Starting today, Facebook users will be able to tag Pages in their photos. Page tagged photos will adhere to a user’s privacy settings, and will only appear on a Page’s Photos tab if set to be visible to everyone. Initially, Facebook is only allowing Pages categorized as “Brands & Products” or “People” to be tagged, but it says it is “looking to expand this functionality to more Page categories over time.”

Since a tag will cause a link to that Page to be displayed on a user’s photo, the feature could become an important discovery and growth channel for Pages.

Previously, users could only tag their friends in photos, but now they can tag any Page with the proper category, whether they’ve Liked it or not. A tag of a brand or public figure represents a strong social recommendation of that Page, which will make a user’s friends curious to visit that Page and improve the chance that they’ll Like it themselves.

Photos is Facebook’s most popular native application, receiving huge numbers of Page views. Tags of Pages in Photos could gain many impressions from a user’s friends over a long period of time, offering many opportunities for that Page to gain new fans. Tagged photos also often appear in the news feed generating additional impressions for the Page’s link.

Brands, products, and people are some of the things represented by Pages that most frequently appear in user photos. Brands like soft drinks or clothing lines may incidentally be included in photos of friends, while users often upload photos of themselves with celebrities to the social network. The examples Facebook included in the information it sent us include brand/product Coca Cola, and musician Kanye West who is technically categorized as a musician/band, indicating that Pages with a wide range of categories that represent people may be able to tak advantage of the new feature.

Back in September 2009, Facebook began allowing users to tag Pages in status updates and comments. The delay before expanding Page tagging to photos indicates that Facebook understands the abuse and news feed dilution potential of the feature. It could overly incentivize Pages to ask users to tag them in photos, filling the news feeds of friends with photos that aren’t that compelling. Facebook will need to ensure that photos that only include tags of Pages but no friends aren’t given high visibility in the news feed.

If Facebook can minimize the impact of the few Pages and users that try to abuse Page photo tags, the feature will let users share the brands and celebrities that are important to them while simultaneously offering a new unpaid growth mechanism for Pages.

Facebook hit 677 million users worldwide in the month of April, increasing its total monthly audience by just over 2%. Growth rates came in just below March numbers, with markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa contributing the greatest number of new users. Facebook saw slower growth – and even some losses – in Europe and North America.

The full breakdown of growth by country and demographic, including 12-month historicals and projections, is available in this month’s edition of Inside Facebook Gold.

Inside Facebook Gold is Inside Network’s data service providing monthly data on Facebook’s growth outlook through a comprehensive data feed service and growth report.

The May 2011 edition of Inside Facebook Gold includes:

• Global Data Feed Service, a comprehensive data CSV supplying vital stats on Facebook’s audience size, demographic distribution, advertising business, and global language distribution.
• Facebook Global Monitor, 100 pages of leaderboards and charts covering audience change in 160 Facebook country markets.

Inside Facebook Gold is a data service designed for analysts seeking to understand and maximize opportunities in the Facebook ecosystem, and presents data on key indicators ranging from the site’s traffic growth to its advertising business and its robust applications platform.

Download the May 2011 data suite at Inside Facebook Gold.

We have quite an eclectic and new batch of applications on our list of the top growing apps by daily active users on our list this week. There were several horoscope, dating, video and virtual gift/greeting card apps, as well as a location-social network app, an iPad app, a photo app and a mobile app. The apps overall grew from between 77,100 and 2.4 million DAU this week.

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.	Daily Horoscope	3,332,033	+2,428,251	+269%
2.	Badoo	2,155,109	+422,750	+24%
3.	Gardens of Time	1,902,345	+401,542	+27%
4.	Today’s Video	391,282	+390,315	+40,364%
5.	WhoIsNear?	303,043	+228,528	+307%
6.	Kral Video !	220,430	+210,644	+2,153%
7.	Yahoo!	7,824,909	+185,536	+2%
8.	flipboard	329,581	+174,117	+112%
9.	Are YOU Interested?	1,098,569	+163,015	+17%
10.	Günlük Burç Yorumları	266,957	+149,796	+128%
11.	Tarjetitas	243,431	+143,753	+144%
12.	Bubble Saga	719,682	+140,529	+24%
13.	Diamond Dash	1,213,519	+130,048	+12%
14.	Pixable	254,328	+128,921	+103%
15.	PowerVideo	100,036	+97,604	+4,013%
16.	Videolar 2011	118,159	+91,960	+351%
17.	VideoGezegeni	102,069	+90,557	+787%
18.	Videoloji	89,236	+81,563	+1,063%
19.	Especially for You	103,514	+78,174	+309%
20.	HTC Sense	5,544,613	+77,086	+1%

Daily Horoscope grew by 2.4 million DAU, the version in Turkish, Günlük Burç Yorumları, grew by 149,800 DAU. Both apps allow users to select their horoscope, share the app with friends who are of their same astrological sign, and receive daily horoscope updates on their Walls. The apps grew primarily in Turkey.

Badoo was huge on our list, too, growing mostly in Mexico, France and Italy by 422,800 DAU; the app has a Q&A format where users answer questions about their friends, with subsequent feed stories published to the stream. The Are YOU Interested? app with 163,000 DAU grew in the United States, United Kingdom and India; the app allows users to rate other users’ photos.

Turkish video apps were all over this list, making up a full one-fourth of our list! Today’s Video with 390,300 DAU, Kral Video! with 210,600 DAU, PowerVideo with 97,600 DAU, Videolar 2011 with about 92,000 DAU, VideoGezegeni with 90,600 DAU and Videoloji with 81,600 DAU. The apps all allow users to view, Share, Like and post videos to the stream. The only exceptions were Videoloji, which automatically posts daily videos to your stream and Kral Video, which included a pop-up for daily video posts with each click on the app.

A pair of apps for greeting cards were interesting. Tarjetittas (little cards) grew by 143,800 DAU in the US and Mexico, almost split down the middle. The app allows users to publish Spanish language greeting cards to their friends’ Walls. It’s interesting to note that an app in Spanish is being used almost equally between two countries, perhaps pointing to the ways in which Facebook helps united friends and family across borders. Especially For You grew by 78,200 DAU and basically does the same thing, allowing users to send a card in a message to their friend, then publish the card to your own Wall; thus, there are two viral features at work.

WhoIsNear? with 228,500 DAU is an interesting app that works like a location app — but on Facebook. Users create an account, check in where they are geographically and what they are doing, then are offered to find new friends using the app, finally publishing a story to the feed. Pixable’s app with 128,900 DAU allows users to discover their friends’ photos; we reviewed the app previously. The rest of the list included Yahoo’s app with 185,500 DAU. Flipboard with 174,100 DAU, an iPad app allowing users to read news and social media in a magazine-style layout on their iPads. And, HTC Sense the Android mobile app with 77,100 DAU.

Check in Friday to see the top emerging Facebook apps growing by 100,000 to 1 million  MAU.

Facebook is telling developers today to plan to migrate to newer security standards on the platform — a mostly-planned migration whose roadmap was accelerated because of a data leak discovered by security firm Symantec. Developers will need to migrate to the OAuth 2.0 open standard by September 1 of this year, and they’ll need to have obtained an SSL certificate (not a straightforward process) by October 1.

The security issue was that some applications that used an older authentication system could have shared access to users with third parties, which is conceptually similar to the leaked user identity numbers issue that got so much attention last fall. In this case, older Facebook iframe-based applications could first ask users for permission for actions such as accessing friends lists or posting to the user’s profile walls, as well as the ability to access their profile when they were offline. Facebook would then send back a permission token to the app, in an insecure format that might then be shared (intentionally or not) with others, such as with advertising networks to use for better ad targeting.

It’s not clear what the scope of the problem is. Symantec, which sells security software and so has a stake in there being problems to solve, estimates that more than 100,000 applications had this problem as of last month. It’s not clear how many apps have been leaking tokens, nor for how long.

In response, Facebook reiterates a variety of security steps it is taking, and it also says it has not seen evidence of the tokens being used in a way that violates its policies (which don’t allow third parties reselling data).

The real-world implications of the issue appear to be this: a subset of users who use apps (some users don’t), who also used apps that were leaking data, may have provided a set of permissions that possibly exposed information and access points to unknown parties. So, without more evidence, probably not that terrible. Or as security researcher Joey Tyson summed up earlier today: “Facebook cred leak: 1) Yrs old, 2) not passwords, 3) not OAuth-specific, 3) hard to fix, 4) has caveats, 5) FB monitors, 6) fix in progress.”

In any case, here’s the developer roadmap for the changes, via the company developer blog post today:

• July 1: Updates to the PHP and JS SDKs available that use OAuth 2.0 and have new cookie format (without access token).
• September 1: All apps must migrate to OAuth 2.0 and expect an encrypted access token.
• October 1: All Canvas apps must process signed_request (fb_sig will be removed) and obtain an SSL certificate (unless you are in Sandbox mode). This will ensure that users browsing Facebook over HTTPS will have a great experience over a secure connection.

Facebook is asking the Federal Election Commission to declare its sidebar ads exempt from campaign regulations that require disclosure of who paid for and authorized campaign ads, reports Talking Points Memo. Facebook is citing the FEC’s “small items” and “impractical” exceptions because its ads are too small to contain content and the disclosure. It is also noting an exemption Google obtained for search ads in October 2011.

Since Facebook ads are similarly small in size to Google search ads, and its argument that increasing ad size to accomodate disclosure would disrupt business and the user experience, we believe the FEC will grant Facebook an exemption.

The Federal Election Campaign Act and section 110.11 of the Commission’s regulations require a disclaimer of the political committee that purchased a campaign ad. Facebook’s main points from the 14-page letter it sent to the FEC asking for exemption for ads on the site are:

• The Commission’s has consistently interpreted campaign rules to permit the use of new technology
• Facebook’s ads are small enough that they should be given exemption under the “small items” and “impractical” because disclosure alone could take up the entirety or majority of a Facebook ad or Sponsored Story
• Facebook has purposefully opted for smaller ads as not to disrupt the social experience, meaning increasing their size to permit disclosure disrupt business and strategy
• 160-character text messages are exempt, Facebook ads also have a text limit of 160 characters
• Google search ads that are of a similar size to Facebook ads were made exempt
• Ads on bumper stickers, pens, buttons, skywriting and apparel are exempt because they are “small items” and disclosure there would be impractical
• The internet’s low cost of entry allows groups with “limited funds to maintain a voice on the internet”
• Exceptions of these sort allow politicians to reach young voters that can be difficult to contact through traditional means, helping stimulate and empower them in the political process
• Facebook is not requesting an exemption for all online ads

With precedent and general spirit of the law favoring exemption for Facebook ads, it would make sense for the FEC to approve the request. This would help Facebook continue to grow in importance to the political landscape without changing the unobtrusive nature of Facebook ads that preserve the user experience while funding the site.

Interesting list this week of the top 20 fastest growing Facebook Pages, topped as it was by an important figure in Islam, rounded out by the usual music and media suspects, football (soccer) Pages and brands. We measure the growth of the Pages, which grew from between 415,700 and 718,500 Likes, with our PageData tool.

Top Gainers This Week

	Pages	Gain	Gain,%
1.	عمر ابن الخطاب¨	718,508	+718,508	+0.0%
2.	Facebook	39,919,219	+644,432	+2%
3.	Shakira	28,612,669	+624,935	+2%
4.	Disney	22,447,307	+621,316	+3%
5.	Bruno Mars	4,938,562	+580,010	+13%
6.	Rihanna	32,245,767	+579,908	+2%
7.	Harry Potter	22,840,163	+577,651	+3%
8.	Eminem	35,508,247	+541,834	+2%
9.	Converse	16,062,159	+511,081	+3%
10.	YouTube	32,900,328	+494,971	+2%
11.	MTV	21,090,310	+494,880	+2%
12.	Cristiano Ronaldo	25,456,710	+467,554	+2%
13.	Texas Hold’em Poker	42,274,198	+461,390	+1%
14.	Lady Gaga	33,699,659	+455,883	+1%
15.	The Simpsons	25,886,683	+452,690	+2%
16.	FC Barcelona	14,383,898	+442,778	+3%
17.	Will Smith	17,496,871	+440,513	+3%
18.	Manchester United	13,333,215	+436,874	+3%
19.	Barack Obama	20,179,013	+422,131	+2%
20.	Katy Perry	24,272,125	+415,682	+2%

As mentioned, the top Page on our list this week was for عمر ابن الخطاب¨, or Omar ibn al-Khattab, one of the key leaders of early Islam. The Page grew its entirety this week, 718,500 Likes and the landing tab invites visitors to Like this Page, as well as other similar Pages. Another prominent figure, United States President Barack Obama, also made the list with 422,100 new Likes, probably just because he’s been in the news a lot lately as his presidential campaign for 2012 has begun. All-around celebrity Will Smith‘s Page grew by 440,500 without any updates at all this week.

A variety of big name brands were on our list this week, too. Facebook’s Page grew by 644,400 Likes, Converse’s Page by 511,100 Likes, likely because they are both very active with their inviting status updates and they are currently running a tab promotion to give away 15 free iTunes downloads to fans. YouTube’s Page added about 495,000 Likes while Texas Hold’em Poker added 461,400.

Media companies and outlets were big on the list. Disney’s Page added 621,300 Likes in part by touting its Likes across franchises on Facebook, encouraging fans to Like its Page and publishing photos from classic films almost daily. The “Harry Potter” movie Page grew by 577,700 Likes; this Page is constantly promoting the next film, and movie-related news and promotions. MTV’s Page grew by 494,900 Likes by promoting its programming and other content very actively. “The Simpsons” Page grew by 452,700 Likes by promoting its episodes.

Then, of course, there was music.

Shakira’s Page added 624,900 Likes while she promotes her music tour. Bruno Mars grew his Page by 580,000 Likes by promoting concerts as well. Rihanna’s 579,900 Likes may have been attracted by her new video premiere while Eminem’s Page with 541,300 Likes touted a new single in which he makes an appearance. Lady Gaga’s 455,900 new Likes could have been drawn in by the release of her new singles and video while Katy Perry’s 415,700 new Likes came during a time when she promoted her concerts and coverage in the press.

Finally, there was football (soccer). Cristiano Ronaldo’s Page added 467,600 Likes as he updated fans on his games and football-related activities. FC Barcelona added 442,800 Likes and Manchester United 436,900. All three Pages ask fans on a welcome tab to Like the Page.

Companies appear to be hiring technical and sales positions this week in our look at hires across the Facebook platform.

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:

BranchOut

• Taylor Raquer, Marketing Associate – formerly at student at the University of Washington.

Involver

• Jed Wheeler, Interface Engineer/Technical Trainer – previously a technical trainer at Academy X and designer at CircleAlpha Designers.

Vitrue

• Eric Guerin, UI Engineer – formerly a software engineer at EADOC.

Wildfire

• Tom Callen, Sales Executive – previously an agent at New York Life Insurance Company.
• Vincent Ng, Account Executive – formerly worked as a Sales Associate at the company.
• Scott Schroeder, Sales Associate – previously an analyst Cohen Financial.

While Facebook has been busy denying the existence of any single “Facebook phone” and instead pointing out that there are many such devices, Sony Ericsson is coming to market with a line of phones this spring that ties the social network to their calendaring, music and photo features.

Sony Ericsson’s Xperia line is the latest in a series of so-called “deeply integrated” mobile devices that put Facebook functionality at their core instead of in third-party, standalone apps.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

ReverbNation, developers of Facebook musician app Band Profile, this week launched a new Page management tab application called “Venue Profile” that helps performance spaces promote themselves and their upcoming shows. Venues can provide location details, take email signups, list upcoming shows, stream music of performers, and link to ticket sales.

Venue Profile will allow venue owners to create a much more compelling presence than Facebook’s native Places pages, helping them convert one-time visitors into regulars, while giving ReverbNation exposure to bands who are its core market.

To date, there haven’t been many useful Page or Places tab applications for venues. Most, including Context Optional and BetaPond’s, have focused purely on driving check-ins, or have been designed for restaurants like that offered by Exit41. Meanwhile, tools like ReverbNation’s own Band Profile and AuthorPage by Rethink Books have helped musicians, authors, and other public figures set up a multi-media presence on Facebook, but there was no app designed specifically to help venues.

Now, venues can set up their own rich media destination for free through Venue Profile. Set up is simple and straight forward, only requiring the minimun basic information about a venue before an admin can publish the app to their Page or Place. Admins can then choose to add email signup and booking contact widgets, and ReverbNation walks users through the process of making Venue Profile their Page’s default landing tab.

Upcoming shows can be added manually or imported from a CSV. If the performers have ReverbNation Band Profiles, details about them and a music player are automatically imported into the show’s listing, allowing admins to give visitors a sample of their material without hosting any MP3s or other media. A venue’s next show is automatically promoted just below their banner, and the show list updates itself as dates pass. All shows can display details and ticket links, and Share buttons let visitors tell their friends and organize outings.

Admins can choose the look of their app by choosing pre-made themes or creating custom color themes. They can choose to show their Page’s latest update, add info to fields that are relevant to venues such as age limit or capacity, and they can edit and set a custom URL for the tab.

Venue Profile already has some prominent music performance spaces featuring the app on their Page, including The Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, and The Roxy in Los Angeles. The app is free, but we suspect ReverbNation is using it to generate leads for its Band Profile app that monetizes musicians through email marketing services. When artists see their shows displayed in the app, they’ll likely ask the venue or investigate how they can similarly promote themselves on Facebook.

As more brands and local businesses establish a presence on Facebook and look towards how to gain and engage fans, expect more of these vertical-specific Page management tools. Though they might not be standalone money-makers, these types of apps can help developers gain exposure to less niche, more lucrative markets.