Facebook’s long-awaited Chat service, originally launched last Sunday to a select group of users (primarily in some of Facebook’s earliest college networks), has slowly been rolling out to additional networks and users.

Within the last 48 hours, Facebook Chat has been launched for users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. However, most other users still don’t have access yet. While Facebook refuses to announce stats on the service until after the rollout is complete, most users have found Chat very stable so far.

As for Facebook Chat’s impact on Facebook Platform chat applications? That remains to be seen - none have shown very strong numbers so far.

New York-based Buddy Media, makers of the AceBucks loyalty platform for Facebook application developers, this week announced the launch of the Buddy Media Ad Network - a new social media ad network for social network application developers. The self-serve platform, which is now live, will allow advertisers to price campaigns on a CPM, CPC, or CPI basis, use a variety of creative formats, and target by age/sex/location.

Buddy Media has built a reputation for successfully bringing big brands into the Facebook app world. The company leverages its Acebucks loyalty program to drive engagement on customer applications. Earlier this year, it acquired 5 applications from developer ChipIn (the “versus” series) in order to adapt concepts from those apps into its advertising programs.

With the launch of the invite-only Buddy Media Ad Network, the company plans to build its developer roster. The company hopes to leverage its network of clients, including Microsoft, Anheuser Busch, People.com, FedEx, Readers Digest, and Time, to jump-start the Buddy Media Ad Network.

Additionally, CEO Michael Lazerow announced that Buddy Media has closed a $6.5 million Series B round of funding, led by Softbank Capital (Karin Klein and Eric Hippeau), European Founders Fund (the Samwer Brothers), Greycroft Partners (Alan Patricof), and super-angel Ron Conway. Investors in Buddy Media’s $1.5 million Series A round also participated.

Social Gaming Network, one of the largest network of games on Facebook, has just announced the acquisition of Esgut, Free Gifts, Nicknames, Oregon Trail and Friend Block. With these acquisitions, the SGN family of games now has more than 50 million Facebook application installs and almost  million daily active users.

The acquisitions have actually happened gradually over recent weeks as SGN has built out its founding team and moved the staff to downtown Palo Alto. The following developers have joined SGN as co-founders:

• Suleman Ali and Jamal Ashraf of Esgut


• Zach Allia of Free Gifts


• Adam Gries and Wayne Mak of Nicknames

In addition, SGN purchased the Oregon Trail and FriendBlock applications directly.

“We are building a brain-trust of leading app talent. These are very highly regarded developers and SGN is blessed to have them join to help build a great company that brings innovation, creativity and joy to our users,” said Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN. “We are all passionate and believe in our vision of putting the key pieces together to be a creative force in building EA 2.0 with strength in new social games and virtual goods.”

SGN is shaping up to be a dominant force in the social gaming space. The company also announced that its game network has now grown to over 70 games, and it has also recently launched an innovative new Game Feed feature. More to come as SGN and Zynga battle it out to become the biggest social gaming platform!

Part of Facebook’s upcoming profile redesign involves the addition of tabs - including application-specific tabs - to the profile page. While Facebook will install Wall, Info, and Photos tabs on every user’s profile (and perhaps a tab for all your current application boxes) by default, users will also be able to add (at least 2 or 3) tabs for specific applications to their profile page.

This morning, Facebook released more information about how this may look and work. According to Facebook,

There isn’t a set template for what these tabs will look like, but we still thought it would be valuable to share the general idea of how this concept might work.

If you take a look at the top of the screenshot, clicking on the “+” sign will enable you to add a new tab. This will bring up a list of your added applications, and you will be able to choose which one you want to add to its own tab, if any. App developers are now designing new layouts for what their application will look like on these new tabs so we hope to be able to share an example of this soon. If you have a favorite application, you might want it to have more visibility than just a small box on your profile. This will also give application developers more room to add interesting features and functionality that lets you share more information about yourself on your profile.

Profile page tabs are a major new point of integration that has not previously existed in Facebook’s “profile box” world. If or how apps will be able to prompt users to add tabs has not yet been announced.

As the Platform matures, so are applications. More and more applications are providing robust functionality that need the same security features as sites on the open web.

While Facebook is working on a secure payments solution for application developers wanting to accept payments but unable to setup a payments infrastructure themselves (and not wanting to use Paypal), Facebook has released one security feature that developers can use today: CAPTCHAs.

CAPTCHAs keep bots from filling out web forms. As Facebook’s Justin Mitchell writes,

Over the last three years, we have developed many tools to stop this type of activity and protect users’ private data. One of the most powerful tools in our arsenal is the CAPTCHA, a simple image that displays obfuscated text that computers cannot read but humans can.

Now that Facebook Platform applications have become incredibly popular, we’re rolling out tools that make it as easy and efficient as possible for third party developers to secure their applications. As part of this effort, we are introducing a new FBML tag to easily drop a CAPTCHA onto a canvas page.

We’ll let you know of all the new security features Facebook is making available to app developers.

Facebook today announced the launch of Facebook Lexicon, a visualization tool reminiscent of Google Trends. Just as Google Trends measures and compares search query volume across multiple terms, Facebook Lexicon shows how frequently your search terms appear in Facebook Wall conversations over time.

Lexicon only counts profile, group, and event Wall conversations - it doesn’t count messages, chats, or application activity (feed items, notifications, or invitations). Facebook’s Roddy Lindsay also says that, “No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts.”

Unlike Google Trends, however, Facebook Lexicon doesn’t allow filtering by geographic region (a bit more complex in the Facebook environment, since the user’s IP may not always match their geographic region).

Facebook Lexicon will be a great way to get near-real time stats on the buzz surrounding current events. It should be a very valuable tool for the PR community!

A few months ago, Facebook added per-story feedback to the News Feed in order to allow users to help the service learn their personal preferences. While Facebook has always allowed more general Facebook preferences (like More About These Friends/Less About These Friends), this feedback was much more granular and potentially powerful.

However, as of today, Facebook has removed News Feed story preferences. When asked to comment on the change, a Facebook representative said the thumbs up and thumbs down were removed “to simplify the site and create a better user experience.”

It’s too bad Facebook wasn’t able to get more value out of the explicit preference data users were generating. For now, Facebook will need to rely on more implicit data.

Facebook developers in the Bay Area should head over to AOL tomorrow night for a great lineup on social gaming including Zach Allia of Free Gifts and Social Gaming Network, Josh Liptzin of Oregon Trail, Lawrence Sinclair of Social Score, Nathan Blecharczyk of Identified Hits, and Zynga - all MC’d by the master of 500 conferences, Dave McClure.

In addition, Ryan Merket of CBS Interactive and Ping.fm, Tim O’Shaughnessy of Hungry Machine, Wayne Mak and Adam Gries of Nicknames, and Kasra Zokaei of J2Play will be participating on a panel discussion on current trends in social media. The evening will be very interactive, and after each demo there will be a time for Q&A from the audience.  Should be a valuable and fun evening!

Last week, I interviewed Bret Taylor, the co-founder of FriendFeed, a new website which aggregates content you’re sharing around the web and shares it with your friends.

Today, Facebook launched a feature specifically designed to make it easier to share content from around the web, called Feed Importing. Like FriendFeed, just enter your credentials for your accounts at supported partner sites and your content will appear in your Mini Feed (and your friends’ News Feeds).

According to Facebook’s Harry Wang,

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small “Import” link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we’ll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care about.

This will certainly make Facebook a more powerful way to share content - currently, users have to actively “Post” items to their profiles or for certain friends. FriendFeed’s Taylor said the service was already the #2 referrer for some bloggers - if Facebook expands the feature to allow users to import any feed, will the same be true of Facebook?

Although Facebook intended the Reviews application to help users learn more about an application’s quality, it has quickly become an easy place for developers to spammily increase their Reviews scores. There have been multiple cases over recent weeks of developers caught in the act, from the largest to the smallest.

In response, Facebook’s head of Platform Policy, Paul Jeffries, recently said, “When we discover fake accounts, we delete them to preserve the integrity of the Facebook community, and sometimes take further action. Of course, use of fake accounts by developers (or those acting as their proxy) to manipulate the review system is prohibited, and subject to policy enforcement measures such as a moratorium.”

However, Facebook is going to have to significantly update the way Reviews works to effectively fight this kind of spam. At a recent Developers Roundtable, Facebook indicated it was aware of the issue and doing just that. Even if Facebook just filtered out posts with links, that move alone would eliminate a good portion of spammy reviews.