Inside Facebook

Building off the now-common Like button that it launched last year, Facebook is introducing a new social plugin today called the Recommendations Bar. It’s designed to deliver additional recommended articles to readers right as they finish each article.

While Facebook’s recommendations box plugin has already driven this behavior, there has not been a slick interface to help readers move to a new recommended story once they finish the first recommended one. In most implementations to date, the user has to click back to find more stories in the recommendations box.

The new plugin lives at the lower right corner of each browser window of a page that has the plugin installed. It floats down as users scroll, basically like how other toolbars work. When a user first loads a page — say, an article on CNN — the bar is collapsed and only shows the option to Like the page. But as the user spends more time reading the article and scrolling down, the plugin will expand and show additional articles to read on the site based on the criteria below.

The expanded view also shows an “Add to Timeline” button. If the user clicks on it, the story will be shared back to Facebook and placed within the (new) Timeline profile. Although it might not be obvious to the user at the time, they are also enabling the plugin to share a “read” action back to Facebook every time in the future that the plugin is activated on that particular site.

Users can either turn off the feature by clicking again on the “Add to Timeline” button on the bar, or by adjusting their privacy settings on their home site, according Faceboook product manager Austin Haugen.

As the Facebook documentation outlines below, developers have the following options for defining exactly when the plugin bar will expand:

• onvisible - the plugin is expanded when a user scrolls past the exact point where the <fb:recommendations-bar /> tag is placed on the page. This is the simplest option and will work best if you place the tag right at the end of your article’s main content. This is the default.
• X% - where X is any positive integer less than or equal to 100. This specifies the percent of the page the user must scroll down before the plugin is expanded. For example: 100% would indicate that a user needs to scroll all the way to the end of the page before the plugin expands. 50% would be to the mid point of the page.
• manual - use this option to manually trigger the read action. When you want to trigger the action callFB.XFBML.RecommendationsBar.markRead(href); in JavaScript. The href parameter is optional and will default to the current page if not set. If provided, it must match the href parameter on the XFBML tag. The manual trigger is useful when you have more a multi-page article. For example on a three page article, you would addtrigger="manual" on pages one and two and never call the ‘markRead’ JavaScript function on those pages.

In addition, a read_time parameter will tell the plugin to wait a customizable number of seconds before it expands. It’s set to 30 seconds by default.

Facebook will then take all “read” stories data and figure out how to display them in users’ Timelines and in their friends’ news feeds.

Overall, the bar should help each user find more interesting stories from their friends while reading news stories on a site. For example, a user might get to the end of an article about government budget issues, and see a recommendation from a friend about a related opinion piece on the topic. The result is that the user stays on the site longer than they otherwise might, finding more useful information while bringing the site more engagement. The plugin also could generate additional traffic through the sharing back to Facebook. However, the opt-in once aspect of the feature might surprise some users.

The Inside Network team is here at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco. We’ll be providing live coverage of all the news over the course of the day, starting with a live blog of the opening keynotes below. You can also watch the live feed of the show here.

Among the many rumored launches are a music and media platform service, a new profile, more sophisticated developer access to news feeds, and a new set of buttons that indicate certain actions.

10:16 Andy Samberg has taken the stage posing as Mark Zuckerberg, cracking lots of jokes — including a graph that shows “800+ million users” worldwide, and a graph that shows engagement trends growing. He’s also announcing a new section of the profile for “I’m not really friends with these people.”

10:21 The real Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage. They’re making more jokes.

It’s great to be hear today. Here are two of the most exciting things we’ve been working on.

The last 5 years of social networking have been getting people signed up and connected. Until recently, a lot of people weren’t sure how big it was going to be, how long it would last.

Now we can see that it’s everyone working.

For the first time ever last week, we had half a billion people use Facebook in a single day.

More and more people continue to sign up and use the service.

The next era, the next 5 years, will be about apps and depths of engagement now that everyone has their connections in place.

It’s an exciting time to be part of building these new apps that are possible.

10:26 I want to start out talking about the profile. People feel an intense ownership over the profile. Everything about you. Millions of people have invested a ton of time on them. Our job is to make them the best way to share and express who you are.

How this works has changed a bunch over the years.

The 2004 profile was basic, just showed info like where you’re from. But people loved it. Showed valuable information.

Then we started adding things like photos, groups and apps. If the first 5 minutes is basic, an introcution, then the next 15 is about what your’e doing.

By 2008 we introduced a new profile. It had changed to all things you’d shared and done recently. Allowed you to have the next 15 minutes.

But we’re more than what we did recently. Most get into all parts of your life. Just clicking “more” on the wall was hard to do.

All the stories you’d shared over time fall off the cliff at the bottom of the wall. Millions of people have spent years curating the stories of their lives and there hasn’t been a way to share that.

We think we’ve solved that. Showing all the unique things of your life…. beautiful.

What I want to show you today is the rest, beyond 15. The next few hours of a great, in-depth engaging conversation, whether with a close friend or someone you just met.

The heart of your Facebook experience, completely thought up.

10:30 Launching Timeline

The story of your life.

So lets take a look.

The first thing is that it’s a lot more visual. Down at the bottom, all your stories. A nice visual… bottom section is visual. The right is years to get to any point in your life. In the middle are visual tiles to see apps and other stuff you’ve done. On top of is the cover photo.

All your stories, all your apps, a new way to express who you are.

Then you can scroll past and see tiles that keep going all the way to the bottom.

Here’s what it looks on a mobile device. Smaller view of the scroll.

Biggest challenge was telling whole stories on a single page. But don’t want to show every single thing.

Starts off with recent, as you go further back it starts summarizing. Further back you summarize more.

Last month a little less, etc.

You can see the timeline running down the middle here. Blue dots are highlighted, gray dots are for less important.

See something that’s hidden, hover over. But all right here. See everything in 2007, click on the link and it’s all there.

It’s so simple.

10:35 Exactly how you want to browse through time, and discover what people have done through their whole lives.

But how to add? Say I want to add a photo from my childhood. Pop up composer, post.

Creating completely new type of timeline for life event. Getting a dog — add Beast’s info and it’s there.

This is the main timeline.

What do you do if you want to see content filter down. Here’s the photos timeline view. Here’s some people working at Facebook.

People visiting. Much nicer than anything we have today.

You can see all sorts of trips, where you were. Go all the way back to where you were born. All about apps, tell the story of your life on your timeline.

Perhaps the most common thing people had used was to add boxes of things to their profiles. A lot of people had 50 or 60 or even 100 boxes. Add to the bottom of profile, quickly became unwieldy. We learned that people really want to use apps to express themselves.

Even though they couldn’t all fit into the old profile design, we took those lessons and now apps can be used to express on the timeline.

The way is that they’ll rely on apps to help them out.

What kinds of content can go on the timeline? You can start sharing like before. Here’s an example: post about cooking bison burger. No activity is too big or too small to share.

You can add a box right at the top.

This is a report of everything that I’ve cooked in September — summary is more interesting than every single thing. Apps can help roll up every activity. Get a nice summary, really interesting. We think people are really going to like these.

Take me to a timeline view. All the way back in time.

10:40

If the app has history, you can see everything in there.

Here’s Bret’s timeline. Using a running app. Pretty cool. Nice pop-up.

That’s how apps can help you tell the story. I’ll get into more detail about building these apps in a bit.

In your timeline, not just a place for adding stories and apps. Where you tell your story online is very personal.

Gives ability to highlight and curate stories so you can express who you really are. Cover photo. Nice big photo right at the top. Still have a profile pic. So cover can be something else. Great way to learn about someone without having to read anything at all.

You can change the cover as often as you like. Really easy: hover, pick photo, switch. Some people in testing are doing every day.

Vacation photo — how to highlight in timeline? Hover over any story in the timeline.

Calls up all the important stuff. Switch to blue dot from gray.

Shows sample profiles for travel-lover, musician. Showed most on web. But all works beautifully on mobile devices. Works beautifully. See all the photos.

10:48 This means a new kind of app.

Last year we introduced the concept of the open graph. A map of all of the connections in the world. You could add anything. Connect to it by liking it. Connect to order of magnitude versus before. This year we’re taking it to the next step: you can connect to anything, anywhere.

Not just “Like” but “Read” a book. “Watch” a movie. “Eat” a meal. “Hike” a trail. “Listen” to music. Language for anything you want.

Every year we make some new social apps possible, express themselves in new ways.

People have things they want to share, but don’t want to annoy their friends. If the problem is that, then Ticker.

Lightweight stream of everything going on around you. Something might catch your attention out of the corner of your eye, but not annoy your friends. Share post goes into news feed, but activity goes to Ticker and Timeline but not news feed unless there’s a particularly interesting pattern that you want your friends to see.

Until today, no socially acceptable way to express lightweight activity.

Next version of Open Graph. Connect to anything you want. Define action and publish. This will make it possible to build a completely new class of social apps. What kind? A lot. We believe almost all will be social. But in real world there’s a spectrum.

Naturally social — turn into social apps first.

10:55 Communication, games. Other side of spectrum are health care and finance that I don’t think there’ll be social apps for a long time.

Expand to new stuff: media. Music, movies, TV, news, books. Really great open graph apps.

Next is “lifestyle” apps: helping you keep track and express everything about your lifes. Bike rides, cooking, apps.

New class of apps, rethink a lot of industries.

Open graph, enable apps that do two types of things: fill out timeline and discover new things through friends.

Frictionless Experiences

Sharing super mario app that let’s you share activity. In the middle of some app that makes you share.

If you’re using new open graph apps. Add activity without prompts. Still publish to stream, but if your goal is to just share lightweight activity — connecting timeline together.

To make this work, we completely redesigned permissions.

App says what kind of activity it will publish. Now Spotify won’t have to prompt me every time I do something. How is this going to help you discover new things through friends.

Turns out they’re already doing a lot of things around you.

Real-Time Serendipity:

Tick right in. Friends hover over, can see what to listen to. Now listening to song with a friend. Music is synched up with friends.

News feed can show patterns of friends. Seem flow of music from friends.

11:00 Finding Patterns and Activity

Sometimes you discover new songs from friends across platforms. See any music player. Any patterns. Discover really neat new things.

Shows shared music listening.

Can see notifications from friends who share.

Next wave is music companies trying to help you discover new songs, not blocking existing ones.

Devs are using Open Graph. But rethink music industry.

11:05 Daniel Ek from Spotify is on stage.

Big day for everyone who loves music. First time that I used in Facebook in Sweden back in the day. Like serendipity.

Music is important part of my life. People discovered through friends.

A bit over ten years ago, big change: Napster. Didn’t work for music industry. So we worked a music that fairly compensates artists. And lets you see what your friends are listening to.

With social, spotify has: more music, more variety, twice as likely to pay.

Huge list of new music partners.

TVs and Movies

Really similar to music. See friends who are watching Glee on Hulu in news feed. Hover over, click, new social canvas app shows. Everyone who uses it will be FB user, will have social experience. Further down page, four friends have recently watched movies with Johnny Depp in them on Netflix.

Can click through and watch a Depp movie.

Here is a friend’s timeline. Carl’s video timeline. Can see all the things he’s watched.

Not just watching with your friends.

11:10 Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO and Facebook board member, is on stage.

Netflix algorithm shows lots of friends watching Breaking Bad. Shows lots of info, but social also helps.

Facebook-Netflix integration is live in 44 countries, but not in US due to outdated privacy law — but Congress is working on that.

11:15 News

Social news app with Open Graph to discover what your friends are reading first. Really interesting patterns that are possible to show. Here are all of the most popular articles. Yahoo News article on astronaughts — will use open graph to discover more news stories through friends. Back to the feed, I can also see that 30 friends are reading about f8. Can see all the articles.

See one from Washington Post. See news in real-time as it’s breaking in the Ticker. More than a dozen devs worked with us to build news apps. Rethink a lot of the way that the industry works.

Social games are killing it.

Games are biggest on platform — will get bigger.

Now with open graph, nice clear dialogue up front. Will see real things that they’re doing. Not just “this person is playing a game” — Mike playing Words With Friends with Carl. Can see game board and word on it. Possible because every piece of content in open graph has picture associated with it. Zynga’s Words With Friends.

Social games, using open graph.

11:20

Lifestyle apps. Running, cooking. Covers what he’d mentioned at the start.

New class of social apps. Things with friends.

11:25 Bret Taylor, Facebook CTO, on stage.

Detail on how to build these apps. How your apps fit into new vision.

Open graph apps are about more than sharing. Self-expression, serendipity. As great side effect of normal behavior. Lightweight way that goes beyond shared dialogue.

Open Graph goals

- Simple user experience
- Simple developer experience
- Engaging apps

Adding app to timeline is one-click experience.

No step two — just add and start listening.

11:30 Social by design

- Model your app’s social actions
- Design your timeline integration
- Add to timeline

Model Your App’s Social Actions

Big question is how it fits in. Expanding social graph to all social actions. Listening, watching, reading, etc.

That’s what it means to be part of social graph. What activity do I want to see?

See songs I’m listening to, and stations I’m plahing. Also creating a few custom radio stations. Imagine creating list and sticking next to graduation photo. Now every time I listen to song in iHeartRadio, using data structure, tapping into all experiences that Mark showed earlier.

By using same underlying structure as what f8 uses. That cooking app. All recipes I’ve added, recipes that friends have bookmarked.

Design Your Timeline Integration

List of music that user listens to. Or list of artists most often played. Aggregations — query of trends.

All sorts of other info — 6 layout styles, flexible query engine. I can pick and choose which of these stories I want to show my friends. Really one simple step next.

But a timeline button in your app. Work on every device conceivable — all web and mobile apps.

Moment you get access to dev beta, you can start adding all these platforms.

Engaging Apps

How to build them right? We’ve heard over and over that it’s just too hard right now. Shouldn’t need PhD in engineering and psychology to do it. Not tricks and gimmicks either.

The more engaging, the more people will discover. Ambitious considering where we are today.

Graph Rank — AI system that manages discovery of all open graph. What is most interesting to me? What is right to see?

Different for colleagues.

11:40 Chris Cox, vice president of product at Facebook, on stage.

Data as narrative. Story of wikipedia growth on one Page. Infographic are part of way that news is expressed. For any data-rich topic, can find one-page topic.

Not just topics. Nothing we love to summarize more. News publications do it all at the end of December.

Scrapbooking before ended up on bookshelves. But combine with information design.

Nicholas Felton data and business partner Brian Case developed new version for us. Hired Sam Lessin as well.

Accidentally tested Memories view for an hour this spring — lots of people loved it. What is the modern vehicle for scrapbooking?

Goes over how to use the new scrapbooking feature.

11:55 Zuckerberg back on stage

Timeline: beta starts now.

Developers will get access now, everyone else will sign up and it’ll get rolled out widely in the next few weeks.

While Facebook product launches tend to get the most speculation before the f8 developer conference  – there are 750 million users who care, after all — the company has often used the event to push grand presentations that instead target developers.

That trend may be the case again next Thursday, we’re hearing from a trusted source with some knowledge of what the company has planned.

Developers might be getting new access to Facebook’s news feed, building off of the graph API that Facebook presented at last year’s f8. They’d be able to provide new structure to the information they share into the news feed, allowing Facebook’s news feed algorithm to present it to the audience most likely to find it relevant and engage with it.

Update: Facebook spokesman Jonny Thaw has also confirmed with us that “Yes, there will be platform integration” for Smart Lists. This includes the ability for developers that have been granted access to a user’s Friend Lists to publish content specifically to members of Smart Lists.

The goal is to help developers focus on sharing what’s right for users (not just their own traffic and revenue numbers), while giving the users themselves a more subtle and serendipitous experience.

With a more structured input of information, Facebook could then match content to users who’ve previously enjoyed similar content. It could also measure which developers are producing the most beloved content, based on factors like users resharing or hiding the story, and reward the developer with more visibility for their stories. That would create a more virtuous cycle where high-quality developers become more prominent, inspiring more user engagement that benefits both developers and Facebook, the company no doubt hopes.

Structured Content for Enhanced Relevancy

To understand what the changes mean, one example might be the well-understood problem of social game spam. Say a user achieves a new high score in Scrabble, an event that’s exceptional enough that they want all of their friends to know about, not just their Scrabble-playing companions. A developer could structure the story about the high score to signal to Facebook that it is of more general interest to all of a user’s friends, or maybe just the larger subgroup of friends who have played some social games on Facebook, but have not installed Scrabble.

In another situation, a local business discovery app could structure the content shared by its users such that Facebook knows its more relevant to local users. The content would then appear more prominently in the news feed to those living in the same city as the user posting it.

This isn’t just about games and apps. The change would impact anyone sharing any information to Facebook, including all of the sites that have installed the Facebook Like button and other plugins since they launched at f8 last year, or integrated with Facebook Connect (in total, Facebook’s official stats say that more than 2.5 million sites have integrated it so far).

Developers can already ask users permission to access their Friend Lists, but since they’re unique to each user, it’s difficult to know what type of audience corresponds to what list. With platform integration for Smart Lists and special lists, which Facebook confirms with us will be available in a few days, developers will be able to ask permission to target updates published by users through their apps to local friends, classmates, coworkers, family, Close friends, and Acquaintances.

Currently, the Graph API allows developers to provide a variety of more straightforward meta data about the content they publish, like the title of the info they’re sharing, a blurb, etc. But Facebook has used other signals in its news feed algorithm to figure out what to share and with whom, such as who a user’s closest friends are based on photo tags and who’s Liked a user’s previous posts.

The Context Is Right for This Launch

In the past, Facebook has taken blunter measures to fight spam, with methods such as clumping all stories from specific applications into a single thread, and hiding most stories about social games from friends who have not installed the app.

It has also taken a still-changing approach to how users make the news feed work for them. It has constantly iterated on the news feed algorithm since bringing it back a few years ago, and tested features that ask users how often they want to discover new games, or what types of content they prefer to see in the feed.

Just today, it officially launched a variety of Smart Lists and special lists – automatically created and populated lists of a user’s local friends, coworkers, and those that share other characteristics, and lists of best friends and distant contacts whose members appear more or less in the standard view of a user’s news feed. It’s probably not a coincidence that this particular launch is coming now. Users can apply the Friends Lists as news feed filters, but Facebook could allow developers target some stories to these lists as well. For example, the Scrabble high-score story could be formatted to be shared with the “Acquaintances” list, while less monumental stories would be formatted to just appear for “close friends.” That example is, to be clear, just a guess based on what our source has said.

Thinking more long-term, Facebook has steadily laid the foundation for this move over the years. The first f8, in 2007, was where the app platform was unveiled. Facebook Connect came in 2008, which started Facebook’s reach outside of the site by helping people to log in using their Facebook identities. The Graph API came at its next conference, last year. In addition to the consumer-facing social plugins and instant personalization, the company created the Open Graph protocol system for assigning web pages meta data that improves the format of news feed stories shared from them. The plugins utilizing this meta data pushed Facebook across the web. All that effort on the part of Facebook and its growing ecosystem now makes this change a natural progression.

In this context, the other big and interesting things that Facebook is rumored to be launching — a music platform that might include a scrobbling tool, a mobile web development platform, an iPad app — are more pieces of the puzzle that Facebook has been putting together. That is, making anything, from a catchy song to a popular mobile game, get the exposure it deserves to the users who want it.

The move would also aid Facebook against long-time competitor for owning and distributing the world’s information: Google. The launch of better methods for sharing quality information into Facebook could help it improve its news feed and box out Google, which is trying to move its new social alternative Google+ to the mainstream. Last year was about Facebook pushing itself out to the world via plugins, this year could be about pulling more of the world into Facebook.

Want to join us for some casual drinks, rumor and speculation the night before f8, come to the Inside Network happy hour next Wednesday at Mercury Lounge in SF. RSVP here to get a free drink on us.

Josh Constine co-authored this article.

Facebook appeared to be on course to make $4 billion in revenue for 2011, we and other publications heard from sources close to the company in January, with net income at around $1 billion. Reuters has an update on that estimate today, citing a source that says Facebook actually made $1.6 billion in the first half of the year, with net income near $500 million so far.

Looking at the past and present numbers together, revenue is lower than projected at this point, but net income is on track. That in turn suggests that costs have come in lower than expected.

Facebook doesn’t currently provide information on its finances, so we don’t know for sure what has caused its business to grow. But financial documents leaked in January during Goldman Sach’s fundraising efforts indicated that Facebook had made roughly $2 billion in 2010, with profits up to $600 million. That was more than double 2009.

Two additional trends have started to kick in, that could cause revenue to grow more sharply in this second half of the year, and continue the annual doubling trend.

One is that Facebook has finalized Credits as the only paid currency for third-party canvas apps on its platform. While Zynga and other top social game developers began transitioning as early as a year ago, the policy only went fully into effect on July 1st. From that point, we can say for certain that Facebook is getting 30% of revenue from basically all virtual goods transactions in apps.

The other trend is what’s been happening in Facebook’s marketer ecosystem. The Ads API, a way for larger advertisers to buy big, automated, fine-tuned ad campaigns through third-party tools, has launched publicly after spending years in private beta testing. The result is that companies who have figured out how to get a good return on investment from ad campaigns can now spend in bulk, like they do with online ad leader Google through Adsense and Adwords. In the meantime, Facebook has been busy building up its own sales teams around the world, and introducing a variety of new products and advertiser services to make spending easy and worthwhile.

While revenue is an increasingly important indicator for the company as it matures, it still has lots of growing left to do. It has opted against short-term revenue boosters like homepage takeover ads, in contrast to distant competitors like MySpace. Overall, it just needs to show some sort of serious revenue growth every year in order to get investors excited about its long-term future. If and when an offering happens, public investors will be hoping the company repeats the post-IPO success of many other companies over the years, and ultimately more than justify the $70 billion and $80 billion valuations that the private-market stock has been trading at.

Whether it’s gearing up for an IPO in the next year or two, or just trying to strengthen its ties to other power centers in the United States, Facebook has named Erskine Bowles to its board of directors.

Bowles might not be a familiar face in Silicon Valley, but he is on the Eastern seaboard due to a career that spans investment banking, politics and a stint in higher education.

From a leading political family in North Carolina, he started began his career at Morgan Stanley before cofounding an investment bank, holding key positions in the Clinton administration, founding another investment bank, running for senate a couple times, and holding top positions in the University of North Carolina education system. He recently co-chaired Obama’s debt panel, which produced a politically difficult but intellectually sensible national debt reduction plan that has yet to be acted upon. He’s currently on the board of Morgan Stanley, Cousins Properties Inc., Norfolk Southern Corp. and Belk Inc.

“Erskine has held important roles in government, academia and business which have given him insight into how to build organizations and navigate complex issues,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a press release. “Along with his experience founding companies, this will be very valuable as we continue building new things to help make the world more open and connected.”

He’s the sort of serious figure that Facebook wants to be associated with as it looks to convince the world of its seriousness as a company.

As a consequence of its success, and particularly its plan to make its financial information public next year (possibly ahead of an IPO), Facebook has attracted new scrutiny from the government. Various congresspeople have spoken out against Facebook over privacy and security issues, the Securities and Exchange Commission has looked into its secondary market transactions, the Federal Trade Commission has examined how Facebook collects and applies user data in its products and revenue models. The company has already been building out its public policy team to help convince the political world of its positions.

Meanwhile, Bowles’ legitimacy within the finance community and corporate America can help bolster Facebook’s image as a leading company in the nation, and possibly encourage more investors to take a closer look at Facebook stock if it decides to go public.

Facebook also recently added Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings to the board. Long-time members also include Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Don Graham and Peter Thiel, with David Sze and Paul Madera on as observers. Founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to own a majority of the company and as a result has decision-making power over the other directors.

Facebook may be poised to let users translate comments from other languages — that’s 750 million users around the world who are going to have an easier time talking to each other.

In tests that we and others are now seeing on some parts of the site (only on Pages, at this point), comments in languages other than your account’s current one now include “Translate” button next to them. If you click on the button, the comment is automatically translated to your account language. The Translate button is then replaced by “Original,” which if clicked will untranslate the comment.

Facebook has already successfully crowdsourced the translation of its site to dozens of languages, connecting millions of people to each other around the world in new and unexpected ways. For an interesting example, take a look at the aggressive international cooperation that happens between users trying to mutually advance in a social game like FarmVille.

Most users are not currently communicating much with people who speak other languages, simply because they can’t understand each other (unless they’re manually doing so through a third party service like Google Translate, as we sometimes do with commenters on our Facebook plugin for our site). And of course, users who already speak multiple languages won’t always need this tool.

But you can still see how there are some potentially very big use cases here. Page owners, especially for popular international icons, are deluged by comments across the languages that Facebook now supports. Chances are they don’t understand everything every fan has been saying, so they’ve had to rely on Google Translate or other tools instead. As the feature is only working for Pages now, Facebook seems to be focusing on solving that problem.

If Facebook introduces this feature to personal profiles and apps as well, one can also imagine some other interesting ways it’d be used. For example, immigrant families who speak more than one language often have generational communication divides, typically where older members speak the language of the home country while younger generations speak the language of the host country. They’ll now have an easier time using Facebook to relate to each other. Meanwhile, social gamers with international friends could have a much easier time collaborating to get more points in a game, organize protests, or anything else.

More pessimistically, users might use this feature to better understand each others’ flames, particular on Pages for controversial topics.

For now, it only seems to be available in a few languages, including Spanish, French, Hebrew and Chinese. And it also doesn’t always recognize the comments, delivering a “There is no translation available for this story at the moment” response or sometimes not finding the right individual words within sentences. But in testing that we’ve done or had reported by readers, it appears to be familiar with slang — see the example in the screenshot from reader Amit Lavi, who tipped us off about the change. The translation technology figured out how to communicate “totally cool” from Hebrew to English, for example. It’s possible that the tech is making use of existing translation input from users that it has already gathered in its translation app.

The feature could have far-reaching consequences for how people use Facebook, if not how they understand the rest of the world. We’ll see how the company decides to expand it from here. We’ved asked to for more details on how the feature works and what the plans for it are, and we’ll update with any response.

Facebook has made a small interface change with a potentially big impact. Within the last day or two it has removed the option to “Hide All Posts” from the menu of options available for editing posts in the news feed. Many users instead are seeing only the options to hide the individual post, report the post or mark it as spam. If they then hide the post, they just see a message with links to either undo the post or unlike the Page. The option remains for friends’ posts, but a step further into the process.

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Update 8/7/2011: The option to “Hide all by [Page]” has been reinstated. It now appears after users opt to hide a single post by the Page, beside the option to Unlike the Page.

By burying the option one step deeper, Facebook may be able to prevent users from indefinitely hiding a Page’s updates on impulse. Note that the rest of this article is not out of date.

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The company may feel that since users are opting in to receive updates from people and Pages in the first place by friending or Liking them, the interface shouldn’t then make it too easy hide the most significant function of that decision. Philosophically, it has used the “you opted in in the first place” line of reasoning for other information-sharing features, from location to phone numbers to friend suggestions and much more.

For Page owners, the change means that users can no longer obscure all of their content with a single click, unless they want to Unlike the Page. That option does appear once you hide the post, but that’s relatively buried compared to the previous place it had in the main drop-down menu. Some Page owners have complained in the past that they don’t get enough visibility in the news feed based on the overall ranking structure of the algorithm. This change might make them happier.

But on that point, Facebook also decides on what posts to show in the news feed, and it is less likely to show any content from a source that users have previously shown they don’t interact with or don’t want.

A final note: this change is happening right after a big revamp to the news feed, and before what might be the introduction of more granular controls for individual news feed items. If Facebook adds other ways to easily control content by person and page, this interface change won’t end up looking like much.

[Thanks for the tip, Justin Oh of 22squared and Jeff Widman, cofounder of PageLever, along with our readers.]

Update: Repeated from above – The option to “Hide all by [Page]” has been reinstated. It now appears after users opt to hide a single post by the Page, beside the option to Unlike the Page.

The Facebook platform is best known for social games, but another class of applications has been on the rise in the past couple years: integrations of Facebook features by large media and tech companies into their own properties. They are now among the largest applications on the platform.

Most notably, companies like Microsoft and Yahoo have been taking advantage of the platform’s authentication service (formerly known as Connect) to help users sign in to their other services using Facebook, and then sync the relevant Facebook user information to their service. Bing, for example, lets you sign in with Facebook, then shows you search results that your friends have Liked.

Our AppData traffic tracking service highlights the scale of the Facebook traffic for some of these apps today. By monthly active users, Bing is now the seventh largest app on the Facebook platform, with 28.9 million today. Windows Live Messenger is in tenth place at 21.5 million, and Yahoo is right after it with 20.9 million people. By daily active users, Messenger handily beats top social game CityVille to the number one spot, with 18.1 million people. Yahoo is in third place with 11.8 million and Bing is in tenth with 4.28 million. Other companies with large Facebook numbers on our list include TripAdvisor, Yelp and VEVO for Artists.

Check out the graphs below to get a sense for these apps’ trajectories. But first:

Strategic Implications of Facebook’s Prevalence

If nothing else, these numbers illustrate that large sites that integrate Facebook can get serious traffic. Depending on how the integration is done, Facebook could be driving new traffic by encouraging more users to bother signing up, and engaging existing users by making the products more valuable through the use of Facebook data. But if the integrations are done poorly, companies could just be encouraging more users to view Facebook as the center of the web (and the owner of their data), without more value being created. Or, users might simply sign in at some point with Facebook but get nothing out of it — resulting in big stats, but nothing substantive.

It is this complicated set of costs and benefits that helped convince Apple to not do its own Facebook integration with Ping last year. And, as far as we know, Facebook purposefully blocked then stonewalled a deal with Twitter because it was concerned that Twitter would be able to get the better side of the deal, essentially funneling more Facebook users to Twitter. The result of these two issues is that Apple has anointed Twitter as the main social sign-in service for iOS 5, leaving Facebook mostly excluded.

The data here shows what Twitter and Apple might be missing out on. The flip-side is that Facebook’s dealmaking has left it in a worse position for reaching iOS users.

Anyway, here are the biggest Facebook integrations today, by MAU and DAU:

Bing

Windows Live Messenger

Yahoo

TripAdvisor

Yelp

VEVO for Artists

The Inside Network editorial team has proposed several panels for this year’s South By Southwest Interactive and Music Conferences, but we need your votes to get them on the program — and voting is just about to end, so now is the time to check them out if you haven’t already.

The panels look at:

1. Why brands need third-party Facebook service providers such as Page management and Ads API companies
2. How Facebook Credits can power digital media sales and be used as ecommerce purchase incentives
3. How musicians can best market themselves using Facebook
4. The ways film and TV studios are integrating with social games

Here’s a closer look at the four panels we’ve proposed. If you think these are important issues, please follow the links and vote for them. Help us out even if you aren’t planning to attend, as some panels will be livestreamed, and we’ll publish coverage of the discussions.

Brands Need 3rd-Party Tools to Succeed on Facebook

Can brands succeed at Facebook marketing on their own? We’ll discuss with the heads of the biggest service providers on the Facebook Platform what problems third-parties can solve for brands more efficiently than they can solve on their own, including advertising, brand presence, and promotion. We’ll also look at some of the biggest questions brands are confronted with when choosing service providers, and why marketing on a social platform requires different partnership strategies than what brand are used to. Moderated by Josh Constine, Lead Writer of Inside Facebook. Panelists include:

• Michael Lazerow, CEO, Buddy Media, Page management
• Victoria Ransom, CEO, Wildfire Interactive, Page management
• Patrick Toland, US Managing Director, TBG Digital Inc., Ads API

Vote here for “Brands Need 3rd-Party tools to Succeed on Facebook”

Facebook Credits: Not Just for Virtual Goods

Facebook Credits, the social network’s virtual currency, has become the exclusive payment method for all Facebook games. Now, more users are maintaining a balance of Facebook Credits, and more users want them. This has opened new business and marketing opportunities. Content owners can license streaming access or downloads of their content in exchange for Facebook Credits. Meanwhile, ecommerce companies can reward users with Credits for marking purchases or signing up for email lists. Representatives of companies pioneering the use of Facebook Credits outside of social games will discuss the current state of Facebook Credits and their typical uses, explain how virtual currencies are already disrupting several industries, and debate which types of transactions are the next to be changed by the emergence of a virtual currency that is in demand and cheap to distribute. Moderated by Eric Eldon, Editor of Inside Network. Panelists include:

• Suchit Dash, Co-founder, Ifeelgoods, Inc., virtual goods incentives
• Dean Alms – VP of Marketing and Biz Dev, Milyoni, ecommerce
• Jennifer Taylor – Manager of Product Marketing, Facebook Inc., social networking

TV & Film in the Age of the Social Game

What does Jersey Shore have to do with FarmVille? Major media producers like Starz, A&E and MTV are capturing new audiences both online and off by leveraging the power of social games on Facebook. As more licensed entertainment brands integrate with social games on the platform, what are the greatest risks, and who is taking the lion’s share of rewards? Join us for a critical look at social game integrations that are headed for a crash, and the ones that are getting it right. Moderated by Amanda Glasser, Lead Writer of Inside Social Games. Panelists include:

• David Katz – Director of Digital Media, Starz Media, television
• Kris Soumas - A+E Networks Digital (Games), television and games
• Catherine Herdlick – Product Manager, 6waves, social games

Vote here for “TV & Film in the Age of the Social Game”

Facebook quietly launched a Like button browser extension for Chrome a couple months ago, TechCrunch has discovered today. The extension appears as a button to the right of the search and address box in the Chrome interface, and as an option in the right-click menu. As one might expect, it lets you like any web page, share content and your commentary back to Facebook, and see the number of other Facebook users who have liked a post.

Interestingly, it appears to have been released around when Google+ launched in late June, possibly in reaction to hints that Google had their own +1 button extension coming. Google did — but the product only just launched this week.

Maybe Facebook is planning a big push of the plugin at f8 or something? But the lack of promotion that the company has given the plugin suggests that it was a side project or test done by an individual or small team of engineers. As of now, the extension has 555 users.

It seems to work well enough from a user perspective, but could use a bit more polish. For example, if you Like one page, then use hotkey commands to go to other open tabs, the popout description of the Like will remain overlaying the browser.

The overall aim of this sort of feature is to get more users sharing more information through Facebook, and so make its site more valuable to developers and advertisers. It could also give Facebook additional data about its users.

As TechCrunch notes, some users have been concerned about these types of extensions sharing browsing activity and other sensitive information back to the parent company. If you use Facebook’s extension while you’re logged in to Facebook, the company says it will see the URL, your IP address, and when you visited the site. Both companies disclose what data their extensions access in their Chrome Web Store extension descriptions, so users should decide if they’re willing to share browsing activity in exchange for using the product. If it makes leery users feel any better, Facebook and Google both have a wide range of other ways to track users online identities and behaviors, as do countless other web companies.

Facebook has experimented with various types of persistent web interfaces over the years, notably browser toolbars and a navigation toolbar tested for a while in 2008 that appeared above any page that users had clicked to from inside the site. Some web companies, like StumbleUpon, have successfully used persistent browser add-ons to drive usage. Facebook has more often emphasized other ways of making its services effective beyond its home site, like Connect and Graph API-based products such as the Like button. Perhaps its ongoing interest in browser technology and development will result in more features like this extension.