Spotify, the streaming music service that’s big in Europe, is coming to Facebook in the form of a special integration, according to Forbes. The rumor of some sort of partnership between the two has been going around for a while. The new report says this integration, which sounds as if it will give Spotify special placement on users home pages, could be coming as soon as the next couple weeks.

The pent-up demand for a seamless, streaming music service on Facebook might finally be met. Licensing issues have until now stopped that from happening (and still are in the US).

The music service already has a relatively popular Facebook platform integration live in its desktop-based player, with 2.39 million monthly active users and 937,000 daily actives according to AppData, our app tracking service. But most of those users are younger men in the United Kingdom; Spotify has not worked out a deal with all the major labels for US distribution, and has not launched in the US as a result, although a number of Facebook employees including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg are users and fans of the service.

Facebook had looked at partnering with a third-party music provider a few years back, but despite many conversations with labels and music startups, no product ever launched. In the meantime, music-based Pages have grown to become one of the most dominant interests that people express on Facebook through Liking Pages. Some 44 of the 100 largest Pages are music-related. A growing ecosystem of music-focused Page service providers has arisen to do things like provide streaming music player applications for bands. It’s unclear how the Spotify integration might help or compete with these other companies in countries where it is available.

The report offers a few more details of how the product will work. A Spotify icon will appear on the left-hand column of the home page, in the top section next to Events, Photos and other Facebook apps rather than in the lower section for third-party applications. Users click the icon to download the Spotify desktop app. The integration, like the current one, will show users what their friends are listening to, as well as publish their own selections to their news feeds. There’ll also be a feature to let people listen to the same song at the same time — some sort of user voice service? The name will either simply be “Facebook Music” or more cobrandedly “Spotify on Facebook.”

Also from the report: Facebook will launch Spotify in the US once a deal with the labels has been worked out.

So all in all, given Facebook’s long-term interest in music, its shared investors with Spotify, as well as the presence of early Facebook visionary Sean Parker on Spotify’s board, this news is not too surprising. Musicians should see new engagement on Facebook as a result, and Spotify should get a big increase in its subscription revenues. Meanwhile, music service providers on Facebook’s platform will need to wait and see if this integration includes anything directly competitive to what they’re currently providing.

A diverse array of applications made up our list of growing Facebook apps by daily active users this week. Everything from astrology to luck to virtual gifts, videos, photos, mobile, Chase Community giving and assorted Page tab apps. All told, the apps on the list grew from between 69,500 and 1.7 million DAU. Our list is compiled using AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook, and covers those that gained the most users in the past seven days.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Astrology	1,961,620	+1,770,414	+926%
2.	BandPage by RootMusic	1,546,288	+356,460	+30%
3.	Luck Daily!	423,902	+335,290	+378%
4.	Send Gift	270,016	+245,801	+1,015%
5.	Genç Video	275,655	+233,354	+552%
6.	Monster Galaxy	810,361	+167,399	+26%
7.	Gardens of Time	2,604,895	+160,913	+7%
8.	VEVO for Artists	324,045	+150,005	+86%
9.	60 Photos	608,039	+135,787	+29%
10.	Norton Safe Web	149,980	+127,470	+566%
11.	Zuma Blitz	868,368	+100,711	+13%
12.	Yahoo!	8,115,579	+100,063	+1%
13.	friend.ly	355,967	+91,637	+35%
14.	picplz	135,992	+87,560	+181%
15.	flipboard	407,394	+77,794	+24%
16.	Chase Community Giving	81,734	+77,120	+1,671%
17.	e-Diagnostics	133,916	+74,758	+126%
18.	eBuddy	2,158,987	+70,483	+3%
19.	Welcome Tab for pages by SocialAppsHQ	231,083	+70,385	+44%
20.	HTML + iframe + FBML = iwipa	397,764	+69,502	+21%

The top app on the list tis week was Astrology, which grew mostly in the United States, by 1.7 million DAU. The app includes a pop-up upon use asking the user to allow for daily horoscope posts to their Wall. Luck Daily grew by 355,300 DAU; the app posts your luck “percentage” to your Wall. Send Gift, with 245,800 DAU, is an app that allows users to send virtual gifts to their friends’ Walls, also providing the user the opportunity to subscribe to new gift notifications.

Genç Video grew by 233,400 DAU; the app allows users to view, Like, share and comment on videos. 60 Photos is an app that allows users to click “nice” or “pass” on friends’ Facebook photos, generating feed stories with answers; the app grew by 135,800 DAU. Norton Safe Web grew by 127,500 DAU mostly in the US, as did Yahoo’s app grew with 100,100 DAU.

The friend.ly app added 91,600 DAU, Flipboard saw 77,800 new DAU — the app is for iPad users to view social media content in a magazine-style layout. The Chase Community Giving app grew by 77,100 DAU. Finally, e-Diagnostics is an app that grew mostly in Indonesia by 74,800 DAU; the app appears to be an IQ-type test, which after the user completes, the app asks users to select which of their friends carries traits such as “the best logical reasoning skills,” creating feed stories when answered.

Two mobile apps were on the list. Picplz grew by 87,600 DAU and promises to help users share photos from their phone to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Then there’s eBuddy with 70,500 DAU to allow users to use chat clients on their phones.

Page tabs of all sorts made up the remainder of the list. BandPage by RootMusic grew by 356,500 DAU in the US; the app continues to become the go-to app for musicians to share their music, tour and merch information. VEVO for Artists, the music video tab, grew by 150,000 DAU. Welcome Tab for pages by SocialAppsHQ grew by 70,400 DAU and is set to allow users to share photos or video on a welcome tab. Then HTML + iframe + FBML = iwipa grew by 69,500 DAU; the app allows users to build tabs for their Pages.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

Users who find Pages and Places they like can decide to recommend them to friends, via a feature that Facebook appears to be in testing on a handful of accounts. In an example spotted by Kevin Evanetski of Social Yeah, the “Recommend This Place” feature appears in a right-hand module, and asks users to “Help your friends discover great places to visit by recommending this” (leaving a supporting comment in the module).

If users choose to make the recommendation, their comment will appear in the module, and post as a wall and news feed story.

Although the wording here is for “Place,” the box is appearing on what appears to be a merged Place/Page for a San Francisco Bay Area radio station, Sports Radio 95.7 FM. Given Facebook’s other efforts to unify Places and Pages, as well as the current feature similarity of the two types of pages, this feature could also be introduced for Pages that don’t have Places functionality.

Doing so would add on to the existing Page recommendation feature, which allows Page administrators to suggest their own Page to users. That feature was adjusted last month from showing recommendations in the friends requests page and the now-gone home page Requests panel, instead showing recommendations in a “Recommended Pages” module. Previous iterations of the feature have experimented with how to allow users and Page owners to share the Page recommendation, with a separate option for users to share Pages being removed earlier this year.

While it’s up to users to make use of this new feature, Page owners should consider ways of encouraging sharing without breaking Facebook’s terms against incentivizing social actions, such as creating special Places and Pages within a brand, that are especially likely to attract recommendations.

For deep analysis of Facebook’s organic distribution features, as well as weekly profiles of innovative marketing campaigns, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook.

Facebook appears to have added a “Subscribe via RSS” option to Pages. The link, found at the bottom left side of Pages beneath the profile picture, leads to an Atom feed of wall posts by the Page that can be auto-discovered by clients.

The RSS option will assist users that want to stay up to date with news distributed from specific Pages without constantly having to check Facebook. Some people that might find this especially useful include those tasked with industry or corporate communications policy compliance, researchers, or those whose access to Facebook is blocked by an employer, educator, or government.

This link joins RSS links on Notes as evidence that RSS is not dead on Facebook, despite the site more actively supporting JSON-based API feeds. In the past, Pages could sometimes be subscribed to via SMS, but now most Pages show both RSS and SMS options. Some clients have also had limited access to RSS feeds of Pages in the past, but there was no official option for this on Pages.

Before, some thought Twitter’s API and RSS options made it a better choice for producing content to be received by certain types of clients. Though Facebook’s Graph API still doesn’t support subscriptions, Page wall RSS subscriptions bring it closer to parity with Twitter. They will also permit some experimental users of Facebook, where certain types of posts can trigger actions in controlled by clients.

In a move that makes sense when you look at it big-picture — which Facebook does — the company has decided that Page owners can no longer apply to have commenting removed from Pages. It used to allow some Page owners, notably pharmaceutical and financial firms, to do so in order to more easily avoid regulatory issues. It’s not completely clear why the change is happening now.

Facebook sent out an email to select pharmaceutical Page owners last week, that first highlighted that Pages are intended to be a place for “authentic, engaging, two-way dialog,” before explaining the changes. From the email, republished by pharmaceutical marketing firm Intouch Solutions:

Previously, pharmaceutical brands could submit a request through their Facebook Sales Representative to disable commenting on their Facebook Page. Starting today, Facebook will no longer allow admins of new pharma Pages to disable commenting on the content their Page shares with people on Facebook. Pages that currently have commenting disabled will no longer have this entitlement after August 15th.

While the change won’t affect most Page owners, some pharmaceutical brands may decide to at least temporarily close their Pages — especially Pages with generic themes, like ADHD Allies, which is sponsored by McNeil Pediatrics, a Division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. These advertorial, cause-themed Pages might convince people to think they’re supporting a cause, when they’re actually giving drug companies full control over what discussion happens on the Page.

The core reason these companies say they want to cut off comments is that the US Food and Drug Administration requires them to report any “adverse events” relating to their products — a way for the agency to educate itself and the public about issues with approved drugs. However, the reporting requirement has not yet been modified for social media, as it’s still under discussion at the FDA. In the meantime, companies don’t know what types of comments they’ll need to report to the FDA from Facebook users. All comments? Only specific, negative ones? This unknown could be why, up until this point, Facebook gave them a pass on the issue by allowing them to disable comments.

But why did Facebook make the change now? That’s not entirely clear. Maybe Facebook felt that too many drug companies were creating and controlling Pages about generic themes — that’s not unlikely, considering previous reports of that issue, as well as Facebook’s overall tone towards the industry. While a given company might benefit from Astroturfing its product into the market, Facebook as a whole suffers due to the resulting mistrust among users.

Or, maybe Facebook doesn’t want to try to enforce others’ rules — which is a direction it has gone with other terms recently. It just removed a blanket ban on promotions for a variety of content categories, including prescription drugs, and instead told marketers to follow its other guidelines and all other laws on their own.

Another possibility is that Facebook has some idea of what might be coming from the FDA on the matter.

Or, perhaps it feels that there are a satisfactory number of other options for these companies at present, regardless of this particular restriction.

Also, in the email, Facebook says that “Subject to [its] approval, branded Pages solely dedicated to a prescription drug may (continue to) have commenting functionality removed.” So, some Pages can still run without comments. It’s just really obvious in these cases that users are there to discuss a specific drug, and not a disease or a company.

Pharmaceutical companies have been trying to use Facebook for years, but their concern around the requirement has made them especially cautious, and many of their campaigns over the years have come across as canned or stilted, or otherwise unsocial. But as the Intouch blog points out, they can still take approaches with their Pages that allow them to reach users without running afoul of Facebook or the FDA. They can still block users from posting to their Page’s Wall or otherwise creating and adding their own content (it’s just comments on Page-created content that can no longer be blocked). Companies can also install a third-party application that provides forum-style functionality, that separately provides an interface for moderating user comments. Or they can provide a full-time monitoring team to handle Pages with comments enabled.

We’ll be covering this issue as Facebook and the government continue to evolve their policies.

For deep analysis of Facebook’s terms, as well as weekly profiles of innovative marketing campaigns, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing through Facebook.

A variety of Facebook platform companies hired everything from interns to sales to operations to engineers this week. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into next week’s post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Efficient Frontier

• Charlene Fernandez, Sales Executive – previously a student at London Metropolitan University.
• Guanghong Yang, Senior Software Engineer – formerly worked as a Software Engineer at The Fanfare Group.

Involver

• Yagnik Khanna, Web Developer/Programmer Intern – studied at University of Waterloo.

Kontagent

• Cindy Lee, Lead UI/Visual Designer – formerly worked a similar position at Cisco.

Nanigans

• Robin Botto, Ad Ops Manager – formerly the Director of Account Management at Avenue100 Media Solutions.

Spruce Media

• Kelsey Elliott, Ad Delivery Manager – formerly a freelance writer at The Chefs Director and a Director of Marketing at A Daily Apple.

Syncapse

• Andrew McGrath, Senior Program Manager - formerly performed a simliar job at Hostopia.

TBG Digital

• Wladyslaw Mettler, Python Developer at TBG Digital - formerly performed a similar job at Jamkit.
• Kenny Skelton, Client Service Director - formerly worked as Direct Channel Sales and Marketing Manager at Vodafone.

Vitrue

• Kevin Race, Senior Client Delivery Manager – formerly worked as a Project Manager at Trivantis.
• Sarah Vabulas, Strategic Services Analyst - formerly a Social Media and Public Relations Coordinator at The Maximus Group.

Wildfire

• Robert Williams, Inside Sales – formerly performed similar work at Confluence Media, Inc.

Facebook’s top Pages continued to be dominated mostly by musicians, but food, celebrity, Turkish apps and various media companies made an appearance this week, too. Musicians like Rihanna and Lady Gaga are regulars on the list, but musician Bruno Mars made an appearance this week, as did Aerosmith. Food was on the list, too, with Subway and Pringles, in addition to several media companies like Disney and the Converse shoe company. The Pages on our list grew from between 535,700 and 2.6 million Likes, we measure the growth of Pages with our PageData tool.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Likes	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Bruno Mars	7,747,981	+2,632,468	+51%
2.	Subway	6,648,846	+2,263,418	+52%
3.	Mustafa Kemal Atatürk	846,784	+846,784	+0.0%
4.	Amerikan Bayrağının 1 Milyon Hayranı Varsa Türk Bayrağının 70 Milyonu Geçer	828,763	+828,763	+0.0%
5.	Rihanna	33,505,211	+774,561	+2%
6.	Lady Gaga	34,806,862	+722,452	+2%
7.	Disney	23,669,451	+721,226	+3%
8.	Facebook	41,135,533	+708,511	+2%
9.	Shakira	29,799,147	+690,219	+2%
10.	Eminem	36,632,305	+670,077	+2%
11.	Will Smith	18,541,930	+629,465	+4%
12.	Bob Marley	25,049,857	+627,602	+3%
13.	Harry Potter	23,932,167	+618,590	+3%
14.	Vin Diesel	24,177,900	+616,947	+3%
15.	YouTube	33,897,860	+601,891	+2%
16.	Aerosmith	3,577,593	+567,733	+19%
17.	Converse	16,993,691	+551,524	+3%
18.	Nhật ký	548,752	+548,752	+0.0%
19.	Cristiano Ronaldo	26,393,273	+537,902	+2%
20.	Pringles	13,876,929	+535,693	+4%

Bruno Mars topped the list with 2.6 million new Likes to his 7.7 million total; the landing tab for his Page features tour and music video information and the Wall contains news of recent awards and charity work. Rihanna, with 774,600 new Likes to add to her 33.5 million, also won some awards. Lady Gaga drew 722,500 new Likes to her 34.8 million this week with the launch of her new album.

Shakira’s 690,200 Likes pushed her Page’s total to 29.8 million, she’s been posting videos to her Wall. Eminem’s Page features music videos on the landing tab, drawing 670,100 Likes to his 36.6 million total. Bob Marley’s Page grew by 627,600 Likes to pass 25 million by featuring music, story and video posts. Finally, Aerosmith’s Page grew by 567,800 Likes to reach 3.5 million; the Page also promoted a recent appearance on the TV show “The Simpsons.”

Food featured this week included Subway with 2.2 million Likes to grow the Page to 6.6 million, partly due to a Commit to Fit sweepstakes featuring up to $25,000 in prizes. Also, Pringles with 535,700 Likes grew the Page to 13.8 million, featured a Share Your Way Sweepstakes with 181 prizes.

Two Turkish Pages were as usual big on the list this week. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk grew to 846,800 Likes this week; he was the first president of Turkey and a prominent historical figure. Secondly, another Turkish flag Page, Amerikan Bayrağının 1 Milyon Hayranı Varsa Türk Bayrağının 70 Milyonu Geçer, grew this week to 828,800 Likes.

There were media properties on the list. Disney with 721,200 Likes to grew to just about 23.7 million by posting photos and animated film stills. Facebook with 708,500 Likes to pass 41.4 million. YouTube with 601,900 Likes to almost make it to 34 million. Then, “Harry Potter,” which added 618,600 Likes to almost make 24 million by promoting the final installment of the series.

Celebrities made an appearance, too. Will Smith with 629,500 Likes to his 18.5 million updated with a visit to Oprah. Vin Diesel with 617,000 Likes to grow the Page to 24.1 million added a landing tab that asks users to invite friends to his Page. Finally, Cristiano Ronaldo’s Page grew by 537,900 Likes to its 26.3 million with updates about his professional matches. The remaining Pages, Converse with 551,500 Likes and a 16.9 million total and Nhật ký (Diary in Vietnamese) added 548,800 Likes this week.

In the most significant update for developers from last week, Facebook pushed out the latest version of its PHP SDK late last week, well ahead of its self-imposed deadline of July 1st. The move is part of the company’s wider effort to increase security around users and their data, in the face of evidence showing data leaks.

The new PHP SDK, version 3.0.0, improves from the previous 2.2.x version by using the industry-standard OAuth authentication standard over Facebook’s prior flow. It delineates between two classes of data, one for most data, and a separate class for handling user IDs and access tokens — IDs and tokens have at various points been reported to be leaking out of applications, potentially allowing third parties to gather data and access users without the proper permissions.

Facebook is telling developers who only use the PHP SDK to update now; those using the Javascript SDK should wait four weeks, until Facebook introduces that updated version as well. The timeline, via the Facebook developer blog post on the topic (which you should also check for coding examples and more detail on the transition).

On a related note, Facebook reiterated developers in its weekly update last Friday that they should run through a check-list of causes if they discover that user access tokens have expired. Some offline mode tokens were leaking, security firm Symantec discovered recently. Facebook said in the post that among other reasons, it could invalidate access tokens for security reasons — the reminder could be due in part to Facebook expiring tokens that it believes were compromised.

The weekly post included a few other notable items, too. Facebook recently introduced a server-side method for developers to require users to re-authenticate passwords to confirm identities, such as when they are clicking to complete a purchase on a shared computer; now it is also introducing a client-side method to do the same. And, as of tomorrow, Facebook will remove the old version of the Insights dashboard, as it rolls out the new version.

Cable television’s USA Network recently launched an app called Chatter that allows a specific TV show’s viewers to converse with fellow fans and engage with a streams of official content aggregated from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. Flickr, live chat and forums.

Chatter’s synced web and Facebook apps provides a destination for real-time conversation and auxiliary content consumption around TV shows that can increase participation and live viewership.

USA Digital first launched the HTML5 web version of Chatter in October for its shows Burn Notice and Psych. Chatter features three streams: a feed of “All” user and official content; a “Curated” feed of just content from official accounts, writers, actors, and producers; and a “Live” feed which displays uStream question and answer sessions with talent from the shows when available. Chatter posts from users may also be shown on a ticker during the broadcast of TV shows, adding an extra incentive to participate.

It launched the iframe Facebook Page tab app version at the beginning of May for the pro wrestling show Tough Enough and it inspired a 10% increase in user wall posts to the show’s Page. Users can invite their friends using an invite button (which actually produces a share dialog).  As the web and Facebook versions of the app are synced versions of the app are hosted on the show’s site and Facebook Page, there are multiple access points for the aggregated content.

Without Chatter, fans would have to bounce between bounce between all of a show’s different branded content channels. This friction leads to drop-off, and prevents cross-channel conversation where users might read a tweet or a view a YouTube video but could reply through Facebook. It also limits the reach of content posted to any one channel.

Jesse Redniss, vice president of digital for USA Network, tells us that giving added exposure to user generated content through Chatter “makes the fan environment more inviting because it’s not a blackhole.” Early response to the Chatter has been positive. It has reached a peak of 25,000 concurrent users and 250,000 unique users to date, with an average of 20% of users actively submitting content.

Redniss explained that it was essential for the app to live on Facebook and pull in data from the social network because Facebook is more conversational, whereas it wasn’t seeing as high a rate of replies to its Twitter accounts. On Twitter there is “less of an overall community response. On Facebook a piece of content might get 600 Likes. That has a large impact that we haven’t seen from Twitter.”

In June, Chatter will be rolled out on Pages for all of USA’s shows. The development team hopes to add private fan-to-fan chat, and it is working with Facebook to offer exclusive content to those that invite their friends in a manner that doesn’t violate policy. The team should also consider allowing users to opt to cross-post what they write in Chatter to Facebook and Twitter to increase virality.

Chatter centralizes conversations and auxiliary official content to create a real-time secondary form of entertainment that encourages users to post show-related content to their networks by giving it additional visibility to other serious fans.

The conversation also incentivizes users to experience live television broadcasts. This should make the Chatter concept appeal to all TV studios and networks as they see their audiences drift towards piracy, watching through a DVR where they can skip commercials, or through an online streaming service which generate fewer ad dollars and cross-promotion opportunities.

Brands made some good use of leveraging Facebook’s platform this week. Lancôme used photos to show users how good they could look with its makeup products, Nivea leveraged its sponsorship of a Rihanna concert to grow its Page and Cost Plus used a sweepstakes to simultaneously bulk up its email marketing list. Allstate, Budweiser and Axe also had interesting ways of engaging fans and growing Pages this week.

We’ve excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of dozens of other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Lancôme’s House of Color Makeup App

Goal: Page Growth, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase, Engagement

Core Mechanic: An app that allows users to try out Lancôme’s latest brand of eye shadow products on their own photo on Facebook.

Method: The House of Color app on the Lancôme Page asks a user to select a photo either from Facebook or upload one, choose the shape of your eye, then apply the makeup to your photo. Once you do so, you can either download the photo, or share it to Facebook, Twitter or email. Also, users may click on “Shop” to purchase the eye shadow in question on the Lancôme website.

The app is not only an original use of Facebook photos, but very tightly woven into the Facebook photo interface. Lancôme here uses Facebook at every stage of the app to sell its products.

Impact: Currently the Lancôme Page counts about 357,300 Likes.

Nivea’s Rihanna Live Sweepstakes

Goal: Page Growth, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure, Engagement

Core Mechanic: A sweepstakes sponsored by Nivea where users can enter to win either tickets to a Rihanna concert or a grand prize of meeting Rihanna.

Method: Nivea is one of the sponsors of Rihanna’s current tour and so is sponsoring the Rihanna Live sweepstakes, where Nivea Facebook fans may win tickets to the singer’s North American LOUD Tour this summer. The company is giving out a pair of tickets to about a dozen stops on Rihanna’s tour with a grand prize of a trip to New Jersey with airfare, hotel and a meet and greet.

Because the promotion is Like-gated and because Rihanna’s much more sizable fan base also sees Nivea’s products there are several opportunities to grow Nivea’s Page here. Additionally, because Rihanna is, like many pop stars, also something of a fashion and beauty icon, her partnership with Nivea allows the company to reach her millions of female fans with her implicit endorsement.

Impact: Nivea’s Facebook Page has 196,400 Likes on Facebook and Rihanna’s Page, which promotes Nivea’s products also has 33.4 million Likes.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of dozens of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.