Today marks the six-year anniversary of the Facebook Platform, something that has been defining for Facebook as a company and already influenced a number of industries.

Now, Facebook is making its next big moves for the platform by introducing app services — new tools for developers that make it easier to build applications that span different devices and put users at the forefront. This is seen most clearly with the acquisition of Parse, a mobile backend as a service company, which will continue as a separate brand with a freemium services model for the time being. Facebook also recently hired the team behind Spaceport, a cross-platform development framework, and stealth software startup Osmeta, which was reportedly working on something related to enabling simpler development across devices.

“We’ve been thinking about how we can provide tools to developers to enable a more cross-platform world,” Facebook Director of Developer Products Doug Purdy said at a media “whiteboard” session Thursday. “We’re trying to create a platform that developers can build something that spans over devices and makes people the center. Regardless of the device that you or your friends are on, everyone can have a rich experience.”
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Facebook breaks into Fortune 500 – Facebook has made its first appearance on the Fortune 500 list at No. 482 this year. The Fortune 500 is a yearly list of top U.S. companies. Facebook ranks sixth out of the seven companies in the category of Internet services and retailing, joining Amazon (No. 49), Google (55), eBay (196), Liberty Interactive (270), Priceline (473), and Yahoo (494). Last year, Facebook was outside of the list at No. 598. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest CEO of companies on the list, and he’s one of only two CEOs under 40.

Reports: Facebook could be looking to buy Waze – A number of outlets with anonymous sources say Facebook is considering an acquisition of Waze, the crowd-sourced traffic and navigation app. The news was first reported by Israeli business publication Calcalist. TechCrunch and AllThingsD say they have sources corroborating the story. Earlier this year, there were rumors that Apple was looking to acquire the company, but it turned out Waze was simply a partner for its Maps app. Waze has more than 40 million users and has raised $67 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer.

Facebook speeds up Recommendations Bar – Facebook engineer Stoyan Stefanov this week detailed his efforts to improve the Recommendations Bar plugin. The plugin, which shows personalized recommendations to web visitors, now starts to render in half the time as before and is twice as fast overall. Stefanov also improved the payload 7x and reduced the number of requests by one-third. This follows other recent improvements to the Like button, Send button, Facepile and Likebox. By improving the speed and performance of its plugins, Facebook improves the millions of websites that incorporate them. Details about the improvements, along with before and after comparisons are available on Stefanov’s blog here.

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Facebook today announced a new version of its Like Box plugin that has been rewritten to load two to four times faster than the previous implementation.

The Like Box is a plugin that anyone can add to their website to attract and gain Likes for their Facebook page. Visitors can see how many users are connected to the page and which of their friends Like it. They can read recent posts from the page and Like the page with one click, without needing to leave the site they’re on.

Facebook made several changes to the plugin to help it load faster, including smaller components, smaller CSS and JavaScript size and better packaging. There are also changes that improve perceived performance. Inline CSS and non-blocking JavaScript deliver the first impression to the user faster, so even though more needs to be loaded after that, it feels even faster because users start to see some of the plugin right away.
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A bug temporarily led all third-party websites that use Facebook login or social plugins to redirect users to Facebook.com where an error message displayed earlier today.

A spokesperson for the social network said in a statement:

“For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third-party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.”

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Facebook updated its WordPress plugin this week to offer more stability and options for customization.

The Facebook for WordPress plugin lets users cross-post WordPress content to their Timeline and to Facebook pages they manage, streamlining the process of sharing new blog posts or articles on Facebook while still offering publishers ways to customize what they post. For example, some sites publish through WordPress, but then manually copy-paste their links into Facebook or another social publishing platform. Others automate sharing to Facebook, but eliminate the option to share a custom message along with the link. The plugin makes it so that publishers don’t have to choose between two unideal options.

With the latest update, Facebook for WordPress supports custom post types and statuses, creating a cleaner interface for content management uses beyond blogs and news sites, for instance, an artist portfolio, retailer store location or musical artist listing. With custom status support, the plugin can recognize the publicness of a post status beyond just “publish.”

The update also aims to improve the settings page by moving them into individual submenus by feature and introducing contextual help.

Publishers can continue to use the plugin to mention the names of pages and friends in a post and further distribute their content. Also, if users authorize the plugin to post to their personal Timelines, stories will appear as Open Graph actions, for example, “published an article,” as seen below.

The plugin can be downloaded here.

Facebook responded to reports today that alleged the social network was scanning private messages and Liking pages on users’ behalf.

The company clarified that the Like count of an article or webpage will increase when users share the link via direct messages, however no private information is shared. URLs sent through private messages are not shown publicly on user profiles and users will not see a friend’s name or photo next to a Like button if the person shared the article privately.

When publishers implement social plugins such as the Like, Recommend, Share or Send buttons, they and site visitors can see a counter of how many actions have been made related to that link. It isn’t completely clear to outsiders that the total includes actions that were made by clicking the button directly, as well as the number of times the link was copy-pasted into a Facebook post or message, which is why some users thought the social network had a security flaw. However, Facebook explains this in the FAQ about the Like button plugin.

Facebook notes that no human is reading users’ private messages. Its systems parse the URL being shared in order to render the appropriate preview and to ensure that the message is not spam. In the process, it also adds to the link’s share total. The company admitted that the feature recently had a bug that led the count for the Share or Like plugin to occasionally increase by two instead of one, but it is working on a fix so that publishers have accurate metrics for their sites. This does not apply to Facebook pages, only to third-party sites that have implemented social plugins.

Some people taken issue with Facebook adding private shares to the public total for a link, though we see this as similar to site visitor widgets, which increase whenever a user visits a webpage but do not reveal who visited. Even if the privacy implications are minimal, there is the matter of all these actions being combined under the “Like” or “Recommend” wording, which suggests positive feelings, even though some users might have shared a link that they disagreed with wanted to talk about for reasons besides recommending it. This might look good for publishers but doesn’t necessarily reflect the true sentiment about a post.

Facebook filed a 22-page letter with the Federal Trade Commission outlining its thoughts and recommendations for the commission’s proposed changes to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The social network lauded the FTC’s commitment to protecting children’s online experiences and privacy, but expressed concern about some language in the proposed change, which could hold Facebook liable in cases where third-parties use its social plugins and create additional burdens for Facebook, developers, publishers and parents. In particular, Facebook urged the commission to explicitly allow first-party advertising as an acceptable use of a child’s “persistent identifier,” such as an IP address or cookie ID.

The FTC is proposing that COPPA be expanded to apply to apps, games and online ad networks, in addition to the child-directed websites it currently covers. Some language in the proposal would deem website publishers and developers that use plugins like Facebook Login or the Like Button as “co-operators” with Facebook. Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan, who wrote the letter to the FTC, suggests that the language in the proposal “fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between plugin providers and website publishers.” The social network, for example, makes plugins available but doesn’t choose which websites use them, which plugins they use or how they use them. Neither does Facebook share data with the third-parties that use its plugins. As such, the company wants to ensure that it would not be held liable under COPPA for offenses by web publishers or app developers that integrate with its platform.

The FTC proposal makes some exceptions for collecting and using children’s information as needed for “support for internal operations.” Facebook requests that the FTC clarify its definition of “support for internal operations” to include data captured by plugins and to explicitly include activities that do not impact children’s privacy, such as first-party advertising. The letter cites the commission’s previous reports that distinguish first-party advertising from third-party advertising because it does not raise the same privacy concerns and is generally an expected part of free websites and online services.

Egan further recommends that COPPA not include language that requires operators of child-directed sites to “treat all users as children” and obtain parental consent even if they otherwise have knowledge that a user is 13 years or older. For example, if a user has signed up for Facebook, the user has verified that they are over 13 by providing a birthdate. Egan says this should apply to third-party sites that integrate plugins without requiring additional consent or age verification. “It would be nonsensical to require an operator to obtain verifiable parental consent before collecting information from a parent,” Egan writes.

As we’ve previously written about, Facebook could ultimately serve as a means for age verification all around the web. In its letter, the company suggests that the commission could add explicit clarification that publishers can use a common mechanism to obtain verifiable parental consent, as Microsoft, Disney and a number of organizations have suggested in their comments to the FTC. Doing this, Egan writes, would minimize the burden on parents by reducing the number of times they have to give consent and eliminate the need for multiple detailed privacy notices. Instead, parents could give consent and get notice up front. They would then then get a more specific notice when a child wants to play a game or use a new app. If a platform provides this ability, Facebook argues, it should not assume liability or turn the platform into a “co-operator” with third-party apps or websites that implement it.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Facebook was taking steps toward allowing children under 13 to be allowed on the site, including creating mechanisms that would connect children’s accounts to those of their parents. Facebook has not publicly shared whether it is planning to lower its age limit or how it would do so.

Facebook today officially launched the Recommendations Bar plugin, which serves up recommended articles to readers as they finish reading another.

When a person reaches the end of an article or after a certain amount of time has elapsed, a small pop-up appears at the bottom of a webpage, suggesting other articles to read — including those that friends have Liked or shared. The module also prompts readers to Like or recommend the article they’re on.

The plugin, which was released in beta in September 2011, previously integrated the social reading and sharing capabilities of Open Graph, so users could post what they’ve read to Timeline. But it seems sometime last month, Facebook changed directions and now the plugin doesn’t work as a social reader, though it still includes a Like button for users to actively recommend articles to their friends. A spokesperson says, ”We tested it with social reading functionality but ultimately chose to focus the bar on Likes and Recommends, which is more suited for a broader set of apps and sites.”

The company has received criticism for its “frictionless sharing” apps, which post what users read, watch or listen to. But we wondered whether the previous iteration of Recommendations Bar would help publishers convert their sites to Timeline apps and create a more unified experience across the web so users wouldn’t be confused about how their reading activity would be shared. Now that the company has backed away from offering its own social reader plugin, the user experience will continue to be fragmented across different sites. Third-party companies like ShareThis, however, are hoping fill the void with their own Open Graph sharing widgets.

Facebook’s Recommendations Bar is already being used on sites such as Mashable, Wetpaint and The Mirror. Facebook has offered similar functionality with the Recommendations Box, but that module sits off to the side of an article and because it remains static, isn’t always as noticeable as the new plugin. The social network says early tests show three times higher clickthrough on the stories it recommends through Recommendations Bar than through the Recommendations Box.

Information about how to add the social plugin to your site is available here.

Newly launched Recommendations Bar

Previous version of Recommendations Bar, including social reading options

Facebook appears to be testing a new “Want” button plugin similar to its popular Like button.

Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep discovered that a Want button has been added to the Facebook Javascript SDK as an XFBML tag – <fb:wants>. The button is not publicly listed among the other social plugins on Facebook’s developer site. Waddington says the button will only work on Open Graph objects marked as “products.”

With Open Graph, developers have been able to create their own “want” actions, but users have to authorize a third-party app in order for those buttons to generate stories on Timeline and News Feed. If the Want button plugin works similarly to the Like button, users will not have to go through the step of authorizing an app. This means even more users will be likely to click it.

Just as the Like button allowed Facebook to collect massive amounts of data about users’ interests, the Want button could be a key way for the social network to collect desire-based data. A Want button plugin will make it easy for e-commerce and other sites to implement this type of Facebook functionality without having to build their own apps. Many of these sites are already using the Like button, but Liking a product could mean users already have it or that they are interested in getting it. Being able to distinguish between these groups of people and target ads to either one could be very powerful for advertisers and help make Facebook a stronger competitor to Google AdWords.

Although publishing “Want” actions is currently disabled by Facebook, Waddington was able to implement a version of the button on his own site. Clicking the Want button returns an error for now.

We’re waiting to hear back from Facebook for more details on when this might be rolled out and how exactly it will work.

[Update 6/29/12 10:33 a.m. PT - Facebook provided the following statement, "We're always testing new Platform features, however we have nothing new to announce." ]

Facebook stock up 10 percent - Facebook shares closed at $33.05 today, up 10 percent from last Friday. Despite some bad news regarding a legal settlement that will allow users to remove their names from Sponsored Stories, optimism is growing for Facebook’s potential future to create an ad network. The company also announced subscription billing and a move away from its virtual currency Credits toward a broader payments platform that allows developers to sell items in a user’s local currency, i.e., dollars or euros.

Facebook forms creative council – Facebook announce its inaugural Facebook Creative Council, which convened in Cannes this week. Similar to the the Client Council announced last year, the Creative Council will help Facebook identify priorities for agency creatives. Members include Jeff Benjamin (JWT), Colleen DeCourcy (Socialistic), David Droga (Droga5), Rob Feakins (Publicis), Toshiya Fukuda (777), James Hilton (AKQA), Linus Karlsson (McCann), Amir Kassaei (DDB), Nick Law (R/GA), Mike Lazerow (Buddy Media), Tor Myhren (Grey), Rob Reilly (CPB), Mark Tutssel (Leo Burnett) and Mark Waites (Mother).

AmEx and Facebook team up for small business contest – American Express OPEN and Facebook launched its second annual “Big Break for Small Business” contest. Five small business owners will receive house calls from American Express OPEN and Facebook marketing specialists who help transform a business’ social media efforts. Winners will also receive $25,000 in cash to go toward the social strategies they learn. Every small business that enters the contest will get $50 in free Facebook advertising credits. American Express Cardmembers and merchants who enter will receive $100 in advertising on the site.

Users get easier opt-out from notifications - Facebook introduced a new way for users to opt out of notifications from apps, groups, or other sources that send them. People have always been able to opt out on the Notifications Settings page, but now users can opt out directly from the notifications drop down menu.

Facebook adds comment editing - Users can now edit their own comments at any point after they’ve been posted. Previously, Facebook users only had about 12 seconds to edit their comments without removing them. Now comments that have been edited include an “edit history” that anyone can view. This means users can fix typos or clarify a point, but a full record of edits is available so users can’t deny what they wrote before editing it.

Payvment adds one-click Facebook ad buying – E-commerce platform Payvment announced a new one-click Facebook ad buying service this week to give merchants a way to turn promotional Facebook posts into ads and target users based on their shopping patterns.

New Louisiana law requires sex offenders to list status on social sites – Louisiana sex offenders must now state their criminal status on Facebook and other social networking sites. The law, which is the first of its kind in the U.S., requires sex offenders to list the crime for which they were convicted, the jurisdiction of conviction, a description of their physical characteristics and residential address.

Study: 24 percent of top websites integrate Facebook - According to a study by Pingdom, 24.3 percent of the top 10,000 websites in the world include Facebook integration on their homepages, this includes Facebook login and Facebook plugins such as the Like button. A total of 49.3 percent of the top 10,000 sites include basic links to Facebook.

GE launches HealthyShare Facebook app - GE launched a new Facebook Timeline-enabled app called HealthyShare, a tool for people to share their health goals, track their progress and use friends as sources of motivation toward achieving those goals. The app, which was timed ahead of the Olympic Games, was developed in partnership with Facebook.