Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

As many users are aware, Facebook has been fighting mounting security threats in recent weeks. Developers and analysts alike want to know more about what’s happening and what Facebook is doing to contain the threats, so here’s the story:

The Problems

1. A variant of the Koobface worm, originally detected by Kapersky Lab a few weeks ago, has been increasingly spreading on Facebook in recent weeks. Here’s how it works:

Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, which targets Facebook users, creates spam messages and sends them to the infected users’ friends via the Facebook site. The messages and comments include texts such as Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street; Examiners Caught Downloading Grades From The Internet; Hello; You must see it!!! LOL. My friend catched you on hidden cam; Is it really celebrity? Funny Moments and many others.

Messages and comments on MySpace and Facebook include links to http://youtube.[skip].pl. If the user clicks on this link, s/he is redirected to http://youtube.[skip].ru, a site which purportedly contains a video clip. If the user tries to watch it, a message appears saying that s/he needs the latest version of Flash Player in order to watch the clip. However, instead of the latest version of Flash Player, a file called codecsetup.exe is downloaded to the victim machine; this file is also a network worm. The result is that users who have come to the site via Facebook will have the MySpace worm downloaded to their machines, and vice versa.

2. In addition, recent chain letters have started to spread across Facebook with various types of misinformation, including messages like “Facebook is going to start charging you to use the site,” “Facebook is going to start shutting down accounts that aren’t active enough,” etc.

Facebook’s Response

Facebook has responded in a number of ways:

1. Facebook is deleting content generated by the worm (Facebook says they have “again contained” it) and spammy chain letters.

2. Facebook is posting updates on the status of security issues to the Facebook Security Page and publishing best practices for users to avoid phishing attacks, like these and these.

3. Facebook is asking users to pass on the following information:

We will never use any of the following methods to tell you information, or ask for you to take an action:

* Your Wall
* An inbox message from a friend—in other words, chain letters.
* Messages spread through Applications—if an application is telling you that Facebook is about to shut down, report it.

Since there’s been a lot of wrong information about Facebook spreading around, we’d like to clarify a few things for the record:

* We are not shutting down accounts that are not “active” enough.
* We are not going to start charging you to use Facebook.
* We will never ask you to send us your password or login information.
* We will never put the responsibility on YOU to send information to your friends. If we have information we need to share, it’s our job to get the word out.
* When we do communicate to you about the site (with the exception of posts made on this blog) it will always be from a collective Facebook. You won’t hear from me, personally, or from Mark, or from Dustin, or from any of the Facebook bloggers you’ve seen here.

So the next time you see a chain letter, chain wall post, or chain anything, report it to our User Operations team, and tell all your friends to ignore it. We could make a joke here about passing this entry on to ten of your friends, but that’s not cool.

4. Facebook is blocking Wall posts that contain links to known phishing sites:

5. Facebook is improving its automated systems to automatically detect abuse on the site more quickly.

6. Facebook is pursuing many of the perpetrators (the company sued alleged Facebook account hijacker Adam Guerbuez last week).

Conclusion

What do Facebook’s recent security issues mean in the long run? Ultimately, it’s vital for everyone involved in the Facebook ecosystem that Facebook continue to invest in security detection and prevention. Everything in Facebook depends on user trust, and everyone wants these issues to be have as little impact as possible.

Facebook will be holding its first Developer Garage “Connect Edition” next week in Palo Alto. Developers will be able to learn more about how Facebook Connect can be used to let users connect their Facebook identity to a third party site, find friends there, and share info back to Facebook.

While Connect is still in beta, this will be one of the first chances developers have to see early versions of Facebook Connect implementations. Here are the details:

* When: Wednesday, September 3rd
* Time: 6:30 PM- Midnight
* Where: Blue Chalk Café - 630 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA

For more, check out the event page.

Popular Facebook game Mob Wars has recently been rumored to be the most profitable app on Facebook. While that will never be known for sure, one thing is clear: Mob Wars is making a lot of cash. Probably in the tens of thousands of US dollars per day. How?

One large reason: Mob Wars has baked incentivized CPA offers from Super Rewards directly into the game, and expertly tuned its virtual economy to drive offer conversions without significantly imbalancing the economy or damaging game play. (Mob Wars also works closely with CPA monetization firm Offerpal Media.)

Super Rewards has largely remained quiet on the PR front to date, but the company is working with many of the top developers on Facebook to monetize their games. Super Rewards partners include Mob Wars, Knighthood, Premier Football, and several of the top apps in Zynga’s family of games, including Texas HoldEm Poker and YoVille. The company has built a 14 person team across its Vancouver headquarters, New York office, and soon to be opened San Francisco office.

We recently spent some time with Super Rewards CEO and Co-founder Jason Bailey and President Adam Caplan to learn more about how the company is working with Mob Wars and other leading apps and social games to make real money.

Jason, how does Super Rewards help social app and game developers make money?

What we do exceptionally well is understanding the nuances of all the games we work with. We work closely with developers to tweak and balance their game play and economies around their virtual currencies. Developers come in making $100 a day and we can take them up to $1000 a day in short order.

How detailed do you get?

We provide a broad range of services, everything from pricing specific items to consulting. Some developers have experience with their economies in current or past apps and want our help putting offers in front of their users. Others come to us while their game is still in alpha and really value our input.

What’s the most important thing developers need to do to make money with CPA offers?

The most important thing is balancing your economy properly. You should support all kinds of players well, while remembering that your hardcore users will generate 90% of your revenue.

You want to make sure users want to obtain and spend points, while preserving the quality of the game play. For example, in Mob Wars, in order to replenish your health you can either wait for the system to revitalize you or you can “go to the Godfather” and earn some “favor points.” (see right)

So how do you measure performance?

The core metric we use is dollars per click. We hope our developers can get 25% of their daily active users through a Super Rewards page at some point. Of those, if the economy is balanced correctly, you should see a 40-50% click through rate, and ultimately a net 8-10% conversion rate. Developers get about $1.00-$1.50/conversion for US users, but less for international users. We’re lucky to get $0.06/conversion in China, but we have games operating in Europe and other parts of Asia at $0.25 and up.

So assuming all of a developer’s traffic is US traffic, the developer could see up to $83 per day per thousand DAUs. However, on an average basis across all geographies, we are about half that number. It goes without saying that there is a wide distribution around the average based on quality of app and balance of virtual currency economy.

What kind of apps are doing the best?

Games! Gifting and poking apps don’t do as well. Games that do the best are ones in which the players want to be on top of the leaderboard, collect items, or play games of chance.

Also, keep in mind at that a majority of the revenue generated per user is generated early in the lifetime of the users’ interaction with the games. People spend money developing their characters, climbing the leader board, and unlocking new elements of the game. Once their character is strong, they have many prizes, and have unlocked all the levels - naturally there is less desire to complete offers and pay. It is those top guys though that motivate the little guys to climb and thus spend.

As another example, there is one app that has about 200,000 MONTHLY active users (4-50k DAU). Yesterday, about 14,000 users hit the Super Rewards page (about 30%). The users were about 35% USA, 55% CA, AU, and UK, the remaining 10% all over the world. 5,500 clicks were generated (40% CTR). Revenues were about $4,500 for the day for an EPC of about $0.80. This is a newer app so its earnings per 1,000 DAU is a touch higher than average. Also it is an engaging game with a virtual currency so it is a great fit for us. It is a fairly international app, but nothing unusual. If it had more US users it would earning higher aver EPCs.

So those numbers scale well at the smaller DAUs, but when apps have 500k DAU the formula gets more complicated. That being said, there are PLENTY of apps making $6,000 a day on various platforms. But no single app that I know of making $60,000 a day consistently.

However, we’re just in the beginning. We’re starting to see bigger players move in to the space with higher quality apps. I expect to see some very high quality games released in the next few months.

And some people think our stuff looks hokey, but we purposely make it match the look and feel of the game, like in Mob Wars. That is just how Facebook games look.

Right. So, how much does the social network context affect monetization potential?

The social factor is definitely important in driving games where there is pride or ego involved in being on the top of the list. However, the main reason our partner apps are doing well is entertainment. Casual MMO’s outside of social networks would do just as well. Social networks are just a great way to grow quickly, and play against real friends and family instead of random people you meet in the lobby.

Thanks Jason. Any final thoughts?

We are very bullish on the space. We’ll be moving into other areas like casual games and web games soon.

Our 200 developers love Super Rewards, but they don’t want us to talk about it. But we’ve been optimizing our system over the last year, and are now ready for prime time.

This evening, Facebook announced a new set of demographic targeting features that will enable developers to limit users that view specific content. Developers may limit viewership based on age and location. With these restrictions comes a policy update which enables alcoholic beverages to be promoted. As the blog post today states:

We plan to modify this policy to permit promotion of content around the sale of alcohol, provided that you specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.

There have already been a number of applications shut down for the promotion of alcohol and it is no secret that alcohol companies are desperate to get on to Facebook. Most likely because one of the largest demographics for the site is college students. Does that mean that Facebook is going to start alcohol promotions in the near future? I don’t see why not.

Alcohol companies spend billions on advertising, so I’d guess that we’ll see many more beer and liquor ads in the near future. Perhaps Facebook will start to feel like spring break! If you’d like more details on the demographic restrictions check out the wiki page.

While 10% of Facebook employees may have come from Google, the tide is now flowing in the opposite direction too. Ben Ling, who decided to leave Facebook this week, is headed back to Google to lead YouTube’s monetization efforts, Kara Swisher reports.

The move back to GOOG comes only 10 months after Ling left Google Checkout’s e-commerce platform group to run Platform product marketing for Facebook. YouTube’s former head of monetization, Saschi Shef, recently left Google to become chief revenue officer at KP-backed startup Cooliris.

Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.

The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.

Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”

Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.

“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does

Facebook pushed a couple changes to the redesigned home page tonight that may be of interest to application developers:

1) Publisher shortcuts for Facebook-developed applications have been removed, and publishing status updates has been promoted.

The new design is reminiscent of the Twitter home page:

Previously, links to your own profile page with the Publisher selected for posting photos, videos, notes, and links were located here.

2) Status updates have been removed from the right rail, and application bookmarks have been promoted. Now, status updates are only accessible within the Top Stories feed or filtered Status Updates feed.

Old:

3) And finally, some UI elements have been cleaned up, which may satisfy picky designers.

Top Facebook application developer Slide has rebranded FunWall, the biggest application on the Facebook Platform by monthly reach, as “Slide FunSpace (formerly FunWall).” FunWall’s 21 million monthly active users should now notice the chance on their Facebook profile pages and bookmarks.

The move marks the first time Slide has included its company brand in the name of its Facebook applications. While all Slide applications are heavily branded within the canvas page, Slide’s other popular applications - Top Friends and SuperPoke - don’t include the company’s name in the app title.

The change in branding may be partially due to some of the changes in Facebook’s upcoming profile page redesign. The new “Wall” tab on the profile page allows for more types of rich media content in the Facebook Wall (a combination of Facebook’s old wall and feed concepts), which many have argued encroaches on third party “wall” applications.

The change also reflects how easy it is for application developers to rebrand their applications inside the Facebook world. One change to your developer settings page and voila! - your application’s name is updated to millions of users throughout Facebook instantly.

Facebook announced today that is has enabled two new Facebook Platform features that enable developers to restrict access to certain application content - or the entire application itself - from users fitting certain demographic profiles.

Demographic restrictions have been requested by two camps of developers:

1. Those who have licensed content or games only in certain geographic regions - like the US and Canada but not the rest of the world.
2. Those who want to limit access to certain application content or experiences to users of a certain age group - like under 18 or over 21.

Facebook’s new “Demographic Restrictions” APIs will enable developers to limit access to users according to any combination of age and location restrictions.

* The admin.setRestrictionInfo method allows developers to restrict access to the entire application.
* The fb:restricted-to FBML tag allows developers to restrict access to the included content.

So, how exactly is Facebook going about implementing these restrictions? Facebook says it will be using “a combination of what information a user has entered and verified on Facebook as well as IP targeting” for location. Furthermore, Facebook says that developers should not rely on Facebook to implement any restrictions developers are legally obligated to.

[Developers] must use this technology whenever Facebook policies require it… but you can and should consider implementing additional consent or confirmation in your application as appropriate. For example, if for legal reasons your application requires the user to affirm that they are of a certain age or are in a certain location, you should continue to solicit that explicit affirmation, and not regard the fact that the user passed through the Demographic Restrictions as equivalent.

Since the launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook’s Platform Application Guidelines have expressly prohibited applications that promote the sale of alcohol:

I. Applications may not promote, or contain content (including any advertising content) referencing, facilitating, promoting or using, the following:

4. Sale of liquor, beer, wine, tobacco products, ammunition and/or firearms;

Today, Facebook announced that, with the launch of its Demographic Restrictions capability for application developers, that policy is changing.

Now, Facebook says it plans to allow application content that promotes the sale of alcohol, provided that developers “specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.”

Facebook is currently beta-testing the new Demographic Restrictions feature with a “very limited” set of companies, and the new policy should go into effect in September, barring any big hiccups in the beta test.

This is good news for applications like Booze Mail and Happy Hour, that allow users to send each other virtual drink gifts, as well as other application developers hoping to sell to beer, wine, and liquor brands.

Developers interested in talking with Facebook on any sensitive questions regarding alcohol policy can email developers-help@facebook.com.

Over the past few days I’ve been writing about the shift of social networks from technology companies to media companies at the Social Times. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might want to check out a post on Techcrunch today in which Mike Arrington argues that Facebook’s lack of a centrally controlled music service is damaging its domestic growth.

Last year I suggested that Facebook is supposed to be launching a music service after a source told me that he had spoken with somebody that interviewed for a position to run a music service. Mike Arrington says that it’s now clear that Facebook is sticking with iLike as its music partner. That was emphasized when iLike was announced as a launching member of Facebook’s Great Apps program.

Hadi discussed this during an interview with the Social Times. For Facebook to launch their own competing music service would be a bad political move but as Mike Arrington suggests, “Music is such a big category that is so completely dominated by MySpace, that it seems like they should have their overall music strategy under their direct control.”

So is music key to Facebook’s domestic growth? It’s clear that music is definitely one way to attract outside visitors. Millions of bands and artists use MySpace as their central location for promoting their work and that means millions of visitors being promoted to the site. Is there another channel that Facebook can target that has the same level of self-promoting activities?

Not that I know of. Is there any other group that you think Facebook should be targeting?

There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is. All that matters is that a top application that is used for entertainment purposes is generating over $1 million a month.
Facebook Apps As a Business

While it still doesn’t qualify the company as a large business, it does emphasize the potential for applications in this space. As an individual developer or a small team of developers, $1 million a month is pretty damn good and I’m sure a large portion of that is going straight to the bank. Who’s responsible for generating this revenue?

Well there is already multiple ad networks that are generating revenue for their developers, but some of them are going so far as to speak out about how much money is being generated. myOfferpal (who is also a sponsor of and participant in our Social Ad Summit) has said that developers are generating around $75 per 1,000 active daily users on average and $150-$200 for more engaging applications.
How to Generate the Big Bucks

So are you looking to become the next Facebook application millionaire? Good luck! Generating $1 million a month is pretty challenging in the current environment but if you can come up with a creative application, you may have a chance. (fluff)Friends users for instance, are so passionate about the application, that some of them went so far as to participate in a (fluff)Friends video contest. Below are a couple of the top videos.

This application and a few others like Friends For Sale, Mob Wars and Owned, are all highly engaging applications. Each of them continues to attract users months after they were launched and the applications also continue to evolve. If you are looking to build up your revenue base, then you might want to mimic many of the strategies employed by these companies.

Have you hears of any other interesting rumors about application revenue being generated?

Using Google’s new Insights for Search tool, Inside Facebook has mapped Facebook’s US and international search growth over time from its launch in February 2004 to the present. Note that while these are not visits, searches and visits do generally correlate.

United States

April 2004

Facebook launches in February 2004 at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

June 2004

It then opens to other Ivy league schools and Stanford University in California.

Facebook, which has been filling up 5 offices on University and Hamilton in downtown Palo Alto with its now over 600 employees (and reaching close to 1000 by year’s end), today announced that the company is moving to an old HP/Agilent building just off of California Ave a couple miles away in Palo Alto.

While many had speculated the company would move to San Francisco, Facebook’s Debbie Frost told the Palo Alto Daily News that the company wants to stay close to its downtown Palo Alto home, since so many employees live nearby.

“We have loved our time in downtown Palo Alto and consider it part of the DNA here at Facebook. Many of our employees live in the area and will continue to be a part of the downtown community,” according to her e-mail statement… “The motivation behind the move was the need to scale the organization while taking into account employee preferences to be located together as much as possible.”

Facebook pushed a couple changes to the redesigned home page tonight that may be of interest to application developers:

1) Publisher shortcuts for Facebook-developed applications have been removed, and publishing status updates has been promoted.

Previously, links to your own profile page with the Publisher selected for posting photos, videos, notes, and links were located here.

2) Status updates have been removed from the right rail, and application bookmarks have been promoted. Now, status updates are only accessible within the Top Stories feed or filtered Status Updates feed.

New:

Old:

3) And finally, some UI elements have been cleaned up, which may satisfy

Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.

Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:

1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.

The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?

Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.

While 10% of Facebook employees may have come from Google, the tide is now flowing in the opposite direction too. Ben Ling, who decided to leave Facebook this week, is headed back to Google to lead YouTube’s monetization efforts, Kara Swisher reports.

The move back to GOOG comes only 10 months after Ling left Google Checkout’s e-commerce platform group to run Platform product marketing for Facebook. YouTube’s former head of monetization, Saschi Shef, recently left Google to become chief revenue officer at KP-backed startup Cooliris.

Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing  support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.

The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.

Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”

Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.

“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does - something OpenSocial developers have been clamoring for for months.

New statistics are out for comScore this month which reveal Facebook’s ongoing expansion has yet to slow. The company attracted over 132 million users over the year ending in June versus MySpace which attracted 117 million. The real story here is that the company continues to surge past the competitors internationally. In Latin America Facebook has grown over 1,000 percent over the past year, helping to catapult it’s worldwide growth to 153 percent in comparison to MySpace’s paltry 3 percent growth.

Facebook has launched a sponsored video ad offering as displayed in the image below.   The videos display on the right hand side of the homepage in the area that Facebook announced would have sponsors when the site was redesigned.  The only thing that the company failed to mention was that those sponsorships would be videos.  The videos also enable comments.  You can then view the comments that your friends have posted pertaining to that video.

Jason Beckerman was able to get me a screenshot and I checked out the site and it displayed as pictured below.  The ad no longer displays for me but I’m guessing it will reappear shortly.  This could be Facebook testing it out as Jason states in the comment, but it’s clear that Facebook would like to enter the video advertising space.  This positions Facebook directly against VideoEgg who is currently one of the leading video advertising solutions providers on the market.

Facebook should also be able to charge a premium for video ad placements.  It’s exciting to see Facebook expand their advertising offerings.  We will update you with any news pertaining to this new advertising offering shortly.

Benjamin Ling will be departing Facebook according to Eric Eldon. Ben Ling joined the company less than a year ago and is already on his way out the door. While the company continues to post record-breaking growth numbers, the company can’t seem to hold on to many of their executives. What’s the source of all the problems? It could simply be that some employees would prefer to take stock options and leave, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for Ling.

Eric Eldon questions the reasoning behind his departure. While many have suggested that the reason for the exits was that the new executives, primarily Cheryl Sandberg, were not getting along with the old execs, that doesn’t appear to be the case. One Facebook employee that I’ve talked to, spoke highly of Cheryl and said that the company is finally getting some order, whereas before there didn’t appear to be much order to the organization.

As the company expands, executives appear to be dropping like flies but that may not be the worst thing. Perhaps the company simply has an effective model for wiping out those that aren’t in it for the long-term. At this point it’s all speculation. Ben Ling has been effective at fostering good relationships outside the company. It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s relationships with external companies change with this new departure.

Facebook issued the following statement:

Facebook confirms that Ben Ling will be leaving the company in the coming weeks to pursue other interests. We wish him well and appreciate his great contributions to the early success of Facebook Platform. Platform is poised for continued growth and success and the company is on track to deliver the range of major initiatives announced last month at f8, including Facebook Connect, fbFund and the Great Apps and Application Verification programs. Each of these programs have a strong team of professionals focused on attracting the best developers to Facebook Platform, helping developers succeed on Platform, and helping users find and enjoy great applications on Facebook.

I think I’m way behind on this but today when searching for Facebook’s advanced search feature, I ended up empty handed. The new search page only displays search by name, school and company. Previously Facebook enabled users to use the advanced search utility to find people by practically all areas of a user’s profile. Now there appears to be no more advanced search feature. I searched the web and couldn’t find any reference to the removal but this is significant.

First, this emphasizes Facebook’s commitment to making the site a social utility to browse among your own friends. There is also no longer a link to browse for users within the new design. While you can access browse by going to the following page, it doesn’t appear to be accessible via any other method. There’s another component of the missing advanced search story which is a little more sinister. It appears that someone has successfully attempted to capitalize on advanced search gone missing.

An application called “Advanced Search” claims to enable users to search through over 80 million users on Facebook. How do they let you do that? Well in the past month alone close to 50,000 people have accessed this application. When you visit the app, it automatically populates a bunch of form fields with you name, gender, birthday, schools you’ve attended, companies you’ve worked at and more. It looks just like Facebook’s standard advanced search which misleads users into submitting their information.

This application would be extremely useful for any of the ad networks that wish to use profile data to target users. The other funny thing about this application? It doesn’t appear to actually provide any advanced search functionality. Instead it simply collects data. When you view the “advanced search application” it states “Welcome to Advanced Search for Facebook - Before you start searching, please check, update and store your details so that other people can search for you.”

It then prompts users to enter there info. If you don’t enter anything, it doesn’t display the search. Yikes! I’ve tried searching for more information on this application which has been popular since last October and I couldn’t find anything. Have you been able to find Facebook’s advanced feature? Have you tried this misleading application? Do you think it should be shut down?

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you may not have noticed that Michael Phelps has risen to become possibly the most popular athlete in American history over the weekend. On Facebook, Michael Phelps attracted almost 1 million fans over the past week and has grown to have the second most popular fan page on Facebook. The only person that Phelps has to contend with on Facebook is Barack Obama who currently has over 1.34 million fans.

Michael Phelps is catching up rapidly and with the help of Facebook, who has decided to promote the page at the top of the newsfeed today, there’s a good chance that Michael Phelps will soon be the most popular person on the site. The page is currently growing at around 20 fans a second so within a few hours, Phelps could theoretically be the most popular person on the site. We’ll have to see if the growth remains constant.

If you’d like to be part of making Michael Phelps the most popular person on Facebook, go check out the Michael Phelps fan page.

While websites can take many steps to ensure their own code is secure, there’s often no way to completely prevent malicious code running on client computers from abusing stolen website credentials. That’s exactly the type of problem Facebook’s security team has been dealing with over the past two days, as at least two variants on new worms have been spreading to thousands of users across the site.

Responding to the situation, Facebook’s Head of Security Max Kelly said in the company blog earlier tonight,

We spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We’ve identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.

Kelly encourages Facebook users to never share their password and report any suspicious activity.

While Facebook hasn’t experienced widespread worm abuse in the past, it must continue to invest in early-warning detection systems to shut down these kinds of attacks before they spread very far in order to preserve the trust users place in the company to manage and store great amounts of personal information.