Facebook has announced a second mobile talent acquisition in two days as the company bought Strobe, the maker of a platform supporting mobile web apps that can work on multiple devices and operating systems like iOS and Android.

The company’s founder Charles Jolley was behind Sproutcore, an open source Javascript framework that lets developers create web-based applications that resemble native desktop experiences. He also designed the architecture behind MobileMe’s web-based applications at Apple. Facebook said Jolley will join the company’s mobile engineering team.

His company Strobe, which raised $2.5 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Hummer Winblad, lets developers test code for mobile web apps and manage their deployment across multiple platforms from a single interface. It also comes with analytics to track usage.

The deal to buy Strobe plays into a big push this year to get developers building HTML5-based mobile web applications instead of native ones for the iOS or Android platforms, which Facebook doesn’t have as much power to influence.

After several months of anticipation, Facebook launched an HTML5-centric platform last month that enables mobile developers to spread their applications virally — which is something the native iOS and Android app stores aren’t really designed to do because they’re directory-based and curated (especially in Apple’s case.)

>> Read more on Inside Mobile Apps.

Several companies hired sales and account management staff this week and SNAP Interactive brought on Jon Pedersen Sr. as CFO.

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:

SNAP Interactive

• Jon Pedersen Sr., Chief Financial Officer – formerly Senior Vice President – Controller of Warner Music Group.

AdParlor

• Denis Melnik, Account Manager – formerly the Xbox Marketing Assistant at Microsoft.

Efficient Frontier

• Floris ter Braak, Associate Account Manager – previously was a student.

Wildfire

• Joe Elga, Social Media Marketing – previously a student.

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

Facebook picked up yet another small startup in what may help efforts to build a full-featured, standalone photo or video app.

The company bought Digital Staircase, the maker of a handful of photo and video editing apps like MovieCam, according to the startup’s blog.

“We’re announcing today that we’re being acquired by Facebook to help bring these mobile innovations to a broader audience. Many things may change, but our dedication to immersive experiences will not,” the company wrote in a statement.

Digital Staircase had a modest amount of success with a handful of paid apps. The company had published five apps to date, although three of them hadn’t seen any updates in two years. Its two most recent releases were MovieCam and MovieCam Go, priced at $2.99 and $1.99 respectively. Those apps seemed to hover in between the #100 and #200 range in the paid apps part of the photography category, indicating it might have been difficult to scale up beyond much of a lifestyle business.

>> Read more on Inside Mobile Apps.

This morning, Google announced the worldwide release of Google + Pages via blog post, establishing itself as the newest competitor to Facebook’s Pages. For consumers, this comes as a rapid advancement for the Google + network, but for marketers who tried to get an account when Google + was first released, it’s about time.

“For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face,” writes Vic Gundotra, Google senior vice president of engineering.

Earlier in the year when Google + beta was unveiled, marketers rushed to build their social branding presence. New business pages were quickly deferred and deleted by Google in effort to make Google+ user-centric at first. To disgruntled marketers, Google said there would be upcoming solutions—and now here we are. Almost. For the time being, Google + Pages are only available to select companies.

Google + Pages has launched with big brand names leading the healm and stretching the gammot of social influence. Key names include Pepsi, The New York Times, Burberry, Save the Children UK, Coldplay, and of course, it’s own Google and YouTube Pages. With the ability to create video and chat “hangouts” with a Page’s social circle, G+ Pages is creating an intruiging cool factor for personal connection.

Pepsi on Google +

Google+ Pages Profiles look somewhat like a ghost town compared to the application add ons with Facebook’s platform; however, the basics are there. Google has set up its brand Profile Pages similar to Facebook, with a main focus on the Stream. Brands can post “what’s new” via video, photo, text, attachments, and location-based check ins. With the popularity of mobile companies like food trucks, Google + decision to add check-ins could be a leveragable integration. Otherwise, Profiles are simple. There is the Stream, an About page, and tabs for Videos and Photos. In testing, we found the check-ins are not quite debugged.

While Facebook has been getting rid of internally built features for Pages, like Discussions, Google has built in a variety of extra tabs– but only related to the Stream. For Pages, there are several Stream categories: Following, Customers, VIPs and Team Members. Google and Facebook Pages can both be accessed via mobile apps. As we’ve reported, the iPhone/iPad has 52.3 million daily active users and 92.7 million monthly active users according to AppData, so marketers tapping into both Google + and Facebook pages have ample opportunity to gain consumers.

Similar to Facebook Pages geographic targeting for posting, G+ is taking a age-related route to “targeting.” Content on a G+ Page can be posted to any G+ user, or limited to 18 years or older. Soon, content visibility can be limited to 21 and older and anything alcohol-related. Similar to Facebook, Google is focusing its Pages on storytelling and connecting. Google prohibits contests or sweepstakes, and doesn’t provide any promotion-related opportunities as Facebook does.

Of all the Google + Pages hype, the most promising and differentiating feature is the ability to Direct Connect from Google search to a Google+ Page.

Remember when typing in + used to bring up more advanced Google searches? They took it away for a reason. It’s now called Direct Connect. To search for a company Google+ Page, users just indicate [+] in the search bar, and the Page will appear. Users can then option to automatically join the circle of anything they put a [+] next to. For example, users looking to join the Twilight circle before the movie comes out can just type in +Twilight to be seamlessly integrated to its social circle.

For developers, the feature takes an extra code that will be picked up by crawlers and approved before a Page can Direct Connect. Like the general G+ Pages feature, this ability is limited to a select number of companies at present.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip]

The fashion industry lends itself particularly well to Facebook – the platform’s most prolific (and engaged) demographic is 18 to 34 year-old females – and many of Facebook’s most popular Pages come from this sector. Fashion by definition strives to be up-to-the-minute and ‘in’, and this, plus the strong use of color and powerful visuals by brands in this field, mean that a well-managed Facebook Page can be a very powerful tool in the digital marketer’s arsenal.

In this week’s Facebook Marketing Showcase we’ll be looking at some of the most popular clothing brands on Facebook.

Zara

Established in 1975, Spanish fashion chain Zara expanded so quickly in the last decade that it overtook The Gap as the world’s largest clothing retailer. Zara’s rapid turnaround (the company claims to take just two weeks to develop a product and get it into stores) and incredible prolificacy (around 10,000 new designs are launched each year) has led to the brand being described as “possibly the most innovative and devastating retailer in the world.”

Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/Zara

Overview: Zara’s Facebook Page represents the brand well, with over 10 million fans and a very high level of engagement – new posts receive thousands of Likes and hundreds of comments. The landing page (“The Mood”) uses strong black and white visuals that click through to the Wall, and (fairly unique amongst Facebook Pages) top-screen navigation menu that allows visitors to move between the main custom tabs.

Customized Page Tabs: 5 – The Mood (landing page), This Week (showcases the latest fashions), People (fans can create a look using items from Zara collections and have their photos displayed on the Page, plus a chance to win cash prizes), LookBook (collections) and Mobile (downloadable iPhone and iPad apps).

Likes: 10,447,132

Like Accumulation: 50,000/week

Fan Reward/Incentive For Liking The Page? No

Does The Page Support Check-Ins? No

Update Frequency: 3-5 posts per week

Can Fans Post On The Page Wall? Yes

Is The Page Moderated? Some spam is visible in Post comments and on the Wall

This is an excerpt from the first post in a series of profiles on Facebook Pages by company and product category. For the complete profiles article, including coverage of Zara, Levi’s, Gap, Victoria’s Secret, and Old Navy, plus more strategies for Page marketing on Facebook, check out the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing, promotion, and advertising on Facebook.

We saw an interesting new promotion on our weekly roundup of Facebook campaigns — paying customers cash to buy products. There was also a branded dress-up contest, a branded game, a Facebook customer service tool, contests, travel apps and more.

Below is an excerpt of this week’s full Featured Facebook Campaigns entry in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Pepsi and SavingStar Launch Spend $15, Get $5

Goal: Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure

Method: In an interesting new Facebook promotion, Pepsi Max is using SavingStar technology to ask users who buy $15 worth of Pepsi Max or Diet Pepsi products on November through participating retailers to receive $5 cash at the end of the month.

Core Mechanic: SavingStar built a network of 24,000 retailers throughout the country and by using SavingStar technology, Pepsi customers do not have to drastically alter their shopping behavior to participate. Simply registering a frequent buyer card, say at CVS, is enough to participate. At the end of the month users have several options to redeem their cash, SavingStar CEO David Rochon tells us. “The money goes in an account in your name and you can choose how to receive your money — through a PayPal account, bank account, Amazon gift certificate, or you can donate it to charity.”

The idea behind the SavingStar platform is to make it simpler for customers to receive value, and also to make that process fully digital, Rochon explains. This way, these branded offers may reach not just loyal Pepsi fans, but even people who may not normally drink this product. Such promotions are positioned to take the place of dwindling ad campaigns like the Sunday newspaper coupon, Rochon told us.

“The reason that we love Facebook is that these are the kind of promotions that are inherently social, people want to share them, that’s the reason that a national program [like SavingStar] is important,” Rochon explained.

Impact: The offer launched last Tuesday and Rochon told us that thousands of folks had taken advantage of the offer just a few days later. The Diet Pepsi Page and the Pepsi Max Page are both getting some bumps in Likes, according to our PageData tool. But, this campaign’s success is better measured in brand awareness and sales than Likes, since the feature is not Like-gated.

Want to learn how top brands are designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

A creepy Connect integration topped our list of the fastest growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week. Then there were a few Page tab apps, photo apps, horoscopes, the Washington Post Social Reader, Skype, Scribd, Facebook’s Android app, Yahoo and more. The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 400,000 and 3.7 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.	TakeThisLollipop	8,400,000	+3,700,000	+84%
2.	Mafia Wars 2	15,000,000	+2,500,000	+20%
3.	Facebook Messenger for Android	9,500,000	+1,800,000	+24%
4.	Static Iframe Tab	17,600,000	+1,700,000	+11%
5.	Yahoo!	3,100,000	+1,600,000	+145%
6.	Ravenskye City	5,900,000	+1,400,000	+33%
7.	Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab	9,100,000	+1,100,000	+14%
8.	FarmVille	29,100,000	+1,000,000	+4%
9.	Scribd	12,200,000	+900,000	+8%
10.	Bubble Witch Saga	6,500,000	+800,000	+14%
11.	ShareAndTell.com	870,000	+720,000	+480%
12.	Skype	7,500,000	+600,000	+9%
13.	Zynga Game Bar	4,100,000	+600,000	+17%
14.	Mis Fotos	2,100,000	+600,000	+40%
15.	My Photos+	920,000	+520,000	+130%
16.	Washington Post Social Reader	950,000	+510,000	+146%
17.	Welcome tab app for Pages	12,300,000	+500,000	+4%
18.	Texas HoldEm Poker	30,300,000	+500,000	+2%
19.	Horoscopes	820,000	+460,000	+128%
20.	Wildfire’s iFrames for Pages	9,400,000	+400,000	+4%

TakeThisLollipop is a horror Facebook Connect integration that incorporates your profile photos to make it seem like a creepy man is obsessed with, and coming for you. The app grew by 3.7 million MAU. Then Facebook Messenger for Android grew by 1.8 million MAU.

There was a group of Page tab apps. Static Iframe Tab grew by 1.7 million MAU, Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab by 1.1 million MAU, Welcome tab app for Pages by 500,000 MAU and Wildfire’s iFrames for Pages by 400,000 MAU.

Yahoo grew by 1.6 million MAU. Document service Scribd by 900,000 MAU. A website within a Page tab app, ShareAndTell.com, grew by 720,000 MAU. Then there was Skype with 600,000 MAU. A pair of photo apps made the list, Mis Fotos with 600,000 MAU and My Photos+ with 520,000 MAU, and these apps present users with a photo gallery of their friends’ photos, allowing them to Like or save them. Liking them publishes a feed story.

Closing out the list was Washington Post Social Reader with 510,000 MAU and Rock You’s Horoscopes, which asks users to publish daily Wall posts and grew by 460,000 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.

A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you between October 31st and November 5th.

Inside Mobile Apps

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

Monday, October 31st:

• With 60M Monthly Actives, Outfit7 Hints at Powering Distribution For Other Mobile Developers
• Flurry Sees 2.6B App Downloads This Month on iOS, Android
• More Details on Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
• Flurry Launches New Ads to Bring Users Back to Apps They’ve Already Downloaded

Tuesday, November 1st:

• Emerging Top Paid iOS Apps: Zombies, Zombies and More Zombies
• Gameloft’s iOS FPS Modern Combat 3 Blows Up on the App Store
• Emerging Top Grossing Apps: Modern Combat, Booyah’s MyTown 2 and Game Insight
• The New Alternative to UDIDs Seems to Be The MAC Address, But Privacy Issues Still Loom
• GREE Says it Will Launch New Global Mobile-Social Gaming Platform Using OpenFeint Next Year

Wednesday, November 2nd:

• Vector Unit Races to iOS with Watercraft Racing Title Riptide GP
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Natural Motion, King.com, TinyCo and More
• Emerging Free iOS Apps: Assassin’s Creed, Adobe Carousel and Cut the Birds
• Gameloft Earnings Rise 17% to $55.9M in Third Quarter
• Ngmoco’s Young Gives a Saucy Rejoinder to Mobage Critics as Android Gaming Network Comes Out of Beta

Thursday, November 3rd:

• Capcom Sees $77M In Revenue From Mobile-Social Gaming Unit Through Year Ending in March
• More Details on Tapjoy’s New Direct-to-Consumer Play — A “Personal App Marketplace”
• Android Grows to 43%, While Apple Holds at 28% in U.S. Smartphone Market Share
• Glu Mobile’s Smartphone Revenues Climb to $9.7M in Third Quarter

Friday, November 4th:

• New Hires in Mobile: GREE, Gameloft and Tapjoy
• Ayopa’s W.E.L.D.E.R. Spells Out New Twist on iOS Word Games
• Top Emerging Android Apps: Life is Crime, Clouds & Sheep and Suddenly Popular Zombies
• Zynga’s Mobile Daily Actives Grow by Tenfold in Less Than a Year to 9.9M in Third Quarter
• Zynga Spent Nearly $20M on Acquiring Four Companies in the Third Quarter

Saturday, November 5th: 

• Mobile App Roundup: Funzio, DeNA and Adobe
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: ngmoco :), Check Point Studios, TinyCo and More

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, October 31st:

• Bubble Games Bouncing Around This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• Cheech and Chong’s Animated Game Lights Up on Facebook
• More Details on Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
• Pool on Facebook: Simple But Highly Social

Tuesday, November 1st:

• YetiZen’s Accelerator Program Shows Off Revamped Games, Services
• Game Insight Goes to Google+With Resort World, Bringing Mystery Manor to iPad
• Multi-Channel Ad Marketplace AdKnowledge Acquires Bootstrapped Facebook Ads API Vendor AdParlor
• GREE Says it Will Launch New Global Mobile-Social Gaming Platform Using OpenFeint Next Year

Wednesday, November 2nd:

• Ravenskye City, Bubble Witch Saga on Top in This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games by DAU
• Q-Games Brings its Acclaimed PlayStation Tower Defense Game PixelJunk Monsters to Facebook
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Games Cafe, King.com, TinyCo and More
• Bossa Studios Makes its Godzilla Sized Mark on Facebook Games with Monstermind
• RockYou Cuts Half of Staff, Shelves Cloudforest, Spins Out Playdemic, Drives up ARPU on Zoo World 2

Thursday, November 3rd:

• New Hires in Social Gaming: Crowdstar, Playfish and Zynga
• How to Spot a Breakout Facebook Game
• Zynga’s CastleVille Launching This Month

Friday, November 4th:

• Zombie Island, Wasteland Empires Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Zynga’s Revenue Climbs to $306.8M in Third Quarter as Daily Actives Decline
• With Android, iOS, Close to 20 Percent of Zynga’s Daily Actives Are Not on Facebook
• Zynga Spent Nearly $20M on Acquiring Four Companies in the Third Quarter
• Supercell’s Facebook Action RPG Gunshine.net Comes Out (of Beta) Shooting
• OMGPOP Expands Facebook Offerings With HTML5 Based Gem Rush
• Social Gaming News Roundup: Sony, Playdom and DeNA

Saturday, November 5th:

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: TinyCo, King.com, Lolapps and More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, October 31st:

• Birthdays, Page Tabs, Band Apps, Scribd, Cupid and Skype on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• More Details on Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Street King, Realtors, Gray Line, MassMutual and Farmers Insurance
• Facebook Discontinues Official Mp3 Music Player, Pushes Users to Streaming Partners

Tuesday, November 1st:

• Adele, Real Madrid, Puss In Boots, Battlefield, Jesus and Coca-Cola on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• Multi-Channel Ad Marketplace AdKnowledge Acquires Bootstrapped Facebook Ads API Vendor AdParlor

Wednesday, November 2nd:

• Yahoo, Snaptu, Grooveshark, Onedate, WhoIsNear? and Photos on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• The Facebook Marketing Bible November 2011 Edition Is Now Available
• Hotel Marketing Platform Buuteeq Helps Travel Destinations Build Rich Facebook Presences
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: BLiNQ, Lolapps, TinyCo and More
• How to Use Facebook Open Graph Apps for Marketing Through the Ticker and Timeline

Thursday, November 3rd:

• Facebook Hires and Departures: Engineering, Research, Marketing and More
• Facebook Careers Postings: Legal, Asia, Recruiting, Engineering and More
• Deal United’s Facebook “Credits Rewards” Lets Clients Incentivize Signups and Purchases With Virtual Currency

Friday, November 4th:

• Photos, Halloween, Pixable, Washington Post Social Reader and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Instant Message, Music Services Are Now Among the Most Engaging Facebook Apps
• Facebook Roundup: Swedish Data Center, Solar Energy, Politics, Messages, Seattle and Ceglia

Saturday, November 5th: 

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Acquinity Interactive, BLINQ, King.com 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 Acquinity Interactive, Lolapps, BLiNQ, Natural Motion Games, ngmoco :), Check Point Studios, Games Cafe Inc., TinyCo and King.com.

• User Acquisition Manager
• Principal Data Analyst
• Producer/Project Manager

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

• Senior Software Engineer

• Sr. Programmer

• Senior Social Game Designer
• Social Game Designer
• Game Programmer

• Product Performance Manager, Skillgames – King.com
• Senior Systems Developer, Skillgames – King.com
• Front end Developer, Skillgames – King.com

Swedish Govt May See All Data in New Servers – Sweden’s 2008 law, FRA, allows the government to see any Internet data passing its borders without a warrant. Since the company is set to build a data center there, this potentially means Facebook users’ data could become a target of this law, according to a report.

Cogenra Solar to be Installed at Facebook’s CA HQ – Cogenra Solar is set to install a renewable energy project at Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, California. According to a statement, the project will provide on site electricity production, hot water, and be integrated into the top of the building’s fitness center to power gym equipment, light and water for the showers.

Most Expect Candidates to be on Social Media – Digitas released a study this week noting that 61% of social media users expect to see candidates on social media platforms like Facebook.

Facebook Seattle Changes Offices - Facebook Seattle is changing office location. There are currently 60 employees but room for up to 200.

Facebook Not Worried About Messages Threat – CDW consultant Nathan Power found a way to send a malicious attachment to other Facebook users. Facebook responded that this threat is no different than the ones faced by other email providers, and requires “an additional layer of social engineering.“ Plus, there are easier ways to get malware to users.

Ceglia Ordered to Return to the U.S. – Paul Ceglia, who claims to own half of Facebook, had fled to Ireland but was ordered by a federal judge to return to New York in order to search for a missing flash drive which may contain pertinent evidence. Ceglia claims the flash drive was lost.