, and refine their Like story for maximum CTR.

The Shares overview displays the number of times a site was shared on Facebook, impressions of those shares, CTR of shares, a list of the most shared webpages, and demographics of those who shared. This data can help admins learn which of their webpages resonate most with Facebook users.

The Comments Box overview displays Comments Box impressions, total comments made, the comment rate (comments divided by impressions), demographics of commenters, and the webpages receiving the most comments. These analytics let admins identify their most discussed webpages and what type of users are commenting.

Since this new version of Insights offers new data fields, developers who want to access this new Insights data programmatically can use the Insights FQL table or the Graph API. Many of the new Insights fields won’t display historical data, as it wasn’t being collected. In two months, Facebook will forcibly migrate all admins to this new version of Insights, and they may lose access to some historical data. Therefore, all admins should export their lifetime data. The migration may anger some admins and developers who prefer to see a data all the way back to the creation of their app or Page.

The data presented in these new fields will help turn succesful management of an Open Graph-integrated website into a more precise science. Larger companies who may have been weary to add social plugins such as the Like button without a clear way of determining their impact will now have real-time data they can use to support their decisions.

Expect the new Insights to further accelerate social plugin implementation. Also, by creating a stepping stone to Open Graph integration for webmasters curious about how their site is being shared, Facebook may be able to convert some hold-outs.

Today Warner Brothers announced that it will begin renting movies to users through Facebook applications, starting with The Dark Knight. By allowing users to pay for digital content, not just virtual goods, with its virtual currency Facebook Credits, Facebook is moving in a bold new direction that encroaches on the territory of iTunes and NetFlix.

However, Facebook users aren’t accustomed to consuming long-form content on the site, and Facebook historically hasn’t been optimized for this kind of user experience. Though Facebook’s enormous audience gives it some advantages, it will have to overcome numerous challenges to become a viable competitor to established content distributors and begin collecting its 30% fee on Credits spent on content sales.

The Warner Bros. promotion allows users in the US to visit The Dark Knight Page, use an application, and pay 30 Facebook Credits (USD $3.00) to gain access to the film for 48 hours. Users can watch full-screen, pause, resume, fast-forward, and rewind the film at their leisure. If they leave Facebook, they can return within the 48-hour period and resume watching by clicking the “Watch” tab on the film’s Page or the bookmark for the app in their home page’s left sidebar.

When not in full-screen mode, users can use Facebook Chat, a Facebook Like button or a Twitter button to share news of their experience with friends. The viewing application is intuitive and the film buffers almost instantly when fast-forwarded. While it hasn’t been tested at large scale, if users want to sit down and watch a full film on Facebook, the current experience is smooth and enjoyable

Advantages and Challenges to Becoming a Content Distributor

Though Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg initially imagined that Facebook could allow users to access media, albeit illegally via his application Wirehog, the Facebook interface has evolved as a social network, not a content library.

Users are accustomed to frequent, short visits and rapid browsing, not staying on a single screen for any extended period of time. Therefore, it may be difficult to get them to sit still and watch a feature-length film, even in segments. The Facebook navigation bar present at the top of the window when not watching full-screen may make users restless, reminding them that compelling news about their friends is always just a click away.

Content management is also an issue. The Facebook application bookmark system is designed to surface your most frequently used apps, and hide the rest below a “more” fold. There’s no way to sort your apps, even alphabetically, so finding a specific film amongst an unruly list of games, apps, and content is a chore. Once a rental expires, its bookmark will likely remain, cluttering the menu.

To attract content producers, such as film studios and record labels, and increase sales, Facebook would also need to provide an effective content discovery system. It has great data to facilitate this, as it could employ the Likes and app usage of a user and their friends to power recommendations. Facebook released such a discovery engine for Pages this summer, though neither it nor its Apps Directory are especially well-designed nor drive much traffic.

Facebook does have some inherent advantages if it chooses to promote itself as a content store. Its nearly 600 million person audience, as well as the built in marketing and viral channels, are attractive to content creators, as evidenced by the large number of Facebook Like buttons and deeper Facebook integrations present across the web.

While Apple currently has a lot more user credit cards already on file, Facebook’s browser-based interface could one-up iTunes, which requires users to be on an Apple device or clumsily authorize another device that has the iTunes application installed to be able to access their content. Facebook users could easily log into a public computer or a friend’s device to begin interacting with or purchasing content.

For now, Facebook doesn’t seem to be taking an overtly active role in this early content distribution trial, simply allowing Warner Bros. to operate within the guidelines of the Platform. There’s nothing stopping other content producers from creating their own similar apps as an additional distribution channel to more established content stores. In fact, if content distribution on Facebook by third-parties became popular, and user were eager to consume content on the site, it could become a significant new revenue source for the site, the way social games have.

Facemoods, an Israeli startup that offers emoticon and animation add-ons to Facebook chat, may now serve as a Facebook Chat client. This means users don’t need be signed onto the Facebook site to chat with Facebook friends upon installing the Facemoods browser add-on for Firefox. The service is also compatible with chat for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Windows Live.

We wrote about Facemoods in August when it had 4.4 million Likes on its Page and 1.5 million weekly active users. At the time the company saw most of its users between the ages of 13 to 34 divided up between the U.S., UK and Western Europe. Now the company’s Page counts more than 9.7 million fans, there are more than 11 million users and these users are now spread across the globe, showing growth in Asia and South America. The company is also profitable.

Installing the browser add-on is simple and fast. Once installed, you can pop-out the Facemoods chat client, close your browser and chat using Facemoods’ animations. If you are not signed into Facebook, you can sign in from the pop-out window. Users can add sound icons, miniature animated movies, animated emoticons, animated and colored text, as well as animations of pop icons like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga to their conversations.

One drawback is that unless you’re chatting with people who also have Facemoods, they won’t be able to see the animations. This could be a boon to the app, though, as it may prompt users to get their friends to install it.

Since Facemoods reduces the need for people to visit Facebook as often since they don’t need to go there to chat with friends, the app could put a small dent in Facebook’s time-on-site and return visits.

Last Friday’s Platform Update on the Facebook Developer’s Blog included announcements regarding the migration to POST for canvas applications, a Javascript SDK for testing in the beta tier, and the termination of the ability to turn normal user accounts into test accounts. It also noted that Facebook has begun enforcing its policy that developers must only use approved ad networks, it has fixed a settings bug in the new version of its Comments Box social plugin released last week, and is recommending that those using the old FBML comments plugin upgrade to this new iFrame version.

Starting March 12th, all canvas applications must embed User IDs in a HTTP POST body to ensuring they aren’t exposed in the HTTP Referrer header. POST for Canvas is the solution Facebook developed for a much publicized issue with third-parties gaining access to User IDs.

All applications on Facebook.com must use this protocol or they will error out. To test the change, developers can go to the Advanced tab of the Developer app, and enable POST for Canvas under Migrations.

Each Monday, Facebook pushes code changes to a beta tier that will go into effect Tuesday afternoon, allowing developers to test their apps for breakage. Facebook will now offer a US english beta version of the JavaScript SDK each Monday that developers can point their apps towards for testing.

If developers experience bugs that can be reproduced on the beta tier but not the live version of Facebook, they should report them with the mark Beta Tier for expedited resolution before the code is pushed. The beta JavaScript SDK should help minimize breakage from weekly pushes, improving Facebook’s standing with the developer community.

Previously, Facebook all0wed developers to convert normal user accounts into test accounts that can’t interact with the rest of the Facebook user base or be turned back into normal accounts. To prevent users from accidentally being turned into test accounts, Facebook has removed the conversion option.

Now, developers must create test accounts via the Graph API using the updated documentation. This should reduce the incidence of horror stories where developers lose all their friend connections because they mistakenly converted themselves into a test account assuming they could change back.

Starting March 11th, admins will no longer be able to install new FBML tap applications on their Pages, and must instead use iFrames. To facilitate this shift, Page management tool provider Wildfire Interactive has released “iFrames for Pages”, an app that makes it easy to create a Like-gated welcome tab that can show a different image or custom HTML to fans and n0n-fans.

The app will be available for free for the next three months, allowing developers with or without coding skills to create a welcome tab that drives Likes.

Since forming in 2008, Wildfire Interactive’s sweepstakes and promotions tools have helped it become one of the top Facebook marketing service providers. The company took $4 million in funding last April, and has been steadily expanding its service offering to include Twitter and email marketing services as well as social media measurement.

Now the Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant is aiming to onboard new customers who are looking for simple way to navigate the migration from FBML to more code-heavy iFrames. Once the three month trial is up, Wildfire chief executive Victoria Ransom tells us the company may continue to offer the app for free, or roll it into one of the tiers of its Promotion Builder suite that cost either $5 or $25 per campaign and $0.99 or $2.99 a day.

Once an admin installs the iFrames for Pages app on one of their Pages and provides Wildfire with their contact information, they’re brought to the app’s editor. There they can select whether they want to Like-gate their app, and then upload images or paste in HTML code for the different versions shown to those who have or haven’t Liked their Page.

The option to upload static images allows those with no coding experience to build a compelling welcome tab. The HTML option offers richer functionality, such as linking to another Page tab app, which is useful for directing users from the welcome tab to a promotion, Like-gated content, or the core functionality of a Page.

To create a custom name for the welcome tab, admins must go into the Edit Page interface, select the Apps tab from the sidebar navigation menu, and click the “Edit Settings” link in the iFrames for Pages pane. They can then replace the default “Welcome” title with another name. One minor shortcoming of the app is that admins have to manually Unlike their own Page to see how the welcome tab looks to users who haven’t Liked the Page.

By recognizing a need stemming from Facebook’s developer roadmap and creating a smooth, free solution, Wildfire has positioned itself well to absorb Page admins seeking a graceful stopgap to the migration problem.

Strategies for how Pages can most effectively use welcome tabs and the new option to direct Facebook ads to a specific Page landing tab can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising on Facebook.

The new version of the Comments Box social plugin for third-party websites that Facebook released last week only gives users the options to login with their Facebook or Yahoo! accounts. However, we’ve just learned that the plugin includes live code supporting logins for accounts from Google, Twitter, and other OpenID providers. This means it might be easy for Facebook to enable logins from additional providers if its relations with these companies improve.

Facebook apparently pulled the public options to use Twitter or Google credentials at the last minute. Facebook recently clashed with Google over data portability and whether users should be able to export email addresses of their Facebook friends to Gmail. Twitter released an app in June that allowed users to see which of their Facebook friends tweet, but a disagreement between the companies led Facebook to block this functionality.

The only legitimate alternative login option to Facebook is Yahoo, which recently began allowing visitors to its network of sites including Yahoo News and Flickr to register for Yahoo accounts or sign in using their Facebook credentials.

Yahoo’s inclusion in the Comments Box could be a repayment for this favor, a sign that Facebook doesn’t consider Yahoo a threat, or the result of it signing some terms or deal with Facebook. Those logged in to the plugin through Yahoo don’t display a profile picture or link back to their account, though, making their comments appear inferior to those from Facebook users.

Modifying the Comments Box

By adding a line of Javascript, Google, Twitter, and other login options can be enabled. Adding  MultiLoginPopup.setProvider('google.com'); initiates the Google OAuth flow, and document.getElementsByClassName(“submitButton”)[0].click() lets users comment from their Google accounts.

A similar code snippet  MultiLoginPopup.setProvider('twitter'); can be used to attempt a Twitter login. This relies on a call to www.facebook.com/connect/twitter_login.php , which is currently unaccessible, causing the authentication to fail. MySpace and other OpenID providers can be enabled by substituting  ’myspace’, ‘myopenid’ or ‘pip.verisignlabs’ for Twitter or Google.

Note that Facebook prohibits modification of the Like button and its other social plugins. Facebook told us that “to provide a consistent and easily identifiable experience across the web, social plugins may not be altered beyond options that are already documented.” Developers should know that they add this JavaScript at their own risk and could be punished.

To provide a consistent and easily identifiable experience across the web, social plugins may not be altered beyond options that are already documented.”

The fact that this live code was left in the plugin means Facebook may be looking optimistically towards its future relations with other web service giants. Legitimate support for these credentials would open commenting on third-party sites that have implemented the plugin to a wider audience, improving discussion.

The Comment Box’s lack of an anonymous login option discourages low quality comments and trolls, though it may also discourage valuable but controversial comments users might not want their friends to associate with them.

Allowing Google as a login option could permit slightly more anonymous commenting, as many users’ Google accounts aren’t as deeply connected to their friends. Allowing users to comment from a widely held account that is tied to their real identity, but not necessarily their entire social graph, could lead to more heated debate without opening the floodgates to abuse.

Facebook could but doesn’t currently provide a way to limit on a comment-by-comment basis the visibility to friends of comments syndicated from the plugin to a user’s news feed. In the absence of such privacy controls, there’s an increased need for an authenticated but disconnected commenting option.

[Thanks to Tom Waddington for the tip.]