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If you run a Facebook Page, you may be very interested in some new features that are rolling out for admins. Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook has discovered that some admins are starting to see impression counts for each post, as well as the number of likes and comments for each impression.

Eldon spoke with BrandGlue.com’s Jeff Widman , who is one of the admins that has so far been able to access this information (doing work for a site called Mint.com), and he says he is able to check things like how much the news feed algorithm weights individual items versus the fan page itself. He also says Pages are seeing "many more" impressions than fans. Eldon writes (and shows screenshots):

With Mint’s Page, for example, it has around 45,000 fans but a single post has more than 53,000 impressions. The 8,000 difference could be fans coming from the Page wall instead of their news feeds. But “it’s also a little uncertain where those 8,000 extra visits are coming from," Widman adds, "as the Insights package shows less than half the 8K page visits since that post appeared. Perhaps it’s counting each time someone sees the News Feed? So multiple Facebook visits in a single day appear as multiple impressions?"

Facebook Pages have become an increasingly great way for businesses and web sites to generate traffic as well as customer engagement. Facebook also recently launched it’s answer to Twitter’s retweet, which means that content pushed through pages have a much better shot at being shared more frequently throughout the social network (which is much larger than Twitter I might add).

In other Facebook news, the company is getting into customized data centers and is now letting application users get notifications through email. This means developers can seek out your email address on an opt-in basis (not much differently than a web site would do).
 

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Although you probably guessed as much, people who occasionally update their Facebook status or post something on Twitter represent a significant portion of the online community.  And today, Forrester pegged the exact portion at 33 percent.

Forrester’s been classifying online people as inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators for quite some time, and its statistics regarding these groups have provided valuable about how the online landscape is changing.

The problem, as Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff noted earlier, is that these categories didn’t leave much room for normal Facebook and Twitter users.

So the conversationalists classification was introduced to represent Twitter users and Facebook users who make at least one status update per week.  Exactly 33 percent of online folks should fall into this grouping, and Bernoff added, "They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder."

Also, "While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up."

The above diagram pretty well shows the breakdown of other groups.  Now we just get to sit back and see how quickly people travel up the ladder as the social Web gains momentum.

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Rumors of MySpace integrating Facebook Connect have circulated since October. And now it looks like they’re coming true: MySpace’s Fan Video site allows users to login with either MySpace or Facebook accounts.

The Fan Video site itself takes professional music videos and inserts your profile picture prominently. The site also features sharing capabilities to post the videos to MySpace, Facebook or Twitter. Additionally, you can create videos for your friends using their profile pictures, and you can choose these friends from your MySpace or Facebook friend lists (depending on which account you used to sign in).

Not a super-useful application (more fun than sheep throwing, I guess), but is this a harbinger of things to come for MySpace? Are they ready to concede the social networking arena to Facebook?

Side note here: although Facebook has eclipsed MySpace in terms of traffic, MySpace still edges out Facebook in ad revenue. So the race isn’t already lost. May be close, though.

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Some people use their Facebook account like another email address, logging in, checking their messages, and logging out.  Others just add a couple of friends, skim a few status updates, and call it a day.  But data from Pingdom proves that Facebook does a far better job of engaging people than other social networks.

Pingdom recently compared a number of social sites in terms of monthly page views per visitor.  Facebook blew away the competition, scoring almost twice as high as the next-closest site, Hi5.  It ranked ahead of MySpace by a margin of about 2.5 times, and proved almost ten times as engaging as Twitter.

Of course, a post on the Royal Pingdom blog did highlight one potential problem with the rankings, stating, "These numbers are bound to be a bit unfair to Twitter.  Many of its users rely heavily on applications to access the site and don’t necessarily spend much time on the site itself."

Still, Facebook’s win seems pretty undeniable, and the margin of its lead is even more impressive if you consider the size of its user base (350 million people, according to an official blog post published early this morning).

Pingdom observed, "This is bound to be extremely good news for Facebook’s income from advertising."

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Today, the Apache Software Foundation gained a new sponsor: Facebook.  Facebook is a gold sponsor, too, which means that the social network expressed its support for open source software by volunteering to donate $40,000 per year to the ASF.

Cynics shouldn’t waste their time looking for an ulterior motive.  Facebook won’t get much out of this deal aside from a link on the ASF’s "Thanks" page, an ASF logo to put on its own site, and a PR blurb.

This gesture just appears to represent genuine goodwill towards the open source community.  A post on the Facebook Developers blog explained that open source software has been important to the social network since its start, and that Facebook’s actually been repaying the favor for a while, contributing three open source projects over the past two years.

As for what effect Facebook’s donation will have, ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski explained in a blog post of his own, "Sponsoring the ASF helps us grow existing projects, incubate new initiatives, promote community development, host user events, expand our outreach, and provide the infrastructure that keeps the Foundation running on a day-to-day basis."

Other ASF sponsors include Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo (at the platinum level), HP (at the gold level), and Intuit, Joost, and Matt Mullenweg (at the silver level).

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Today Facebook launched a feature that some would consider long overdue. They now let you reply to comments via email. In other words, when you get an email notification alerting you that someone has left a comment on one of your status updates, you can simply type your reply in the email and hit send, rather than having to leave your inbox, go to Facebook and respond there.

"One of the easiest ways to stay updated on relevant conversations happening on Facebook is through email notifications, which inform you about comments made on the posts you’ve created or commented on," says Facebook’s Tom Whitnah.  "These notifications—for comments on such content as status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts—allow you to stay informed about your Facebook friends’ activities without being logged in when you’re on the go, on your phone or at work."

The addition of the new feature is simply an added convenience for Facebook users. It’s one less step you have to take to stay engaged in the conversation.

If you don’t have email notifications activated, then this of course won’t apply to you. If you don’t have them activated and you want to now because of this feature, just go to your account settings and find the Notifications tab, where you can select the option to receive them.

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Facebook said today it is launching the Facebook Fellowship Program aimed at Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year.

The goal of the Facebook Fellowship Program is to find candidates who can help solve problems surrounding the social web and Internet technology.

The Facebook Blog provides more details. "We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval."

"Full-time Ph.D. students who are enrolled in U.S. universities and working on research in these topical areas qualify to apply for one of five fellowships, which will cover their tuition and fees and provide a $30,000 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits."

The deadline for application submission is February 15, 2010. Recipients of the fellowship will be notified by email of their acceptance on March 29.
 

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Facebook said today it is launching the Facebook Fellowship Program aimed at Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year.

The goal of the Facebook Fellowship Program is to find candidates who can help solve problems surrounding the social web and Internet technology.

The Facebook Blog provides more details. "We are interested in a wide range of academic topics, including Internet economics, cloud computing, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and systems and information retrieval."

"Full-time Ph.D. students who are enrolled in U.S. universities and working on research in these topical areas qualify to apply for one of five fellowships, which will cover their tuition and fees and provide a $30,000 stipend in addition to conference travel and other benefits."

The deadline for application submission is February 15, 2010. Recipients of the fellowship will be notified by email of their acceptance on March 29.
 

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Facebook – along with a few other social sites and the developers of games for them – may be in for a great few years.  Certain experts believe that the business of virtual goods is going to take off in a big and very profitable way.

Here’s the opening line of a new article from the BBC: "Virtual goods such as weapons or digital bottles of champagne traded in the US could be worth up to $5bn in the next five years . . ."  Which would correspond to a whole lot of nonphysical stuff, if you consider that transaction prices are often in the $1-$2 range.

Still, the BBC interviewed Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Playfish’s Tom Sarris, and a casual gamer on its path to that conclusion.  Plus, there are the recent deals involving Zynga and Playfish to consider ($180 million and $400 million changed hands), along with the fact that Asia’s virtual goods market is already worth around $5 billion.

Toss in Facebook’s semi-sporadic support for its payment system and the new Preferred Developer Consultant Program, and it’s not hard to imagine that a great deal of growth in the virtual goods space is indeed possible.

Sarris addressed critics by saying, "The way we look at it is it’s no different from paying money to go and see a movie or rent a DVD.  What you are paying for is the experience and that notion of entertainment."

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While most of us in the Internet marketing “industry” were all aghast at the Facebook privacy problem of ’09, the rest of the world could have cared less. You know those people, right? The ones who don’t live and breathe this stuff to the point that all perspective is lost? These are the ‘everyday’ Facebook users who don’t give a rip about Mark Zuckerberg and the continued search for 7,000 people who care enough to impact any policy changes with the social media giant.

So those regular folks pushed Facebook to a point where it had never been before: the number one site during the Christmas holiday. ReadWriteWeb tells us

Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples’ Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year, according to traffic analyst firm Hitwise today.

Makes sense doesn’t it? Personally I was more prone to using Skype rather than updating everyone but that is certainly a personal preference.

So while the site finished third for the year behind Google and Yahoo Mail it was certainly a milestone to be seen as the Christmas site of choice. Last year Facebook finished second in this contest to Google but was able to flip positions this year.

See what a year of gigantic growth can do for you? Wonder if Santa will be as nice to Facebook next year after the rest of the world catches on that their “goings on” at Facebook aren’t as private as they used to be?

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