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.

—

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.

—

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief post today by Facebook product manager Justin Shaffer describes a new version of Facebook’s photo viewer coming out now. In place of the black lightbox background window that it previously had you’ll see a much thinner white background. Meanwhile, images are getting considerably more space, going from 720 to 960 pixels., They’ll also load “twice as fast,” Shaffer writes.

For sake of comparison, newly-launched Google+’s maximum photo size is 2048 pixels. Facebook’s size increase might be designed to reduce the gap between the two. The thinner border will keep more of the previously viewed page visible, reminding users to close the photo viewer and resume browsing rather than leave Facebook altogether.

By moving to from a black to a white background, opening photos from the mostly white news feed should be less jarring. This could reduce fatigue from rapidly dropping in and out of the photo viewer and keep users browsing the site for longer.

The photos product has been one of Facebook’s key draws since the early years. Today, in a new stat revealed in the blog post, the company says it’s getting 250 million uploads a day, or about one photo for every three users on Facebook. The upgrade will be rolled out over the next few week, and should make Facebook Photos even more of an attraction for sharing and viewing.