Hey, you, my innocent-looking Facebook friend. You’re using Bang With Friends, aren’t you. No? Well, thanks to an oversight found by The Daily Dot, I have proof.

There was a two week period in 2012 where everybody was talking about Bang With Friends, the Facebook app that connects you to friends you’re “emotionally” interested in if they’ve also expressed an interest in you. It was intended to be completely anonymous, in that no one would know you signed up for the app, your identity being revealed only when you’re matched up with another person.

But if you play around with Facebook’s URL a little bit, you can see all your friends who have installed the app.

All you have to do is go to this link: https://www.facebook.com/browse/friends_using_app/?app_id=178205172320915

Facebook uses “friends_using_app” to tell the server to pull data about your friends in particular and then uses the “app_id” to define which app you’re talking about. This ID happens to be for Bang With Friends.

It’s pretty simple, and it seems you can do the same thing with any app on Facebook, as long as you can find the app ID number. For example, I found out that five of my friends use Match.com by going to the company’s Fan page. From there I clicked on “Go to app” and saw in the address bar a number that looked very similar to the app id shown in the Bang with Friends example. In this case, the number came after “client id=” in the address bar. I plugged it in and it worked.

However, it was difficult to find other fan pages that linked to their apps in the same way. Simply going to the app store and clicking on an app doesn’t produce the same results either. But if you know the app’s ID number, it’s simply a matter of plug and play.

Girls gossiping image via Shutterstock

Facebook is rolling out Developer Alerts, a way for developers to keep tabs on their Facebook apps via email and Facebook notifications.

The new alerts cover a range of key communiques, such as notifications of upcoming API changes, status updates for new app submissions, and communications about the social network’s policies.

The whole system is part of Facebook’s recent wave of attempts to give developers what they need and specifically request. In this case, the company said devs were asking for more and better communication.

“Most developers won’t receive alerts very frequently, but when you do we hope you find them a helpful way to understand and track issues with your app,” writes Facebooker Min-Young Wu today on the company blog.

“We’re beginning to roll this out to apps today and plan to enable it for all apps in the coming weeks.”

Special alerts will go out when Facebook is planning changes that might break your app. You’ll get notifications 90, 60, and 30 days before the change goes into effect until you’ve enabled the necessary migration.

For clarity’s sake, app alerts are going to be threaded by issue and will include links if you need to get more information or take an action. Notifications will also be sent out when an issue is resolved.

Top image courtesy of Hasloo Group Production Studio, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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[UPDATE]: We’ve just been told by a Facebook spokesperson that app notifications will not be pushed to mobile, nor will they appear in the notifications section of the mobile app. “However, app notifications will be available for mobile in the future,” the spokesperson said.

Facebook apps just got a new way to reach out and touch ya: customized, real-time notifications. This is great news for app developers, because they can turn on notifications for any user that has authorized the app; no new permissions are required.

The Notifications API was launched today as a beta product for developers of Facebook-connected apps to give developers a way to keep users updated and engaged with the apps they make. Facebook says the best notifications are ones that are short and customized.

For example, you could send a user a notification that John T. Friend had completed a move in an Chess With Friends game.

As digital media go, notifications aren’t too invasive; they appear in the globe-shaped “jewel” for all Facebook notifications, a huge and noisy channel that also includes comment thread and message notifications.

Also, app notifications can be turned off by the user at any time with a simple and intuitive “x” button in the top right corner of the notification box. And users can choose to flag notifications as spammy, as well — even more incentive for devs to keep their notifications respectfully brief and infrequent.

On the developers’ side, Facebook is also putting out some analytics tools so you can see how those notifications are performing. You can see the number of publishes and clickthrus over time, as well as the ratio of publishes to clicks to help you better optimize when you’re sending out notifications.

Here are a few preview shots:

For those of you whose memories (and experience with building Facebook apps) go back more than, say, the lifespan of a goldfish, you may recall that Facebook has gone back and forth a bit over the years on how apps have been able to reach users.

In 2010, notifications were a different beast, and apps lost the capability to use notifications to reach users. After that, apps had to use email to speak to users — a surefire way to overcommunicate and alienate users if ever there was one. Then, apps got to reach out via counters embedded in sidebar “dashboards.” Noninvasive, but also easy for users to overlook.

Of course, the really interesting part here is to figure out how notifications will work on mobile devices. A 1-to-1 connection to users from within a website or app is great, but a 1-to-1 connection to users directly on their phone’s homescreen is even better — for developers, at least.

We can’t imagine Facebook hooking devs up with that level of access without changing user permissions, though, so while we’ve been told that mobile notifications are coming soon, we’re sure Facebook will require a fair amount of developer responsibility in exchange for that kind of power.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Want to tell all your Facebook friends that you’re voting this year? CNN and the social network want to make that easy for you with the “I’m Voting” Facebook app.

While the partnership between Facebook and CNN was announced last month, it’s only today that Facebook and CNN have gotten around to launching the new app.

“I’m Voting” taps into Facebook’s Open Graph, enabling users to broadcast to their Facebook friends what political matters they care about and for whom they plan on voting. Users can then compare their responses to those of their friends.

CNN plans to use all of this data as a sort of “second screen” for its news segments. With the Facebook user base, the network will be able to offer poll questions and get well-sampled responses relatively quickly.

While user participation in the app is low so far, some numbers have already come in: 46 percent of participating users have declared themselves  as Democrats, while 28 percent say they are Republicans. Sixty-one percent of users said they will vote for President Barack Obama during the upcoming election, compared to 30 percent who plan to vote for presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney. 

Three months and three major social-software acquisitions for Oracle.

The enterprise software and hardware company now clearly has some not-so-secret ambitions to get ahold of a healthy chunk of the marketing budgets allocated to Facebook.

Following a May purchase of social marketing startup Vitrue and a June buy of social media monitoring company Collective Intellect, Oracle today announced that it is acquiring five-year-old social marketing platform and Facebook preferred developer Involver for an undisclosed sum.

Involver is the maker of a platform used by more than 1 million brands and agencies, and it’s best known as the startup that helps brands and marketers build rich applications for their Facebook pages. The company is also the developer of many of Facebook’s own marketing applications.

“The combination of Involver with Oracle is expected to create the most advanced and comprehensive cloud-based social solution, across marketing, sales, and service touch points,” Involver president and CEO Don Beck wrote in a post on the company’s blog. “Our technology is expected to extend Oracle’s social platform to help customers more easily and cost-effectively collaborate and build engaging applications and social experiences across social networks and the Open Graph.”

With its third recent buy in the space, Oracle is signaling to customers, investors, the world, and maybe even Salesforce (which purchased Buddy Media for $689 million) that it’s quite serious about becoming a social services provider. The three-month shopping spree should help the company, not often associated with social prowess, offer its enterprise clientele a full arsenal of tools to accomplish most of their social marketing needs.

San Francisco-based Involver raised roughly $10 million in funding, including an $8 million round in October 2010, prior to its sale. The deal is expected to close this summer.

Photo credit: Andreas-photography/Flickr

Your Facebook newfeed is about to get a whole lot more political.

This fall, Facebook will team up with CNN to bring Facebook users closer to the election action with a trio of new initiatives.

One of the new plans is “I’m Voting,” a Facebook app that will allow politically-minded users to declare their stances on major issues and candidates. For not-so-political Facebook users, this means a lot more political activity in their news feeds, timelines, and tickers.

Along with the app, CNN will measure how Facebook users are talking about the presidential candidates and their running mates. The network says it can also measure this buzz on a state-by-state basis. CNN also plans to survey users around some of the larger political events later this year.

With 160 million users, Facebook’s U.S. population represents over half of the country, and while not all of those users are of voting age, it’s still a massive number. So it makes sense for CNN to tap into the network.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have taken an increasingly large role in CNN’s coverage, as they allow the network to peer more closely at the real-time reactions of its viewers. The move with Facebook takes that relationship one step further, giving CNN a stronger connection with the thoughts of huge numbers of voting-age Americans.

Expect to see a lot more Facebook in your CNN (and vice-versa)  in the coming months.

Photo: CNN

Users can now import Facebook “likes” into Springpad notebooks. The app already separates your collected items into categories like movies, music, bars, and recipes, and it will categorize and share your “likes” in the same way. With the new features, “likes” are more than a simple expression of goodwill, but rather a testament to your unique tastes and interests. Followers and friends can reference the things you like as a decision making and discovery tool.

“Facebook ‘likes’ can be valuable for people seeking recommendations from friends who share similar interests, but today they’re not discoverable,” said Jeff Chow, CEO and cofounder of Springpad.

The new Facebook integration allows new users to automatically import their “likes” into the app, which are then categorized into notebooks. Springpad enhances the “likes” by supplementing them with actionable information, like Rotten Tomato movie reviews, maps, and OpenTable reservation links. Users will also be able to post notebooks to their Facebook timelines if they choose.

Springpad was launched in 2008 and challenged Evernote as the go-to digital notebook app. The 3.0 version that launched in April added “Explore” and “Following” tabs so people could share their notebooks, evolving the product in a more social direction. The redesign also created greater visual and conceptual similarities with Pinterest. Springpad is based in Boston, MA, and has raised $5 million to date.

As a partner of the Olympic Games, General Electric has an active interest in promoting the upcoming be-all, end-all athletic competition. That explains why the appliance manufacturer has partnered with Facebook to today launch HealthyShare, a Facebook application designed to encourage people to lead healthier and more active lifestyles, just like the athletes they admire.

HealthyShare, a product of GE and Facebook, is themed around the Summer Olympics in London. The application tasks Facebook users to take six different challenges with activities inspired by Olympic hopefuls and legends, including NBA star Kevin Durant and four-time gold medal-winning sprinter Michael Johnson.

With HealthyShare, users log their progress in challenges and are awarded points for each day of activity and for Facebook “likes.” The app’s stated mission is to encourage people to stay motivated while working to achieve their health and fitness goals.

“Many research studies show that our friends can help us live healthier lives,” Facebook’s global head of brand design, Paul Adams, said. “By supporting each other, we increase people’s motivation, helping them meet their goals of feeling better, and being healthier and happier. This new tool by GE is the first step in a vision to help people be healthier by interacting with their friends.”

The tool, however, is elementary at best and seems aimed at too broad an audience, thus making it fall short of its purpose, at least in this reporter’s eyes. Each challenge offers the bare minimum in guidance and only provides users with a simple prompt, text box, and “I did it today!” or “I didn’t do it today” buttons. Kevin Durant’s GE Olympic Games Challenge, for instance, is a routine that “includes sprinting, push-ups, and plenty of time with a basketball.” But, there’s no plan to follow or any real way to track progress. Instead, users get this question to answer: “What have you done to train like an Olympian today?”

All is not lost though. “The plan is to learn quickly from this release and continually improve this tool together in the coming months,” Adams said.

For now, the app seems to be a thinly veiled, slightly awkward attempt by GE to connect its brand to uplifting concepts, establish a little goodwill, and draw attention to its support of the Olympic Games. It’s a notion underscored by the fact that GE and Facebook have a financial arrangement around the app that includes Sponsored Story ad buys.

HealthyShare is only one part of GE’s Olympic Games media push, which also includes Twitter ad buys and community engagement (ie. earned media) efforts on hot social properties Pinterest, Viddy, and Instagram.

Photo credit: Steve Broer / Shutterstock.com

Fresh after receiving a vote of confidence from Silicon Valley venture firms and rocketing to fame through Facebook, social video application Viddy is getting the red-carpet treatment from Hollywood.

Singers Shakira and Jay-Z and actor Will Smith join other high-profile entertainment and technology types as investors and partners in the Los Angeles-based company, Viddy announced Monday.

Viddy is the short-and-sweet, shoot-and-share video application for iPhone that has experienced a remarkable uptick in usage and new users since it integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph platform for Timeline and Ticker in February.

The one-year-old company, which surpassed 4.5 million users 11 days ago, now has more than 10 million registered users and is adding 300,000 new users per day. The company partly attributes its recent rapid user growth to its status as the number one free app on Apple’s App Store, a place it’s held for nearly a week.

Now Hollywood has come a-calling. Will Smith’s Overbook Entertainment and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, along with Shakira, skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, soccer star Gerard Pique, and Skull Candy chairman Jeff Kearl have all invested or partnered with Viddy, the company revealed today. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, ShoeDazzle founder Brian Lee, and Omniture founder Josh James have also hopped on Viddy’s bandwagon.

In a rather odd move, the startup is not disclosing which of the heavy-hitters are investors and which are merely partners, nor is it going on the record with how much funding it has raised — but the latter we can determine for ourselves.

In Viddy’s Form D, filed Feb. 12, the company indicated that it had sold $5.75 million of a $6 million Series A offering. And a company spokesperson told VentureBeat that, ”This group expressed interest in participation toward the completion of Viddy’s Series A round in February.”

We can deduce then that the new investors pooled together the remaining $250,000 to fill out the round.

As Viddy sits comfortably in the top spot at Apple’s App Store, continues to spread on Facebook, and has the backing of celebrities, we can well ask if the app now has what it takes to achieve Instagram-like success.

Photo credit: Thomas Hawk/Flickr

The debate club is coming to Facebook, and no, I don’t mean the after-school activity. CrowdFanatic is pitting Facebook fan pages against each other today, opening up the “walled garden of fans” that are social groups for lively back-and-forth.

“Facebook’s groups and pages act as isolated islands with no bridges to other groups and limited ways to promote their causes or challenge rivals,” said CrowdFanatic founder Yaron Bazaz in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “There is no place on the internet that acts like online Tahrir Square, where rival groups can engage online directly to advance their cause or create a democratic dialog with opponent.”

CrowdFanatic’s new social app acts as layer over Facebook, so that fans from, say, Obama’s fan page can go head-to-head with Mitt Romney’s. Users can “create arenas” in which these fans will suggest debate topics, play games, vote in polls, and perform other Facebook-oriented actions such as liking and commenting. On either side, fans can become “top supporters” depending on how often they engage with the arena. The end goal is to win your debates and spread your side of the story on the biggest social network in the world.

Bazaz notes that EnemyGraph lets you find people with rivaling opinions across Facebook, but doesn’t give you a place to hash out opinions in a public forum. Of course, you could also just like a fan page and put your opposing views on that page’s wall, but that’s poor Facebook form. Twitter will undoubtedly remain the most popular debating destination among social networks.

Currently, CrowdFanatic is getting interest from sports organizations, non-profits, as well as protesters to use the app.

Bazaz started the company in 2009 and opened the beta destination site crowdfanatic.com in 2011. So far the company has raised around $300,000 from friends and family, as well as government grants. CrowdFanatic has six employees and is headquartered in Vancouver as well as Sunnyvale, Calif.

[Update: On stage at DEMO, Bazaz and his colleague Chris (pictured below) showed how you could easily create an arena. They created a Hunger Games vs. Twilight movie battle. Then they activated it with one click and then shared the link with friends. Friends could then pile into the discussion and vote. In another ongoing battle, they showed that The Hunger Games was beating Harry Potter, 518 to 307. 

Bazaz said, "In a fun way, you can fight for the group and win the social media battlefield."]

[Photo Credit: Heather Kelly]

CrowdFanatic is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Arm wrestling image via Shutterstock

Web content discovery service StumbleUpon is rolling out a new Facebook Timeline app today that allow you to share all the cool stuff you find during the day with friends and family.

StumbleUpon’s service lets people discover and share new web content based on a broad spectrum of categories. Users click a “stumble” button to discover new content, and then have the option of voting and commenting on the selection. As of October 2011, the service has 20 million active users, and over 1 billion “stumbles” per month.

“What we’re doing with the new app is marrying the best parts of both services, StumbleUpon’s content discovery with Facebook’s socialization,” said StumbleUpon VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that the new app was a logical move for the company because so many of its own users are also constantly on Facebook.

Every time you either discover or give a “thumbs up” (a.k.a. like) to something, the new app will push that activity to your Facebook Timeline as well as the real-time news ticker feed. Adding a new channel, category, or StumbleUpon user also generates a notification within the Timeline. All your likes will get grouped together by category (as shown in the image above), which is probably more effective than the standard list of Facebook “likes” for showing people what you’re into.

Leibowitz said the company plans to add more functionality to the Facebook app as it makes sense based on user behavior, but for now there’s plenty to gain from just integrating activity updates. He pointed out that a person is likely to feel gratification for being the first among their social circle to share the funniest/weirdest/craziest thing from the web — which is something I agree with. The combination of StumbleUpon and the Facebook Timeline app has the potential to make your friends think of you as the foremost connoisseur of web content and curation.

And curating all the best links will naturally spark discussion. StumbleUpon has its own method for commenting on a discovered web page, but its far from the robust conversations that take place through Facebook.

“Each activity update for discoveries, likes, or favorites becomes its own social object that invites people to start talking about it,” Leibowitz told me.

The new Timeline app is specifically designed for current StumbleUpon users, but that doesn’t mean others won’t enjoy it vicariously through friends. And considering how good the service is at finding entertaining/interesting content, its bound to drive new people to sign up for StumbleUpon accounts and boost traffic. It’s also worth noting that community link sharing site Digg, which has content discovery elements similar to StumbleUpon, saw a huge boost in signups and traffic activity after launching its own Facebook app in February.

StumbleUpon’s new Timeline app is available today. However, to enable the app itself, you have to grant the service permission to link with your Facebook account through the StumbleUpon settings page.

First, it was the lifestyle apps. Then, it was the media apps. Now, video apps are reporting huge growth numbers from launching Timeline-friendly features for Facebook.

Today, Facebook issued some interesting stats from a slew of video companies, including heavy hitters such as Vevo and Viddy.

These apps are using Actions, a new way for apps to show up on your Timeline. Actions turn structured data into a visually interesting and engaging experience for normal users, and these numbers show how well they work for video sites in particular.

Viddy first launched its Timeline app in February. Viddy makes one of the most popular apps in the Apple App Store, and since rolling out Facebook Actions, it has doubled the number of average daily signups and has grown from 60,000 monthly active users (MAUs) to more than 920,000 monthly active users.

Vevo only started integrating with Facebook recently, but it’s already seeing a 200 percent uptick in daily registrations. Also, Vevo stated that the majority of its traffic — 60 percent — comes via Timeline posts on Facebook.

Izlesene is a Turkey-based video site. Facebook reported this company has seen its MAUs skyrocket from 250,000 to a whopping 6.5 million since last September. Finally, French startup Dailymotion reported 9 million new users for the Dailymotion Timeline app over the past two months, bringing in a total of 6 million site visitors each day.

These kinds of growth numbers are pretty typical for most of the larger apps we’ve seen that have reported post-Timeline-app growth stats. For example, back in February, Pinterest, Fab, and a slew of other lifestyle apps said their numbers were skyrocketing directly due to Actions’ implementation on users’ Timelines. During the same month, we heard similar stories from media outlets such as MTV News and the Daily Show.

We even had some one-on-one time with Goodreads founder Otis Chandler to talk about “the Facebook bump” — for Goodreads, this meant nearly 6.5 million actions published to Facebook over a two-month period. “We hoped for it, but we didn’t know it would be to this extent,” said Chandler, echoing the similar sentiments of many founders in his position.

However, we should note that this kind of engagement is typical only for apps using Actions to publish stories to users’ Timelines. Brands that have enabled Timeline for their own Pages have not seen significant increases in engagement, as several third-party researchers have stated and as Facebook confirmed via email to VentureBeat this afternoon.

For Timeline apps, however, bringing social context to social products is key. “The social context should continue throughout the user’s experience,” Facebooker Alex Himel wrote on the Facebook developer blog today. “For example, VEVO shows a facepile on the left side of the website that the user sees from the start and surfaces social features with each video.”

Top image courtesy of Dmitry Kalimovsky, Shutterstock

UPDATE: Yoke founder Rob Fishman wrote us to say another 2,000 people joined since last night, and we have updated the headline accordingly.

The hardest part about starting a dating site is getting a crowd of interesting people to join up that can be matched against one another. Some sites resort to buying up sleazy pre-made profiles, but the New York startup Yoke has another approach. It uses Facebook as the base of your profile, and matches you with single friends and friends of friends who share interests. In it’s first week, says founder Rob Fishman, the site has added 5,000 users.

Yoke doesn’t ask users to create a profile, it pulls data on gender, sexual orientation and what kind of books and movies you like straight from your Facebook account. It also hooks in to the Netflix API and looks at listening history from sites like Spotify and Rdio, then compares them to a taste graph made available through the Echos Nest API. Yoke also has their own API that matches users based on what college they went to (Harvard you say, I’m a Yale man myself).

What are the advantages to this approach? It’s super-lightweight. Users don’t spend any time creating a profile of themselves and answering innumerable questions about what they are and aren’t looking for in a new partner. The downside? The service is connecting you with people who never signed up for Yoke and may or may not be looking for a date at all. We know plenty of folks who list themselves as single on Facebook who are most definitely already attached.

“We only have a few thousand people signed up, but that means tens of millions of possible connections,” says Fishman, who previously worked as a social media editor at the Huffington Post. His co-founder, Jeff Revesz, sold his company Adaptive Semantics to HuffPo in 2009 and helped create HuffPo’s commenting system. Yoke is backed by a $500,000 seed round led by Lerer Ventures along with SoftBank Capital. “I’m on there using the service, along with the rest of the team.” They say a good startup always eats its own dogfood, and Fishman promised to update VentureBeat if he finds a new girlfriend via Yoke.

Proving that not all people want to characterize online relationships in the friendliest of terms, a new Facebook application for listing your enemies is now working its way through the social network at breakneck pace.

EnemyGraph, first released last month, is a play on Facebook’s social graph and encourages people to use the popular social network to do the exact opposite of what they’re used to: declare their enemies.

The app, developed by a research group in the Emerging Media and Communications program at the University of Texas at Dallas, has received a lot of media coverage in the past two days for its anti-friending product, adding more than 10,000 users in the last 36 hours.

“People want to express themselves in broader ways, and not always in the ways that Facebook prefers. I think this is a blind spot, an opportunity,” EnemyGraph co-creator and program director Dean Terry told VentureBeat.

He might be right. The frenzy of activity may be too much for the little app, however, as it appears to be buckling under the pressure of maintaining so many enemy relationships.

In addition to encouraging folks to finger their foes, the application also tracks the most disliked people on Facebook. Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and pop-star Justin Bieber are two of the most despised people on Facebook, according to EnemyGraph’s tabulations.

For Terry and his student co-creators Bradley Griffith and Harrison Massey, though, EnemyGraph is less about making enemies and more about understanding the complexities of online relationships. The current crop of social networks are lopsided, they argue.

“You learn a lot about people by what they dislike,” Terry said. “This app opens the door to wondering if there’s a way to draw people together against something that in turn results in positive social change, or at least brings [people] together in new ways.”

With the influx of attention, the application, launched primarily as an exploration in social dissonance, could evolve into a full-fledged company. “We’re interested in developing this idea further in a non-Facebook app. There’s certainly a startup angle here,” Terry said.

Photo credit: joeshlabotnik/Flickr

Facebook is now letting users do most of the things they’d do from a status update, like uploading photos or including locations or tagging people, from just about any non-Facebook app.

Starting today, your apps can add location and friends as properties to any update, photo, or link. To accomplish this feat, the social network has rolled out a whole herd of new APIs and documentation. You have your location-setting API, your friend-tagging API, your improved places search API, and your location-reading API.

“It’s going to allows consumers who are using third-party apps to have a richer and deeper experience with third-party apps,” said Gowalla founder and current Facebooker Josh Williams.

“Now, content that’s coming in from an application can have the same sort of feature-richness on a user’s Timeline that something posted natively would have.”

Williams continued that the new APIs will be saving developers a lot of time. “It’s stuff that devs spend a lot of time building out from scratch.”

Also, he noted, some of the functionality announced today is entirely new, stuff that devs couldn’t do with any amount of time or effort. “Previously [at Facebook], there was this idea of checking in,” Williams explained. “There was a traditional checkin product that Facebook built originally, but that was deprecated to allow adding location to any post. That API has never been available before.”

So, instead of just checking into the places they’re at right now, users can put a lot more meaning and nuance into locations — where they’ve been, where they want to go, where life events happened, and more.

“In the context of a Timeline maps view, you can show, for example, the countries you’ve visited in the past,” said Williams. “I’m excited about the things we’ll see on the Timeline map, i think this will open up new channels for creativity.”

Apps can set location for Open Graph actions and objects or with stream publish stories; friends can be tagged with Open Graph actions or with stream publish stories. Place search now includes optional latitude, longitude, and distance parameters and support for finding posts from friends around a place. And location-reading uses the FQL table location_post.

You’ll also get APIs for larger photo display and inline video playback.

“Speaking as a recent third-party developer myself, we were really excited about taking all this content we were creating and seeing it visualized in this consistent, permanent space,” said Williams of developing for Timeline.

“There are all kinds of niches where Facebook is never going to go, but people really want to see that information represented in the kind of holistic journal that Timeline is… it’s beyond the scope of what we are building internally.”

Image courtesy of pressureUA, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With Facebook’s financial situation firmly in the spotlight after its IPO filing, the company will finally address the problem of generating revenues from mobile users by introducing mobile ads in the next few weeks.

One of Facebook’s biggest risks Facebook listed in last week’s IPO filing was “mobile,” and the company said it generates no “meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products.” One solution would be to launch a Facebook-branded phone that would help the company better control the experience and serve up new ad products. But a more reasonable and quick solution is to start serving ads through its popular mobile apps and the mobile version of the web site.

The company will launch mobile ads, called “featured stories”, within weeks, according to the Financial Times. Essentially, Facebook’s will start putting ads inside of your News Feed that look similar to other stories with no way to block them. That’s quite a similar approach to what Twitter does with its “promoted tweets,” and its likely the smartest way to immediately start generating mobile revenue while working on other advertising products.

Facebook’s mobile presence is staggering, with more than 425 million monthly active users active on mobile devices. Its users have access to the service through mobile sites, feature phone products, and smartphone apps on Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile. In the S-1 filing last week, it claimed that the Facebook application is the “most frequently downloaded app across all major smartphone platforms in the United States,” according to a third-party report. The company believes usage across mobile will continue to grow, especially with young users, so it needs to start monetizing that usage.

While users will likely be vocally upset with the inclusion of ads on mobile like they were with Twitter, those users will likely not leave because of it. If I had to take an educated guess, they’ll just complain bitterly about the change to their friends on Facebook and then get over it a few days later (like they do with every major design change).

What do you think about the inclusion of advertising in your mobile News Feed?

Facebook on Android phone photo: Johan Larsson/Flickr

Sad that Google’s online photo editor Picnik is meeting its demise this year? Well, veteran photo editing service Aviary is plotting to take its place. On Monday the company announced it’s bringing its photo editing services to the Web with a new Facebook app.

“We took the best pieces of our original software, made it lightweight, and launched into Facebook. We were founded to try to bring creativity to the masses,” Alexander Taub, Aviary’s lead of business development and partnerships, told VentureBeat.

Aviary started out in 2007 as a powerful editing service for professionals — “Photoshop in the cloud” as Taub  calls it. In 2011, the company moved into the mobile device market with a mobile API.

Aviary lets you do all the basic photo edits you’d expect; crop, brightness, and contrast. Beyond simple edits, Aviary has several photo filters and stickers to add personality to your pictures. The filters give your photos the in-demand retro Instagram-look, a feature Picnik lacked.

With Picnik gone, Aviary hopes to be the better and more powerful answer to Picnik, with more tools and faster photo editing. It also hopes to offer its services on a larger online scale.

“Picnik built their offering into third party apps such as Flickr. We want to fill the gap Picnik has created with those services,” said Taub.

Aviary is based in New York City and has raised a total of $11M from Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and Spark Capital.

The company, which started out as a textbook rental entity, has exploded into an education conglomerate with it’s hands in course registration, homework help, tutorials and more. Chegg may be focusing on more internal design efforts, however, beefing up its design team with the simultaneous acquisition of software design studio 3D3R.

“Chegg is always striving to offer students the very best tools to save time, save money and get smarter,” said Chegg president and chief executive officer Dan Rosensweig in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “In that spirit, we recently acquired Flux Software Co./3D3R, which is an incredible engineering and design team focused on helping Chegg deliver the dynamic user experience students expect today.”

According to the filing, the deal rung up a little over $1.1 million in common stock.

Flux, as TechCrunch points out, is not associated with the enterprise software company Flux Software. Instead Flux/3D3R is a design team, which may, more specifically, have been brought on for Chegg’s recently announced Facebook application.

“We’ve created apps and experiences for a variety of web platforms, and have an extensive history of developing for the Facebook ecosystem,” reads 3D3R’s website.

Chegg announced its Facebook integration soon after Facebook’s f8 conference in September. The company says it will provide course listings for over 1000 colleges and universities, and allow students to add their own through a Chegg widget.

3D3R was founded in 2005 with offices in both San Francisco and Tel Aviv. It has worked with companies like Yahoo, Nokia and Boxee.

Music streaming companies like MOG, Rdio and Spotify were eager to get integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph platform because it makes sharing music selections and music companies much easier. Turns out that connecting 800 million users with your already-good service really does wonders for exposure and growth.

MOG said registrations through its Facebook app reached 160,000 users for the month of October, which is a 246% jump of monthly average users. MOG CEO and founder David Hyman told VentureBeat that integrating with Facebook has been the best method of distribution the company has ever had.

“This is monumental growth for us,” Hyman said. “Based on early data, we expect to get a 3 to 5 percent conversion rate for premium use.”

At the present growth rate, Hyman said MOG’s Facebook-authenticated users could reach 2 million users by the end of the year. He also noted that the number could explode more once Facebook further integrates the Open Graph with users and launches its anticipated Timeline feature.

“Our understanding is that Facebook has not even come close to exposing the music platform to most of its users,” Hyman said. “Most users haven’t even seen a play button on Facebook yet. I’ve been told 15 percent have so far. Once Facebook is done with its Timeline testing, that 2 million user projection could get even bigger.”

Hyman said the next step is encouraging and incentivizing its Facebook Connect users to share more music on Facebook and get more Facebook friends to give MOG a try. MOG currently has a free version where users have a “gas tank” of free music but can get more gas in the tank by sharing MOG and music with friends.

“We need to turn these people coming in from Facebook into a megaphone that drives more people into the funnel,” Hyman said. “We want to ensure that every person coming in through Facebook uses our links to earn more free music.”

Premium unlimited access to MOG’s 13 million song catalog is available using its desktop app or though Samsung Smart TVs and Blu-ray players and costs $4.99 a month. If you pay $9.99 a month, you can use the service via iPhone and Android apps as well.

Digital comic book platform Graphicly is keenly aware of this trend, which is why it launched a new Facebook app Tuesday that lets comic book publishers host their content within the social network.

The app makes it much easier to expose new and casual fans to a wide selection of comic books, according to Graphicly founder and CEO Micah Baldwin.

“Most of our users are actually new comic book readers who have never been exposed to comics before,” said Baldwin in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that because of this, the new Facebook app is the perfect place to grow interest in digital comics and add value to the Graphicly platform.

As for reading comic books on the app itself, the experience is pretty enjoyable. Facebook users first choose a particular comic they’d like to read and select it, which is then displayed in the app window within the publisher’s Facebook page. The size of the comic is smaller, but users can choose to view it in full screen mode without degrading the quality of the images. Two pages appear on the screen at a time — just like you’d see when opening a physical, paper version of the comic — and you can navigate back and forth using arrow buttons in the menu bar (see screenshot). The Facebook app also features Graphicly’s panel-by-panel view setting that’s available on other Graphicly platforms (web, desktop, iPhone, iPad, etc.).

The one thing you won’t find on Graphicly’s Facebook app for publishers is its own branding. The only reference that’s made to the service is within a word-less icon that pops up when users mouse over a comic that’s being read through the app. When clicked, the icon sends the user to Graphicly’s website to view that particular comic, which they can then purchase, rate, or discuss. The company has lots of integration with Facebook for its commenting and sharing. Eventually, users will also be able to purchase comics using Facebook Credits, according to Baldwin.

The process for comic book publishers is also very easy, as it requires minimal technical skill. Publishers, such as Top Cow which is featured in the screenshot, need only add a few lines of code to their Facebook page to include a sample of their products via Graphicly’s app.

Right now, Graphicly boasts a large number of major comic book publishers, including Marvel, Archie Comics, IDW, Boom Studios and more. However, both smaller publishers and creator-owned works are getting added to the service each week and will also have the ability to feature their comic books through the Graphicly Facebook App.

“I think we’re gravitating to a model that lets anyone use the Facebook app to showcase their work, but for now its only available for publishers (featured on the Graphicly platform),” Baldwin said.

Currently, Graphicly is the only digital comic book platform that offers publishers a way to put their content on Facebook. It’s one of several features that sets the company apart from competitors in the same market, such as industry leader comiXology, which is more focused on providing an inventory of content available to users via cloud storage.

The Boulder, Colorado-based startup closed a $3 million funding round in January 2011 led by DFJ Mercury, with participation from 500 Startups (the “super angel” fund from well-known investor Dave McClure), Dundee VC, Ludlow Ventures, and individual angel investors. The company was incubated by TechStars and previously raised $1.2 million from DFJ Mercury and others. It has 20 employees and has raised a total $4.2 million to date.

As you can see from the Dell and Intel logos in the screenshot, the app is ad-supported. This is an interesting twist considering that the bulk of WSJ content is now behind a paywall.

The app, called WSJ Social, filters the publication’s content through Facebook’s social graph to yield a collection of news tailor-made for each person.

“[I'm] really excited about news apps on Facebook and how it has the potential to change the reading and news consumption experience on the platform,” said Facebook Journalist Project Manager Vadim Lavrusik on his Facebook wall.

The app itself features articles that are arranged in tiles that consist of a thumbnail image, a headline and a few smaller thumbnails of people who have “liked” that particular link. At the top left-hand corner, the news app displays the total number of WSJ stories you’ve liked and saves them for later viewing. Beside the “likes” link is another “readers” link, which lets you follow particular editors and such. I’m not entirely sure how useful this feature will be because I don’t know any WSJ editors — especially any that frequently use Facebook.

With 20 titles available so far, the Miramax eXperience app is one of the largest movie streaming apps yet to hit the massively popular social site. It joins other studios like Warner Bros., Paramount and Universal that also allow users to rent and watch movies via Facebook.

Miramax CEO Mike Lang said he sees the Facebook app as just the beginning of a wide-ranging content strategy where users will be able to watch movies on any web platform.

“No question, there will be more content and more markets,” Lang said in a blog post. “Our plan is to use this as an enabling platform, including eventually as a digital locker cloud service.”

Users can watch movies on Facebook from a PC, iPad, or Google TV browser. Rentals through the application cost 30 Facebook credits, or $3. Facebook gets to keep one third of the rental costs, so Miramax earns $2 for every rental. That amount is higher than what a company makes from streaming rentals through a service like Netflix or Hulu, which usually gives pennies for each stream.

Aside from short movie clips, the app will also soon include a game called Casting Call where you can can cast your Facebook friends as characters in Miramax films.

What do you think of Facebook movie rentals? Do you think many users will use it?

He also said the platform is now hosting 700,000 apps (or 150,000 more than previously reported).

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=12784867&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Five Q’s with Timothy Sparapani, Facebook from Rob Haralson on Vimeo.

Sparapani said:

“Who’s in charge of making sure these applications do exactly what they say they’re supposed to do? The vast, vast majority — 99.99 percent — of the applications on our platforms, on Apple’s and Google’s, are going to do exactly what people expect. But some will have bugs. Some will get hacked. And some of them, unfortunately, will be run by people who will try to manipulate data and try to take it and use it in ways that consumers won’t expect.

So who’s in charge? Is it the developer? Is it the FTC? Is it the attorney general? Is it Facebook, Apple and Google? And these are questions that haven’t been quite answered yet. If you look at the way the law is currently structured, we think the FTC and the attorney general have a responsibility to make sure that those very few applications which might not meet consumer expectations are being policed.

There’s an open question as to whether the FTC and attorney general are looking into this and we think they should at least begin to consider how they’re going to police it because the other opportunity is to force Google, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce — companies which are platform companies — to have some sort of enforcement mechanism.

And that’s not a role we want to be in. We want to set the parameters. We want to give our users a good experience. But it’s very difficult for one company to tell other companies — especially 700,000 of them — exactly what they should do and how they should control their interactions with other consumers.”

One of the very interesting questions confronting companies like Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google is how they police ecosystems involving hundreds of thousands of applications every single day.

Each company has its own style of regulation. Apple exerts upfront control with its review process, rejecting apps if they crash, use private application programming interfaces or don’t work as advertised. But it has weaker power to police apps once they have met its approval. Google, on the other hand, is permissive at first, but can shut down apps that violate its policies even if a user has already downloaded them.

Facebook’s enforcement has evolved since the platform’s inception three years ago in response to spam and unanticipated abuse. Its style resembles Google’s and it cracks down on apps if it discovers violations.

However, the speed and scale with which all of these ecosystems have flourished raises a number of legal questions. Facebook may act in good faith, but with 700,000 applications and just 1,400 employees, its whack-a-mole approach can’t possibly discover every violation.

There are plenty of innocuous apps, like quizzes, that could take user data — which they now have access to for an indefinite amount of time under Facebook’s new policies — and use it in unscrupulous ways. Nor would they have the incentive to overtly reveal how they manipulate user data. This is unlike apps that blatantly steal passwords or violate the company’s policies, which Facebook will shut down.

While there isn’t a prominent case of this sort on Facebook yet, it does exist on the open web. For example, the RealAge ads that permeate millions of web pages and advertise a quiz to tell consumers their “real age,” is actually a front for drug marketers, according to The New York Times. More than 27 million people have filled out detailed medical questionnaires, revealing data that pharmaceutical companies pay for unbeknownst to consumers.

Who is responsible for watching out for cases like these? Should platform companies have the same kind of “intermediary liability” that protects ISPs, web hosting companies and search engines when their users upload illegal content?

Judging by the FTC’s recent interventions with other platform companies like Google — like its six-month inquiry into the company’s acquisition of AdMob — it seems the regulatory agency doesn’t have the resources to understand the dynamics of these complex ecosystems, let alone handle enforcement for millions of apps. So it’s unnerving to see the buck being passed around.