Facebook has shared a few updates to its “Operation Developer Love” program, intended to further improve on what has been a sometimes turbulent relationship with its developer community.

Most prominently, it has said it intends to stick to a “90 day breaking change policy,” meaning it will give developers 90 days to adapt before making platform changes that cause applications to break. Examples of these types of changes include the deprecation of FBML and the REST API, or SDK. However, major product updates and urgent privacy and security fixes are, as one would expect, not included in this policy.

Facebook has also been giving developers more ways to test their applications against Facebook’s weekly Tuesday code updates. It’s been giving developers earlier and earlier access to test against the new changes for any bugs or other issues. It’s now also providing a Push Status feed to help developers more easily follow Facebook’s daily and weekly schedules of changes. It also now returns HTTP headers for API calls that identify the version number of the running code, helping developers more easily isolate version-specific issues.

Developer relations head Doug Purdy, who authored today’s developer post on the changes, also notes that his team has been busy improving the documentation, building out the developer support team, and moving to fix bugs more quickly – three of the biggest issues that developers have cited in past years. These latest updates aren’t going to be enough to make every developer happy (a very hard job), but they’re a step in the right direction.

In the latest of many rumors about Facebook’s yet-to-launch music service, CNBC says today that it is coming at the company’s f8 developer conference next month in San Francisco.

GigaOm reported basically the same thing in June, and described the features in detail then. The service will include a new page called a Music Dashboard, that’s linked to the home page via a Music tab. The interface would allow you to choose from Spotify and a variety of other music services, and include a persistent play button, and a variety of other music-sharing features.

Facebook has bandied a variety of music-related ideas around over the years, and in 2008 it was poised to launch a streaming music of some sort in collaboration with a single music company, such as Lala. Nothing ever happened, largely because record labels didn’t want to agree to a deal to stream content to Facebook users at the time. Most of the potential partners that Facebook talked to then have since failed (also due to label licensing problems) or been acquired, and the project stalled out.

In the intervening years, musicians have formed a significant part of Facebook’s most popular Pages, and a variety of Page management companies have built businesses providing customized music applications for them. The market leader, RootMusic, just raised a second round of $16 million after growing its monthly active users by ten times in the past twelve months to reach around 32 million users a month today. As we noted about that deal this morning, a conceivable threat is what Facebook does with its music service. Are Spotify and other partners going to provide a better fan experience than Facebook Pages in this new service, and focus engagement away from the existing services? Or will Facebook’s Music Dashboard and other features tie the existing music Pages together with the new streaming options.

Either way, the new service sounds like a big win for the millions of Facebook users who love music, and for the partners who are part of the launch.

Among other launches that we expect at f8, the HTML5 efforts is looking increasingly mature, and there’s been a variety of leaks around upgrades to photos and its mobile app. Lastly, Facebook could finally launch its long-awaited iPad app.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Identified, Nanigans, King.com, Amazon, FunCom Oslo AS, Tagged, 5th Planet Games,  TinyCo and Liquid Entertainment.

• Super Software Engineer
• Super Human Product Manager

• AdOps Manager

• Advertising Operations Director – King.com
• Partner Manager – King.com -Nordic
• HR Manager

• Senior UI SDE: Social Games
• Senior SDE: Social Games

• TEAM LEAD – SOCIAL GAMES BUSINESS ENGINE
• SENIOR DATABASE AND BACKEND PROGRAMMER/ARCHITECT – SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES

• Art Director – Social Games
• Game Designer
• Creative Director – Social Games

• Mobile Game Developer (iOS)

• Monetization Analyst
• User Acquisition Specialist
• Data Analyst
• Product Manager

• UI Artist
• Social Games Programmer

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

RootMusic has led a movement of musicians and fans onto Facebook over the past year. Now it’s building on its market position, announcing a second round of $16 million today.

Over the last twelve months, its BandPage application has grown from around 3 million monthly active users and 150,000 daily active users to 32.4 million MAU and 1.56 million DAU, according to our AppData tracking service. On Facebook, it is by far the largest Page app for musicians, and the seventh-largest app overall. By some measures, it is now bigger than long-time leading music fan site MySpace.

The company says that the money will be used for “expansion” without really saying how it will be used — but clearly, to go after a bigger opportunity. The platform, Facebook, has been growing quickly in recent years and now has 750 million people on the site every month. The demand that all these users have for quality Page experiences around musicians has almost certainly not been met yet. Meanwhile, long-time top music destination MySpace has fallen to the tens of millions of users from its heyday, with Compete showing it at under 30 million in the US, and Quantcast showing under 20 million.

The app also has a premium-service business model. The free version provides what you’d expect from a Page management application designed for music: a music player, a video section, a store for buying music, a tour calendar, and ways to post songs and other information to Facebook and Twitter. Page owners who want to get more interface customization options have to pay. The company has, by the looks of this promotional video, signed up many of the most popular acts in the world over the years, from a variety of older acts like The Doors and Bon Jovi to top new ones like Rihanna and Taylor Swift. It says it has more than 250,000 bands overall.

So far, RootMusic seems to have carved out the music category of Pages well. It has been steadily rolling out product upgrades over the past couple of years, while some of the other companies we’ve seen approach the market head in other directions or lose focus. It could, however, theoretically get more competition from any in-house music service that Facebook might decide to roll out, and in the form of streaming music services like Spotify attracting the attention of fans.

New investor GGV Capital (formerly Granite) led the round, with another new investor, Northgate Capital coming in to participate. Mohr Davidow Ventures also added on to its existing $2.3 million first round.

Photos and horoscopes were super popular on our list of growing applications by daily active users this week. Page tab apps, Skype, Yahoo and Windows Messenger were also on our list. The titles on our list below grew from between 191,500 and 4 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Oddly, three different apps named “Friend Photos & Albums” appeared.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Sims Social	7,531,096	+4,081,773	+118%
2.	Birthday Calendar	3,377,500	+3,334,336	+7,725%
3.	Daily Horoscope	8,162,467	+2,210,359	+37%
4.	Günlük Falınız – The Fortune Teller	1,610,346	+1,419,058	+742%
5.	21 questions	3,924,431	+983,926	+33%
6.	Horóscopo Diário	1,525,608	+622,977	+69%
7.	Yahoo!	11,804,142	+587,518	+5%
8.	Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon	502,516	+440,491	+710%
9.	Friends Photos & Albums	431,426	+416,693	+2,828%
10.	Friends Photos & Albums	451,848	+394,237	+684%
11.	Static Iframe Tab	685,349	+336,673	+97%
12.	Friends Photos & Albums	410,869	+312,258	+317%
13.	Skype	1,648,629	+296,851	+22%
14.	عيد على صحابك	288,881	+287,465	+20,301%
15.	My Tab	453,018	+284,369	+169%
16.	الأبراج اليومية	1,282,061	+272,859	+27%
17.	Top 5 Games	288,425	+263,151	+1,041%
18.	Welcome Tab	679,517	+261,941	+63%
19.	Windows Live Messenger	18,104,245	+236,761	+1%
20.	Astrology	3,868,633	+191,530	+5%

Birthday Calendar grew by 3.3 million DAU this week, the app creates an interface with a user’s photos and birthdays in calendar form, allowing them to add events to it. Then there were other friend-related apps, 21 questions which asks questions about friends and posts answers to the feed, grew by 983,900 DAU.  عيد على صحابك grew by 2.2 million DAU, allowing users to post virtual gifts to their friends’ Walls, but then generating a feed story that you did so, increasing network exposure. Friends Photos & Albums is a Connect app that places your friends’ Facebook photos into a new interface on the app’s website where you can view, Like or send them. This app appeared on our list three times, including growth of 416,700 DAU, 394,200 DAU and 312,300 DAU. The first is made by developer eYari and an apparently related company named eYPhotos made the second two.

Then horoscope apps were very popular this week for whatever reason. Daily Horoscope grew by 2.2 million DAU, Turkish Günlük Falınız – The Fortune Teller grew by 1.4 million DAU giving you a percentage of things like health and money, Horóscopo Diário is a Spanish language app that grew by 623,000 DAU,  الأبراج اليومية grew by 272,900 DAU and Astrology grew by 191,500 DAU. These apps either publish to your stream, ask you to subscribe to daily Wall posts or to invite your friends to use the app.

Tab apps included Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon that grew by 440,500 DAU, Static Iframe Tab with 336,700 DAU, My Tab with 284,400 DAU and Welcome Tab with 262,000 DAU. Yahoo’s app grew by 587,500 DAU, Skype by 296,900 DAU and Windows Live Messenger with 236,800 DAU.

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

Facebook recently released a big upgrade to the options for sharing information to friends through the news feed, that focused on making privacy settings more flexible. Now, it may be looking to provide additional options for what information users see from their friends. A screenshot sent in by Inside Facebook reader Jan Krems shows a test apparently happening now on some accounts, that allows you to “Choose What You See.”

According to a message that users are seeing about the feature, options for filtering include regular material like photos and status updates, additional information including comments and check-ins, and major life events like job changes and family births. The message links to a URL that is currently not live for those users seeing the message, according to our reader. You can see for yourself, here. Presumably, the “subscriptions” link described by our reader would contain a more comprehensive administrative view of each users friends, the current sharing settings of their feeds, and options to adjust.

Before we get any further, we should provide the usual caveats about why one must not assume that this change is a fact: we have not been able to independently reproduce this message on our accounts, the screenshot may be fake, Facebook may decide not to launch the feature as seen, etc. We’ve asked Facebook for comment and we’ll update if we hear back.

All that said, we’ll note that this type of interface is not wholly new. In previous years, Facebook provided a set of sliders that allowed users to manually adjust the number of various types of posts. It since moved towards an algorithmically-determined feed, and then a raw stream of updates, and then a hybrid of the two — that, as we covered last week in detail, is still undergoing significant changes. A variety of other companies that provide social feeds, notably FriendFeed, have also experimented with more granular options for what types of content you can consume from friends. However, Facebook’s previous filters didn’t allow you to specify the posts you saw by type, by individual friend.

Facebook has continued to change the news feed as it tries to find a balance between simplicity and flexibility. Many users might not care about granular filtering, but those who are trying to keep close (or distant) track of specific friends should find the new feature useful.

Given the recent rollout of changes to how publishing works, perhaps we’ll see changes soon to how information can be consumed. We’ll be covering as we learn more.

Facebook has confirmed that it is testing a new feedback option for the ads shown on its site, that allows users to block specific advertisers from reaching them. The “Hide all from [advertiser]” option is appearing to some users when they ‘x’ out an unwanted ad, in addition to the existing option to select why they they clicked to remove the ad.

When apps and Pages have their posts hidden from the news feed, Facebook’s quality ranking system decreases the prominence of that entity’s posts to all users. If Facebook applies the same quality ranking algorithm to ads, being hidden through the new feedback option could decrease the prominence of an all of an advertisers’ ads. This could encourage them to use more responsible, less spammy ad creative to avoid being hidden.

Alternatively, if Facebook doesn’t apply the quality ranking system, being hidden might actually improve an advertiser’s click through rates because those who otherwise wouldn’t click can exempt themselves from impressions. Either way, if rolled out the ad feedback option could improve the Facebook experience for those sensitive to the content of the ads they see.

Facebook has long allowed users to provide feedback on ads, providing users with choices such as “uninteresting”, “misleading”, “sexually explicit”, or “repetitive” when they ‘x’ out an unwanted ad. This data helps Facebook refine its ad targeting algorithm, identifying if certain types of ads are relevant to a user, or are being shown too frequently.

We also assume that advertisers receiving negative marks about the content of their ad creatives are subject to reprimand or throttling of the placement of their ads. This would keep advertisers from using aggressive or spammy tactics to boost CTR at the expense of the user experience.

Now when some users ‘x’ out add, they see the option to either “Hide this ad” or “Hide all from [advertiser]“, in the case of our example “Hide all from Buy South Africa Online”. If a user chooses the latter, they’ll see the message “Ads hidden. We’ll try not to show you ads from [advertiser]“. The term ‘try’ is likely used because advertisers could reach users that have hidden them by creating new ad accounts under different names.

Users then have the options to select why they hid the ad, or unhide the advertiser. Facebook recently disabled a number of apps that were receiving high volumes of negative feedback on their news feed and wall posts. This led to an outcry about a lack of transparency around enforcement, so Facebook launched feedback analytics and benchmarks for apps, so developers could determine when they were being too spammy.

Facebook explained that apps receiving negative feedback would see negative impacts on their EdgeRank, or the prominence of their posts in the news feed. It’s believed that a similar system punishes spammy Pages.

That same quality ranking system could apply to advertisers as well, and the “Hide all from [advertiser]” option would give users a way to explicitly fight back against those showing them objectionable ads. Advertisers receiving high volumes of negative feedback could possibly have their ads shown in lower positions in the ad stacks that appear in Facebook’s right sidebar.

By increasing the repercussions for aggressive or spammy advertisers, Facebook may be able to provide a more appealing browsing experience, and attract high quality brands to market on its platform

In an apparently widespread set of Page consolidations, several on our list grew by the hundreds of thousands in the span of a few days but had a daily growth of a few hundred — and most were obscure films, TV shows or bands. There were, however, several films and Pages on the list that we’ve seen before; it appears as though lots of Page consolidation occurred this past week.  Pages on our list this week required 395,800 and 2.1 million Likes to make the top 20 this week. We compile these lists with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.

	Name	Likes	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1.	Listening to music	2,198,884	+1,547,089	+2,169,587
2.	Everything	1,022,236	+741,595	+1,001,686
3.	My Family	1,096,491	+697,562	+979,006
4.	Vodafone Egypt	942,203	+972	+933,877
5.	Islam KTP	828,523	+455,440	+734,818
6.	Arti Sahabat	672,772	+354,341	+601,958
7.	Official Detroit Red Wings	1,098,639	+227	+494,795
8.	The Smurfs	3,352,945	+72,145	+485,352
9.	Harry Potter	33,719,140	+56,433	+447,013
10.	Detective Conan	471,257	+279,911	+440,909
11.	Music	26,886,202	+59,190	+438,662
12.	The Armada	493,667	+123,204	+431,221
13.	3 Idiots	5,793,257	+204,250	+413,553
14.	Gospel music	3,501,632	+276,453	+410,599
15.	Titanic	13,486,119	+57,296	+409,479
16.	Facebook	51,780,853	+58,590	+406,539
17.	Harry Potter	17,856,481	+107,924	+405,083
18.	Ghostbusters	800,781	+680	+403,683
19.	Twilight	22,210,630	+64,746	+398,748
20.	Real Madrid C.F.	19,050,371	+32,575	+395,801

Pages on our list included Community Pages this week. Listening to music grew by 1.5 million Likes, growing most of that in a few days, to 2.1 million; the Page is dedicated to enjoying music and appears to have no affiliation. The band Everything’s Page grew by more than 1 million Likes; it’s a Community Page that grew most of these Likes, 741,600, in a few days. The Music Community Page grew by 438,700 Likes. Irish rock band The Armada’s Community Page grew 431,200 Likes to 493,700 in a few days. Then the Community Page of Gospel music grew 35 million with 410,600 in the span of a few days.

TV shows included the Indonesian “My Family” with most of its 1 million Likes, 979,000, occurring in a few days. “Islam KTP” is another Indonesian TV show, but this is the Community Page that grew to 828,200 Likes with 734,800 this week. Finally, a Filipino show, “Arti Sahabat” grew more than 354,300 Likes in a few days to 672,800 Likes.

Movies on the list included “The Smurfs” grew by 485,400 Likes to 3.3 million; the Page is running a related contest. “Harry Potter” saw 447,000 Likes this week to grow to 33.7 million; the “Harry Potter” Community Page was also on the list, growing 405,100 Likes to 17.8 million. A 2009 Indian movie, “3 Idiots” grew 413,600 Likes to 5.7 million in the span of a few days. “Titanic” Community Page grew 409,500 Likes to 13.5 million. “Ghostbusters” saw 403,700 Likes this week to grow to 800,800, thought most of that came in the span of a few days. Finally there was “Twilight” with 398,700 Likes to 22.2 million as the next installment in the franchise is set for a November release.

Other Pages on the list included Vodafone Egypt, which seems to be organic growth of 933,900 Likes to 942,200 this week. Sports teams were on the list, too; Official Detroit Red Wings grew 494,800 Likes to pass 1 million in a few days but Real Madrid C.F. grew 395,800 Likes to 19 million this week, all organic it seems. Japanese comic book series, Detective Conan, grew more than 440,900 Likes to 471,300 in a few days and Facebook’s Page grew 406,500 Likes to 51.7 million.

In a relatively quiet week of hires this week among companies active on the Facebook platform, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Arielle has started work as a junior product manager at brand promotions provider Wildfire Interactive (although LinkedIn shows her starting in June).

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:

Nanigans

• Christopher Zegel, Advertising Operations Manager – previously worked as a Digital Coordinator at Blitz Connects.
• Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey, Director of Market Development – formerly a Director of Media and Entertainment at Visible Measures.
• John Saitta, SVP Operations – formerly the VP of Operations at Visible Measures.

Wildfire

• Arielle Zuckerberg, Junior Product Manager – formerly a student.
• John Carriero, Sales Engineer – worked as a mathematics and technology teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School.

Work4 Labs

• Gene Lam, Sales Executive – previously worked as a Multi Media Advertising Consultant for Hearst Media Services.

Vitrue

• Daniel Hayden, Senior Manager – formerly a Director of Product Development at UDA Technologies, Inc.

Kontagent

• Mark Stanger, Director EMEA Business Development – formerly an independent consultant to Mindscape UK Ltd.

Buddy Media

• Devon McDermott, Project Manager – formerly worked as a Digital Services Manager at Triton Digital.

Rokkan

• Sav Banerjee, Executive Strategy Director – formerly performed similar work at Big Fuel Communications, M80, and SapientNitro.

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

February 8 – 9, 2012 | San Francisco Notify Me When Registration Opens

Inside Social Apps is coming back to San Francisco! We are proud to announce our third conference on the future of monetization on social and mobile platforms, and we hope to see you there.

Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis.

Social applications first made their splash in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms.

Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market.

Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early.

Sign up here to be notified when registration opens.

Speakers

Our 2012 speaker list will be announced in the weeks to come.

Past Inside Social Apps agendas have seen a roster of leading developers, including:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Mark Pincus CEO, Zynga		Kristian Segerstrale Co-founder and CEO, Playfish (now part of EA)
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Paul Bettner GM, Zynga with Friends
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Dennis Ryan EVP Worldwide Publishing, PopCap Games
	Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies		Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal
	Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)		Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
	Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace		Martin Essl Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
	Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung

A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Registration

We will be announcing limited tickets at special early pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register early and so your company doesn’t miss the event!

Join our registration notification list here.

From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco.