Google today announced a number of new partners, including Facebook, with apps for its wearable computing device Google Glass.

Facebook developed its own app Facebook for Glass, which will allow users to post photos from Google Glass to their Facebook Timeline and friends’ News Feeds. Users can share photos they’ve just taken or upload past photos. To include a caption, users can speak their description aloud. The app includes options to share with the public, friends only or privately with the “only me” setting.

For now, the app enables photo sharing but not other types of status updates or posts. If Google Glass eventually comes into wide use, Facebook is likely to develop other ways for people to share, browse content or connect with friends through the device. The social network aims to let people access Facebook from any platform, whether it’s web, mobile, smart TVs or emerging categories like wearable computers. Generally, though, it focuses its own development on the top platforms like web, Android and iOS, whereas apps for less popular platforms like Windows Phone and Blackberry are done by those companies themselves.

“We look forward to exploring Facebook experiences across new types of mobile devices; this is only a first step,” Facebook Mobile Product Manager Erick Tseng wrote in a post on Facebook.

More information about Facebook for Glass is available from the social network’s Help Center. Other partners with apps for Glass announced today are Twitter, Tumblr, Path, Evernote, CNN, New York Times and Elle.

Instagram today announced a new way for users to tag their friends and other accounts, along with “Photos of You,” a new section of the profile that displays all the photos a user or brand has been tagged in.

The feature is similar to Facebook’s own photo tagging, where users can tap an area of a photo to add a person’s name. The person will be alerted and have the option to approve the photo before it goes on their profile. Previously, users could mention other users in the caption of their photos, but there was no way to clearly indicate who was in a photo and where. There also wasn’t a way to quickly access all the photos users themselves were in.

One difference from Facebook is that users can easily tag brand accounts. Facebook allows tagging of pages from desktop but never brought the feature to mobile, a missed opportunity since so many photos are uploaded from mobile devices. Instagram, with hashtags and now photo tagging, is closer to Twitter in being a platform for connecting with public figures, brands and people that users don’t know in person. Facebook on the other hand has struggled on this front in large part because there isn’t an easy way to tag non-friends or to notify those brands and public figures that they’ve been mentioned. Instagram’s all-private or all-public approach to privacy, like Twitter has, means it doesn’t have to deal with the same subtleties that Facebook does when it comes to these settings.
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Jim Breyer to leave Facebook board – Accel Partners venture capitalist Jim Breyer announced today that he is stepping down from Facebook’s board of directors in June after holding a seat since April 2005. Breyer was recently elected to the Harvard University Corporation Board. He also sits on the boards of Brightcove, Dell, News Corporation and Walmart. Facebook’s current board lineup includes Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Don Graham, Reed Hastings and Peter Thiel.

New Facebook data center coming to Iowa – Facebook this week announced plans for a new data center in Altoona, Iowa. Altoona will be the company’s fourth owned and operated data center. Its others are in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. The facility will feature its Open Compute Project server designs, outdoor-air cooling system and other innovations to be more energy efficient. Facebook says it plans to break ground this summer and begin serving user traffic in 2014.

Stickers come to Messenger for Android – Facebook updated its Messenger for Android app this week to include support for the new stickers in chat. Stickers are larger emoji that are popular in Asian messaging apps like Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat. Facebook offers a number of sticker sets, which are available for free download from its mobile Sticker Store. This feature came to the main Facebook for iOS app last week, but it is not yet available for the main Android app or Messenger for iOS.

Facebook Home passes 500K installs – According to the Google Play Store, Facebook Home was download more than 500,000 times in the week since it launched. So far the app has only a two-star rating.

Facebook tries new image format – Facebook is testing a new WebP image format, which could make the site faster and reduce network costs, according to CNet. Now, when users upload JPEG images, Facebook converts them to WebP and delivers them this way to people using browsers like Chrome and Opera, which support the format. WebP, however, is not always compatible outside of the web, which means it is harder for users to download and share images they get from Facebook.

Facebook users change profile picture show support for same sex marriage – As the U.S. Supreme Court met this week to address same-sex marriage, the Human Rights Campaign encouraged users to change their profile pictures to an image of a pink equal sign on a red background in support of marriage equality. Since then, the image and hundreds of variations of it have gone viral across the social network. Facebook’s data science team found that there was a 120 percent increase in profile photo changes on Tuesday after the HRC launched its campaign compared to the previous Tuesday. More stats are available in a note here.

Report: Zuckerberg gets political - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly involved in forming a political advocacy organization with other Silicon Valley executives, including Joe Green, co-founder of NationBuilder and Causes, who was Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard. The group is expected to work to influence issues related to immigration, education reform and the economy. Zuckerberg has reportedly pledged as much as $20 million to support the Super PAC.

Amazon buys Goodreads – Amazon this week announced its plans to acquire Goodreads, a social reading community and book recommendation platform that integrates with Facebook’s Open Graph. The service will continue to operate under the Goodreads name and its CEO Otis Chandler. Amazon reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, which has 16 million members.
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Facebook this week added a job listing for a Software Engineer, Computer Vision to join a team working on the social network’s “next generation products.”

Computer vision is a field that involves electronically processing and understanding images. It can be applied to a range of industries and tasks, but most obviously for Facebook, it could help the company organize the massive amount of photos and videos users share by recognizing what is within those images. If Facebook could better understand the contents of a photo or video, that could improve News Feed relevancy algorithms, help users search and find media on the platform, and open up new possibilities for Sponsored Stories or ways to monetize Instagram. (more…)

Facebook has updated its policy for pages’ cover photos, eliminating rules against calls to action, contact info or references to price or purchase information, while maintaining the 20 percent limit for text overlay.

The new guidelines give page owners more flexibility in the type of content they include in their covers. Many were unaware of these rules or simply ignored them knowing Facebook was unlikely to take action against them for their violations. The latest guidelines for pages regarding cover photos is:

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines. Covers may not include images with more than 20% text.

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Instagram today announced a new milestone of 100 million monthly active users.

Just a month ago, Instagram surpassed 90 million MAU, but before that, the company only reported registered users not monthly actives. Some had speculated that Instagram might have lost users or seen growth slow after a controversy related to its data use policy, but there hasn’t been any data to indicate that has been the case. Instagram seems to be continuing to gain app downloads, sign-ups, active users and engagement.

Facebook reached 100 million monthly active users in August 2008 – four and a half years after it was founded. Instagram began in October 2010, and has risen very quickly, in part because of the virality of Facebook, plus the new infrastructure and resources that come along with being owned by the social network.
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Instagram has launched its image feed to the web, allowing users to scroll through users’ photos on their web browsers, the Facebook-owned company announced on its blog.

Users no longer have to use dedicated mobile apps to browse through the content their friends and connections share.  The desktop feed lets users like and comment on images, but does not support uploading pictures on desktop. The feed is also optimized for mobile device users that may not already have a dedicated native app.

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Facebook re-enables photo tag suggestions – Facebook announced Thursday that it is re-enabling the photo tag suggestion feature in the U.S., which uses facial recognition to help users identify  friends in their photos. The controversial feature launched in late 2010, and was removed temporarily last year while Facebook made technical improvements and considered privacy matters. The feature uses algorithms to group photo uploads by those with similar faces, then it suggests friends those faces may belong to by matching them with previously tagged photos of friends. Users can adjust or approve those tags. The feature is on for users by default.

Facebook launches Ask Our CPO feature -  Facebook this week launched an Ask Our CPO feature, which allows users to submit questions, concerns and feedback about privacy issues to the company’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, who will respond to some questions each month. The feature works as an app on the Facebook Privacy page and is part of Facebook’s attempts to give users more opportunities to raise important matters and get responses from the company, especially after the social network eliminated the option for user votes on policy changes late last year.
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More than 50 million pages and 10 million apps are now part of the Facebook platform, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.

Facebook provided these updated stats after last reporting 42 million pages and 9 million apps in April. Pages are only counted if they have more than 10 Likes. Apps include those on Facebook.com, as well as websites and mobile applications that use Facebook login or other integrations with the social network.

Along with stats about pages and apps, Facebook provided other updated figures for photo uploads and friend connections in its filing today. On average more than 350 million photos per day were uploaded to Facebook in the fourth quarter of 2012. More than 240 billion photos have been shared on the social network. There were also more than 150 billion friend connections among its more than 1 billion users as of Dec. 31, 2012.

On Wednesday, the company reported that it reached 1.056 billion monthly active users during the fourth quarter of 2012. It also reported that its mobile DAUs have exceeded web DAUs for the first time.