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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.

This post is an excerpt from the NEW, revamped Facebook Marketing Bible — a major update to the leading resource for marketing and advertising strategies on Facebook. If you’re interested in learning more about this upcoming update, check out a preview at The Facebook Marketing Bible.

The Recommendations Bar is one of Facebook’s newest social plugins, and the first to integrate the social reading and frictionless sharing capabilities of Open Graph. Put simply, the Recommendations Bar allows any website to implement the same social reading and social recommendation features found in “social reader” style applications from the Washington Post, The Guardian or USA Today. The plugin is still in beta, which means that when installed, it is only viewable to developers and testers associated with the website or application. Normal site visitors cannot yet see or interact with the plugin. However, once the Recommendations Bar becomes publicly accessible, we expect it to be a highly effective tool for any news site looking to increase referral traffic and reader engagement.

The Recommendations Bar enables three essential social  functions:

Social recommendations

The Recommendations Bar prompts readers with other articles when they finish the one they’re reading, using Social Graph data to recommend the most relevant articles. This includes articles that a user’s friends have liked or articles that have received a high volume of likes and comments. Essentially, the same “secret sauce” that goes into ranking News Feed posts and Comments is leveraged in the Recommendations Bar, ensuring that readers are recommended articles that are relevant to their interests and social connections.

Omnipresent Like Button that “follows” the user

The Recommendations Bar creates a Like button that doesn’t move, even when users scrolls or resize their browser windows. Many sites currently struggle to determine the most effective placement for the Like button. Should it appear at the top near the byline? At the end of the article near the comments section? As part of the sidebar? The Recommendations bar is a much more elegant solution, as it eliminates the need to place a Like button in a particular location on a given page — its position is relative to the user’s browser window, not relative to site content. While this can be done using relatively simple HTML and CSS, Facebook’s solution is even simpler to implement, and the sizing and display has been thought through down to the pixel.

Social reading through frictionless sharing

The Recommendations Bar allows users to turn on social reading, the same functionality that’s available within canvas applications like the Washington Post Social Reader, USAToday + Me, and The Guardian. Except while those companies spent time and money creating a canvas application within Facebook, the Recommendations Bar provides the same functionality on any pre-existing website, with minimal effort. If you’ve seen stories pop up in your News Feed and Ticker like Brendan read “Facebook CEO speaks out against SOPA, PIPA” on Washington Post Social Reader, the Recommendations Plugin can generate the same kind of rich Open Graph story.

Continue reading for a preview of the NEW Facebook Marketing Bible coming in February!

Having your website rank at the top of the search engines will provide you with a stream of traffic ready to read buy or interact with your site. Getting this high first page ranking in the main search engines such as Google Yahoo and MSN is extremely difficult and not to mention time consuming.

Search engines take considerable notice of how many and the quality of incoming links to your site. Traditionally webmasters have sent out link requests asking to exchange links this however is becoming more and more ineffective as people’s email addresses are spammed by automated robots.

Method savvy internet marketers are now using article submissions. Here is how it works. The webmaster writes an article on the topic of their site including a back link to their site. They then submit this to various article directories. In turn some of these article directories list this article and its back link and also distribute it to all their members. Some even pass this onto other article sites.

This can manually take a long time however. A lot of copying and pasting of articles has to happen you have to log in and log out of sites and the whole thing can be very tedious. Over the past 6 months new products have been released that take some of the tedium out of article submissions. These semi-automatically go to the relevant sites and submit your article logging in for you and populating the forms with your article. They can be a great time saver.

Finally there are new services that actually go off and submit your articles for free to other large directories. They advertise on your article page on their site. This is a win-win situation. The article writer gets valuable backlinks to their site or their content read by many people the large article directory gets the extra content and advertising revenue so everyone is happy.

We highly recommend article writing for marketing your site it may take a little time but with the services outlined here it need not be so painful as it once was.

This post is an excerpt from the NEW, revamped Facebook Marketing Bible — a major update to the leading resource for marketing and advertising strategies on Facebook. If you’re interested in learning more about this upcoming update, check out a preview at The Facebook Marketing Bible.

The Recommendations Bar is one of Facebook’s newest social plugins, and the first to integrate the social reading and frictionless sharing capabilities of Open Graph. Put simply, the Recommendations Bar allows any website to implement the same social reading and social recommendation features found in “social reader” style applications from the Washington Post, The Guardian or USA Today. The plugin is still in beta, which means that when installed, it is only viewable to developers and testers associated with the website or application. Normal site visitors cannot yet see or interact with the plugin. However, once the Recommendations Bar becomes publicly accessible, we expect it to be a highly effective tool for any news site looking to increase referral traffic and reader engagement.

The Recommendations Bar enables three essential social  functions:

Social recommendations

The Recommendations Bar prompts readers with other articles when they finish the one they’re reading, using Social Graph data to recommend the most relevant articles. This includes articles that a user’s friends have liked or articles that have received a high volume of likes and comments. Essentially, the same “secret sauce” that goes into ranking News Feed posts and Comments is leveraged in the Recommendations Bar, ensuring that readers are recommended articles that are relevant to their interests and social connections.

Omnipresent Like Button that “follows” the user

The Recommendations Bar creates a Like button that doesn’t move, even when users scrolls or resize their browser windows. Many sites currently struggle to determine the most effective placement for the Like button. Should it appear at the top near the byline? At the end of the article near the comments section? As part of the sidebar? The Recommendations bar is a much more elegant solution, as it eliminates the need to place a Like button in a particular location on a given page — its position is relative to the user’s browser window, not relative to site content. While this can be done using relatively simple HTML and CSS, Facebook’s solution is even simpler to implement, and the sizing and display has been thought through down to the pixel.

Social reading through frictionless sharing

The Recommendations Bar allows users to turn on social reading, the same functionality that’s available within canvas applications like the Washington Post Social Reader, USAToday + Me, and The Guardian. Except while those companies spent time and money creating a canvas application within Facebook, the Recommendations Bar provides the same functionality on any pre-existing website, with minimal effort. If you’ve seen stories pop up in your News Feed and Ticker like Brendan read “Facebook CEO speaks out against SOPA, PIPA” on Washington Post Social Reader, the Recommendations Plugin can generate the same kind of rich Open Graph story.

Continue reading for a preview of the NEW Facebook Marketing Bible coming in February!

Facebook is in the final stages of preparing a filing for a much anticipated public offering, sources familiar with matter tell us.

The Wall Street Journal reports that such a filing could come as early as Wednesday and says that Morgan Stanley will take the prestigious role as lead underwriter with Goldman following. We can confirm that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. are slated to underwrite the deal, but can’t confirm the order.

Facebook could be valued at between $75 and $100 billion and is expected to raise around $10 billion in the offering. Larry Yu, a Facebook spokesperson, said the company is “not going participate in IPO-related speculation.”

If Facebook went with Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter, with Goldman Sachs following, it would mimic the arrangement that Zynga chose in its December public offering. Morgan Stanley could receive up to $220 million in fees for its involvement, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The underwriting arrangement is a surprise considering that Goldman Sachs was supposed to have an advantage on taking the lead spot, given that it organized a $1.5 billion private placement for Facebook last year. Because of Securities and Exchange Commission rules allowing only 500 shareholders for privately held company that doesn’t publicly share financial results, Goldman’s fundraising round attracted media scrutiny. So the investment bank decided to allow only foreign investors to participate in the round.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that trading of Facebook shares on secondary markets would be halted for three days. Employees and former employees have also been warned by Facebook’s legal counsel not to talk to the press in the past few weeks, suggesting that a filing may be imminent.

The IPO filing would come at a critical time for Facebook. Private companies with 500 or more investors must legally make their financial records public within 120 days after the end of that calendar year.

Facebook said in January 2011 that it expected to pass the limit and file financial reports no later than April 30 this year. The company does not have to make a public offering at that time, but other companies in a similar position in the past like Google have chosen to go forward with an IPO anyway. Even if Facebook files next Wednesday, it may take several months or more than half a year before the offering depending on broad market conditions and whether company executives manage the SEC “quiet period” well.

For many years, chief executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he was not interested in taking the company public because he was focused on the product. Going public could make the company focus more on the short-term expectations of investors and less on the long-run opportunities ahead.

However, as the company’s value has grown, the pressure from employees for an exit has become more intense. In late 2008, Facebook stopped issuing outright equity and instead began to use restricted stock units, which convert to real shares in an event like an initial public offering. What this has meant for employees who have joined after 2008 is that they don’t have an ability to sell their shares in private secondary markets unlike earlier employees.

Zuckerberg has recently changed his tone. In a November interview with Charlie Rose, Zuckerberg said “We’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly, in a liquid way.”

Some pundits expect Rick Santorum to drop out of the race after the Florida primary, but his Facebook page has gotten a burst of new Likes since Thursday’s debate, according to our Inside Facebook Election Tracker.

There is still time for things to change before Florida voters go to the polls on Tuesday, but in the past, we’ve seen correlation between Facebook growth and election performance. Newt Gingrich’s page was on the rise leading up to the South Carolina primary and had a large spike the day after he won there. His growth has since leveled off, but remains higher than it had been two weeks ago.

Ron Paul reached a new high with more than 9,500 new Likes in a single day following the debate in Tampa, Florida. He has been gaining the most new fans per day for the past week. Mitt Romney’s growth has slowed over the last few days, mirroring his drop in the polls.

For a closer look at how GOP presidential primary candidates are performing on the social network, visit our election tracker.

I posted an ad for a job we are hiring for which said “To apply please send an email explaining why you would be good for the job + your resume” Applicant: hi, I am intersting in applying for this ad how can I go about it Me: Sorry, we are looking for people who [...]

Applications ranging from friendship to Open Graph to “Twilight” to job searching made our list of emerging Facebook apps by monthly active users this week. However, much of the list was taken up by applications that help users manage their Facebook pages via tabs, iframes, sweepstakes and more.

The apps grew from between 110,000 and 310,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Mejores Amigos	440,000	+310,000	+ 238%
2.	RISK: Factions	620,000	+310,000	+ 100%
3.	Hosted iFrame #3	740,000	+270,000	+ 57%
4.	Shufflr	570,000	+260,000	+ 97%
5.	Candy Dash	780,000	+250,000	+ 47%
6.	Hosted iFrame – Main	420,000	+230,000	+ 121%
7.	Hosted iFrame w/ Social Icon	500,000	+230,000	+ 85%
8.	Static IFRAME Tab : Note Icon	980,000	+210,000	+ 27%
9.	Woobox Custom Tab | Star #2	480,000	+180,000	+ 71%
10.	IFrame tabs	460,000	+170,000	+ 59%
11.	Netflix	870,000	+170,000	+ 24%
12.	Breaking Dawn – Part 1	1,000,000	+160,000	+ 19%
13.	LiveProfile	490,000	+140,000	+ 40%
14.	Sweepstakes	410,000	+140,000	+ 52%
15.	Fan of the Week for Pages	1,000,000	+120,000	+ 14%
16.	NS_EN Play Now Tab	650,000	+120,000	+ 25%
17.	Twoo	870,000	+120,000	+ 16%
18.	World Mysteries	660,000	+120,000	+ 22%
19.	11×11 – Online Football Manager	410,000	+110,000	+ 37%
20.	find.ly	350,000	+110,000	+ 46%

Mejores Amigos topped our list, growing by 310,000 MAU. This app forces users to invite all of their friends before it works. Shufflr, a daily video post, as well as Netflix’s Open Graph integration made the list. An app promoting the release of the next “Twilight” DVD, Breaking Dawn – Part 1, grew. Then there was a mobile messenger, LiveProfile,  dating app Twoo and professional Open Graph integration find.ly that grew by 110,000 MAU, despite the fact that only users that own accounts can use the app.

The rest of the list was composed of page apps. There were iFrame apps that grew from between 170,000 and 270,000 MAU: Hosted iFrame #3, Hosted iFrame – Main, Hosted iFrame w/ Social Icon, Static IFRAME Tab : Note Icon and IFrame tabs. Woobox Custom Tab | Star #2, Woobox’s Sweepstakes and Fan of the Week for Pages allow users to promote different content on their pages.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

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Facebook now shows some users up to seven ads on one page — an increase from the former maximum six.

Adding more ads to the same page could reduce clickthrough rates because it increases competition and pushes ads down to parts of the page that users might not see, but it could increase revenue for the social network. Advertisers might be concerned that as Facebook increases the amount of information it includes on fan pages, fewer ads can be seen without scrolling. When some fan pages are viewed in smaller browser windows, none of Facebook’s display ads are visible at all.

Timeline pages typically have fewer ads. We’ve seen one to two ads at a time on the new profile, which might be why the company is testing more ads on other pages. Facebook is also testing the orientation of ads on Timeline. Ads have alternated between horizontal and vertical formats in the past week.

The social network earns the majority of its revenue from advertising so optimizing the frequency and positioning of ads is important. Facebook clearly has enough inventory to increase the number of ads it shows on each page, but it must balance that with maintaining quality user experience and a level of performance that will keep advertisers coming back to the platform.

Facebook began displaying six ads at once in November. At that time the Help Center said up to five ads would show on a given page. The Help Center has since been updated to say up to six ads may be shown, but we have seen instances of seven ads at a time.