iOS and Android Messenger app gets update - Facebook’s standalone mobile Messenger app got an update today so users can now see whether their messages were received and more quickly see the location from which a message was sent. Image via Techcrunch

Facebook Messenger for iPad, video chat for iPhone in development - 9to5Mac says a source provided the site with access to an upcoming Facebook Messenger app for iPad and a version of the iPhone app with video chat features.

Facebook introduces Open Rack - Facebook introduced a new open source server design Wednesday called Open Rack. Part of the company’s “Open Compute Project,” Open Rack is meant to increase efficiency in Facebook’s data centers, the entire design of which is open sourced so others can model after it or improve upon it.

Facebook joins GNI with unique status – Facebook has joined the Global Network Initiative as an observer, Fast Company reports. The GNI is a consortium of institutions that monitor Internet firms on issues of free speech and human rights. As an “observer,” the company does not have to submit to auditing. It is the first company to have this special status.

Facebook’s first buy rating – Facebook saw its first buy rating from Wedbush Securities Inc. this week, with a target price of $44. That’s well above the $28 to $35 range Facebook set earlier this week.

Like button is not protected speech – A federal judge in Virginia ruled this week that Liking something on Facebook was not tantamount to speech protected under the First Amendment.

FBI lobbying for Facebook backdoor – Wired reports that the FBI has been lobbying Facebook, as well as other companies like Yahoo and Google, to give them backdoor government access to their platforms for wiretapping.

Googles Ordr.in launches Timeline integration – Google Ventures’ Ordr.in became the first restaurant commerce app to integrate Facebook Open Graph. Users of the app can order from a restaurant and share their activity to Facebook timeline using the new actions “crave” and “eat.”

U.K. bouncers identifying patrons via Facebook – Bouncers in some U.K. bars are asking patrons for their smartphones to compare IDs to Facebook profiles in order to guard against fake IDs.

Roadwire wins Facebook Small Business Boost contest - Roadwire, an automotive aftermarket manufacturer and distributor based in Austin, Texas, won the Facebook Small Business Boost contest that rewarded companies that added the most new fans in a given period. Roadwire added over 125,000 fans in less than three months, and earned $10,000 in Facebook advertising as a prize.

Static HTML: iFrame Tabs — a utility for page owners to customize their pages with landing tabs and applications — has fallen to No. 2 on the AppData chart for top applications by monthly active users after more than 6 months at No. 1.

The app lost its position on Thursday, leaving room for Yahoo Social Bar to take the lead. The two were tied on Wednesday with 42 million MAU, but Yahoo still doesn’t have quite as many users as Static HTML did on Tuesday.

Across the board, page tab applications like those from Thunderpenny, Woobox and a number of music-focused developers, are losing users more quickly than they ever gained them. Open Graph applications, like Yahoo Social Bar, are among the fastest growing and top overall applications by monthly active users. This is a trend we expect to continue over the course of the year until Facebook at some point eliminates page tabs completely.

The Thunderpenny-developed Static HTML app lost about half of its monthly active users since Facebook widely implemented Timeline for pages and removed the default landing tab option in March. The app overtook CityVille and The Sims Social for the No. 1 spot on Oct. 16, 2011, with 61 million MAU. It grew to a peak of 89.7 million MAU on Feb. 14, but has since dropped to 41.2 million MAU, according to our AppData tracking service.

At the same time, Yahoo’s social reading integration has grown to 42.4 million MAU, largely because of the viral nature of Open Graph: stories automatically post to Timeline, Ticker and News Feed when users engage with the app. Because of the emphasis on News Feed discovery, Open Graph applications can regularly draw users back to their apps. Yahoo Social Bar also benefits from living off-Facebook. Yahoo can capitalize on the massive amounts of traffic it already has on its site.

In contrast, page tab applications are rarely discovered unless a page directs an ad campaign to the tab. These apps then struggle with re-engagement because users rarely return to fan pages after clicking Like. Another issue is that page tabs aren’t available on mobile devices, whereas many Open Graph apps are. For example, Yahoo has a mobile web app version of its social news reader, which Facebook says was getting 1.4 million visits a day in February.

Although Static HTML and other page tab apps still have millions of users today, we can only foresee their numbers continuing to fall. As mobile usage increases, the potential audience for these apps shrinks. There is also the growing trend of pages running Sponsored Stories and page-post ads, which unlike traditional Facebook ads, cannot lead directly to a tab application. We can imagine Facebook completely eliminating its traditional ad format within the next year or two. It could also do away with third-party page tab applications completely in favor of the Timeline activity box display it uses for personal profiles. Either way, it’s clear that Facebook believes in Open Graph as the future of its platform and developers will need to respond accordingly to maintain relevance moving forward.

[Updated 5/5/12 10:32 a.m. PT - It's also worth mentioning that MAU is calculated differently for Open Graph apps and tab apps. Users have to allow permissions for an Open Graph app to count as an active user, whereas anyone who visits a tab counts as active. This means tab applications likely report inflated MAU and keep them higher in the leaderboards, when their actual engagement is far less than that of a canvas or off-Facebook app.]

Facebook has re-introduced “action links” that allow users to take specific in-app actions directly from stories in the desktop News Feed, Timeline or Ticker.

These customizable action links give developers a way for users to engage with their apps more easily, increasing the viral potential of each story. For example, Foursquare has added a “save this place” link to check-in stories, allowing users to instantly add a location to their to-do list when they see a friend’s activity on Facebook. When a user clicks an action link, a subsequent story will be shared on his or her Timeline. Before today, users could Like or comment on the activity or click to visit the app, but there weren’t app-specific calls to action that functioned this way.

Facebook first offered action links in 2008. Developers could add multiple calls to action for a single app story, which would deep link to the appropriate place within an app to take the action. In 2009, the company made action links the sole way developers could include calls to action within feed stories. This was to maintain structure and prevent developers from putting spammy messages in the body of a story or in images. Later that year, Facebook limited apps to only one action link per story, and ultimately eliminated the entire feature.

Now Facebook says action links can be part of any Open Graph story, and developers can designate an action link for any action they define in their app. Similar to the Foursquare example, Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads could add a “want to see” or “want to read” action link on stories about a friend rating a film or book. Words With Friends might want to include a “play with this friend” or “challenge” link in its stories. This would allow users to easily begin a new game with the friend whose activity they saw in their feed. According to Facebook’s documentation, if a user has not already added an app, they can be directed to an auth dialog when they click on an action link.

Action links are not currently supported on Facebook’s mobile site or apps, and the company did not provide timing for when that might be available. It could be a while, considering Facebook hasn’t even added its own native “Share” button to mobile posts yet.

Facebook marketing software company Involver today introduces a new application programming interface to allow marketers to optimize their Facebook ad campaigns based on post-click engagement.

With the Engagement Optimization API, Involver apps can pass optimization data to the customer’s ad platform of choice. We’ve seen a number of ad providers and app management companies partner to create unified products that enable this type of optimization, but it often requires brands and agencies to change their software or service providers. Involver says it can provide the same optimization features while being agnostic to which ad provider a customer wants to use. Facebook ad partners Marin, Unified and SocialCode have already integrated the new API.

“We want to change the way this market operates,” Involver VP of Marketing Roland Smart says. “We believe things need to become more technology-driven and [social marketing tools] should interoperate with each other.”

When businesses develop applications using Involver’s Social Markup Language, they can get parameterized URLs so each Facebook ad can include unique click tags. Involver assigns a score to every interaction within an app — watching a video, filling out a form or claiming a coupon, for example. Involver’s system tallies that score and returns anonymized, aggregated data for each ad so that ad platforms can make decisions accordingly.

“We’re not telling ad platforms how to optimize,” Smart says. Involver simply delivers the data in a way that is Facebook-compliant.

Smart says the Engagement Optimization API can also be used beyond ads to provide insights for email marketing campaigns or posts across different social networks.

Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers with access to the Ads API can enter into a referral agreement with Involver for access to the Engagement Optimization API. This move could serve Involver well if more ad providers sign on. Instead of investing in acquiring a single ad company as Buddy Media and others have, Involver can work with several at a time. However, it remains to be seen whether the market will continue to consolidate as it has been or if Involver’s API approach can disrupt that.

Two new mobile video apps — Viddy and Socialcam — have shot into the top 25 most popular Facebook apps by monthly active users this week. Their developers have both raised funding from prominent investors, with valuations likely influenced by Facebook’s recent $1-billion-acquisition of Instagram.

But as these and other Open Graph-enabled video applications are gaining between 1 million and 5 million monthly active users a day seemingly without advertising, pundits and investors should be aware of the mechanics in place that lead Facebook apps to grow faster than ever. Developers might also want to look to these apps as examples, but the true test will come in the next few weeks when we can see whether these apps can maintain regular engagement among a sizable percentage of new users.

The following video apps are within the top 40 most popular Facebook apps by monthly active users, according to our AppData tracking service. We’ll look at how these apps use Open Graph to maximize impressions and gain new users. We’ll also address some of the privacy controls they’ve put in place to allow users to limit what they share.

Dailymotion

Dailymotion‘s web integration is the No. 9 Facebook app with 27.3 million MAU. When users visit Dailymotion.com, there is an option to log in with Facebook, but it is not required. When users click on a Dailymotion link from Facebook, however, they are immediately directed to an auth dialog asking for Timeline publishing permissions. After users accept by clicking “go to app,” they can watch the video. Social sharing is automatically enabled but the site offers a “remove from Timeline” button.

So far the app doesn’t share stories about any other activity besides watching videos. Uploading a video or subscribing to a channel, for instance, doesn’t generate a Facebook story. The app also doesn’t share stories when users watch videos directly from a Dailymotion user’s channel. This is good because these videos autoplay and might otherwise lead some unwanted links to be shared with friends.

Unlinking a Facebook account from a Dailymotion account is relatively difficult to do from Dailymotion’s website, but users can always remove the app from their Facebook app settings.

Viddy

Viddy, currently No. 11 with 24.8 million MAU, is an iOS app that allows users to add Instagram-like filters to short videos. Unlike Instagram, it has a full website where users can browse and play videos, follow other users (like Mark Zuckerberg and Snoop Dogg) and mark videos as favorites. These actions all generate Timeline stories, creating aggregations like the one below.

Although the app has been at the top of the iPhone charts, it’s unclear what proportion of the app’s active Facebook users have downloaded the mobile app versus logged into the website. When users click on a Viddy video from Facebook.com, they are presented with an auth dialog. People can watch Viddy videos without logging in if they go to the site directly. After accepting Timeline permissions by clicking “Okay, watch video,” users are taken to the Viddy site where they have the option to turn broadcasting on or off, as well as remove posting permissions for particular actions so users can decide to share videos that they like or comment on, but not those that they simply watch.

Viddy currently lacks an “undo” or “remove from Timeline” button to let users hide their activity directly from the app. Providing this option seems to be an emerging best practice and will help the app avoid potential backlash that could result if users don’t realize how the app is sharing their activity.

The iPhone app lacks any notifications that users are sharing their activity, and the only way to disable sharing — even temporarily — is to go to “settings,” followed by “configure services,” and then “Facebook.” From there users can unlink their accounts, turn off publishing or de-authorize specific permissions.

Socialcam

Socialcam is No. 24 with 17.7 million MAU. It is similar to Viddy in that it allows users to add filters and share videos from their smartphones, though it also seems to include a number of YouTube videos. Unlike Viddy, Socialcam has an Android version. The app also has a website from which users can view videos and follow other users (including Britney Spears and MC Hammer), which raises the same question as Viddy: how many active Facebook users have downloaded the mobile app versus logged in from the web.

When users click on any Socialcam video link, they get an auth dialog, whether they came from Facebook or directly. This makes it seem as though users have to allow Timeline permissions in order to watch a video, but if a user clicks “cancel,” they will be able to view the clip without logging in and sharing their activity.

If users do accept permissions by clicking “Okay, watch video,” social sharing is enabled, and activity will be posted back to Facebook after users get about halfway through a video. Socialcam also offers a remove from Timeline option, and the ability to separately de-authorize publishing permission for viewing activity and other actions, including liking and commenting.

We’ve noticed Socialcam using Facebook requests as a way to bring users back to the app, but it does not seem as though these requests come from any particular friend. Clicking on the request simply redirects users to a canvas version of the app on Facebook.com. If Socialcam is indeed sending requests that are not initiated by friends, we expect Facebook to disable this feature.

Metacafe

Metacafe, which is No. 36 with 13.2 million MAU, seems to offer users the clearest explanation of what is being shared when they visit the site and how to disable it. This web integration prompts users with an auth dialog when they click over from the social network. After clicking “log in with Facebook,” users face a second step where they can choose which actions to share back to their Timelines.

When users play their first video, even though watch activity is “on,” Metacafe doesn’t publish a story until users explicitly click “Add it.” From that point on, activity will be shared on Facebook until users turn activity “off” or “undo” an individual story. For now, the app does not seem to share any other actions besides “watch.”

Some Facebook users are seeing a new icon on News Feed items which link to sites that share activity back to a user’s Timeline. The color of the icon indicates whether clicking the link will generate a story alerting users’ friends that they read an article or watched a video.

A small icon appears next to the name of social news readers and social video apps within News Feed. When the icon is grey, sharing is disabled and users can click on a link knowing that others won’t be able to see their activity, for example, if a user has set the app’s default privacy to “Only Me.” When the icon is green, social sharing is enabled. Users can hover over the icon to see to whom their subsequent activity will be visible. These icons appear within the mobile and desktop News Feed, but not on users’ Timelines.

Earlier this month we saw Facebook testing a similar functionality, but this latest iteration is more ambiguous. The new icon is so subtle that most users will not even notice it, and without any additional context, the icon does not seem to immediately represent social sharing. In fact, on mobile devices, there is no way to find out what the icon signifies. If Facebook does end up picking an abstract icon to designate its “frictionless sharing” applications, it will need to educate users what it means and where they should look for it.

For now, the company seems to be testing a number of options in order to find a future balance between making sharing as easy as possible and still letting people have control over their experience. This is increasingly important as websites and apps can now ask for permissions once and then automatically publish stories to Ticker, Timeline and News Feed when users take action like reading an article, listening to a song or watching a video. Since these apps are so new, there is a lot of variation in how developers make users aware of what they are agreeing to share and how they give users the option to opt-out. By experimenting on its own site and giving third-party developers some freedom to try different approaches, Facebook can discover best practices and ultimately define policies. Until then, some users might be hesitant to add any new applications or click on news and video links.

Other users might want to set certain apps to be visible to “Only Me.” This gives users a chance to experience new apps without fear of over-sharing, and the option to chronicle their activity for themselves alone. Users can later widen the scope of who can see their activity once they trust an app. The easiest way to do this is from the activity log. See the last two screenshots below for an example.

There are now more than 42 million Facebook pages and 9 million Facebook apps, according to a recent amendment to the social network’s filing for an initial public offering.

The number of pages on Facebook with 10 or more Likes has increased by 5 million since Dec. 31, 2011, and the number of apps and websites that integrate Facebook are up by 2 million since that date. These new totals show that Facebook’s platform continues to grow in ways beyond new users. It also shows just how much is competing for users’ attention these days.

Facebook did not provide a category breakdown of the 42 million pages on Facebook. However, in a letter to prospective investors, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared that more than 4 million businesses have pages on the site. Other pages on the social network — including many of the most popular ones — are pages for popular figures, movies and sports teams. A large proportion of pages are also likely to be fan-generated community pages. Unclaimed locations also account for some of these pages, although Facebook has been working to eliminate duplicates.

The number of apps and websites connected to Facebook is likely to quickly grow past 9 million. With Open Graph integration proving to be a large source of traffic for third-party apps and websites, we can expect many more blogs and media sites, as well as mobile games and other apps to implement aspects of the platform

Along with stats about pages and apps, Facebook provided other updated figures for photo uploads, interactions and friend connections in its filing this week. Between Jan. 1 and March 31, there were more than 300 million photos uploaded to the site each day — up from 250 million per day in Q4 2011. Users also generated an average 3.2 billion Likes and comments each day in the first quarter of 2012 — up from 2.7 billion per day in Q4 2011. And Facebook now has more than 125 billion friend connections between its 901 million monthly active users.

In a continued effort to get users to provide star ratings for apps they’ve recently connected to, Facebook has implemented a new “rate apps” sidebar module and redesigned similar module that appears on canvas pages.

The “rate apps” module (seen right) appears on pages across the site. Facebook also updated the design of the “rate recently used apps” feature that displays on canvas pages underneath a user’s bookmarks (seen below). Both modules present users with the option to give apps a rating out of five stars.

Several months after eliminating app reviews and ratings, Facebook began displaying star ratings once again in late March. An app’s average star rating appears within discovery modules on the right-hand side of pages and in the card that appears when users hover over the name of an app from within News Feed. Some users are even seeing a “featured apps” section of the games discovery page that includes ratings.

There does not seem to be a way for users to choose which apps to rate. With the old “Reviews” feature, users could visit a tab on any app profile page to give the app a star rating and leave a review. Because these were easily manipulated, users are now prompted to rate apps randomly. For example, they might see a “rate apps” module while visiting a fan page of something completely unrelated to the apps Facebook asks them to rate. Other times, when users visit a canvas app, such as Washington Post Social Reader, they will be prompted to rate another recently used app. In the past week or so, Facebook has updated the design of this module to display larger stars and eliminate the question “How would you rate [app X]?” See the difference below.

While this random sample approach might lead to more representative scores, it’s debatable how useful stars are in letting users know whether they’ll actually enjoy an app. Facebook’s strength is in social data and recommendations. Anonymous star ratings might make users subconsciously more likely to click over to a new title, but they would likely benefit much more from social context such as, “Users who like [this page] also use [this app]” or “You and a friend both play [game X]. Your friend also plays [game Y].”

Ratings could inform Facebook’s algorithms behind the scenes and give the company some additional data about the type of apps users like, which might be slightly different than what they use. For example, a person might regularly use the Hulu app to watch the latest TV shows but still think the app needs a lot of improvement. However, developers do not have access to more information about their ratings, so they can’t necessarily act on that user feedback.

A new Facebook change will make it easier for developers to migrate their existing apps to Open Graph without requesting additional permissions from users.

This will happen through the merging of the publish_actions and publish_stream permissions, according to a post on the company’s developer blog Wednesday. Apps that were previously granted publish_stream do not need to request publish_actions. This is good news for developers planning to add Open Graph capabilities to their existing apps, but should not be taken an opportunity to begin publishing all sorts of activity users wouldn’t wish to be share on Facebook. The social network has updated its app policy to read:

If a user grants you a publishing permission, actions you take on the user’s behalf must be expected by the user and consistent with the user’s actions within your app.

When Open Graph launched in September 2011, Facebook introduced a new publish_actions permission that allowed apps to publish stories on a user’s behalf. Previously, apps requested publish_stream permissions, which would work for posting items to a user’s Wall, but didn’t create the Timeline activity boxes now associated with Open Graph apps. As a result, developers migrating to the new format had to ask for what was essentially the same permission twice.

Now Facebook will combine these permissions so that apps only have to ask users once to publish on their behalf. The publish_actions permission will now include basic publish_stream permissions, including posting on a user’s timeline, posting photos/videos, commenting on and liking content. This permission will appear on the first auth dialog screen. Apps that need advanced capabilities, like posting to a friend’s timeline or to groups will still need to request publish_stream, which appears on a second screen where users can opt out.

Earlier this month we learned Facebook was working with a small set of partners — including Instagram before the company was acquired — to test extending the old publish_stream permission to include the new Open Graph publish_actions permission. Facebook told us then, as it iterated today “This setting does not change the controls users have or what apps can publish, and it will continue to be the app’s responsibility to make it clear to the user what content will be shared back to Facebook.”

In the case of Instagram, automatically enabling Timeline permissions made sense because it simply optimized the format of posts and users still have a clear choice whether or not to share a photo on Facebook when they create an image in the Instagram app. The only action Instagram publishes is “took a photo,” and as a result, few users will even notice a difference in how the app interacts with their Facebook account. It would be against Facebook policy for Instagram to automatically begin publishing stories about when users follow another account, write comments or take other actions within the mobile app that people haven’t explicitly chosen to share with Facebook friends.

Developers should make it as clear as possible which actions in their apps post to users’ Timelines and to their friends’ News Feeds. If users begin to mark an app’s stories as spam, Facebook is likely to revoke publishing permissions or shut down an app completely. More information is available from the publishing permissions and platform policies sections of the developer site.

Facebook today announced that native Android apps will now be able to benefit from the same social discovery channels as web apps and native iOS apps that integrate with the social network.

Previously native Android apps that used Facebook login couldn’t get distribution through mobile News Feed, Timeline, bookmarks and requests. These channels have been available to HTML5 and iOS apps since October 2011; in February, Facebook told us that 60 million monthly active users navigated to mobile apps from the social network. Apps like Pinterest, BranchOut, Diamond Dash and Words With Friends are among those that have seen millions of additional monthly visits by incorporating Facebook single sign-on. As part of the latest update to Facebook for Android, native Android apps can now access the same features.

Android developers who currently use single sign-on can visit their app settings to enable deep linking. After that, the native app will open when users tap on Facebook stories or requests within Facebook. For example, Spotify users will be able to instantly play songs from their Android devices when they tap on a friend’s listening activity (see example right). If users don’t have the native app installed, they will be taken to a download page.

Apps that integrate Open Graph, in addition to single-sign on, have additional opportunities for discovery on mobile. Facebook recently added game stories in News Feed as a way for users to discover apps on their mobile devices, and a new “trending articles” module gives additional traffic to social readers on the web and mobile devices. We’ve also seen expanded activity modules on mobile Timeline this week.

Developers will be able to get insights about the distribution of referral traffic from the mobile feed, versus mobile search, bookmarks, notifications and Timeline. This was first introduced in March.

More details about deep linking for native Android apps is available on the Facebook Developers site here.