Last week, the Facebook finally opened up viral channels to both iOS and HTML5 mobile developers, which could make it much easier for apps to acquire users cheaply. To push its nascent mobile platform forward, Facebook launched several resources around HTML5 this week to help lure developers away from building purely native apps. The new resource center contains things like example HTML5 apps from the Financial Times and Scribd and games like Angry Birds and Words With Friends.

Continue reading “Facebook Launches HTML5 Resources to Boost Newly-Launched Mobile Platform” center at Inside Mobile Apps.

A week after launch of the HTML5 app platform and new viral channels for third-party mobile apps, the amount of traffic the social network is driving to individual HTML5-based titles seems to be in the low thousands of unique users. We looked at a handful of the apps that appeared on the company’s HTML5 mobile app showcase via AppData. Moblyng’s Word Racer Live and Social Poker Live each show 1,000 monthly active users or lower.

HTML5 is a key part of Facebook’s big play into supporting an ecosystem of mobile developers. However, because Facebook doesn’t own lower parts of the mobile stack like a phone or an operating system, its options are somewhat limited despite its more than 800 million active users.

For more on Facebook’s negotiations with Apple around HTML5, graphs and analysis of third-party Facebook mobile app traffic, and the current barriers to growth for these apps, continue reading “Early Traffic Results for HTML5 Part of Facebook’s Mobile Platform Seem Tepid” at Inside Mobile Apps. 

Today Facebook released its Messenger standalone mobile messaging app for BlackBerry, and added several new features and languages to the existing iOS and Android versions. Users of all the versions of Facebook Messenger will now be able to see when a conversation partner is typing, view the online status of all their friends, and can quickly add their top friends to a new or ongoing thread. Many additional languages are also now supported for iOS and Android.

Now available in App World via Facebook’s About page, the BlackBerry version of the push notification and SMS app could become a competitor to RIM’s native BlackBerry Messenger service. With the feature additions Messenger now more closely approximates the web version of Facebook Chat, and surpasses the built-in Chat functionality of the primary Facebook mobile apps. Facebook Messenger can now better achieve its purpose of allowing low-friction, cross-platform instant messaging.

The initial release of Messenger in August gave users a way to communicate with Facebook friends and their phone contacts without having to decide what device or platform to route a message to. Friends without Facebook receive messages as SMS, those with the app receive push notifications, those online on the web version of Facebook receive Chats, and those offline receive Facebook Messages in their inbox.

However, users had to search for friends individually to determine their online status and add them to a conversation. There was no way to easily add friends they frequently Chatted with to a conversation. There was also no way to tell if someone else was typing a Message to you, leading people to cut each other off in mid-sentence. BlackBerry users couldn’t access the app and had to Chat using the primary Facebook app or SMS, leading some to stick to BBMing with their other BlackBerry-carrying friends.

Today’s update solves all these problems. When users go to start a conversation or add friends to an existing thread, they’ll first see a list of their closest friends and their online statuses — whether online on the web, on their mobile device, or offline. Below this, users see an alphabetical list of all their online friends, and can also search for offline friends. This means that if users just want to Chat but not with anyone in particular, they’ll see options of readily available friends, which could increase usage of the app.

In addition to new features, 22 new languages have been added to the Android versions, and 12 more have been added for iPhone. In September, Facebook also made the app available in the UK and Ireland.

According to AppData, the iOS and Android Messenger apps have been growing relatively steadily, but have still only reached 1-2% of the audience of the primary Facebook apps for those operating systems. Messenger for iOS has 530,000 daily active users and 1.9 million monthly active users compared to Facebook for iPhone’s 52.3 million DAU and 92.5 million MAU. Messenger for Android has 780,000 DAU and 1.6 million MAU compared to Facebook for Android’s 47.9 million DAU and 70.9 million MAU.

With BBM already ingrained in BlackBerry user behavior patterns, we expect Messenger for BlackBerry to achieve less than 1% of Facebook for BlackBerry’s 28.6 million DAU. Still, the ability to chat for free regardless of a friend’s device should be appealing to BBM users and could steal some of them away. Meanwhile, the new features should boost the DAU of the iOS and Android Messenger apps by making users more likely to choose them over the primary Facebook apps.

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 King.com, Acquinity Interactive, Storm8, Lolapps, Games Cafe, Sociable Labs, Natural Motion Games, TinyCo and CrowdStar.

• PR Executive – King.com
• Consumer Research Executive – King.com
• Marketing Communications Executive – King.com

• Game Programmer
• Social Game Designer

• Principal Software Engineer – Social Commerce

• Design Lead / Manager
• Lead Programmer
• Customer Acquisition Manager

• iPhone Developer
• C++ Game Engineer

• Mobile UI Artist
• Senior Game Developer – Flash

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 has changed the interface of its Groups product, relocating several navigation buttons from the center of the right sidebar to the top of each Group page. The subtle redesign frees up space in the sidebar to show more ads and Facebook’s own modules such as People You May Know. This could help Facebook better monetize time spent on Groups.

Groups launched in October 2010 with the goal of creating designated spaces where a limited set of friends could share private information, such as family, a sports team, or a group for friends organizing a vacation. Since then, Facebook has revamped its privacy controls to make it easier to share with specific Friend Lists, reducing the need for Groups. Many strong use cases remain, though, such as facilitating sharing between non-friends around an interest topic.

In April, Facebook has made a few changes to Groups. It added an in-Group search bar for finding specific posts, began allowing users to upload whole photo albums, and added Questions to the Publisher. It gave admins of closed and secret Groups the option to require administrative approval for all new members. This can help keep Group content from being exposed to unauthorized users by one of the Group’s members, and also helps admins control the size of their Groups. It also launched the Send button, a social plugin that publishes content from an external website to a specific Group.

Now, the top center of each Group displays the number of photos and docs that have been uploaded there, and users can click though to view them or add their own. Previously, links to view photos and view or create Docs were somewhat buried down in the right sidebar and took up a lot of space. By relocating their links to the top of Groups, Facebook is reminding users that rich media can be shared to Groups and making it easier to access this content.

Links to create a Group event, and edit or leave a Group have been relocated into a settings drop-down menu in the top right corner. The edit Group interface tabs have been combined into a single screen. A Group’s description is now shown in the right sidebar. If a Group has a long description, it will be folded into a “See More” link, but will still occupy much of the room freed up by the other changes.

Except for Groups with long descriptions, these updates to the interface create enough additional space in the right sidebar to show roughly two more ads or Facebook modules above the fold. This will allow Facebook to derive more ad revenue, content engagement, and encourage more connections between users from Groups traffic.

Music applications like Spotify continued growing in the wake of Facebook’s most recent redesign on our list of the fastest growing apps by daily active users this week. There were also a few mobile apps, social network integrations and a few others. The titles below grew from between 80,200 and 987,800 DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Spotify	2,300,000	+987,824	+75%
2.	MyPad for iPad	2,100,000	+573,828	+38%
3.	Mafia Wars 2	360,000	+359,959	+877,949%
4.	Ravenskye City	430,000	+326,811	+1,409%
5.	YouTube	720,000	+276,975	+63%
6.	Bubble Witch Saga	1,300,000	+265,150	+28%
7.	Yahoo!	12,800,000	+175,755	+1%
8.	FarmVille	7,600,000	+150,270	+2%
9.	Test Console	420,000	+135,137	+47%
10.	BandPage by RootMusic	1,500,000	+108,601	+8%
11.	Words With Friends	4,100,000	+104,528	+3%
12.	WhoIsNear?	460,000	+103,763	+29%
13.	Grooveshark	180,000	+100,912	+128%
14.	60photos	160,000	+99,033	+162%
15.	MindJolt Games	900,000	+98,744	+12%
16.	Twitter	1,100,000	+83,130	+8%
17.	Foursquare	490,000	+81,906	+20%
18.	MyPad for iPhone	320,000	+80,537	+35%
19.	Pandora	960,000	+80,463	+9%
20.	Samsung Mobile	2,800,000	+80,202	+3%

Spotify topped our list this week with 987,800 DAU, beating out the other three music apps on our list by a lot. BandPage by RootMusic grew by 108,600 DAU, this app is for use by musical acts to create Page on Facebook, then music sharing app Grooveshark grew by 100,900 DAU. Finally the music streaming app Pandora’s Facebook integration grew by 80,500 DAU.

Mobile apps on the list included MyPad for iPad with 573,800 DAU, Samsung Mobile with 80,200 DAU and MyPad for iPhone with 80,500 DAU.

Social network integrations on our list included some big names this week. YouTube was on top with 277,000 DAU, followed by Yahoo with 175,800 DAU. The WhoIsNear? app, a location app on the Facebook platform, allowing users to check in geographically with what they’re doing, find new friends, publish their whereabouts to the stream, grew by 103,800 DAU. Then there was Twitter with 83,100 DAU and Foursquare with 81,900 DAU.

Last on the list was photo publisher 60photos with 99,000 DAU; the app allows users to rate photos and publishes the ratings to the stream. Then there was Test Console with 135,100 DAU, but appeared to be inactive.

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

The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains a detailed walk-through of how to measure the lifespan of your posts through Insights, and how to optimize for gaining new fans or link clicks. 

Facebook’s new Page Insights and some third-party tools can help you determine the lifespan of your Facebook Page updates. When your updates stop receiving Likes and comments, it may be time to post a new update to make sure you’re consistently engaging your fans. Here we’ll walk-through how to find your optimal Facebook Page publishing frequency.

PageLever ran a limited study of 20 posts from five Facebook Pages with over 1 million fans. It found that that average lifespan of a Page post in the news feed was 22 hours and 51 minutes. The median lifespan was 19 hours and 30 minutes. These figures were based on when posts ceased to receive Likes and comments. Posts continued to receive impressions for a slightly longer period of time, but the bulk of feedback occurs within the first 20 hours of a post’s lifespan.

Third-party tools such as PageLever and EdgeRank Checker can track the activity on a post by the hour so you can easily get an accurate, personalized assessment of the life-span of your Page posts.

If you don’t want to use or pay for a third-party tool, assessing the lifespan of your posts is more difficult as Facebook does not report Likes, comments, or clicks by hour, just by the day and per post. However, there is a manual way to gather this data.

To do so, visit your Page and click the Insights tab in the left-sidebar navigation menu. At the bottom of the main Insights tab in the Page Posts section…

Instructions for tracking the lifespan of your posts through Insights and optimizing for news fans or link clicks can be found in the full version of this article. This is available in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

Facebook is asking third-party Open Graph app developers to voluntarily add a private mode to their apps if necessary. Its developer blog post outlines how Spotify and Yahoo! News are tackling Open Graph privacy issues by giving users other options. Without a private mode, some users who initially opted in to sharing their activity may choose not to use an app to listen to an embarrassing song or read a controversial article rather than have that news published.

By getting developers to implement their own private modes, Facebook won’t have to build more privacy controls on its side that might add too much friction to apps that don’t require it, such as those that only share benign content or rarely share at all. An option to retract previously shared activity will also reduce the backlash from users who feel like Facebook infringed on their privacy even though they authorized what a third-party app could share and with whom.

It seems that Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” may have been too frictionless for some. The new app authentication flow announced at f8 lets users permit apps to publish all their future activity without asking them again. While this relieves users from constantly filling out sharing prompts, it occasionally could reveal somewhat sensitive information or cause a chilling effect where users opt not to engage with an app at all rather than share.

Users could always restrict app content to only be shared with certain friends.  The could also visit their profile’s activity log to delete past activity, but only after it had already been shared and possibly seen by friends in the Ticker. Facebook may now look to move away from the term “frictionless sharing” to reduce criticism around privacy.

Following f8, Spotify grew quickly thanks to listening activity published to the Facebook home page Ticker. It also heard user complaints about not wanting news of their listening to guilty pleasures shared to Facebook. It began rolling out a software update that lets users switch into “Private Listening” from the desktop app’s menu. Until they switched back, no listening activity would be shared.

Yahoo! News has implemented a more powerful privacy system that lets users turn “social” on and off, similar to The Independent’s privacy controls we reviewed earlier this month. Users can view a list of their recently read articles and delete that activity from Facebook right from the Yahoo! website. An option to be reminded of one’s privacy settings can also be enabled.

Facebook is taking a Platform-focused approach to privacy. Rather than overlay a one-size-fits-all privacy widget that wouldn’t adapt to different apps, Facebook is asking developers to build what’s right for their audience. This might mean strong controls for apps dealing with sensitive content, or no additional controls for those with a low risk of offending people through sharing.

Facebook already has its own Open Graph privacy controls. What was needed was controls right on the apps themselves, and this blog post should guide developers in that direction. However, if apps don’t voluntarily implement privacy controls when needed and Open Graph app sharing continues to hurt Facebook’s image, it may have to implement a mandatory privacy control system.

Facebook announced today that it is now accepting nominations for the first Facebook Studio Awards that will honor ad agencies who’ve produced they year’s best marketing campaigns. Th awards will serve to promote Facebook’s stand-alone marketing industry showcase. A panel of judges will look for campaigns that are social, scalable, integrated with other media, and use a wide range of Facebook marketing products. Brands and agencies can submit work to the Facebook Studio gallery here in order to qualify for the awards.

The chance to receive publicity by winning the award should encourage marketing industry players to submit their work. This will in turn fill out the gallery with examples and stories of success that can help others improve their own campaigns and attract more marketers to the Facebook platform. The awards are surely a bit of a PR stunt for Facebook Studio, but they’re still an opportunity for agencies to distinguish themselves.

Facebook has also made a few design improvements to Facebook Studio. New navigation options in the gallery allow visitors to find campaigns by agency, brand category, country, language, Facebook product used, and sort by recency, Likes, or whether the campaign has been spotlighted. The home page has been streamlined, and the Agency Directory is now easier to comb through.

Facebook Studio launched in April to create a dedicated space for the marketing community to browse each other’s work and learn about Facebook marketing products. Roughly 350 agencies and their international offices from 35 countries have submitted past campaigns to Facebook Studio. Facebook tells us 75 percent of pageviews are spent browsing agency-submitted work, indicating that marketers may be more interested in learning from examples than product documentation.

The nomination period for the Facebook Studio Awards runs from now through the end of 2011, and submissions will be judged in January. Winners will be featured on the site and will likely receive a flood of new clients, making the awards lucrative even without much of formal prize.

Marketing and advertising agencies are vying for brand clients that are increasing their spend on integrated marketing campaigns that utilize apps and Pages in addition to pure advertising. By creating an opportunity for top agencies stand out, Facebook may be able to populate the Studio website with more examples that will improve the overall quality of marketing on Facebook. This could help keep the site from being degraded by bland marketing that could push users away.

Wikia hired a CEO, and other companies added software engineers and marketing staff in this week’s look at Facebook platform industry career moves.

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:

Wikia

• Craig Palmer, CEO – previously President & CEO of Gracenote.
• Jennifer Betka, Senior Vice President of Marketing – formerly worked at AOL, Time Warner, Veoh, SIRIUS XM, and the LA Times.

Shoutlet

• Blake Samic, Senior Product Manager – formerly Lead IT Architect at GE Healthcare.
• William Cliffe, Software Developer.
• Will Huck, QA Specialist.
• Brianna Purvis, Account Manager – formerly a specialist at Apple, Inc.

Votigo

• Shayna Lashway, Marketing Manager – previously worked a similar position at Botanical Interests.
• Andrew Thorne, Sales Executive -  previously worked as a Senior Digital Sales Executive at The Denver Post.

Vitrue

• Julie Murphy, Director of Business Development – previously a Senior Account Executive at the San Francisco Bay Area at Compendium.

Work4 Labs

• Leopold Boudard, Software Engineer – formerly a Technical/Artistic adviser and developer at Hypertopia.
• Olivier Deffieux, UI Designer – previously an Art Director at The Diplomat.
• Helen Nesteruk, Global Account Manager – previously a Production Manager at MILLIANNA.

Nanigans

• Stephanie Swanson, Contracted Graphic Designer – formerly a Game Art Intern at Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

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

Recent and older films made up a big chunk of our list of the fastest growing Pages by the number of Facebook Likes this week. There were TV shows, networks and personalities on the list, musicians, a few book-related Pages, a Jesus Page, Facebook’s Page, the Angry Birds Page, YouTube’s and more. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.

	Name	Likes	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1.	To Kill a Mockingbird	981,496	+818	+590,786
2.	Luciano Huck	3,039,021	+110,149	+579,173
3.	Fast & Furious	10,387,982	+20,981	+557,508
4.	Adele	7,074,380	+75,733	+447,762
5.	Titanic	13,486,119	+57,296	+409,479
6.	The Chronicles of Narnia	466,372	+958	+407,834
7.	LMFAO	6,706,010	+63,343	+372,575
8.	Titanic	8,579,954	+52,395	+360,367
9.	Facebook	54,192,261	+46,375	+354,165
10.	facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake!	445,351	0	+333,025
11.	Jesus Daily	9,210,413	+52,597	+328,993
12.	Angry Birds	8,781,264	+46,286	+325,850
13.	YouTube	46,205,001	+41,141	+320,495
14.	The Walking Dead	3,098,095	+86,686	+320,390
15.	Chicago	329,857	+685	+318,962
16.	Pitbull	11,792,725	+45,672	+292,915
17.	Canal Fox	1,245,921	+25,605	+288,246
18.	EDEBİYAT	645,327	+220,503	+284,928
19.	V Energy Drink Australia	309,324	+292	+275,212
20.	Harry Potter	35,797,314	+39,445	+272,174

Movies on our list this week came as the result of popularity, as well as Page consolidations. “To Kill a Mockingbird” grew 590,800 Likes to 981,500 in what appeared to be a consolidation. “Fast & Furious” grew seemingly as the result of the promotion of its most recent home release, by 557,500 Likes to 10.3 million. “Titanic” the Community Page grew by 409,500 Likes to 13.4 million and “Titanic” the Page grew by 360,400 Likes to 8.5 million by promoting a forthcoming 3D version of the film. “Chicago” grew by 319,000 Likes to 329,900, apparently a consolidation. “Harry Potter” grew by 272,200 Likes to 35.7 million, promoting a related sweepstakes.

TV-related Pages include Brazilian TV personality Luciano Huck with 579,200 Likes to pass 3 million fans. The show “The Walking Dead” with 320,400 Likes to grow to 3.1 million with the recent premiere of the show’s season. Finally, Canal Fox is promoting programming in Spanish, including popular TV shows like “The Walking Dead.”

Music on the list included singer Adele whose Page grew by 447,800 Likes to pass 7 million, LMFAO which is promoting its music appearances and grew by 372,600 to reach 6.7 million and finally Pitbull’s Page grew by 292,900 to reach 11.7 million by promoting his media appearances and other activities. Books, meanwhile, made the list, too. “The Chronicles of Narnia” grew by 407,800 to 466,400 Likes while the Turkish literature Page EDEBİYAT grew by 284,900 to 645,300 Likes.

The rest of the list included Facebook with 354,200 Likes to each 54.1 million and facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake! with 333,000 Likes to 445,400. Jesus Daily grew by 329,000 Likes to 9.2 million; the Page publishes daily religious posts. The Angry Birds Page grew by 325,900 Likes to 8.7 million. YouTube’s Page grew by 320,500 Likes to 46.2 million. Finally,  V Energy Drink Australia grew seeming in a consolidation by 275,200 to 309,300 Likes.