Facebook is testing a new way to display photos that puts captions and comments to the right of the image rather than below.

The new format takes advantage of horizontal space so that photos can be presented larger and the information and conversation are still visible, instead of forcing users to scroll down to see comments as they do currently. The team at Facebook also appears to be talking to professional photographers for feedback, according to public status updates and comments from employees.

We’ve seen screenshots of two versions of the new display. [Update: 2/7/12 2:35 p.m. - We've now seen four different versions of the photo viewer.] All are lightbox style, meaning the image is shown in an overlay rather than a new page, which Facebook first implemented in September 2010. One version uses buttons similar to the design used on Timeline and the activity log. It puts the “Tag Photo” and “Edit” options above the image.

Another version makes some calls to action more prominent by putting them on top of the image when users hover over the photo. A user with the new photo viewer says the display adjusts to the size of the browser, but we have not been able to test the responsiveness ourselves.

On one screenshot we’ve seen, two ads were very prominent. The other screenshots we received were of photos that had several more comments, pushing advertisements down or away completely. Currently most ads are not visible in the photo lightbox unless a user scrolls down.

Both designs offer a cleaner interface than Facebook’s existing photos product, which includes more than a dozen buttons, some with repeating functions (see image below). The new format seems to put all of these options under a single drop-down menu. Some users might not realize all the actions they can take, but this way the focus is mostly on the photo and the conversation around it.

[Update 2/2/12 10:08 a.m. - We've now seen a third version of a possible new photo viewer, thanks to a tip from Anthony Parrott. This design darkens the background of the page rather than making it transparent.]

[Update: 2/7/12 2:35 p.m. - We have found yet another iteration of the photo viewer. See below.]

According to Facebook, more than 250 million photos are uploaded to the social network each day.

Thanks to Zoltán Faludi, Ivan Brezak Brkan and Rehman Abdur for the tip and screenshots.

Facebook Updates HipHop Virtual Machine - In a blog post, Facebook announced today the launch of its HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM). The execution engine will help the company run code faster. [Image via Facebook]

Facebook Fixes Photo Bug – Facebook acknowledged a problem that occurred, allowing users to see others’ private photos, and then fixed the glitch, according to ZDNet.

Facebook Offers Special Ad Tracking to Some – TechCrunch reported that Facebook has been providing top advertisers with special downstream conversion tracking by installing a pixel on an advertiser’s conversion page.

Facebook Sues Timelines.com – Facebook has counter-sued Timelines.com after that company sued the social network over its use of the word “timeline.” Facebook filed a suit to strip Timelines.com of its trademarks, claiming the are too generic.

Other Announcements:

GroSocial Releases Customizer for Pages – GroSocial released a white-label program allowing users to offer customers a branded version of GroSocial’s Customizer for Pages this week.

Intuit Releases SimpleStore for Facebook – Intuit released its social commerce app SimpleStore for Facebook this week, allowing business owners to simply sell goods on their Facebook Pages.

Facebook has made two UI changes to the photo uploading process and the Events feature in the past couple of days.

The new photo uploading process, announced yesterday, allows users to see photo uploads in real-time. While they wait for the full upload to finish, users can start adding details — such as tagging people in the photos or setting the location for the album. Once the upload is complete, users can review the album before posting. Here’s the example screenshot provided by Facebook:

The new UI also includes a prompt to tag the location where the photos were taken. Overall, it’s another step by Facebook to increase the amount of socially relevant metadata users are associating with photos.

The Events feature update involves several key changes — including a Bing-generated map that allows viewers to get directions to the venue, grouping all response actions in one place on the page, and removing the emphasis from the “Not Attending” response option (which some event owners didn’t want to show).

Facebook Events engineer Bob Baldwin shared the following layout screenshot on his Facebook page, detailing all of the UI elements that now make up the Events page:

These changes bring the Events page layout more in line with recent changes to other parts of the site, and also mark yet another Bing integration inside Facebook.

Buuteeq is a software platform that allows hotels to create engaging content for users across their web, mobile and Facebook sites. We spoke to co-founder and CEO Forest Key about how Buuteeq is working to convert Facebook visitors or fans into customers using research-fueled design.

First it’s important to note that one huge incentive for hotels to have guests book directly — say through Buuteeq — is that they do not have to hand over a slice of their revenue as a commission to a travel agency or booking portal such as Orbitz. When hotels purchase software and service from Buuteeq they are also encouraged to continue to invest in traditional Facebook marketing to boost their Likes so as to better leverage the company’s platform.

The software is set up so that each hotel must only upload content once and it then pushed across web, mobile and Facebook sites by Buuteeq, Key told us. The specific components of Buuteeq’s design are meant to convert visitors into customers; the vast majority of visitors spend 90% of their time perusing photos, room information and interactive maps — all three are central to Buuteeq’s design.

“Guests who look at 15 or more pictures are more likely to make a reservation,” Key told us, noting that Buuteeq’s design is photo-heavy.

Key told us that because Buuteeq is set up on Facebook to take advantage of social recommendation, the customer-facing side of Buuteeq’s Facebook app only show hotels in search results if a user’s friends have Liked that hotel’s Page. In other words, if hotels are not engaging in Page marketing to get their numbers up, the Buuteeq will not yield results for users who are not already connected through their networks. When it comes to booking, even if you find a hotel on Facebook, the actual reservation is made on the hotel’s website.

As far as viral mechanics, Key noted that the future of Buuteeq is set to focus increasingly on its Facebook component. In the meantime, he told us that his clients’ conversion rates are higher and there are Like buttons sown throughout the design, both on Facebook and on the web.

Campaigns on our list this week incorporated varied methods for either Page growth or other types of promotions. Universal Pictures is giving away 1 million Facebook Credits and Fair Trade is promoting an app to help users find fair trade products. Toyota created its own game to promote its products while CVS and Kodak are partnering to promote photo prints.

You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Universal Pictures’ “Tower Heist” 1 Million Credits Giveaway

Goal: Page Growth, Engagement, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: A Credits giveaway when users engage with a Facebook application Heist It Back that promotes the upcoming film, “Tower Heist.”

Method: “Tower Heist” is a film set for release November 4 that mirrors the country’s current financial troubles, involving a crew of “normal” folks who are swindled by a rich businessman and then seek to steal their fortunes back from him.

We spoke to IFeelGoods’ co-founder and Vice President of Marketing Scott Silverman about the application and how it is related to the film. As part of the promotion for the movie, and in what Silverman told us was in keeping with the film’s theme, users may “win back” Facebook Credits when they participate in the application’s different tasks, such as sharing their story about the time they “stuck it to the man,” inviting friends who accept the invitation or sharing on Facebook.

“The idea was almost to give back to people who are interested in the movie by giving them Facebook Credits, or get them to essentially steal [the money] from the main character [of the movie],” Silverman told us about the app. Because free Credits are part of the engagement and the app offers users different actions to earn them, Silverman characterized the amount of engagement he’s seen with the app as “tremendous.”

By the time the film is released, or at least by the time the campaign is over, Silverman expects that all 1 million Credits will be claimed. As of Monday morning 933,200 Credits remain, which is to say that about 66,800 have been claimed by the Page’s 53,800 users.

Silverman said that the application was meant to tie into the movie and enhance elements of the film, which is why people telling their stories and sharing those stories was the main action involved.

Impact: The Page is currently at 53,800 Likes and PageData notes that a spike in the number of Likes occurred last week, a few days after the Heist It Back app launched. Although the film is still several weeks away, that less than 10% of the Credits have been claimed is surprising; the highest number of Credits earned by users at this point is under 300. There are only a few ways users can earn Credits and these don’t all necessarily publish to the stream, so it will be interesting to see whether all of the Credits are claimed. All in all, this was an interesting way to tie-in users to the central theme of the movie while also attaching high value to the application associated with it.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

In the first step to giving Pages the many enhancements already recently made to user profiles, photos posted by Pages will now appear larger on their walls. They can appear up to four times larger than before. Facebook began showing user photos at this larger size late last month, which made Page photos look small in comparison. This may have reduced news feed engagement with Page photos, to the dismay of brands.

Facebook said the enlarged photos “make Facebook Pages more consistent with recent changes made to the site”. This could signal that Timeline, the flashy redesign that is currently only available for user profiles, may eventually be brought to Pages as well in the name of consistency. Page admins have been eager for news about Timeline for Pages because the redesign would give them more flexibility with branding and content curation — which would in turn drive more engagement.

Now if Pages publish a single photo, it will be shown at the increased size. If they post an album, Facebook will determine the most popular photo in the album according to Likes, comments, and clicks, and show that photo at the increased size. Up to two additional photos from the album may appear beside in the news feed story about the album upload. It appears that the change has been applied retroactively to increase the size of photos published by Pages in the past.

The larger size will make Page photos more noticeable, and therefore may draw more clicks, Likes, and comments. By giving Page photos the same amount of feed real estate as user photos, they’ll be able to better compete with social content for attention Photo posts are a core way that Pages attract visits and secure reshares that help them gain fans, and this change should make them even more effective.

Facebook launched a major redesign of the user profile in December of last year, adding a photostrip above the wall and swapping in a left sidebar navigation menu for tabs. Three months later these changes were brought to Pages in an effort to provide a consistent browsing experience where core functional design elements are in the same place across different types of Facebook products.

In this most recent instance of a major design overhaul, the change to Pages comes just a couple weeks after the introduction of the larger feed photos published by users. This bodes well for Page admins hoping the profile Timeline will be added to Pages soon. Once Timeline is fully rolled out and users are given time to adjust, Facebook may extend it to Pages in adherence to its consistent design philosophy.

Facebook Photos Provide 50% More Impressions – Roost released a report this week that looked at more than 10,000 Twitter and Facebook posts, finding that photos generate 50% more impressions than other posts and quotes 22% more interactions. Questions also generate more comments,

Facebook Apps Create Jobs – Research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business found that Facebook’s “app economy” created about 182,700 jobs and that this economy was worth $12.19 billion.

Facebook Hides Pokes – AllFacebook reported this week that Facebook minimized the Poke button into a right-hand menu ahead of a larger change.

App Acts as Banking Center on Facebook – Goal Card is a Facebook app that acts as a bank for holders of prepaid cards, allowing them to manage their money using animated photos, video games and virality.

Honestly Now Raises Funding – Honestly Now has raised a round of seed funding from Golden Seeds and Canrock Ventures. The Q&A social game is aimed at helping women 30-50 make be better decisions.

ShareSafe Proects Against Spam – ShareSafe is a new app from F-Secure that protects users against spam and malicious links in their feed. The app allows you to copy links from Facebook into the app, which then checks them for suspicious content. If they’re clean, users may post them to Facebook straight from the app.

Are You Interested? Mobile App Released – SNAP Interactive released the mobile version of its popular dating app, Are You Interested?, this week, available on several mobile platforms including Android, iOS, and Blackberry OS 6.0+.

Yarsellr Launches Fashion Marketplace – Yardsellr Inc. a social commerce marketplace announced the launch of a new fashion social marketplace, style.ly this week.

Liquidus Showcases Car Dealers on Facebook – Liquidus launched Socialink this week, enabling car dealers to showcase video of every vehicle in their inventory to potential buyers on Facebook.

Facebook Implements New Alcohol Ad Rules – Alcoholic beverage marketers on Facebook will now have to restrict access to their Pages to people of drinking age. However, the company dealt with the issue years ago by providing demographics restrictions, allowing Page owners to customize the age minimum per country to conform with local laws.

Over the past week and a half, Facebook has posted to the Developers Blog announcing several new tools, protocols and capabilities for developers. These include

• Better ways to submit bugs and track the API heath of the Platform,
• Changes to the DealSpot and Games Dashboard Featured Status incentives for developers who have integrated Facebook Credits
• A migration system where breaking changes are only pushed on the first day of the month
• Support for OAuth 2.0 with XMPP
• The deprecation of Auth 1.0 and the FB.Data call
• The ability to manage Events and upload high-resolution photos via the Graph API
• A more direct way for games to handle link clicks on the canvas page
• The option to detect and control flash object visibility in apps

New Platform Tools

High Level Changes

On October 14th, Facebook will open to all Facebook Credits developers several of the special incentive features that were initially used to encourage early adoption of Credits as a currency and payment method.

Developers will gain the ability to target specific demographics with DealSpot, a TrialPay-developed system that shows in-game icons leading to offers users can complete to earn Facebook Credits. DealSpot presents offers to users that might not have visited the offer wall, so developers looking to augment sales of virtual goods with another revenue stream should strongly consider activating the feature.

All developers will also gain access to broad category targeting, which lets them target Facebook Ads to users based on their interest in anything related to a selected topic. Facebook actually began testing this feature in April as an alternative to targeting specific keywords. The ability to target all social gamers rather than just fans or the Pages of certain games, Broad Category Interest targeting could help developers attain more new customers with less effort spent on ad targeting.

Facebook’s free marketing system known as Games Dashboard Featured Status and Social Placements will also become available to developers of games integrated with Credits. Games eligible for the promotions are “evaluated on a case by case basis, such as for game quality, genre and new functionality”. The system will be especially helpful to developers that are building great games but that don’t have big marketing budgets.

Recently, Facebook announced that developers would have a minimum of 90 days between the announcement of a breaking change and its implementation. To make adapting to these changes more predictable, Facebook now says it will only push breaking changes on the first day of any given month. This will reduce stress for developers, since they won’t have to worry that they may have missed an announcement about a breaking change that could suddenly take their app down.

For example, Facebook announced on September 16th that the FB.Data calls for waiting until specific queries were completed to perform an action will be deprecated. As such, the FB.Data calls will be deprecated on the first day of the month following the minimum 90 day period, January 1st, 2012.

Developers of XMPP Facebook Chat clients can now begin migrating to OAuth 2.0. They can use access tokens over SSL rather than sig and session_key parameters. As such, Facebook will deprecate Auth.promotesession on October 1st. The move to OAuth 2.0 will protect Chat clients from some types of data leaks.

A reminder, mandatory migration to OAuth 2.0 is coming on October 1st. Developers will need to have switched to the new JavaScript and PHP SDKs by then.

Specific Changes

Developers can now manage invite lists and check RSVP status for Events using the Graph API in addition to creating and deleting Events. This could help developers create powerful interfaces for professional event managers, or create an Events dashboard for users.

Facebook improved its Photos product last month, increasing the maximum photo size from 760 to 920 pixels. Photos uploaded through the Graph API can now have a maximum size of 920 pixels as well. However, photos returned through the API will still have a maximum size of 720 pixels, so there are no actual changes to what’s received from the API or FQL. The change will keep users from abandoning photo upload and editing apps when they want to upload high resolution photos.

By using FB.Canvas.SetUrlHandler, developers can now select to have clicks of links related to their apps from ticker stories, bookmarks, bookmark drop-down Requests and Request Notification stories be handled in-line in the apps. Previously, these clicks would needlessly redirect a user when they were already viewing the app the link led to.

For example, if an app employs FB.Canvas.SetUrlHandler, a user who clicks on a ‘your move’ Request or an achievement story while already viewing the app that published the Request or story wouldn’t be sent to the corresponding URL, but would be brought to the corresponding screen within the app. This should decrease load times and bounces from users clicking links on the Canvas page.

Flash applications using wmode=”window” rather than the recommended wmode=”opaque” can now pass a callback function to hideFlashCallback to FB.init to customize the visibility of flash elements when popups are shown. Previously, Flash objects could become hidden when popups were shown.

Facebook IPO in Late 2012? – The Financial Times reported this week that Facebook’s IPO is set for the end of next year, with a valuation of what would be at least $66 billion. But The New York Times said Facebook was on track to go public in the first half of next year. Facebook itself hasn’t made any official statements about

FTC Proposes New Privacy Regs – The Federal Trade Commission proposed rules this week that may affect how children under 13 use the Internet. Mobile web apps are now included in the rules, for example, and so may require parental consent for use.

Update on Case Sensitivity of Passwords – ZDnet wrote a piece this week in which Emil Protalinski found that Facebook passwords are not entirely case sensitive. Facebook responded noting that the site accepts three forms of your password: the original, the original with the first letter capitalized (to accommodate mobile devices) and the original password with cases reversed (to accommodate a caps lock being on).

Facebook’s FBAR – Facebook’s Engineering Team wrote a note this week detailing FBAR, or Facebook Automatic Remediation. These are scripts that detect errors or breakage in servers, automatically removing them from the system, determining the problem, alerting a technician to replace the drive, testing it and re-adding to Facebook’s infrastructure. It now manages more than 50% of Facebook’s infrastructure and is doing the work of about 200 system admins. [Image Via Facebook]

Skype, Facebook Integration 5.4 – Skype released its Mac updates recently that includes a Facebook integration that allows you to IM and connect with friends without leaving Facebook, also allowing you to read/update the feed, comment Like and more.

Custom URLs Available to Anyone – Facebook no longer requires users or Pages to need 25 friends to acquire a custom URL.

Fake Facebook Name Not a Felony – Forbes reported this week that, despite an initial concern that a fake Facebook name could be considered a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an amendment added eliminated this possibility.

App Allows Cross-Platform Posting – If This Then that allows users to cross-post to dozens of programs for content management purposes, such as instant messaging to your blog.

More Info on Facebook’s Spartan – TechCrunch reported more information about BoltJS, a UI framework designed by Facebook and written in JavaScript that runs in the browser. Apparently it’s part of Facebook’s Project Spartan, which may not be fully revealed until f8.

Facebook Settles With Lamebook – Lamebook, a humor site publishing funny Facebook posts, and Facebook settled this week. The judge refused to move the suit to California, and thus, some speculate that Facebook settled to avoid jury sympathy for the Austin-based company.

Facebook Extends Comment Period – Facebook extended the comment period for its new privacy policy to 5 p.m. Pacific on September 7. Comments may be left at Facebook’s Site Governance Page.

Facebook Testing Comment Ordering? – AllFacebook reported that Facebook seems to be testing a way for Page admins to order comments based on social ranking, chronology or reverse chronology. [Image via AllFacebook]

Facebook Pays $40,000 in Bounty Program – Facebook’s Bug Bounty program has, thus far, paid out $40,000 to people around the world who have reported issues to the company. Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan wrote a blog about the program this week with more information.

Interesting Insights on Facebook Ads – SocialCode reported some interesting trends about Facebook ads, including: women are 11% more likely to click, older women are more likely to click through and men are slightly more likely to Like an ad.

HTML5 Mobile App Allows for Connect – Nitobi, creators of PhoneGap, launched a new plugin, PhoneGap Facebook Connect. Essentially it allows users to login to HTML and JavaScript apps with their Facebook login.

Social Networks and Patents – Business Week published an interesting story examining the lack of a “patent war” when it comes to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. One reason the magazine speculated, is that Facebook (for example) only holds 12 patents, which is to say, there aren’t as many patents to fight over.

Facebook Developer Blog: Fluid Canvas – Facebook’s Developer blog posted this week about how to build an app on Facebook with Fluid Canvas, to expand the size of apps, depending on a user’s screen resolution.

Other Announcements:

Appbistro Announces PPI Ads for Page Apps – Appbistro announced that the company now installs apps for Page admins, thus the company has seen a 190% increase in installs, recently hitting 100,000 registered Page admins.

Vitrue Releases SaaS 3.0 – Vitrue released version 3.0 of its social media platform, which includes new localization features, analytics and metrics.

Hootsuite Deepens Facebook Integration – AllFacebook reports that HootSuite has deepened its Facebook integration, specifically adding events, photos, groups, and geo-tool updates.

15% of Posts are Likejacked – Norton’s analysis of 3.5 million video posts in August found that 15% were scams, or like jacking. Norton Safe Web for Facebook is an app that may guard against this type of attack.