Facebook COO Shifts Europe focus from privacy to economy -  At a recent conference in Europe, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the audience that the economy is probably more of a concern than privacy. She said so given an impending privacy law draft that would affect 27 European Union countries. Specifically, she suggested that the law could have a negative impact on the EU economy. [Image via Facebook]

Facebook has a €2.6 billion U.K. impact -  A study from Deloitte found that Facebook’s overall economic impact in the United Kingdom was €2.6 billion, or 35,200 jobs in the U.K. and 32,000 jobs in the European Union and Switzerland.

Facebook ads game categories to News Feed -  Facebook now displays the genre category below game names and stories in News Feed stories. As we reported on Inside Social Games, users might be more likely to click on games when they know more about them.

Facebook engineer creates Google hack -  An project called Focus on the User, created in part by a Facebook engineer, provides a bookmarklet that forces Google Search Plus Your World to display results from social networks besides Google+.

Causes now a standalone website – TechCrunch reported that the charity app Causes has re-launched as a standalone website.

85K Arab Facebook logins hacked – ZDnet reported that Israel and Saudi Arabia are in the midst of a hacking war, and 85,000 Arab Facebook logins are one casualty.

Washington state AG targets clickjackers -  Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna announced suits against two companies thought to encourage clickjacking on Facebook. The suit was announced at Facebook’s Seattle office.

Facebook registers ‘FB Origin’ domain - Facebook registered several domains, .com and .biz for example, for something called FB Origin via the company MarkMonitor.  Fusible speculated that this means the company is set to launch a new product along with Timeline apps.

Facebook’s heavy push of the subscribe feature has apparently paid off as thousands of journalists enabled subscribers after its launch in September, according to a note on the Journalists + Facebook page.

The social network’s outreach among public figures and the prominence it gives subscribe suggestions on the site show a level of commitment to taking away some of Twitter’s power and preventing Google+ from gaining traction as a source for news.

Journalists like Ann Curry, Nicholas Kristof, Katie Couric and Don Lemon have converted to Timeline and enabled subscribe. Some of these figures have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. More than 90 journalists from the Washington Post and more than 50 from The New York Times have made their profiles available to public subscribers, according to the Journalists + Facebook note. The Washington Post recently published a list of all its staff members who are accessible on Facebook.

Many users have been able to accumulate Facebook subscribers at a much faster rate than they gained Twitter followers. A sample of 25 journalists showed the average journalist had a 320 percent increase in subscribers since November 2011. This is largely due to the “People To Subscribe To” sidebar that shows up on several pages prompting users to follow updates from journalists, celebrities and other public figures. Of course, when one user subscribes to another, it generates a story in friends’ News Feeds in a way that Twitter hasn’t taken advantage of. (Twitter added an activity feed in August 2011, but users have to visit a separate tab to view it.) Facebook has also offered a subscribe button plugin for third-party sites and added a subscribe call to action within its comments plugin and the “page owners” section of pages.

Notably, Facebook has employees dedicated to outreach, not only to bring the right personalities to the platform but also to provide best practices. Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik has been extremely active in sharing examples of how reporters can use the social network and producing resources like the Facebook + Journalists note today, which included recommendations such as “reader shoutouts can increase feedback by as much as 4x.”

Twitter might have to start implementing changes or better courting public figures to convince them not to neglect Twitter in favor of Facebook. Google+ has an advantage with the way Google Search now displays results from its social network, which could help keep it in the race for public attention. But for Facebook, a key point will be letting users choose whether to post to subscribers or friends. Because posts have to be public for subscribers to see them, a user is forced to also share that content with friends. Unlike Twitter, users can only have one profile so they have to mix business and personal. Another issue is that Facebook does not have a way to designate a profile as “official,” which has long been a problem for pages. And because many people who have subscribers also have pages, the social network will need to determine how to balance these in search.

Facebook and Vevo have met at least twice and the most recent talks took place earlier this month about bringing the popular music video service to the social network’s platform and sharing ad revenue, according unnamed CNET sources.

Scoring a deal with Vevo would be a huge win for Facebook over Google. The social network drives a lot of traffic for videos around the web, but is not a video destination itself. Vevo is an industry-backed website for music videos that are also syndicated on YouTube. According to CNET, the discussions are very preliminary — Vevo’s contract with Google is not up for another year yet – but could result in an ad revenue sharing model similar to what Google and Vevo have now. In November 2011, the NY Post reported that Vevo was looking to renegotiate its deal with Google, which since 2009 has given the company 35 percent of its revenue from the ads played before Vevo’s videos on YouTube.

According to ComScore, Google was the top online video content property in December with 157.2 million unique viewers, mostly on YouTube.com. Vevo ranked second with 53.7 million, and Facebook was fifth overall with 42 million. Vevo, though, is YouTube’s top channel overall, with over 53 billion views generating major revenue for both companies.

What Google could lose, Facebook stands to gain and possibly improve upon. Although YouTube is far and away the most popular video site in terms of unique viewers and time spent per viewer, it has not capitalized on its opportunity as a social network. There is little incentive for users to log in to YouTube and the site is filled with spam and hate from anonymous commenters. Google is likely looking for ways to incorporate Google+ to address these issues, but it’s interesting to see how Vevo is already using Facebook on its standalone site.

Vevo has Open Graph integration, which means that when users watch videos on Vevo.com, the activity shows in Ticker, Timeline and News Feed. When people watch the same videos on Vevo’s YouTube channel, the activity is not shared on Facebook. Vevo.com also uses the Facebook comments plugin, which surfaces comments from a user’s friends first and helps demote spam. Vevo.com similarly includes Like buttons that YouTube does not.

The social network currently offers video ads as a premium unit on the homepage, but because the units are small and opt-in, they are not ideal for advertisers who can get guaranteed views on other sites that run pre-roll ads. Facebook wants to preserve the user experience by keeping ads minimal, but billions of Vevo views suggest many users will accept these ads. A partnership with Facebook could allow Vevo ads to play directly in News Feed and Timeline. Currently Vevo.com links do not embed video on Facebook. Videos from Vevo’s YouTube channel do play directly within Facebook, but do not include pre-roll ads.

What is unclear, though, is how deeply the social network would incorporate music videos into its core product. For instance, Facebook could make Vevo videos discoverable from search as opposed to requiring users to visit a canvas app. The company positions itself as a platform for others to build upon, not a media site like MySpace, but to compete with Google, Facebook has to offer Vevo a bigger or at least more profitable audience.

Google+ implemented a number of changes today that give the social network more parity with some of Facebook’s products. The most prominent new feature is the ability to control how much content from each Circle is shown in a user’s stream, similar to what Facebook allows users to do for individual friends.

Relevance in the feed is one of the most critical factors for any network and will be especially important in the ongoing competition between Facebook and Google. Facebook has gone back and forth over the years, sometimes giving users granular control, other times favoring algorithms. Google is known for its use of algorithms, but seems to be testing human curation potential with its new sliders.

In 2007, Facebook provided sliders for users to indicate the type of content they wanted to see in the News Feed. Users could also list friends they wanted to see more or fewer updates from. Now Facebook provides controls on individual profile pages, giving users the option to subscribe to or opt-out of different types of updates. Here is the old interface:

Google+ also made improvements for page owners, now allowing multiple admins and providing notifications about activity on the page. These changes are important for marketers using the site similarly to Facebook pages. Google+ pages now also include a total count of users that have connected with a page by adding it to a circle or clicking +1. This is similar to Facebook displaying total Likes, which has been a major driver for brands to spend money on ads and marketing campaigns to increase their count. By presenting a similar public metric, Google+ gives brands a reason to drive consumers to their pages there.

Other Google+ updates reminiscent of Facebook features include previews of content in the notifications window and a lightbox display for photos. For more details, see Google’s blog post.

Facebook, Google Pair Up to Fight Anti-Piracy Law – The House Stop Online Piracy Act proposal has brought together Facebook, Google and other companies in an effort to prevent the passing of the law that companies say will place the onus of protecting against piracy on them.

Facebook IPO Rumors Swirl – Business Insider reported that Facebook employees are reporting that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the IPO is coming soon, as early as next month.

Porn, Violence a Recent Problem – Facebook acknowledged to ZDnet this week a series of problems with unwanted pornographic or violent content showing up in their news feeds. The Wall Street Journal reported that it was a “coordinated spam attack” coming as the company ramps up to release Timeline.

FCC, Facebook Settle Over Privacy Issues – The Federal Trade Commission and Facebook reached a settlement over privacy issues, even as the FTC encourages people to Like them on Facebook.

Facebook’s Name Policy Hones in on Salman Rushdie - Writer Salman Rushdie became a target for Facebook’s real name policy this week. After the author took to Twitter to protest the deactivation of his account, the company restored his profile. The New York Times writes about the dilemmas caused by this policy in today’s world. [Image Via david_shankbone]

Google+ Works with Page Management Companies – Google announced last week the creation of Google+ Pages for brands to share information with users on Google+ and Page management companies like HootSuite, Context Optional, Vitrue and Buddy Media are set to work with brands on managing this new platform.

Orange Launches Facebook Phones – Orange is set to release three affordable Android smartphones for customers who heavily use Facebook.

Dems, GOP Participating in DC Hackathon – Congressional members from both parties are set to participate in the first ever DC Facebook Hackathon to find new ways to use social media in the political process. [Image Via Facebook]

Creepy Zuckerberg Fan Appears at Carnegie Mellon – A student at a recent Mark Zuckerberg appearance at Carnegie Mellon University instilled fear in the audience, and CEO, when he made some creepy and cryptic comments. The student apparently snuck into the venue the night before to place some speakers under Zuckerberg’s seat.

PayPal Releases Facebook Payment App – PayPal released a Facebook app, Send Money, that allows users to send money to friends without a fee.

Other Announcements:

Coupons.com for Pages – Coupons.com released its Brandcaster Social platfor to allow brands to create secure, printable coupons directly on their Pages in 48 hours or less.

Napkin Labs Brings Crowdsourcing to Pages – Napkin Labs’ Brainstorm app allows brands to gives brands a way to get feedback from fans anything from new products to coming changes.

NASCAR, ESPN to Livestream Driver’s Camera -  NASCAR and ESPN announced that the two will provide a livestream of driver Tony Stewart’s live in-car camera on Facebook during the season finale on Sunday, November 20.

Facebook is currently testing a new feature called Smart Lists that automatically groups friends with common characteristics into Friend Lists that dynamically update themselves over time. Previously, Friend Lists had to be manually assembled and updated — a chore that contributed to them being used by only 5% of the user base. First spotted by Nick Starr, Smart Lists are now being created for the coworkers, classmates, and friends who live within 50 miles of users in the test group.

Since Smart Lists can be selected within privacy settings and the news feed publisher to determine who can see profile or posted content, they could encourage users to micro-share to specific subsets of their friends. This allows them to post a wider variety of content to Facebook, enriching the site. With Smart Lists, Facebook has leveraged the wealth of data it has about the interconnections between its users to drastically reduce friction in the Friend List creation process, and one-up Google+ Circles that must be laboriously built by hand.

Facebook is also now showing a tool tip explaining how the previously available “Friend List Feed Filters” work when users choose to filter the news feed by selecting a Friend List from the Most Recent drop-down menu. While viewing the filtered feed users can manage the members of the Friend List and confirm Facebook’s suggestions for additions to the list. This change educate users about Friend Lists and make manually created ones easier to keep up to date.

Since December 2007, Facebook has allowed users to assign friends to Friend Lists that can used as news feed filters, distribution parameters for posted content, and visibility settings for the profile. However, their buried place in the interface, the slow creation process, and the fact that explicitly categorizing friends is somewhat unnatural made Friend lists a feature that only attracted power users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the launch event for the Groups feature in October 2010 that only 5% of users had created friend lists.

Over the years, Facebook has tried to surface the feature in more places around the site and make them a little easier to create. While creating friends lists, users gained the option to sort them by parameters such as Recently added as well as profile characteristics including those used to create Smart Lists to speed up assignment. Later Facebook started allowing users to add someone to a list when they confirmed their friend request.

In October 2010, Facebook began showing suggestions of people to add to existing lists based on similarities with previously added members — the closest thing to a predecessor to Smart Lists. Previously these suggestions appeared only in the Friend List editor interface, accessible through Account0 -> Edit Friends, but now they appear beside the news feed when filtering the feed with a Friend List.

Contact sorting and micro-sharing have become bigger issues over the past few months. Google+ was applauded for its drag-and-drop Circle building process that was faster than building Facebook Friend Lists. Third-party developer Katango recently built a product that “auto-magically” build Friend Lists by clustering similar friends and allowing users to export the lists to Facebook. Both products raised the question of why Facebook, with all its biographical and behavior data, couldn’t automatically create Friend Lists for users.

Now Facebook has shown that it can automatically build Friends Lists. Users currently in the limited tester base for Smart Lists have lists for coworkers, classmates, and local friends automatically created for them. The feature doesn’t go as far as Katango, which uses a wide variety of signals to create more than a dozen lists for users such their closest friends or people met on a vacation, as well as those made by Smart Lists.

Facebook very well may improve the feature in the future to create Smart Lists from more subtle clusters of friends and not just those who share an explicitly listed characteristic. The tool tip explaining the feature notes that users can remove friends from Smart Lists at any time, allowing them to expel friends mistakenly admitted to lists where they don’t belong.

The fact that Smart Lists update themselves in response is a huge improvement over Katango and Google+. As more friends move to a user’s city or join their company, they’ll be automatically added to the corresponding Friend Lists. With the friction of building and maintaining lists removed, a roll out of Smart Lists could significantly increase adoption of the Friends Lists and micro-sharing.

Users may be more likely to share professional, nostalgic, and local-focused content by restricting the visibility of these posts to just those they’re relevant to. Without lists for these subsets automatically created and ready, users might have never shared these types of content, making Facebook a less interesting place for their friends to visit.

Smart Lists could also erase one of Google+’s core advantages over Facebook. The feature’s launch underscores a deficiency in Google+’s growth strategy of rolling out to early adopters first without a clear way to bring mainstream users aboard they way Facebook did by opening at one college at a time. As such Google revealed its Facebook-besting features but hasn’t been able to gain massive traction since, giving Facebook time to catch up.

UK Won’t Ban Facebook – Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion met with United Kingdom officials Thursday regarding the social networks’ role in summer riots there. The government ended up not moving to restrict access to the social networks in emergencies such as riots.

Facebook Takes Third Spot for Video – Facebook becomes the third largest video site on the Internet, comScore reported. That is 51.5 million people who watched videos on the platform in July.

AT&T to Discontinue Facebook Phone – AT&T is reportedly set to drop its “Facebook phone” called the Status, according to TechCrunch.

Places More Popular Than Foursquare – London developer Golden Gekko reports its clients report much more Facebook check-ins than Foursquare in Europe. Magnus Jern reported that the ratio ranged from 5-10 to 1. However, the future of the service is unclear.

Facebook Hit 1 Trillion Pageviews - Facebook surpassed 1 trillion pageviews according to Google’s Ad Planner tool, although comScore says otherwise.

Facebook Mobile App to Offer Photo Filters - Facebook looks to be competing with Instagram’s classy mobile app by offering almost a dozen photo filters to its mobile own application — following Facebook’s attempt to buy the startup, according to The New York Times. News of the feature first leaked out in June.

Recapping Facebook’s Bug Bounty – Neal Poole did a basic rundown of Facebook’s Security Bug Bounty program, which included information about multi-line JavaScript URI, redirects preserving fragment portions of URLs, XSS filters and more.

Facebook Wraps Up Farm Bureau Dispute – Facebook and the Farm Bureau had a dispute over Facebook trademarking “FB,” but it seems like the lawsuit is set to be wrapped up.

Milyoni Chart for Credits – Milyoni created a nice chart and whitepaper that includes ways that Facebook Credits can, and cannot, be used.

Facebook to Open Second Campus - Facebook is set to open up an additional campus from its current Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. The second campus pwill be southwest of the current location, to be constructed in 2013 to accommodate about 2,800 employees.

Ticketmaster Allows Users to Find Friends – Line Nation’s Ticketmaster service launched an app that allows users to see where their friends are sitting on seat maps and tag themselves.

BBC Does Facebook On-Demand Video – BBC has developed an on-demand Facebook application allowing users to rent episodes from the show “Top Gear” for 48 hours.

ShopIgniter, Involver Partner – The two companies are entered into a partnership to help online retail businesses with a management content system.

UK Officials Meet With Facebook to Stem Riots – United Kingdom officials are set to meet with Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry regarding their corporate responsibility to not fuel riots, such as those recently plaguing London. One possible outcome: to suspend social networks when governments deem it an emergency.

NYPD Forms Social Media Tracking Unit – The New York Police Department has recently formed a unit specifically to track activity on Facebook and Twitter. Specifically information about parties, gang activity and other problems will be the focus. [Image via Facebook]

Facebook is Not Posting Phone Numbers – Facebook is responding to a viral warning that the company is “stealing” or posting users’ phone numbers for everyone to see. It says phone numbers of friends are kept private.

European Social Network Netlog Banned From Facebook – Netlog, a European social network with roughly 80 million user has been banned from the Facebook Platform after it tried to “access internal Facebook APIs and deliberately compromised intended limitations of our platform acebook has banned the European,” Facebook said.

Facebook, Ceglia, Continue to Duel – Last week Facebook announced that it had “smoking gun” evidence against would-be Facebook owner Paul Ceglia to prove that his lawsuit is frivolous. Then, it turns out, Ceglia is in Ireland and saying he’s being harassed by Facebook.

More Facebook Means More Narcissism – Facebook can lead to mental health issues for teens according to one psychology professor’s research. The American Psychological Association conference presentation included information that heavy Facebook users suffering anxiety and depression, and are more likely to be narcissistic.

Facebook Helps College Newspapers – Facebook has created a guide for college media on how to use Facebook in different ways in the newsroom. [Image via Facebook]

Our Eyes Perceive Facebook, Google+ Similarly – A study found that Google+ has a setup that allows users to perceive it almost identically to Facebook. The study from EyeTrackShop tracked the order of visual fixation for 54 users, finding high correlation between the two networks.

Google+ Set to Surpass Twitter – A study from the UK found that Google+ is set to become the second-largest social network after Facebook.

Other Announcements:

Vitrue, Clear Channel Radio Partner – Vitrue and Clear Channel Radio have announced a partnership in which all of the company’s 850 radio stations will implement Vitrue’s SRM platform.

Buckaroo Unveils Social Media Promotions – Buckaroo has announced a new way that businesses can combine social deals with email marketing, Facebook and Twitter. The technology is designed for small businesses.

Career Notify Leverages Facebook in Job Hunt – Career Notify is a recruitment and head hunting service that sends email notifications to Facebook friends and contacts whenever anyone gets a new job, promotion, or resigns.

Facebook has updated its Platform Polices, prohibiting apps from linking to or promote apps on competing social platforms, and from rewarding users with virtual currency, goods, or downloads through a third-party for taking an action. These policy changes, reported by TechCrunch, will prevent developers from directing traffic from their Facebook apps to off-site destinations, or from incentivizing user actions unless done with Facebook Credits or without the aid of third-parties.

The policy changes were not announced on the Facebook Developer Blog or anywhere else. Facebook may only enforce the ban on linking to competitors in more aggressive cases. Still, fear of enforcement may limit how developers can promote versions of their apps on other platforms such as Google+’s recently launched games platform, hampering growth for both developers and platform owners.

Banning Cross-Platform Promotion

Facebook already prohibited advertising for competing social platforms on its website. Now it’s Platform Policies states “I.11 – Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social platform.”

This policy update could be seen as an extension of that ban, meant to cover developers who are effectively advertising within the real estate of their own games. Alternatively, it could seen as an limiting developers from driving engagement on other platforms from users whose engagement they won on Facebook. Many Facebook developers currently use banners and pop-ups on their canvas apps, as well as Facebook wall posts to promote their presence across the web.

Much will depend on how Facebook interprets “social platform”. If this is taken to mean other web services offering a very similar developer platform within a social network, such as Google+, it would be more sensible, though a sign that Facebook believes these platforms have the potential to serious complete with it. If the term is interpreted to include vastly different mediums such as mobile or console app and game platforms, it could prohibit developers from offering users a more 360 degree experience, where they could play different parts of the same game or access different functionalities of an app while on their mobile device.

UPDATE: Facebook has clarified that the policy update does not apply to cross-promotion of mobile apps or off-platform apps available through a developer’s homepage. Read more on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

If cross-platform promotion is important to a developer, they may either have to leave Facebook, or silo their Facebook app or game experience while their presence on more open social platforms seamlessly integrate across mediums and platforms.

Fewer Incentive Options

Beginning July 1st when Facebook made Credits the mandatory exclusive payment method for Facebook games, it restricted how developers could reward users. Essentially, developers could only reward users with:

• Anything if through Facebook’s approved offer partners
• A developer’s own virtual goods or currency if a third-party isn’t involved
• Only a developer’s own virtual goods through a third-party if the offer didn’t require a user’s personally identifiable information

Previously, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool let users export an archive of their status updates, photos, as well as a list of friends’ names, but not their contact information. Now, Facebook allows users to opt into having their email address included in exports by their friends, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports.

The feature will allow Facebook to deflect criticism that it doesn’t permit data portability by saying that users have the option but choose not to let friends export their email addresses for use in other web services, including Google+.

Facebook launched Download Your Information so users could back up the social content they own, in case they lost their local copy of data such as their photos. It was designed for personal use, with David Recordon, Facebook’s senior open programs manager saying at its launch event “We built this product as something that’s useful for people, not for other developers.” It wasn’t meant to be used to seed a profile and social graph on another web service.

Google and Facebook blocked or put up roadblocks on importing and exporting data between their services in November 2010. Google had accused Facebook of not supporting data portability because users couldn’t export email addresses of friends, but could import addresses from services like Gmail. Facebook responded saying the email addresses of friends are not a user’s own data, and therefore they don’t have the right to export them. Meanwhile, it allowed these same email addresses to be exported through Yahoo! Mail and some smaller third-party email services.

Now Facebook users can authorize their email to be exported when friends use Download Your Information. The option is buried within the folded “Email” settings in Account Settings. Few users regularly visit their account settings, and even fewer would expanded an area that presumably only allows you to change your email address. The placement of the feature here will allow Facebook to say it exists without the risk that most users will actually enable address exporting.

Google’s new social network Google+ bases friend discovery on email addresses, so if users could export the email addresses of all their Facebook friends, they could easily find them on Google+. Facebook clearly doesn’t want this to happen, but doesn’t want to appear to be hoarding user data — a key fear of users that might make them more likely to switch social networks.

Users have little to lose by enabling the option, unless they have friends who would share their email address with unscrupulous developers or spammers. It will make them easier to find around the web, and help friends stay in contact by email if they ever choose to leave Facebook.