Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our fantastic sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!

Zembly is a powerful new application development environment for Facebook applications.

Super Rewards is a leading monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

Zong is a leading provider of mobile payments serving the digital content, social media, and gaming industries.

Offerpal Media is a leading managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

AdParlor is a leading advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites.

Want to target a single ad at both the United States and Iraq? While that may not be something you want to accomplish, it’s something you’ll soon be able to do. On Wednesday a revised version of my Facebook demographics tracking script started acting funny and after a little bit of poking around I realized that Facebook has revised their ad location field to let users manually enter countries rather than select them from a drop-down as previously was the case.



While the current iteration of the ad creation interface doesn’t allow for multi-country tracking, it appears that it will soon be available as the company has modified their inventory estimation script to accept multiple countries. Don’t understand what I’m referring to? When you visit Facebook’s ad creation page, you can select the various countries that you’d like to target. When you select a country and demographic variables, a rough estimate of the number of people that the ad will reach is produced.

As a regular user you aren’t able to enter multiple countries but the revised system has been built to accept them. For the more technical individuals, Facebook has modified their script to accept the “countries” array as an argument rather than a single variable called “country”. There’s not a stated date for full launch but it’s clearly something that will be rolled out in the near future. This is extremely useful for those advertisers that are looking to target globally by interest.

While most advertisers won’t select every country it was previously a tedious process to create individual ads for each country. This will help make the ad creation process more efficient and hopefully contribute to an increase in ad spend as advertisers are able to produce globally relevant ads in a short amount of time. Facebook has been making subtle changes to their ad platform over the past few days including the recently launch of keyword suggestions.

The only thing I’m waiting for now is the improvement of the ad manger area in which multiple campaigns cannot be adjusted simultaneously under the current version. It’s only a matter of time before additional improvements are made.

We’ve heard a lot of people say the iPhone’s built-in support for YouTube video uploading is going to make a huge impact on the number of people posting videos online. That number could grow even more now that Facebook’s upcoming Facebook for iPhone 3.0 app is going to include video uploads - especially amongst people who want to easily post their videos online for friends and family to see, but not the general public.

Joe Hewitt, the lead engineer on Facebook’s iPhone app, says, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

Developers and marketers should prepare for many more user-generated videos shuffling around the Facebook ecosystem in the coming months.

In addition to including video uploads for iPhone 3GS users, Facebook for iPhone 3.0 will include the “new” News Feed, Events Likes, Notes, Pages, a new home page, and a variety of other features. However, Push Notifications, which are in high demand, will be included in Version 3.1 later this summer, Hewitt says. A release date has not been announced.

The local review-sharing site Yelp has added Facebook Connect to allow users to easily share local business reviews with their friends on Facebook.

Yelp allows anyone to submit a review for any local business, from restaurants to shoe stores to mechanics. Once you’ve registered and written a review, you’ll now have the option of using Facebook Connect to post the review to your Facebook page so your friends will see it in their feeds. You can set up an automatic posting feature to pull every review you write over to Facebook, or choose to post only certain reviews.

Facebook Connect has also recently been integrated into other review sites, such as Urbanspoon and Citysearch, and has led to a pronounced jump in activity in the number of reviews, comments, and photos added to these sites.

Citysearch has seen a dramatic increase in registrations since implementing Facebook Connect. The number of daily registrations has tripled since the launch, and 94% of reviewers are sharing their reviews on Facebook. The average review gets 40 views, with 74% of those clicking back to the Citysearch site. Restaurant review site Urbanspoon has experienced similar success. Since adding Facebook Connect in March, 1/3 of the users signing in to the site with their popular iPhone app are doing so through Facebook.

As more review sites add Facebook Connect functinality, Facebook itself is becoming a valuable source for unsolicited, trusted information on local businesses and services. Seeing your friends’ Yelp posts is a great way to learn more about restaurants, stores, and night life around your area. The early success suggests that users are taking advantage of these reviews, and with several different sites, like Urbanspoon and Yelp, integrating with Facebook, you’ll get a larger number of reviews that will allow you to make a more informaed decision on where to spend your money.

The increased use of Facebook Connect also brings more accountability to the restaurants, stores, and shops; any one customer can now more easily spread the good (or bad) word about your business throughout their entire network of friends, so there’s more incentive to offer a good product and excellent customer service.

Live streaming on Facebook is now more affordable for smal businesses and individuals thanks to StreamAPI, a new product from live-streaming company Stickam. StreamAPI is built around Facebook’s Live Stream widget, which was recently opened up to anyone wanting to add a dynamic stream of Facebook status updates around live events on their website.

StreamAPI is slightly different from the currently available service from Ustream, which has been used in many of the live streaming events to date but has setup costs as high as $15,000. With StreamAPI, there is no set up or monthly fee; instead, users pay 45 cents per gigabyte. There’s support for HD video as well. Stickam has plenty of experience with live online video, providing its service to stream content for MTV, CBS Radio, and G4TV, amongst others.

New services like StreamAPI reflect the increasing interest amongst web video publishers for the social context that Facebook Connect brings around live events. New products and pricing models like this one are opening up the market to a larger variety of long tail publishers.

As Inside Facebook reported last month, Facebook is in the process of migrating away from regional networks on the site (they were only ever used by 50% of users anyway, and created some unintended privacy confusion). As a result, network affiliations are being migrated to the Info tab on user profiles as users’ current locations.

For developers, Facebook says that these changes will eventually be reflected in their API. If your application currently makes use of regional networks, you have until September 30, 2009, to make the official change to use the current_location field instead of network affiliations.

This process isn’t without its quirks, however. As pointed out on the Developer’s Forums, the new user-defined city field could be less useful than regional networks as it will likely actually create more segmentation. Any attempt to group like cities together would be at the expense of the application developer.

A couple of months ago, Facebook released the Open Stream API, a new set of Facebook Platform APIs that enable developers to access and publish to the Facebook stream from anywhere. Since then, we’ve seen a number of interesting desktop client integrations, like the recent updates from Seesmic and TweetDeck.

However, a simple new website built on Facebook Connect, Flutteerr, illustrates ways developers could build websites that integrate the stream as well. Developed by Facebook employee Naitik Shah using the standard APIs in his personal time, Flutteerr currently only contains the Facebook stream (and resembles Twitter quite a bit), but it could be enhanced with a variety of features to make publishing to or reading your Facebook stream more powerful.

On Flutteerr, users can filter the News Feed the same way they can inside Facebook, including by Friend List, Network, Page, and particular applications. Status updates, comments, and likes are automatically posted to Facebook. However, you can’t share links, photos, etc. in the media-rich way that the Facebook.com Publisher allows you to.

Since the site is a personal project, it’s unclear what will happen with it going forward (though the name is reminiscent of this parody video from Slate called Flutter: The New Twitter). Nevertheless, the site does go to show what’s possible with the API.

Today Yelp launched their implementation of Facebook Connect to enable users to share reviews with their friends on Facebook. After you post your review on Yelp, you are prompted to post it to your feed. That’s about the extend of the service but it’s definitely another large site to integrate with Connect. Aardvark, Etsy, oDesk, The Washington Post, and many more have also implemented Connect in recent weeks.



Facebook has invested heavily in building out Connect, attempting to get as many sites to implement it as possible. While millions of users have taken advantage of Connect, the company isn’t giving exact numbers. The only numbers that are accessible are currently through Compete.com which state that over 64.9 million people have viewed it. Unfortunately that doesn’t really mean outside of the number of requests for the Facebook Connect JavaScript file.

In other words, any site that has implemented Facebook Connect will request a specific file from Facebook everytime a page is loaded. It’s an effective measure of the combined reach of Facebook Connect enabled sites but it doesn’t count how many people have actually linked their account with sites around the web. We’ve been tracking the number of people connecting via various sites but it’s only a sample so unfortunately I can’t provide an accurate number in this article.

We’ll be providing more Facebook Connect updates over the coming weeks as more sites begin to roll out their implementation of the service.

Each month, it seems like there are a few surprises in store on the Facebook gaming charts. Back at the start of June, we saw a number of new titles appear within the Top 25. One in particular, Farm Town, debuted at #4 with nearly 8 million monthly active users. It just goes to show that even today, with Facebook’s viral channel allocation limits in place, new games can still become popular once word starts to spread.

Of course, distribution has always been an issue for new companies with no marketing budget, but Farm Town shows that things can still grow without a lot of initial spend. This month, Zynga is hot on the heels of Farm Town with its own new farming release, FarmVille…

>> Read more at Inside Social Games

Do you know how to track all of the visitors and new fans to your Facebook Page? If you didn’t you aren’t alone. Up until recently, Page insights were not obvious to Page admins and as a result many were finding it difficult to keep track of who was coming to their page. Enter the new insights box which emphasizes the quality of newly published items and how many people have engaged with your page.



The feature started showing up yesterday evening and while it doesn’t appear to work perfectly (I sometimes get 0 for “Post Quality” and 0 for “Interactions This Week”), it should make Page administrators more aware of the insights product. I regularly get people reaching out to me to ask how to track users that are visiting their page as they are completely unaware of the Insights page. That’s because the link to Page insights was previously buried.

The insights are relatively useful for people looking to keep track of where their fans are coming from but unfortunately there are still no conversion metrics for Facebook Ads. I’ve written about the need to track conversions as it would boost ad spend across the site on a number of instances. Facebook has at least improved their ads to enable users to become fans when viewing an ad which has most definitely improved overall conversion rates.

Hopefully with this new emphasis on Page Insights we will begin to see more features rolled out that help users improve conversion tracking. What features would you like to see within Page Insights?