Inside Facebook

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The local review-sharing site Yelp has added Facebook Connect to allow users to easily share local business reviews with their friends on Facebook.

Yelp allows anyone to submit a review for any local business, from restaurants to shoe stores to mechanics. Once you’ve registered and written a review, you’ll now have the option of using Facebook Connect to post the review to your Facebook page so your friends will see it in their feeds. You can set up an automatic posting feature to pull every review you write over to Facebook, or choose to post only certain reviews.

Facebook Connect has also recently been integrated into other review sites, such as Urbanspoon and Citysearch, and has led to a pronounced jump in activity in the number of reviews, comments, and photos added to these sites.

Citysearch has seen a dramatic increase in registrations since implementing Facebook Connect. The number of daily registrations has tripled since the launch, and 94% of reviewers are sharing their reviews on Facebook. The average review gets 40 views, with 74% of those clicking back to the Citysearch site. Restaurant review site Urbanspoon has experienced similar success. Since adding Facebook Connect in March, 1/3 of the users signing in to the site with their popular iPhone app are doing so through Facebook.

As more review sites add Facebook Connect functinality, Facebook itself is becoming a valuable source for unsolicited, trusted information on local businesses and services. Seeing your friends’ Yelp posts is a great way to learn more about restaurants, stores, and night life around your area. The early success suggests that users are taking advantage of these reviews, and with several different sites, like Urbanspoon and Yelp, integrating with Facebook, you’ll get a larger number of reviews that will allow you to make a more informaed decision on where to spend your money.

The increased use of Facebook Connect also brings more accountability to the restaurants, stores, and shops; any one customer can now more easily spread the good (or bad) word about your business throughout their entire network of friends, so there’s more incentive to offer a good product and excellent customer service.

We’ve heard a lot of people say the iPhone’s built-in support for YouTube video uploading is going to make a huge impact on the number of people posting videos online. That number could grow even more now that Facebook’s upcoming Facebook for iPhone 3.0 app is going to include video uploads - especially amongst people who want to easily post their videos online for friends and family to see, but not the general public.

Joe Hewitt, the lead engineer on Facebook’s iPhone app, says, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

Developers and marketers should prepare for many more user-generated videos shuffling around the Facebook ecosystem in the coming months.

In addition to including video uploads for iPhone 3GS users, Facebook for iPhone 3.0 will include the “new” News Feed, Events Likes, Notes, Pages, a new home page, and a variety of other features. However, Push Notifications, which are in high demand, will be included in Version 3.1 later this summer, Hewitt says. A release date has not been announced.

Live streaming on Facebook is now more affordable for smal businesses and individuals thanks to StreamAPI, a new product from live-streaming company Stickam. StreamAPI is built around Facebook’s Live Stream widget, which was recently opened up to anyone wanting to add a dynamic stream of Facebook status updates around live events on their website.

StreamAPI is slightly different from the currently available service from Ustream, which has been used in many of the live streaming events to date but has setup costs as high as $15,000. With StreamAPI, there is no set up or monthly fee; instead, users pay 45 cents per gigabyte. There’s support for HD video as well. Stickam has plenty of experience with live online video, providing its service to stream content for MTV, CBS Radio, and G4TV, amongst others.

New services like StreamAPI reflect the increasing interest amongst web video publishers for the social context that Facebook Connect brings around live events. New products and pricing models like this one are opening up the market to a larger variety of long tail publishers.

As Inside Facebook reported last month, Facebook is in the process of migrating away from regional networks on the site (they were only ever used by 50% of users anyway, and created some unintended privacy confusion). As a result, network affiliations are being migrated to the Info tab on user profiles as users’ current locations.

For developers, Facebook says that these changes will eventually be reflected in their API. If your application currently makes use of regional networks, you have until September 30, 2009, to make the official change to use the current_location field instead of network affiliations.

This process isn’t without its quirks, however. As pointed out on the Developer’s Forums, the new user-defined city field could be less useful than regional networks as it will likely actually create more segmentation. Any attempt to group like cities together would be at the expense of the application developer.

A couple of months ago, Facebook released the Open Stream API, a new set of Facebook Platform APIs that enable developers to access and publish to the Facebook stream from anywhere. Since then, we’ve seen a number of interesting desktop client integrations, like the recent updates from Seesmic and TweetDeck.

However, a simple new website built on Facebook Connect, Flutteerr, illustrates ways developers could build websites that integrate the stream as well. Developed by Facebook employee Naitik Shah using the standard APIs in his personal time, Flutteerr currently only contains the Facebook stream (and resembles Twitter quite a bit), but it could be enhanced with a variety of features to make publishing to or reading your Facebook stream more powerful.

On Flutteerr, users can filter the News Feed the same way they can inside Facebook, including by Friend List, Network, Page, and particular applications. Status updates, comments, and likes are automatically posted to Facebook. However, you can’t share links, photos, etc. in the media-rich way that the Facebook.com Publisher allows you to.

Since the site is a personal project, it’s unclear what will happen with it going forward (though the name is reminiscent of this parody video from Slate called Flutter: The New Twitter). Nevertheless, the site does go to show what’s possible with the API.

Each month, it seems like there are a few surprises in store on the Facebook gaming charts. Back at the start of June, we saw a number of new titles appear within the Top 25. One in particular, Farm Town, debuted at #4 with nearly 8 million monthly active users. It just goes to show that even today, with Facebook’s viral channel allocation limits in place, new games can still become popular once word starts to spread.

Of course, distribution has always been an issue for new companies with no marketing budget, but Farm Town shows that things can still grow without a lot of initial spend. This month, Zynga is hot on the heels of Farm Town with its own new farming release, FarmVille…

>> Read more at Inside Social Games

It’s been just under 90 days since Facebook announced it has crossed the 200 million active user mark. Today, that number is somewhere around 240 million, perhaps even close to 250 million. If Facebook were a country, it would now have the 4th largest population in the world.

While Facebook has been growing at around 300,00 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the last three quarters, its growth rate seems to have again significantly increased in recent weeks to around 700,000 to 750,000 new users per day based on data we are tracking from Facebook’s advertising tools.

If Facebook continues at this rate, it could reach 300 million active users by November. Keep in mind, however, that as has been the case for most of the last year, about 70% of that growth is happening outside the United States. Nevertheless, Facebook still grew at an 8% monthly clip in the US in May, up to nearly 70 million active users today.

In addition, Facebook has recently released updated engagement stats about the way users interact with different features on the site. Some highlights:

• 30 million users update their statuses at least once each day (13 million did per month at the beginning of the year)
• 8 million users become fans of Pages each day (up from 2.5 million per day at the beginning of the year)
• 10 million videos are uploaded each month (up from 4 million)
• 900 million photos are uploaded to the site each month (up from 700 million)
• 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each week (up from 15 million per month)
• 35 million active groups exist on the site (up from 19 million)
• 2.5 million notes created each month
• 30 million users access Facebook each month through a mobile device

In other words, Facebook’s growth does not appear to be slowing down yet, and engagement is still on the rise.

We’ll of course continue tracking all the latest Facebook stats for you here on Inside Facebook. To dive deeper on how you can engage Facebook’s 240 million users through Facebook Pages, Facebook advertising solutions, Facebook Platform applications, or Facebook Connect for your website, check out Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook’s iPhone application is one of the most popular iPhone apps overall - nearly 25% of all iPhone owners use it according to Joe Hewitt, lead engineer for Facebook’s iPhone application. Today, Hewitt shared some more details on the upcoming version 3.0 of the Facebook iPhone app.

What will be coming in the new version?

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

The new home screen will definitely make for a friendlier user experience, especially with the addition of Events, Notes, Pages, and photo albums. The addition of the Pages feature means that brands with Facebook Pages will have increased visibility when users are on the go.

While Hewitt said he didn’t know when the app will be submitted to Apple, it is about “98% done.” However, Push Notifications, which are in high demand, will be included in Version 3.1 later this summer, Hewitt says.

On the first official day of Q3 2009, which established apps are still growing the most quickly? Here are the numbers from AppData on today’s fastest growing applications on Facebook in the 1 million to 10 million MAU category.

Currently taking the #1 spot is FARKLE, an addictive dice game developed by Facebook app shop Viral, s.r.o. For each game, users roll dice 10 times and try to maximize their scores by following the game’s scoring rules. As you play, chips are earned along the way. They can also be earned by inviting your Facebook friends to play the game, sending your friends who are also users of the app a gift, and/or completing offers on the app’s offer wall.

		Name	MAU	Gain	%	Developer
1.		FARKLE	2,096,924	+197,165	+10.4	Viral, s.r.o.
2.		Barn Buddy	3,188,649	+167,087	+5.5	TheBroth, Inc.
3.		Waka-Waka	3,109,541	+120,994	+4.1	Metrogames
4.		Restaurant City	5,861,728	+106,605	+1.9	Playfish
5.		Biotronic	3,398,277	+101,750	+3.1	Metrogames
6.		UNO™ BETA	1,858,228	+100,639	+5.7	GameHouse
7.		Do you really know me?	1,865,635	+57,851	+3.2	How well do you know me
8.		Know-It-All Trivia	3,707,469	+57,736	+1.6	CrowdStar
9.		YoVille	7,857,944	+44,582	+0.6	Zynga
10.		Street Racing	2,904,532	+43,082	+1.5	Zynga
11.		Bejeweled Blitz	4,404,078	+35,434	+0.8	Popcap Games
12.		Fortune Products	3,504,943	+31,957	+0.9	QuoteMountain.com
13.		Daily Horoscope	4,152,067	+28,981	+0.7	6 waves
14.		Tattoodle	1,262,829	+25,777	+2.1	Make The Web Better
15.		Are YOU Interested?	2,640,198	+23,095	+0.9	SNAP Interactive (Ticker: STVI)
16.		Is Cool by cafe.com	2,221,961	+19,652	+0.9	Cafe.com
17.		Geo Challenge	3,695,910	+19,336	+0.5	Playfish
18.		All About Me	1,436,420	+18,857	+1.3	Lih Chen
19.		SuperPoke! Pets	1,348,700	+17,474	+1.3	Slide, Inc.
20.		Rock Legends!	1,061,607	+17,192	+1.7	Serious Business

FARKLE’s approach to incentivizing friends with the app pushes the boundaries of Facebook’s platform incentivization rules. About a year ago, the Facebook Platform team prohibited incentivized invites within apps - a policy designed to increase the quality of messages sent to users via apps.

Also in the Top 5 are Barn Buddy (TheBroth, Inc.), and verified apps Waka-Waka (Metrogames), Restaurant City (Playfish), and  Biotronic (Metrogames again). The top five spots are all taken by social games, and it’s notable that three out of the five apps are verified apps - one indication that apps in the Application Verification Program are enjoying the benefits of increased prominence.

Do you really know me? and All About Me have also earned places in the Top 20, consistent with numbers from last month showing that simple quizzing apps are continuing to see some pretty viral growth.