A few companies made some big hires this week, BranchOut brought on a Vertical Solutions Director and Efficient Fronter brought on a statistician, but otherwise it was mostly interns and account management.

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:

Work4 Labs

• Eugene Ernoult, Business Developer – formerly the Business Developer & Strategist at Multiposting.fr.

Involver

• Jonathan Eatherly, Software Engineering Intern.

BranchOut

• D Wynne Brown, Vertical Solutions Director – formerly the Director of Sales/Program Director at Monster Worldwide.

Wildfire

• Katherine Holtz, Account Manager – previously on the Growth Accounts Team at mBlox.

Efficient Frontier

• Zhenyu (William) Yan, Senior Algorithms Engineer/ Senior Statistician – formerly a Analytics – Lead Scientist at FICO.
• Jaime So, Account Manager – previously an Associate Account Manager at Efficient Frontier.

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

Since the Skype Video Calling and Chat redesign launch a month ago, you may have noticed something missing from your Facebook home page. The Facebook Chat buddy list now only shows you the online status of a subset of your closest or most recently interacted with friends, around 20 on a screen of average size and resolution. You can only determine if the rest of your friends are available to Chat by searching for them one by one.

The redesign makes a bad tradeoff. Quick access to Chat with best friends is helpful, but search is far too inefficient a method of determining the online status of other friends. It’s unlikely that users will ever strike up a casual conversation with anyone outside of the buddy list. This is unfortunate, because it’s the ability to stay in touch more distant acquaintances that makes Facebook special.

Update: Facebook has returned the ability to view the online statuses of all friends by adding a “More Online Friends” section in Chat.

We asked Facebook why Chat has been redesigned like this, and Director of Product Peter Deng told us, “The goal of the new design is to give more people faster access to the friends they message most. Looking at the early data of how people are engaging with and using Chat, things are moving in this direction.”

Sure, people spend most of their time Chatting with close friends or people they frequently need to exchange information with, such as co-workers or teammates. The new design makes it very easy to start talking with a friend whose wall you recently posted on, profile you’ve been perusing, or that you Chatted with yesterday.

The intelligent sorting algorithm isn’t perfect, though. For example, I see friends I haven’t interacted with in months, while best friends, people I frequently see in person, and those who’ve recently Liked my status updates remain hidden. With time the algorithm could improve, but now if I’m visiting New York City and want to ask several local friends where I should go for lunch, searching one-by-one to see if they’re online is a ton of work. I’ll probably forget to search for someone who might have the recommendation I need.

A quick glance at the unfiltered Chat buddy list on one of Facebook’s mobile apps reveals the friends that are missing, that I might have asked for advice or invited to dinner if it wasn’t so difficult to figure out if they were available to Chat.

The relevance-filtered buddy list is an especially big problem for users with abnormally high friend counts. Facebook says the average user has 130 friends (though we hear it’s closer to 180 now), and for those people perhaps only a handful of online friends don’t appear on the buddy list. If a use has 500 or 1000 friends, though, the number of missing friends is much more significant, recalling names from such a large set is difficult, and searching one friend at time takes far too long to be feasible.

Its these power users and early adopters that are posting updates, tagging photos, and driving total time on site for Facebook. These are the same people that could lead their graphs to another social network if they got fed up with Facebook, so it’s in the site’s interest to keep them happy.

Facebook should implement a combination of the relevance-filtered and complete buddy list, similar to how the news feed has tabs for Top News and Most Recent. The site has considered ways of eliminating the tabbed news feed because some users never leave the default Top News tab, but the buddy list is not an endless stream, it can be easily displayed in its entirety.

By default, the tabbed buddy list could show users the relevance-filtered list, so the most frequent Chat use cases wouldn’t require any buddy list scrolling to initiate. Then let users click to view their full buddy list. Search could be left in to help those with massive buddy lists, or scrapped for a cleaner design.

With a global user base topping 750 million that includes social butterflies and grandparents just looking to share with their kids, pleasing everyone is no simple task. More options make things more complicated, so in most situations, design that work for the majority are best. But when sleek, algorithmic-focused design creates more friction than it removes, one extra link or button may be the answer. In this case, I hope the answer is “See all online friends”.

Update: Read how Facebook fixed this issue with Chat by adding a “More Online Friends” section to Chat that allows users to view the online status of all of your friends.

The last Platform Update to the Facebook Developer Blog announced a mandatory migration to a new spec of OAuth 2.0. It only requires a small code change, but all developers must implement it by November 5th. Facebook also noted that a slightly updated version of the PHP SDK will be released tomorrow, August 9th. This week, Facebook also provided a walk through of how developers can allow users to upload videos to their profiles through an application.

Facebook is currently migrating to OAuth 2.0, a secure authorization protocol that allows applications to keep User IDs and access tokens private when transmitted. All developers must migrate their apps to OAuth 2.0 by October 1st.

Facebook jointly publishes the OAuth spec with Yahoo! and Microsoft. A change to this spec necessitates a changes to Facebook’s auth APIs will also change, which in turn requires a minor change to API calls.

As of November 5th, 2011, auth API calls that previously used included “code_and_token” will instead need to use “code%20token“. All other elements of auth API calls remain identical.

In other OAuth news, tomorrow Facebook will release v3.1 of its PHP SDK. The OAuth 2.0-ready versions of the PHP and JavaScript SDKs were initially slated for a July 1st launch. However the PHP SDK was finished early and released in late May, while technical difficulties delayed the JS SDK until late July.

During the delay of the JS SDK, there were apparently some improvements made upon what was released in the v3 of the PHP SDK. The new v3.1 PHP SDK update to be released tomorrow will “leverage the recent changes to the JavaScript SDK”. Developers can download the update on GitHub.

Facebook has been publishing a series of how-to guides that explain how developers can add advanced functionality to and optimize performance of their apps and websites. Previously, Facebook published a how-to for optimizing social plugin performance. The guides consolidate clear instructions so developers don’t have to dig through forums or use trial and error to achieve the functionality they desire.

The How-To: Use the Graph API to Upload a Video (iOS) guide explains that by allowing users to upload video through an app, that app can gain new users since a link to it is included alongside video content. The guide covers how to:

1. Start a new project
2. Add a sample video to your project
3. Set up the Facebook class
4. Set up permissions and the authentication handler
5. Setup up the video upload Graph API call
6. Handle the results
7. Add single sign-on (SSO) support
8. Test the app
9. Set video privacy

The brands we featured this week ran some interesting campaigns, including: Sears launched a Sears Latino Page, Aeropostale launched an e-commerce store, DirecTV is engaging in a Page growth charity drive while Food Network is simultaneously promoting its sponsors while recruiting users to the Page with an associated giveaway.

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 over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Sears Launches Sears Latino Page

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

Core Mechanic: The new Sears Latino Facebook Page is aimed particularly at Latino customers.

Method: The Sears Latino Page is marketing itself as a destination for Sears’ Latino customers to go to be informed about the latest sales and products that are relevant to them. The Page’s bilingual content — from the landing tab, appliance sweepstakes, status updates and product promotions — is culturally relevant and very family-oriented. Plus, the current appliance sweepstakes is Like-gated, asks for an email address for future email marketing and also asks users to share their entry to the stream.

Impact: The Page currently has grown to 20,800 Likes in the two and half weeks since it launched, and is using several of the tools mentioned above to grow.

Aeropostale’s Facebook E-Commerce Store

Goal: Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty,

Core Mechanic: An e-commerce store on the Aeropostale Facebook Page.

Method: The Aeropostale Facebook Page features an e-commerce store that allows customers the chance to buy, save, share, Like and comment on products without leaving the platform. The Usablenet store launched at the beginning of August and is combined with a mobile app.

The interface of the store promotes sharing content to the stream; 50 users Like the store itself already and users may also Like individual products. Shopping on the store is fairly easy, although there are lots of clicks involved, the individual items are easy to view and Like. Users may also sign up for email, locate stores, track orders or search using the store. The Page is also promoting the store on the Wall via status updates.

Impact: Thus far the Page has 5 million Likes, and PageData shows a growth of about 200,000 Likes since the store’s launch at the beginning of the month.

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.

Facebook is now showing a special type of news feed story that links to a Page when multiple friends post updates that mention the Page’s name, even if they don’t explicitly tag it. The story reads “[Friend's name] and [x] other friends posted about [Page name]“, with the Page’s name linked.

The “Posted About” news feed story shows that Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates to perform named entity recognition. It will help users determine topics that are trending amongst their friends, and help the Pages representing these topics gain more fans.

Facebook previously tested the same type of aggregated news feed story in late 2010, with the stories reading that multiple friends had “mentioned” a Page without tagging it. Other types of aggregated news feed stories the site has tested include those showing that multiple friends had published a link to the same website, written on the same friend’s wall, or checked into the same Place. However, none of these require named entity recognition.

Page names are recognized from within simple text status updates as well as the headlines of posted links. Users can explicitly tag Pages they Like in their status updates using the @ operator, but some users don’t know about this feature, purposefully opt not to tag Pages, or don’t Like the Pages they would tag. Aggregated Posted About stories let Facebook link these updates to the mentioned Pages without actually changing a user’s original update, and thread Likes and comments for each original post.

Posted About news feed stories and other aggregated stories surface popular content and actions from a user’s social graph, providing personalized trending topics. This contrasts with Twitter’s less personalized trending topics feature, which displays the most frequently mentioned words or phrases from the worldwide Twitter user base, or specific cities or countries.

These Posted About stories are highly relevant and fun to read because they present different opinions on a specific topic. You might see a post of a friend talking about how they appreciate a new feature in iTunes aggregated with another friend’s post recommending a new album to buy on iTunes.

However, Facebook has confirmed with us that its natural language processing doesn’t detect sentiment, how a Page’s name is being used, or whether the mentioned Page was actually the focus of the update. As such, the Posted About stories may highlight Pages that aren’t actually what a user was discussing, or that are being talked about negatively. Brands might be weary of having bitter or defamatory posts linked to their official presence.

For these reasons, some users may not enjoy the presence of Posted About stories. They may feel that Facebook is invading their privacy by “reading” their posts, even though the processing is done by computers, not humans. Others may not necessarily want to promote a Page they mention, especially if their update criticizes it, and may feel that they are being used by Facebook as a marketing tool. This could make particularly sensitive users less likely to mention Page names, or make them post less frequently in general, especially since there is no way to opt out of being included in these types of posts.

Growth Opportunity for Pages

Page admins should be excited about the resumed trial of Posted About news feed stories, as they will likely drive growth of Pages. Each mention of a Page aggregated by the story represents a social recommendation, indicating the Page is important to the viewer’s network. They can then follow these implicit recommendations by clicking through the link to the Page and Liking it.

Getting users to tag Pages in updates is a core free growth channel for Pages, and now Facebook is relieving users from having to remember to tag a Page or going through the chore of adding the tag. The Posted About stories should increase the total presence of links to Pages in the news feed, augmenting paid Page marketing through ads with organic growth. The story stype will give businesses an added incentive to get users talking about them on Facebook, and especially help commonly discussed Pages to grow.

Posted About aggregated news feed stories could make the news feed more relevant, and there’s also plenty more potential for natural language processing to improve Facebook. One day you might be able to see aggregated stories about multiple friends that are happy or that are discussing world news , no matter what words they use to describe the emotion or topic.

Facebook’s mobile  feature phone app, Facebook for Every Phone, topped our list with more than 5 million MAU. Calendar apps, photos, quizzes, a handful of Page tab apps, Are You Interested? and Cupid, Yahoo and BandPage by RootMusic rounded out the list. The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 395,100 and 5.4 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Facebook for Every Phone	15,222,109	+5,399,743	+55%
2.	MyCalendar	9,094,402	+4,288,632	+89%
3.	60photos	44,714,139	+3,829,675	+9%
4.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	42,246,438	+2,438,768	+6%
5.	The Smurfs & Co	1,568,701	+1,489,818	+1,889%
6.	MeinKalender	5,704,753	+1,239,394	+28%
7.	Are YOU Interested?	11,078,386	+1,135,441	+11%
8.	Cupid	8,798,728	+1,127,065	+15%
9.	BandPage by RootMusic	30,303,903	+1,098,219	+4%
10.	Zoo World	7,652,670	+1,008,972	+15%
11.	21 questions	19,837,119	+851,216	+4%
12.	Yahoo!	19,191,161	+712,278	+4%
13.	MonCalendrier	869,799	+526,036	+153%
14.	Static Iframe Tab	7,019,593	+505,274	+8%
15.	Gourmet Ranch	3,432,654	+491,952	+17%
16.	freequizz.es	564,566	+491,401	+672%
17.	MapleStory Adventures	779,466	+476,312	+157%
18.	Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab	1,975,089	+473,530	+32%
19.	Welcome tab app for Pages	8,841,845	+396,100	+5%
20.	Megacity	1,082,450	+395,126	+57%

Facebook for Every Phone grew by about 5.4 million MAU this week, far surpassing the next most popular app, MyCalendar which grew by 4.3 million MAU. There were a few other calendar apps on the list, MeinKalender with 1.2 million MAU and MonCalendrier with 526,000 MAU. The calendars almost immediately ask users to invite friends to the app in order to use it.

A few friend interaction apps were on the list; 60photos grew by 3.8 million MAU. This app asks users to rate their friends’ Facebook photos and then publishes stories to their Walls with positive ratings. 21 questions grew by 851,200 MAU; the story asks users questions about their friends and publishes a feed story to their Wall with each answer. The Connect app freequizz.es, which grew by 491,400 MAU, asks users questions about their friends — then asks them to invite those friends to use the app as well.

Page tab apps were popular this week. Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 2.4 million MA,. Static Iframe Tab by 505,300 MAU, Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab grew by 473,500 MAU and Welcome tab app for Pages by 396,100 MAU.

Two dating apps grew on our list pretty significantly this week. Are YOU Interested? by 1.1 million MAU and Cupid by just about the same. BandPage by RootMusic grew by just over 1 million MAU and Yahoo’s app grew by 712,300 MAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network this past week.

Inside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms, and virtual goods.

Monday, August 1st, 2011

• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: iPad Charts Show Greater Activity Further Down
• Even as Android Eclipses iOS in U.S. Mobile Subscribers, It Still Lags in Facebook Mobile’s Footprint
• Zynga Brings Words With Friends to Facebook With iOS Cross-Platform Play
• DeNA’s Net Income Climbs 45% in First Quarter to $121.3M
• Glu Mobile Gets a Foothold in Chinese Market Through Partnership With Hong Kong’s TOM Group

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

• New Free-to-Download Platformer, Cordy, Comes to iOS from Android
• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: Older Titles Get a Boost From New Quests, Social Features
• Glu Mobile Acquires Griptonite, Blammo Games for Stock, Earnouts Worth More Than $50M
• Glu Mobile’s Net Loss Narrows as Smartphone Revenues Rise by 58% in Challenging Second Quarter

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: Skype, Mahjong, & AOL Grow on iPad
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Glu Mobile, Kabam, EA, Tagged and More
• Flurry Adds Age, Gender Demographics in Revamp of Analytics Product
• Storm8 May Veer Down the Funding Route, But A $1 Billion Valuation Would Be Pricey

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

• The Marbians Touch Down on iOS
• Diversifying Beyond Games, Tapjoy Boasts of Driving 10M Conversions for Brands in July
• Glu Mobile Restructures With Departures For Several Marketing, Creative Executives
• Facebook Promotes Mobile Network Operator Partners on the Login Screen
• Electronic Arts Moves Moore Up to COO; Cottle to Oversee Mobile, Social Gaming
• Capcom’s Mobile and Social Gaming Business Brings in $15.5 Million in First Quarter

Friday, August 5th, 2011

• New Hires in Mobile: Big Fish Games, Gameloft, Glu Mobile, & More
• Konami Goes with Disturbingly Cute Concepts in Gesundheit! On iOS
• Q&A: Glu Mobile CEO De Masi on Acquisitions, Third-Quarter Forecast

Inside Social Games

Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, August 1st, 2011

• Zoo World 2, Mahjong Saga, Forest Adventure Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Zynga Brings Words With Friends to Facebook With iOS Cross-Platform Play
• A Closer Look at King’s Bounty for Facebook, by Russia’s Nival
• 6waves Lolapps Raises $35 Million Post-Merger
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for August 2011

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

• Collapse! Blast for Facebook Is A Chip Off An Old Block
• Monster Fusion Brings a Twist to the Facebook Collection Genre
• Social/Mobile Game Developer Service Provider Nextive Acquired by Globant
• Texas HoldEm Poker, 開心水族箱, Ninja Saga Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: FunCom, Tagged, Pocket Gems, EA and More
• Megaband Gets Players to Tune in, Hits the Charts
• Kixeye Raises $18M Third Round, Brings Zynga Co-Founder Trader to Board

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

• 6waves Lolapps Confirms Funding From Nexon, Insight Venture Partners
• Visa’s PlaySpan Finds Life After Facebook Credits Profitable, Educational for Social Game Developers
• New Hires in Social Gaming: 6waves LOLapps, Breaktime Studios, Gamzee, & More
• Updating Discovery for Social Games on Facebook With Algorithms, Better New User Experience
• Electronic Arts Moves EA Sports’ Moore Up to COO, Cottle to Oversee Mobile, Social Gaming
• The Island: Castaway on Facebook Makes Life a Beach

Friday, August 5th, 2011

• 森の物語, Megacity, Collapse! Blast Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• An Early Look at Words With Friends for Facebook
• The Sims Social Steps Up EA’s IP Presence on Facebook
• Social Gaming Roundup: Patent Lawsuits, Virtual Goods, Game Updates, & More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, August 1st, 2011

• Page Apps, Dating, Mobile, Calendars, Photos, Badges, Video and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook, Vodafone, Alcatel Lucent Developer $100 Facebook Phone
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Alamo Rent A Car, National Geographic Channel and Fox
• Roost Local Scorecard Helps Businesses See If Their Facebook Fans Live Nearby
• Even as Android Eclipses iOS in U.S. Mobile Subscribers, It Still Lags in Facebook Mobile’s Footprint
• Facebook Officially Launches Ads API, Opening Efficient Ad Management Tool Development
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for August 2011

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Claritics, Sharethrough, BranchOut, TBG Digital, Wildfire and More
• Amy Winehouse, “Captain America,” Food Network, Walmart and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Facebook Allows Duplicate Pages to Be Merged Into Official Pages
• Facebook Buys Digital Book Creator Push Pop Press for “the Ideas and Technology”
• Page Management Industry Interest in Ecommerce Grows as Vitrue Partners with Milyoni

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

• PageLever Launches Deep Analytics Tool for Facebook Pages
• Katango’s Web App Auto-Creates Friend Lists and Exports Them to Facebook
• Spotify, Photos, Calendars, Horoscopes, Profile Banners and More on This Week’s List of Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: King.com, FunCom, Tagged, EA and More
• The Facebook Marketing Bible August 2011 Edition Is Now Available
• How to Use Facebook’s “Merge Duplicate Pages” Feature to Gain Fans

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

• Facebook Careers Postings: Data Centers, Security, Measurement, Engineering and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Zuckerberg, Deals, Data Centers, Sales, Interns and More
• Platform Update: Social Plugin Performance, App and Website Insights, Notifications, Requests
• Facebook Promotes Mobile Network Operator Partners on the Login Screen

Friday, August 5th, 2011

• Profile Banners, Calendars, Dropbox, Quizzes, Photos and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook’s “Locations” App Lets Corporate Pages Display a Store Finder and Links to Their Local Branch Pages
• Quixey’s Keyword-Based Facebook App Search Engine Could Become a Powerful Discovery Tool
• Facebook Roundup: London, Pages, School, Spam, Foursquare, Zuckerberg and More

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 LeadBolt, King.com, Dynamic Signal, Glu Mobile, Kabam, Electronic Arts, Funcom Oslo AS, Tagged and Pocket Gems.

• Publisher Sales Manager-Digital
• Advertising Sales Director-Digital

• Business Analyst
• Senior Business Development Director – US – King.com
• Business Development Director – Central Europe – King.com
• Advertising Account Manager – King.com
• Business Intelligence Developer

• Front-End Engineer
• Product Management

• Design Director

• Mobile Art Director
• UI/UX Artist
• Senior UX Specialist

• LEAD PRODUCT MANAGER, MOBILE
• Product Manager (Playfish)

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

• Software Engineer – Games
• Game Business Analyst
• Product Manager – Monetization
• Creative Director – Social Games
• Game Designer
• Art Director – Social Games

• Associate Producer / Product Manager
• Game Designer

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.

Facebook’s Page Reaches 50 Million Likes — The company has just reached 50 million Likes on its official Page, which is also unsurprisingly the most popular Page on the site.

Ceglia Facebook Ownership Facebook Looking Even Worse — Despite some turgid articles not too long ago about the possibility of upstate New York entrepreneur and scam artist Paul Ceglia winning his court case claiming that he owns half of Facebook, his big-name lawyers recently left. And now, Facebook says it has found “smoking gun” evidence that he fabricated documents purporting to show his ownership stake. It says it can’t reveal the evidence yet, though.

Facebook Expands in London - Facebook is renting a 36,000 square-foot building in London for its 70 employees that will focus on ad sales.

Unauthorized Pages in Users’ Feeds – Some users are reporting that they are seeing Facebook Pages appearing in their news feeds despite having never Liked them. Facebook has yet to confirm the issue. Thanks to Mike for the tip.

Foursquare Makes Pages Self-Serve - Foursquare’s organizational Pages are now self-serve and aimed at allowing brands to market themselves on the platform.

Facebook Becomes Back-to-School Hub – As happened last year, Facebook is set to become a big place for back to school shopping, giving users the chance to win free items, take advantage of limited time deals and receive discounts.

Spam King Sanford Wallace Indicted – Sanford Wallace, known as the Spam King, was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Jose this week for fraud on the Facebook platform. He faces 16 to 40 years in prison, plus fines.

Zuckerberg Named Silicon Valley’s “Worst Dressed” – GQ magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg worst dressed man in Silicon Valley despite some stiff competition. [Image Via David Terrar]

Facebook to Offer Digital Citizenship Grants – Facebook has pledged $200,000 in grant money for research “that improves understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with how kids are growing up in a world of media and technology”, such as cyber bullying prevention.

Other Announcements: 

SocialVibe Focuses on Political Ads – SocialVibe announced this week that it would be offering services tailored specifically to political campaigns and action committees ahead of the 2012 election. The company specializes in digital advertising.

DealBurner Sends Group Deals When You Check In - DealBurner is a new service that sends users alerts when they check in to a location on Facebook Places or Foursquare about daily deals and pre-paid coupons offered at that business. The service aggregates deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, ScoutMob, and more.

Keyword-based app search engine startup Quixey added the ability to find Facebook apps this week. Users can now type in what they’re trying to do, such as “promote my band” and receive recommendations of apps across mobile operating systems, browsers, social networks, and the web. Quixey does a satisfactory job, returning generally relevant results, but missing some of the most popular Facebook apps when users search for their function.

Although Facebook has social connections driving app discovery, competition is fierce and communication channels aren’t as strong as they used to be. Developers typically spend heavily on ads to market themselves. With time to improve, Quixey could help solve this problem by helping users find reputable apps, helping apps gain users, and making Facebook a more attractive development platform.

Currently, if someone wants to search for a Facebook app, they only have two options:

• a strict name search through Facebook’s internal search engine that doesn’t help if you don’t know exactly what app you’re looking for
• a web search engine search that mixes websites into the app results

Facebook used to have a category-sorted App Directory, but it removed all links to it a long time ago and disabled it completely last month. AppBistro provides a Page tab application directory, but it doesn’t list user apps. A similar discovery problem exists on mobile which is being tackled by Chomp, Appsfire, and Appolicious, but there wasn’t a solid solution for finding Facebook apps until now.

Quixey includes a very wide breadth of platforms in its app search results, including iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, FireFox add-ons, Mac, PC, Web, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. When users conduct a search, they’ll see results from across platforms by default, but they can refine them to specific ones. Uses can also refine to only view apps mentioned in certain publications such as TechCrunch, or that integrate with certain services such as Flickr.

Results pages includes an in-line description, price, preview of a feature breakdown, star rating, and a list of platforms the app is available on. Clicking through a result reveals a full description and feature list, articles and tweets linking to the app, and videos. These signals make it easy to get a sense of the public opinion on an app before one tries it.

Quixey only launched a few months ago, so some kinks are too be expected. Still, result ranking is still somewhat inaccurate, with hardly used apps appearing above some of the most popular Facebook apps for common needs. In some cases, such as when searching for “promote my band” or “Facebook music”, you’ll get the second-most popular app for that use case ranked first, but the most popular app won’t be anywhere in the results despite being indexed by Quixey.

For instance, RootMusic’s BandPage doesn’t appear when searching “promote my band” or “Facebook music”, but less popular competitor ReverbNation’s Band Profile does. Same goes for a “professional networking” search returning Monster.com’s new BeKnown app, but not vertical leader BranchOut.

Results could be made even more compelling with the addition of Facepiles that show if friends have used the app. Quixey would need developers to authorize the plugins themselves, but these social recommendations could help users sort through lots of unknown apps and trust what they choose to install.

Users and developers should both be excited about this new app discovery channel. It will make finding utility apps for things with generic names such as sharing photos or keeping calendars much easier, and give developers added incentive to maintain a high user experience that drives positive reviews. If it works out its result ranking algorithm and becomes more popular, Quixey could drive overall app usage, increasing time on site for Facebook and making developers money.