White House Pushes Privacy Bill – The Obama Administration is seeking to create a privacy bill of rights intended to protect Internet users. This week administration officials asked Congress to pass the legislation aimed at regulating data gathering online. It’s unclear how Facebook might be impacted. [Photo Via White House]

European Union Requires Stricter Rules for Facebook – The European Union is set to overhaul its 16 year-old privacy rules to address social networking; these rules would target the way Facebook and other companies utilize user data.

Facebook’s Engineering Team on New Insights – Facebook’s Engineering team wrote a post about the thought that went into building the new Insights system.

Facebook Makes Tech PR Hire – Facebook has hired Caryn Marooney, co-founder of OutCast Agency, to lead its tech public relations strategy. The Director of Technology Communications position specifically does outreach with the tech community, reported AllThingsD. [Image Via Twitter]

Facebook Implements Micro Servers – Intel powers power and space saving technology that has caught the attention of Facebook; these micro servers may be part of a “mass deployment” for the company’s operations in late 2011 or 2012, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook Comments Better and Worse – Facebook-enabled commenting has reduced the percentage of commenting overall and per post, according to an analysis by TechCrunch. But another analysis shows that Google Buzz increased by 30% and Likes increased total and average numbers.

Facebook Changes Comments – Facebook users may now post comments without having to hit “Share,” and simply press Enter on their keyboards.

Facebook Changes Places, Features Memorable Statuses – Facebook has changed other parts of its interface, too. Eti Suruzon points out that Facebook adds “Nearby Places” to Places Pages now, and also features a “Memorable Status Updates” module on the right-hand side.

Android for Facebook Updated - The Facebook Android app was updated, specifically when it comes to photos, security, Deals and chat.

Netflix’s Facebook Integration Has Begun – Netflix has begun asking customers to synchronize their accounts with their Facebook accounts, allowing them to share what they’re watching with their network. The integration allows a users’ friends to see they’re a Netflix member, what they’re watched, rated, what’s in queue, Likes, interests, and more.

Facebook Shares Used By Fraudsters - The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority warned potential investors to be wary of pre-IPO stock offerings, such as Facebook. One securities trader tricked more than 50 investors into forking over $9.6 million involving fake Facebook stock.

MXP4’s Pump It Facebook’s Top Music Game – MXP4’s Pump It game is the number one game on Facebook, or so the company press release claims. The game has been used by 30 artists, such as Enrique Iglesias and Nelly Furtado, and has more than 1.3 monthly active users.

Brighter Option Releases Social Ad Manager Update – Brighter Option, a company that allows clients to create, target, and bid on ads at a large scale through a self-service tool, released version 2.5 of its Social Ad Manager. The new version offers more information about performance, scheduling, campaign timeline and interest clusters.

Facebook Instrumental in Investigative Journalism – A Denver television journalist won a duPont-Columbia Award after using Facebook for an investigation into housing scams resulting in foreclosures.

Facebook to Stream Baseball Games Free – Facebook is set to stream Major League Baseball pre-season games live until the end of the month.

Facebook now allows application developers to batch requests so they can more efficiently access the Graph API. Developers can batch up to 20 requests, batch multiple HTTP methods and FQL queries, and can order operations to specify dependencies between them.

The capability should help developers build faster, more efficient apps that can access large amounts of data without putting as much server strain on Facebook.

The Graph API was designed for accessing a single object so previously, developers had to send each Graph API request separately. However, it’s more efficient to batch these requests into a single HTTP request, so Facebook has released the capability to everyone’s benefit.

Facebook has created detailed documentation that walk through several different cases of batched requests. One highlight is the ability for operations reference the results of previous operations in a batch using JSONPath expressions.

Facebook has long been dedicated to using progressive coding techniques both internally, and for its Platform. Some developers are applauding the advance, making batch requests a success in terms of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to improve its standing with the Platform community.

Blackberry’s new Facebook application, Facebook 2.0 in beta, is a big improvement over the previous version, which was cumbersome because it was designed with menu after menu to scroll through to do anything. The new application is much more sleek, easier to use and faster, to boot.

Facebook for Blackberry now has an interface that’s much easier to navigate on a phone. When you open the app, there are two drop-down menus, one on the left and one on the right. The menu on the left includes most of the Facebook functions: News Feed, Profile View, notifications, search, messages, friends, chat, Places, photos and options. The drop-down on the right Blackberry calls the “notifications bar” shows you daily updates of notifications, messages, friend requests and chat conversations you have received.

Which brings us to the highlight of Blackberry’s new Facebook app: chat. The chat function is part of the left drop-down menu and is simple to use. If you’re not already online to chat, the app will sign you in, and then friends you can chat with are indicated by a green circle, just like on Facebook. You may either press enter or send via the menu each time you type a message; although chatting on a phone isn’t as easy as on a computer, plus, many people already communicate short messages on their phones via text messages.

Blackberry has also chosen to emphasize photos and Places in the new Facebook application. Previously, these functions were part of a menu that ran across the top of the interface, whereas now the default or “home” interface weaves in the upload photos feature on the left, status update in the middle, and Places icon on the right. Which is to say, Blackberry’s new Facebook app is designed to be as useful as possible to users connecting via mobile phone.

The app also creates utility by making Facebook more like a phone book, when users look up a friend or look at their profile the menu allows you to see their Facebook information — such as Wall, photos, information, poke, view mutual friends — but also to call them if you have their phone number, connect via Blackberry Contacts if you do not and request their phone number.

Comments and Likes used to be displayed in small print underneath each item in your news feed, but now next to each item is a + symbol which Blackberry calls the “more button,” which is where users can go to to comment or Like a post.

Blackberry wrote yesterday that more than 10,000 downloads had occurred in 24 hours since the apps’ release, since it’s still in beta, the company released 10,000 more. The update brings Blackberry’s Facebook app up to speed with recent platform changes, as the company hadn’t significantly redesigned the app for three years. For more news and market research to the mobile application ecosystem, visit Inside Mobile Apps.

[Images Via Blackberry]

Facebook’s location checkin service Places is now available to users in Brazil, India, Singapore, the Philippines, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, other countries around the world, according to users in those countries. We’re checking with Facebook about the scope of the launch — the company has been slowly rollling the feature out since August, starting with iPhones and Facebook mobile sites in the US, often waiting until smart phone penetration reaches critical mass in a certain country before launching.

Update: Facebook tells us that the rollout covers just about everywhere, with some notable exceptions.”We are confirming that Places has become globally available with the exception of Korea and Russia where we are working to launch Places soon,” a spokesperson tells us.

The widespread launch today could indicate that there are many countries with the appropriate smartphone penetration, or the company could just be releasing it to everyone everywhere to see how it’s used.

Over the last few months, Places has become available in the U.K., Japan, Canada, France, Italy, Australia, Denmark and several other countries. Simultaneously, the major handheld device operating systems including Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Palm webOS have gained support for Places through their native Facebook apps.

Some international users couldn’t wait until their country officially received Places, and instead employed US-hosted VPN accounts to be able to checkin locally.

Facebook has chosen international countries with high smart phone penetration to launch Places because there are the spots where users have a way to checkin. If Facebook launches too early before smart phones have proliferated, Places wouldn’t receive enough checkins to convince locals of its value.

[Image via Mobiputing.]

The field of mobile and social apps looking to breakout this week at SXSW was quite crowded. But it looks like almost everyone got a bump in active usage and downloads. Personally, I got pulled into eight GroupMe groups and found myself drifting back to Foursquare from Facebook Places. So New York — not Silicon Valley — won SXSW for me.

To get a more accurate picture of how SXSW impacted different apps, we pulled data on Facebook usage from AppData and looked at iOS app store rankings through AppAnnie and install numbers on Android Marketplace. Unlike many of the mobile games we cover, apps like Foursquare and Instagram are inherently social. They almost always have a strong Facebook integration so these numbers are a decent — if imperfect — proxy for growth.

When looking at the charts below, there are a few things to keep in mind. For some apps like Ditto, where is the no alternative to logging in with Facebook, these numbers actually measure total usage. But for others like Instagram, which only uses Facebook to find new friends, these numbers account for probably less than half of the apps’ total usage. How many people choose to log in with Facebook depends on how well the integration is designed.

The iOS app store rankings are based on pure downloads while Android shows installations (a better metric since it doesn’t count apps that have been downloaded and then later deleted). Android will show a range of installations (e.g. 10,000 to 50,000 or 10 million to 50 million), but not an exact number.

So this is an imperfect way of looking at app usage, but it’s better than reading press releases about downloads or registered users.

Group Messaging

Recently acquired by Facebook, Beluga still made a strong showing at SXSW, grabbing more than 16 thousand monthly active Facebook users during the past week. It also held its iOS app store ranking higher than much-hyped GroupMe through out the entire interactive part of the conference. While Facebook will keep the app alive, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Facebook launch its own standalone group messaging app in the next six months.

Daily active users on Facebook: 7,583 (+1,703 last 7 days)
Monthly active users on Facebook: 79,907 (+16,062 last 7 days)
Installs on Android Marketplace: Between 100,000 and 500,000

Ironically, we can’t really track the app that I seemed to be most dependent on at SXSW. Because it uses phone numbers and Twilio’s API to seed its userbase, it is difficult to get a handle on GroupMe’s daily and monthly active usage. GroupMe has a Facebook integration, but it’s buried three clicks into the app so that metric isn’t going to be very accurate.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Basketball brackets and the NBA were popular this week in the face of March Madness and the upcoming NCAA Tournament. There were a few apps in languages other than English, including a Turkish video application, and other apps in  Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai and Spanish. Profile banner apps were conspicuously absent from our list.

We compile this list of top 20 emerging apps based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook covering apps that grew the most in the past week, ending at between 100,000 and 1 million monthly active users.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	開心探寶	815,768	+761,292	+1,397%
2.	VidyoTV Video	703,667	+408,622	+138%
3.	Tư vấn vui	363,887	+323,690	+805%
4.	Spot The Difference	778,456	+306,280	+65%
5.	Video75 Videoları	794,996	+287,939	+57%
6.	NBA Legend: Official NBA Game	448,799	+253,583	+130%
7.	Super Billares	911,914	+244,207	+37%
8.	CBSSports.com Brackets	245,785	+229,754	+1,433%
9.	Fish World	981,763	+228,157	+30%
10.	การวิเคราะห์สมอง	548,232	+226,827	+71%
11.	Yılbaşı Hediyeleri	328,950	+213,441	+185%
12.	Pirates Saga	780,609	+206,574	+36%
13.	Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game	711,106	+204,105	+40%
14.	英雄遠征-開心農場	847,134	+201,542	+31%
15.	Okey Plus	800,053	+197,211	+33%
16.	My Kingdom	250,878	+178,117	+245%
17.	Poker Texas Boyaa	858,612	+163,982	+24%
18.	Bracket Challenge by Citizen Sports	276,420	+160,780	+139%
19.	Slotomania – Slot Machines	910,592	+156,808	+21%
20.	DDTank	472,391	+151,348	+47

The NBA’s official game, NBA Legend, was on our list of emerging apps this week, adding 253,600 MAU. In the face of March Madness, the game grew 130%, we reviewed the game previously, on Inside Social Games. Two basketball bracket apps were quite popular on Facebook this week, too. CBS Sports brackets added 229,800 MAU this week; the app is pretty straightforward, allowing users to pick their final four and share to the news feed.

Brack Challenge by Citizen Sports, however, was much more complex and created many more opportunities for news feed exposure; it grew 160,800 MAU this week. The app includes a $5,000 grand prize related to the final four brackets, also syncs with an iPhone app, includes trivia questions and allows for extra alerts to your stream. When you play trivia, if you don’t know the answer, you can share the question to your stream for “help” from your friends. You can Like your own bracket once it’s created to receive alerts in your news feed and you can check into games, which also creates a news feed story.

Then there were three Turkish video apps. VidyoTV Video grew by 408,600 MAU; every time you view a video a link posts to your Wall, although users may also share videos manually. Video75 Videoları grew about 288,000 MAU this week; when you use the app a news feed story is generated, users may also Like, share or comment on videos. Finally,  Yılbaşı Hediyeleri saw 213,400 MAU this week.

There was a Vietnamese horoscope app that posts horoscopes to your Wall;  Tư vấn vui grew by 323,700 MAU. Spot The Difference, an app that asks users to compare two photos and point out their differences saw 306,300 MAU this week. Finally,  การวิเคราะห์สมอง, the Thai brain analysis app that posts photos of users’ friends to the stream saw 226,800 MAU this week.

On Tuesday, Facebook began signing up users for Deals, its answer to Groupon and other group-buying services. Subscribers will receive updates in their news feed and potentially by email about pre-paid coupons and experiences they can purchase. Businesses can work with Facebook’s Merchant Services team to arrange and promote Deals such as discounts on going out to a restaurant, the movies, or a wine-tasting tour.

Instead of being distributed through Pages, stories about Deals will be injected directly into the news feed, allowing Facebook to give them as much visibility as it sees fit. This special ability to manipulate the news feed could give it a big advantage over Groupon, LivingSocial, and other third-party group deal providers.

But there was some confusion when users first began seeing the option to subscribe to Facebook Deals in their news feed. The product was given the title previously reserved for Facebook’s location-based rewards system, now referred to as Checkin Deals, that lets local business offer users discounts for visiting their physical location and checking in.

Instead, the new Facebook Deals is indeed a competitor to Groupon, and doesn’t require users to share their location. Instead, they’ll be able to share the news of their purchase. Facebook can increase at will the EdgeRank, or news feed visibility, of both initial updates about Deals and these user shares about purchases.

This means Deals stories might be seen by an unusually high percentage of users in Deals markets, driving signups and purchases. If Facebook sets the EdgeRank of Deals stories higher than normal Page updates and shares, it could have a major advantage over third-party deals providers who must either use less visible Page updates or buy ads from Facebook to reach the social network’s enormous user base.

Facebook says its initial tests of Deals will be free for businesses to offer, but we expect it to begin charging businesses a percentage of user spend in exchange for the distribution. Facebook could charge the same 30% fee it charges applications developers through its Facebook Credits virtual currency payment system, match Groupon’s 50% fee, or set a new rate.

If it does begin charging business to offer deals, it will be the first time Facebook has directly monetized the news feed (aside from news feed ads that it tested years ago). Since it is selling news feed distribution through the Deal updates channel and earning money for each additional purchase, Facebook has a big short-term monetary incentive to make Deals as prominent in the news feed as possible.

However, users have grown to love the news feed because it shows them what they care about, not ways to spend money. Deals could be both, but Facebook must make sure not to place low quality offers above important updates from friends. Otherwise, it risks reducing the news feed’s perceived value to users, which could negatively impact the site’s long-term engagement rate.

If Facebook can seamlessly blend Deals updates into the feed and make them valuable and social, it may have found an enormous new revenue stream, and third-party group buying services will have serious new competitor.

When pressure from protesters helped bring down the Egyptian and Tunisian governments in recent months, Facebook was credited by many organizers and outside observers as being a key tool for the revolution.

Why? Real-world friendships, and features like user profile walls, the news feed, Pages and of course Events provided a new way to first spread new ideas and then plan follow-up actions — or so anecdotal evidence suggests. See this New York Times article for some good examples.

But, of course, Egyptian grievances against now-departed ruler Hosni Mubarak had been festering for decades and was spilling it into the open regardless of any particular piece of technology helping the organizers. And between print, television, mobile phones and other web sites, there were other ways of communicating. And, there is the whole angle of why the revolt was successful — was the Egyptian military making a bid to preserve its power against Mubarak, and using protestors as a vehicle?

Zooming in from these larger questions, we can see that Facebook was at least one factor, and so more data is needed to show how it affects politics in the Middle East and elsewhere. And we have that data, in the form of our Inside Facebook Gold report, which includes historical number on the company’s traffic around the world.

So, here’s a closer look at the Middle East, including North African and Central Asian countries. The table below shows traffic we tracked for each country on February 1st and March 1st, along with the numerical and percentage change over February, and the portion of each country’s population that is currently on Facebook.

While a few countries got on Facebook years ago, almost every country in the region has seen its traffic to the site grow by at least 50%, and some have grown by 100% in the past 12 months. Those levels of growth are not unique to the region as it’s what we’ve seen most other places as well. Let’s look at specific countries to see if more unusual trends emerge.

Countries

Tunisia, where the first wave of protests began in December, has a relatively high 21.1% of the population on Facebook, or about 2.20 million out of the 10.4 million people in the country. Facebook growth had been in the double-digit thousands during across the later months of last year, only growing by more than a hundred thousand a month once the revolution was under way. For the last twelve months, it grew by 73.9%.

Moving over to the next location of a revolution, Egypt grew the most out of any Middle Eastern country in February, adding more than 455,000 new users to reach 5.65 million, or about 6.8% of the total population. Given that the revolution started in late January, most of this growth could be due to interest around Facebook as the revolution was happening. However, it grew by 562,000 new users in January, and for most of the past year it has grown by at least 250,00 people, for a total annual growth rate of 104.4%. While Facebook’s presence in the country could have aided organizers, its relatively low penetration rate and generally steady growth rate suggest it played a relatively small role — perhaps it propelled smaller groups of revolutionaries forward, but the majority of the population was not directly involved.

Looking down the list of the countries that gained the most new users in February, one can see that those near the top tend to have larger populations and lower Facebook penetration rates. That’s a worldwide trend we see. However, beyond Egypt, countries that have been experiencing unrest also show up near the top.

Saudi Arabia gained the second most, with 419,000 new users in February — that’s a big 13.8% growth rate in a single month. Today it has 3.46 million users, or 13.6% of the 25.4 million population, and a 90.8% annual growth rate. Coincidentally or not, Saudi Arabia is ruled by an autocratic government that is facing new rounds of protests, like Egypt was last month. If Facebook is indeed an important factor in promoting revolutionary ideas, Saudi Arabia is in position to provide more evidence of that.

And growing the third-most out of any country in the region? Pakistan, which gained nearly 234,000 new users to 3.89 million, or a still-tiny 2.3% of the country. Growth has been humming along at almost exactly a 100% annual rate. Given the low Facebook penetration rate, however, we doubt the site itself is a major factor in anything today (besides being a target for theocratic judgements, of course).

Looking down the list, you can also see a number of other countries with major discontent appearing. Bahrain and Yemen are both smaller countries, but also grew by 10% and 16% by March 1st.

Conclusion

Given that Facebook is used for widely varying purposes, from gaming to event planning to link sharing to much else, traffic levels on their own do not indicate that a country’s citizens are more likely to march in the streets. People may just want to stay home and play FarmVille all day, or share funny cat photos, or whatever. Meanwhile, protests are typically organized by a smaller group of leaders, often from universities or other intellectual circles. A few people could use Facebook to organize a country, without having much of the country on the site — as what appears to have happened in Egypt. And of course the diversity of governments and their relationships with their citizens further complicates how Facebook impacts each country.

All in all there is no simple formula visible, where we could say if X number of users join Facebook then they are Y% more likely to revolt. However, given the current protests in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen among other countries, more data is coming in and perhaps clear indicators will emerge. We’ll be covering this topic as events unfold.

Facebook added some interesting positions to its Careers Page this week, specifically in Latin America. The company advertised for a Director of Financial Planning and Analysis, Global Business Partnership based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It’s also looking for a Product Marketing Manager for the Facebook Platform, a Strategic Partner Manager of Games, and more.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Director, Financial Planning and Analysis
• Global Business Partnership (Sao Paulo)
• Product Marketing Manager Facebook, Platform
• Strategic Partner Manager, Games
• Strategist, Market Solutions – Local
• Recruiter – Contractor (Sao Paulo)
• University Programs Lead – Contract
• Workday Reporting Analyst – Contractor
• Network Operations Engineer (Dublin)
• Operations Engineer (Dublin)
• Project Cost and Document Controller
• Measurement Researcher (Chicago)
• Measurement Researcher (New Yok)
• Measurement Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Tools Developer, Network Engineering
• Performance and Capacity Engineer
• Analyst, User Operations – Greek (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – Italian (Dublin)
• Account Manager, Online Sales Operations (Singapore)
• Account Manager Danish (Stockholm)
• Sales Associate (Singapore)
• Sales Training and Program Manager (Palo Alto)

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Site Reliability Operations Manager, Facebook

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook hired some positions in Palo Alto, Calif. and Austin, Texas this week, and also seems to have hired people in their Singapore and Dublin offices. Some of the more interesting positions now gone from Facebook’s Careers Page include a Global Product Marketing Manager of Facebook Platform job, a New York-based Partner Engineer, and an Austin-based Intellectual Property Principal of User Operations, indicating that those positions have been filled.

New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:

• Tom Wurmii – System Administrator.
• Leyla Khorasani – Sales Associate and formerly an Account Manager at IT-Resurs.
• Debasish Patra – an Analyst of Online Sales Operations who previously worked as an Event-Coordinator at CSI, Orissa Branch.
• Martin Aguirre Martinez – a Local Business Consultant who previously worked as Accounts & Social Media Manager at Austinontherocks.com.
• Jason Daugherty – Technical Sourcer/Recruiter, formerly did similar work at Google.
• Bennett Woo – now a Fraud Investigator of Risk Operations, had been working as a Research Analyst at Stanford Consulting Group, Inc.
• Matthew Williams – a User Operations Analyst, formerly an IT Intern at MPower Labs Inc.

Recent departures, per LinkedIn:

• Jason Haase – formerly worked in Account Management.
• Richard Stiller – a former consultant.
• Mircea Dima – was a Software Engineer Intern.

Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:

• Global Product Marketing Manager Facebook, Platform
• Partner Engineer (New York)
• Intellectual Property Principal, User Operations (Austin)
• Recruiting Sourcer – Contract (Austin)
• Culture and Communications Lead/manager
• Growth Manager 1102003
• Graphic Designer (New York)
• Administrative Assistant – Sales Support (Chicago)
• Planning Manager
• Physical Security Manager (Hyderabad)
• Law Enforcement Relations Lead, APAC (Singapore)
• Intellectual Property Paralegal
• Specialist, Payment Operations
• Business Operations Associate, Marketing Analytics
• Head of IT Operations
• Windows Systems Administrator, Storage
• Technical Writer, Ads API (Contract)
• Growth Manager 1102003
• Web Application Engineer
• Capacity Planning Engineer
• Web Developer (Internal Tools)
• Online Operations Training Manager (Dublin)
• Specialist, Payment Operations
• Analyst, User Operations – Danish (Dublin)
• Associate LATAM, Ad Operations (Austin)
• Associate ISO, Ad Operations (Austin)
• Agency Team Lead, Online Sales Operations (Palo Alto)
• DSO Account Manager (Chicago)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.