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.

Developers can now request permission to access lists of users’ subscribers and who they subscribe to via the Graph API. Facebook announced this and a few other changes in a blog post Wednesday.

With read permissions for subscriptions, apps can create more personalized experiences for users. They can also track subscriptions over time. Since Facebook does not offer analytics for users who enable subscribers, people could turn to apps to track their growth. Klout might be another third-party that would be interested in incorporating subscriber data because the company could use this information as another factor to calculate a person’s influence.

Facebook also made improvements to the search function on its developer site. Search results now include bugs and technical Q&A from Stack Overflow. Developers can also filter results by type.

The “manage_notifications” permission is now required to read or manage users’ notifications. The change was announced in July 2011 and migration is complete, according to the blog post.

The social network is in the process of deprecating the old page Insights. It confirmed that the old Insights will be completely removed on Feb. 15.

For information about breaking changes going into affect on Feb. 1, visit the Facebook Developer Blog.

California Facebook Ad Lawsuit Proceeds -  A U.S. District Judge in California has rejected Facebook’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from people claiming the site’s social advertisements count as unauthorized use of their names and likenesses.

Facebook the Top Searched Term in U.S. -  Experian reported this week that Facebook topped its list of the most search terms in the United States for the third year in a row, making up 3.1% of all searches. [Image Via Experian]

Facebook Completes Move to Menlo Park - The company moved the last of 2,000 employees from its Palo Alto office into a ten-building, 1-million square foot campus in Menlo Park on Monday. Facebook hopes to one day accommodate up to 9,400 employees there.

North Social’s Facebook Page Don’ts -  North Social put together a video montage of the worst things brands can do to gain fans on their Facebook pages.

Modea’s Wisdom Tree App, Find Gifts For Friends - An app from digital agency Modea allows users to select a friend, answer a few questions about them, and then suggests the perfect (gag) gift for this friend.

Facebook has updated the functionality of typeahead search to direct users straight to applications instead of navigating users to the app’s About Page.

This change makes it easier for existing users to find apps they’ve already installed (and perhaps cannot find on the newly alphabetized Bookmark list), but it could also result in more app installs as new users encounter less friction when seeking out new apps by name.

In its weekly developer blog post, Facebook also announced a series of breaking changes that go into effect today, December 1:

• OAuth spec migration: In order to be compliant with the OAuth spec we have made changes to our auth APIs. As part of this update, we will be deprecating ‘code_and_token’ and need developers to use ‘code%20token’. Everything is identical, just replace ‘_and_’ with encoded ‘%20′.
• Deprecating Dashboard APIs: These APIs are no longer supported and will not be available past this date. This does not include the Dashboard count APIs which will deprecate on the FBML and Request 1.0 schedule (no support past Jan 1st 2012, and removed June 1st 2012).
• Apps on Facebook: FB.Canvas.getPageInfo must be called with callback: The FB.Canvas.getPageInfo method will have to be called with a callback function. This was previously not required. See this blog post for more information.
• Removing Bookmark URL: As mentioned here, this optional field was originally created to help developers track user referrals from app bookmarks. We now pass a ref parameter to let you know that the user is coming from a bookmark (i.e., ref=bookmarks). As a result, we removed Bookmark URL. While many developers left this field blank (defaulting to the Canvas URL), it recently came to our attention that some developers were using this field to redirect to Pages with the Page Tab app installed. We will restore the Bookmark URL to the Advanced tab under Canvas Settings for 90 days. This gives you time to edit the field before it will be removed from the Developer App. To give you the most flexibility, we recommend that you delete the Bookmark URL field and instead detect the ref=bookmarks parameter when the user visits your app and take the appropriate action (either redirect to your Page Tab app on a Page or show the user something different).

Search makes up 34% of all external referral traffic to Facebook Pages, with Google 27.5% coming from Google, according to a six month study of 1,000 Pages by analytics provider PageLever. This means Facebook Page admins should be concerned with search engine optimization when naming Pages, filling in fields on the Info tab, posting content, and placing links to their Pages on websites.

The study also shows a high variance in how much traffic is sourced from search, indicating some Pages do much better at SEO than others and that there is a high potential for gain if Pages execute a smart SEO strategy.

Through its APIs, Facebook shares data about internal and external referral traffic of Pages with their admins. PageLever used data on 1,000 Pages with more than 10,000 fans between January 1st and June 30th, 2011 to conduct the study.

Internal sources include links in the news feed, profiles, as well as Facebook’s internal search engine which has shown to account for the bulk of internal traffic sent to Pages. Overall, external referral traffic only accounts for an average of 27.8% of total traffic to Pages, and those with over a million fans see closer to 8% of their traffic come from outside Facebook.com. In addition to search, external referral traffic is sourced from official websites for businesses, blogs, and other social networks such as Twitter.

Still, the amount of external traffic coming from search is enough to make it worthwhile for Page admins to consider SEO. Optimizing for Google PageRank should be their priority as the other top search engines contribute much less traffic, with Yahoo delivering 4.1% and Bing delivering 2.3 of total external referral traffic.

While trying to court Google PageRank, admins should consider whether they have the best possible name and URL for their Page. They should look to publish links to their website frequently, and have their website reciprocate by posting links to the Page wherever appropriate.

Pages should employ these basic SEO strategies to make sure anyone trying to them from outside of Facebook.com can do so without having to wade through other search results. By combining SEO efforts with compelling default landing tabs that encourage visitors to Like them, Pages can convert this search traffic into additional fans.

A closer look at key Facebook Page search engine optimization strategies can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook. 

Facebook users can currently see the usually hidden list of which friends they interact with most by running a line of JavaScript through a bookmarklet created by developer Jeremy Keeshin. When the bookmarklet is clicked while one browses Facebook, an overlay called “Facebook Friend Rankings” appears in which the lower the number next to a friend’s name, the more a user communicates with, views the profile of, and searches for that friend or other Facebook user.

The information exposed by the JavaScript might alarm some users, as they might not expect that Facebook had been quantifying their behavior so exactly to power products such as the relevancy-filtered Top News feed, search results, and who appears at the top of their Chat buddy list. It could raise privacy concerns as friend rankings indicate who users “Facebook stalk” the most and could be embarrassing if leaked to the public by a hacker or bug.

Facebook calculates the friend ranking scores by analyzing all of a user’s on-site behavior and connections. Other signals in addition to those listed above that likely contribute to these scores include who a user is tagged in photos with, how many mutual friends they, if they Like the same Pages or are members of the same Group, if they check in together, and if they have matching biographical characteristics such as current city, hometown, employers, or education history. The score evolves and becomes more accurate over time.

Facebook uses the friend ranking score to increase the relevancy of its products by making sure users see news feed stories about the people they’re most interested in, can quickly find them in search and Chat, and receive push notifications about them on their mobile devices. Facebook engineer Keith Adams confirms that a user’s browsing behavior only impacts what they themselves see, and that viewing tons of photos of a certain friend won’t make a user appear in that friend’s news feed any more frequently. Users have long been interested in finding out who browses their profile though this information is not available, leading the rise of fake “profile spy” applications that are actually scams.

These scores have been built from years of data and thousands of actions, and the ability to customize the site for relevance is one of Facebook’s greatest strengths. The lack of this data would hamper the functionality of competing social networks such as Google+, even if they had your friend list.

At the top of the friend rankings list users will see their closest friends, people they’ve interacted with a lot recently, and those they frequently visit the profiles of. At the bottom they may see non-friends who they’re connected to through mutual friends or who they used to be friends with.

By using the right-click option “Inspect Element” in Google Chrome or Firebug in Firefox, users can view the file “first_degree.php” which includes the friend ranking data. Facebook pre-loads this file to speed up typeahead search results. In it, users will notice “tokens” associated with some friends. These are alternate names that can be used to initiate a friend tag in a status update or photo or find these friends in Facebook search, and include long and short forms of common names, familial relation types, and old names of users who’ve since changed their Facebook name. For example, a friend named Richard would have the tokens “rick” and “dick”, while a friend that a user has confirmed as their brother would have the token “brother”.

Users who want to view their friend rankings should do so now as Facebook may modify its code to prevent users from seeing this data. This is because knowledge that such a list even exists could scare users into avoiding any embarrassing browsing behavior. It’s these extended viewing sessions of an ex-lover’s photos or the wall of an admired peer that help drive the social network’s massive average time-on-site, so Facebook probably doesn’t want users to think these friend rankings could ever see the light of day.

Keyword-based app search engine startup Quixey added the ability to find Facebook apps this week. Users can now type in what they’re trying to do, such as “promote my band” and receive recommendations of apps across mobile operating systems, browsers, social networks, and the web. Quixey does a satisfactory job, returning generally relevant results, but missing some of the most popular Facebook apps when users search for their function.

Although Facebook has social connections driving app discovery, competition is fierce and communication channels aren’t as strong as they used to be. Developers typically spend heavily on ads to market themselves. With time to improve, Quixey could help solve this problem by helping users find reputable apps, helping apps gain users, and making Facebook a more attractive development platform.

Currently, if someone wants to search for a Facebook app, they only have two options:

• a strict name search through Facebook’s internal search engine that doesn’t help if you don’t know exactly what app you’re looking for
• a web search engine search that mixes websites into the app results

Facebook used to have a category-sorted App Directory, but it removed all links to it a long time ago and disabled it completely last month. AppBistro provides a Page tab application directory, but it doesn’t list user apps. A similar discovery problem exists on mobile which is being tackled by Chomp, Appsfire, and Appolicious, but there wasn’t a solid solution for finding Facebook apps until now.

Quixey includes a very wide breadth of platforms in its app search results, including iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, FireFox add-ons, Mac, PC, Web, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. When users conduct a search, they’ll see results from across platforms by default, but they can refine them to specific ones. Uses can also refine to only view apps mentioned in certain publications such as TechCrunch, or that integrate with certain services such as Flickr.

Results pages includes an in-line description, price, preview of a feature breakdown, star rating, and a list of platforms the app is available on. Clicking through a result reveals a full description and feature list, articles and tweets linking to the app, and videos. These signals make it easy to get a sense of the public opinion on an app before one tries it.

Quixey only launched a few months ago, so some kinks are too be expected. Still, result ranking is still somewhat inaccurate, with hardly used apps appearing above some of the most popular Facebook apps for common needs. In some cases, such as when searching for “promote my band” or “Facebook music”, you’ll get the second-most popular app for that use case ranked first, but the most popular app won’t be anywhere in the results despite being indexed by Quixey.

For instance, RootMusic’s BandPage doesn’t appear when searching “promote my band” or “Facebook music”, but less popular competitor ReverbNation’s Band Profile does. Same goes for a “professional networking” search returning Monster.com’s new BeKnown app, but not vertical leader BranchOut.

Results could be made even more compelling with the addition of Facepiles that show if friends have used the app. Quixey would need developers to authorize the plugins themselves, but these social recommendations could help users sort through lots of unknown apps and trust what they choose to install.

Users and developers should both be excited about this new app discovery channel. It will make finding utility apps for things with generic names such as sharing photos or keeping calendars much easier, and give developers added incentive to maintain a high user experience that drives positive reviews. If it works out its result ranking algorithm and becomes more popular, Quixey could drive overall app usage, increasing time on site for Facebook and making developers money.

The primary means of app discovery on Facebook is sharing between friends, but the company is today announcing changes to the other options — search, and its Application Directory.

“Many developers have been confused about what it means to submit to the App Directory and frustrated by the length of time it took to get approved,” Facebook product manager Carl Sjogreen writes on the company blog. “As we have looked into this issue, we found that the App Directory drove less than 0.5% of all app installs while a significant number of app installs came as a result of Facebook search.”

Instead, developers will now be able to submit their apps directly to be indexed in search results, and Facebook is in the meantime “removing the App Directory (in its current form).”

Before, developers had to register through the App Directory in order to be visible in results. Meanwhile, Facebook gradually de-emphasized the directory over the years, and for more than a year has not linked to it from anywhere on the site that we know of. (The URL was still live as of publication, but is now dead.)

Developers who have more than 10 monthly actives can go to the Developer App and click on the “Submit to Search” link on the left sidebar in edit mode. Facebook will then place the app in the search index. Sjogreen says that changes to app settings will automatically be updated in the index, and that it can take up to 72 hours for search results to begin showing newly-added apps.

He also notes that “as always, there is no approval process for launching an app on Platform.” Apple’s App Store, arguably the biggest rival platform today, both requires an application process and mainly drives growth through its official leaderboards, and now Facebook has neither. While Sjogreen might have hinted that there will be some new version of the App Directory one day, the main message seems to be that it’s doubling down on its strengths: being open and social.

Cost-per-action social media and search advertising service Taykey has just closed a $9 million second round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.

The company tracks social media mention and search trends in real-time to take advantage of urgent advertising opportunities and interest-based targeting parameters to power Facebook, Twitter, and search campaigns. Here’s a closer look at what it provides to advertisers on and off Facebook.

How Taykey Works

Let’s take a look at an example of an advertising campaign powered by Taykey. A singing contest television show such as X-Factor could hire Taykey for a month-long campaign on what amounts to cost per Facebook Like model, where the client pays a price per Like and sets a goal of the total Likes they want. Taykey would then monitor social networks, news, blogs, and searches for trends in the behavior and interests of the show’s target age and location demographic. It could determine what other TV shows or musical artists the audience Likes, and then run a series Facebook ad campaigns for the X-Factor Page targeted at people with those Likes.

Taykey co-founder and CEO Amit Avner tells us that “if X-Factor judge Paula Abdul falls off the stage, we’ll know in five seconds and go buy ‘Paula Abdul’ Google search keyword ads” to preempt the oncoming rush of searches for that keyword. Taykey might also purchase Twitter trending topics, or ads on Bing, Myspace, Digg in an effort to drive its own cost per Facebook fan as low as possible to make the maximum margin on the deal with X-Factor. Otherwise, X-Factor might just target 18-35 year old women, whereas Taykey would target those with interests related to the show, such as those who Like competing show American Idol.

Taykey says its patent-pending algorithm mines data from across the web, deduces keywords and sentiment, and maps the data to demographic and psychographic profiles. It then specifically targets those with the right profile, relieving brands from having to constantly discover new targets. Without using cookies or tracking of individuals, it shifts spend from one trend to the next attain the optimal CPA.

Avner explains to us that brands advertising on Facebook often target an age, gender, and location demographic that is too wide and unfocused, leading to lower conversion and rapid burnout. Taykey pinpoints the interests of these audiences to run a series of campaigns that keep conversion rates higher over time than more general campaigns. For instance, instead of targeting 18-24 year old males in New York City that Like ‘hip hop’, Taykey would determine specific artists such as “Jay-Z”, or television shows such as ’106th & Park’ to target the fans of.

Taykey and Real-Time Facebook Advertising

The 19-employee Tel Aviv-based company was founded by three former members of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s intelligence arm, and has now secured a total of $12 million in funding. Several Fortune 100 companies have already run campaigns targeted by Taykey’s algorithm, including Pepsi, for which it attained 46,000 Likes in two days at half the projected spend.

It will use use the new round of funding, joined by Softbank Capital and Crescent Point, to hire engineers in Tel Aviv, Israel and to build out a New York sales office.

The “Related Adverts” real-time advertising system Facebook is testing that displays ads related to the content of a user’s most recent status update or wall post could be very useful to Taykey’s business. “We’d love to get in on it as soon as possible” says Avner of the beta product that doesn’t allow advertisers to choose if or which traditional interest-targeted Facebook ads are displayed in real-time.

As more brands realize the concrete value of Facebook fans, CPA ad services such as Taykey will become crucial to attaining large volumes of fans at the lowest possible price. While more well established Ads API tools and services will likely continue to manage much of the Facebook spend of the world’s biggest brands, real-time focused advertising services can complement a marketing mix by exploiting fleeting low-cost pockets of conversions.

Earlier this week, Microsoft’s search engine Bing significantly deepened its Instant Personalization integration with Facebook. It launched several new social features for its web search, shopping, travel, and toolbar products; and it began triggering the display of social content much more frequently.

By improving result quality with both the data of a user’s friends and the Facebook user base at large, Bing is positioning itself as the search engine of choice for when people need social reassurance to make a decision.

We sat down with the Director of Bing, Stefan Weitz to ask him a few questions about the motives behind the update. We’ll follow that with an in-depth look at the product changes.

Q&A on Social as the Future of Ecommerce Search

Inside Facebook: Why is Bing pushing to get social integrations so deep into decision-based search?

Stefan Weitz, Director of Bing: Decision search is moving from exploration to active conversation because 80% of people delay making a purchase online until they can talk to a friend.

Core search stuff has been taken care of by intelligent organization. But how do people sort through all the links and make a decision? You do all the research, but at the last minute you walk away from the purchase process because you’re not convinced until you get a social recommendation.

When you want to tap into that info you have to go to a bunch of different places. Whether it’s just Facebook that solves that problem, or if it’s Quora and other sites, behavior is already moving in that direction (of seeking advice online rather than offline). But no one does a good job of pulling it all together into search.

IF: What has changed that’s made this possible but also necessary?

SW: Stuff that was previosuly in your brain is now in a format that machines can read. Friend connections are a new way of thinking about ranking search.

Meanwhile, humans are creating 5 billion gigabytes of data every two days, and machines are losing their ability to categorize it all. How can PageRank handle a Yfrog image? It probably doesn’t have a title, or caption, or anything else that could help index it. But if a friend Likes it, that’s important.

IF: Why is the social content appearing more frequently now?

SW: Honestly, it was light before. You didn’t see much of it.  Now it’s gone up a ton, you’ll see it a lot more. It triggers more because we have higher coverage [across products]. Its more than just Likes now. We think of people as having characteristics and attributes, not just actions. Now we’re considering what other meta data can we use that people will give us access to so we can continue to personalize search.

Improvements to Bing’s Existing Facebook Integration

Bing began its Facebook integration by indexing Page updates and publicly visible links posted by users in June 2010. In October of that year, it partnered with Facebook to offer Instant Personalization of Bing search results so users could could see Likes by friends of search result objects, and their network connections to Facebook users found through a name search.

However, the search result Likes were displayed very infrequently, so some hardly noticed the change. Microsoft also released the Bing Bar toolbar, which allowed users to view the Facebook news feed and their notification from any tab, but it didn’t offer an easy way to share web pages and links copied into its Facebook publisher weren’t formatted as they are on Facebook.com.

Bing has now fixed these issues and greatly expanded the functionality of its Facebook integration. As Weitz said, social content now appears in search results much more frequently. Meanwhile, the Bing Bar now has a “Universal Like Button” — a one click way to share the currently viewed webpage to the news feed with the same rich story formatting as if one had pasted the link into the Facebook.com publisher.

Search With More Social Content

Along with more frequently showing you Likes by friends of things represented in top search results, Bing now actually personalizes the rank of results based on these Likes. Weitz tells us that “based on the actions of friends, results that would be on page two or three are pulled onto page one.” Even if no friends have Liked a result, in some cases it will display the total number of Facebook users that have Liked it, helping users make decisions about topics outside the expertise of their network.

In one of the most useful new additions to Bing, frequently Liked webpages from within popular websites will appear beside their Like count underneath a result, allowing users to sift through today’s content heavy blogs and community sites. For instance, articles from a news site or recipes from a cooking site that have been Liked by friends or many other users are now much easier to discover.

Related updates from Facebook Pages now appear in general search instead of being isolated in the dedicated “Social” search tab. As Pages become a sort of news ticker and deals distribution platform for many brands, Page updates are becoming valuable content to surface.

Bing Augments People,Travel, and Shopping Search With Friend Profile Characteristics and Sharing Options

While before users could search for people through Bing, the results were no more helpful in finding the right “Bob Smith” than Facebook’s own search engine. Now people search results display profile data visible to the searcher, such as current city, workplace, and education history if its public or is to visible to “friends of friends” and they have a friend in common.

Similarly, Bing Travel searches will display the friends that live or previously lived in a city that’s been searched for. In an innovative use of the ability for owners of Like buttons to publish news feed updates to those that click them, users who Like flight results between two cities will receive feed stories about about deals on those flights. Users can also share Travel Wish Lists with friends. Bing Shopping has also rolled out it’s previously announced shareable product comparisons so users can seek advice from friends.

Where Social Search Can Go From Here

Bing’s latest social additions could make it a sensible tool for people inquiring about things outside their comfort zone. If I don’t know anything about LCD TVs, but want to buy one, Bing could help me discover reputable brands and popular sources of tech hardware reviews, or share the choices I’m comparing with my friends.

There’s still more to do, though. For instance, I might see that one friend Likes one tech hardware review blog, and another friend Likes a different blog. Perhaps Bing or another social search engine could analyze the full set of Likes of those friends, and determine if one is an expert on technology because they’ve Liked several other tech brands or publications. This friend’s Like could then be weighted more heavily or shown more prominently.

There’s also the question of those who really don’t want a social search experience. Now, even if a Bing user doesn’t have a Facebook account they’ll still see anonymized data about the Likes of the general Facebook user base. By providing an option to completely opt out of seeing Facebook data in search results, Bing could continue aggressively integrating social data without alienating those who don’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd.