Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

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How Will Facebook’s Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.”

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook’s Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users.

It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

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Chrome, Google’s entry into the browser market, has a new beta version today that shows off two new features – instant language translation and privacy settings.

The browser was the only browser to make gains in February and we’re thinking additions like these will only help to propel it’s popularity.

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According to the blog post, “when the language of the webpage you’re viewing is different from your preferred language setting, Chrome will display a prompt asking if you’d like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate.”

Google has, of course, been hard at work in the translation business. In early February, we wrote about how the company has been developing software to conduct real-time translation over mobile phones.

Chrome will use Google Translate, which currently translates between 52 languages, to automatically translate websites.

In addition to translation, the browser known for being lite on pretty much everything will get a little more cumbersome as it gets some privacy settings, though we don’t think this will be the sort of thing to bog it down at all. Rather, we’re glad to see Google looking after the user’s privacy concerns. The new settings will allow you to “control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis.”

The features will be part of the automatic update in the near future, but for those who don’t like to wait, you can download the beta version here.

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As we’ve seen from some of the previews of the new layout, search is becoming more of a focal point for Facebook, and today’s announcement seems to back that up. Microsoft and Facebook announced this morning an expanded partnership, making Bing the default search engine for Facebook’s more than 400 million users worldwide.

The two companies also came to a “mutual decision” to allow Facebook to take over sole responsibility for advertisements on the social network, a move that we see as part of Facebook’s continual progression toward becoming an ad provider.

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Facebook’s Slide Into Advertising?

Facebook and Microsoft had entered into a deal last August to start serving up Microsoft ads, but Facebook has made several moves lately that look to protect its valuable stake in advertising. On Wednesday, the site rolled out a new set of terms for ad and offer providers, increasing accountability and further clarifying how user information gathered through apps could not be shared for advertising.

Facebook has also told us that the company’s recent moves to usher more user content into the light of day and outside of privacy settings are motivated in part by a desire to improve and grow advertising. Furthermore, the company is uniquely positioned, with its Facebook Connect preferred by users by a margin of 2-to-1, to offer tailored advertising to third-party sites using the mass of information it gathers daily on its users. And with Facebook moving into the full-featured webmail game, it may soon be able to compete with Google with an all-encompassing grasp on your information.

Back To That Search Engine Part…

As for the deal with Bing, the search engine had already been providing search capabilities for users in the U.S., but now will expand its services worldwide. The announcement also said that the search engine would provide results “beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions. beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions.”

By increasing the capabilities of the on-site search, Facebook is hoping to become your one and only portal to the web. If Facebook can get its users to perform on-site searches, it can not only keep you on the site longer, but like Google, it can gather even more information about its users through their searches. This stuff is advertising gold.

While some argue that the difficulty here is that it’s hard to monetize Facebook’s data compared to Google’s – Facebook know’s you care about Haiti, while Google knows you’re in the market for a Lexus – this move goes directly at the heart of that problem. By making search a focal point of the site, Facebook is looking to gather the type of data it knows it can leverage in the advertising world.

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Life360 is often described as an “OnStar for life,” providing its users with tools to track and protect people and things through a variety of interfaces.

The company offers IRL services such as child identification paraphernalia, medical IDs, and credit and identity protection; but they also have a cool suite of features that revolve around Internet and mobile tracking of people, objects, and even pets. Their Android application for tracking and securely messaging people even netted them a seed round from Google

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The concept for the company, which was founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revolves around disaster preparedness and emergency messaging. Currently, the available features include an emergency messenger that uses email, web, SMS, and phone to get messages through to emergency contacts; a thorough, web-enabled ID service that gives first responders instant access to critical information; a service for cataloging and tracking valuable items via coded tags; and identity protection services.

The mobile tracking feature – which got the company a $300,000 investment from Google – allows users to locate family members using the web interface or the mobile application. Custom privacy settings allow users to find loved ones in an emergency, check their locations, see their statuses, and retrace their previous locations. While the company states this will not make family members feel stalked, we see this app as Cheaters fodder as well as a great way to keep track of the ones you care about most during times of crisis.

The Android app allows users to access all their Life360 services from their phones. Right now, Android devices are supported, with a BlackBerry app coming soon and an iPhone app stuck in App Store purgatory.

Another “coming soon” service we thought was cool – and also excellent Cheaters fodder – is a GPS-enabled tracking dongle that can be thrown in a bag, duct-taped to the underside of a car, tossed onto a pet’s collar, stapled to a child – you name it. Life360 founder Chris Hulls told us in an email that he hopes to roll out the hardware within the next six months. “There will be an additional fee, probably in the neighborhood of $100 for the device and $10 per month for each tracked person,” he said.

Some other GPS- and mobile-enabled features Hulls plans to release within the next year are a Curfew 2.0 app, a check-in system for “distributed” families to touch base, and customized alerts for emergency notifications in a user’s specific location.

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YouTube has launched a feature that lets video uploaders share information they collect with YouTube Insight. The shared info is able to be viewed by anyone watching the user’s videos.

"Now when you watch a video, you can learn even more about it and its audience: on the watch page, under the ‘Statistics & Data’ section, users will be able to see more information about a video’s views over time, its popularity in different parts of the world, the top drivers of traffic, and the video’s top three audience demographics," explains YouTube Software Engineer Jonas Yngvesson.

Things that can be shared are:

- total views
- number of ratings
- where the video is most popular (geographically)
- popularity by demographic
- referrals

Yngvesson says that partners can attract more advertisers by allowing this information to be viewed. Advertisers are looking for brands with lots of views and audiences who are engaged. Those who fit the bill can basically show this off by sharing the data.

"We’ve seen popular users like Paul Telner and Chris Bosh leverage YouTube Insight to sign business deals and sponsorships," says Yngvesson.

Advertisers can use the data to help them match content with their target audience. They can also find new partners of interest.

When you upload content, you have the ability to turn the feature on or off for each individual video. This can be done in the privacy settings under "My Account".

Have you been lured in by “Texas Hold’em” or “Mafia Wars”? This week I was analyzing a branded application on Facebook using three different data sources: Facebook’s native analytics, Google Analytics and Atlas. One could merely use Facebook’s native analytics platform for tracking app usage, notifications, installs and uninstalls, but you can also glean a lot more from the canvas page than you might think if you creatively use your Web analytics tools to mine some of the data.

The “Canvas page” is the application page that is hosted by the application developer. You can insert a Web analytics tag on the page and mine social graph data about users (if they have granted you permission when installing the app). Data points that are accessible include age, location, gender, interests and number of friends. For the exhaustive list (which might scare you — honestly) visit the Facebook developer wiki as it may provoke you to go change your own personal privacy settings.

Tags that you place on the Canvas page allow for grabbing these data points and inserting them into the URL as either directories or query string variables that you can later mine through your Web analytics tool. Keep in mind that you want to be concise about “bucketing” information so that the data is manageable for analysis. For example, capturing “male” or “female” only adds two elements to a list for analysis, but “city” could add hundreds if not thousands of elements for analysis. Depending on the tool that you use, cardinality may or may not be an issue (something to keep in mind before you go data-collection crazy).

Facebook provides some good tools for looking at the application data in that they will provide the “median” for how other apps are performing across their network. While this doesn’t tell you how you might be doing within a specific segment, it at least provides a benchmark for comparison.

A few pitfalls to note in Facebook’s application analytics:

• “Usage” statistics are reporting in PST while “Features” are reported in GMT (these two reports are just tabs away from each other). One of the cardinal rules in any Web analytics implementation is ensuring that your Web servers are time-synchronized. Ending up with logs (and reports) that are off by seconds, minutes and in this case hours can really throw off your data analysis. My guess is that many application developers or analysts may not see the footnote and have no idea that they are aligning two different time zones of data to each other.
• Definitions aren’t well-defined anywhere within Facebook (that I could find). Understanding how this data is tabulated and filtered would be very helpful to the analyst when trying to interpret the results.

Regardless, Facebook applications provide the application developer with a litany of data points for analysis about those users who are installing and using the application. For brands, this is huge! Just one look at the granularity of information provided within the Facebook API and you’ll see that it is a marketer’s dream (or data overload, depending on your perspective).

I’ve only scratched the surface on what is possible in analyzing here. The point is that utilizing your existing in-house Web analytics tools in conjunction with Facebook’s offerings will provide a more in-depth analysis than using either analytics package in “stand-alone” mode.

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It Takes A Village To Measure Social Applications

iPhone 3.0 users waiting for an updated Facebook app apparently won’t have to wait too much longer. Its developer Joe Hewitt posted a Facebook note outlining the update’s new features, and saying that it is 98% done.

Here’s a screenshot of the note, listing the features:

As you can see from the above image, a lot of people like this. We’ll see if the enthusiasm translates to actual use of the product.

In other Facebook news, the company is getting ready to roll out some new privacy settings. WebProNews sat in on a conference call discussing them earlier today, and from the sound of it, users are going to have a lot more control over what posts they share with what friends.

Not only will these new settings simplify privacy controls, but they will allow users to keep their status updates more relevant for their friends. You can read more about that and checkout Facebook’s slideshow here.

WebProNews just sat in on a conference call and webcast with Facebook, where the social network’s upcoming changes to privacy settings were discussed. These were designed to give users more control over what they share with whom. Are you looking forward to privacy changes with Facebook? Share your thoughts.

The features were discussed a bit last week, but were elaborated much more in this discussion. The company made clear up front that the changes were not related to talk of a Facebook payment system, and have nothing to do with advertising or info that Facebook will make available to advertisers. Users still have control over what info is shared with advertisers.

Here is the slideshow that was presented:

Facebook says its mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. The new privacy controls enhance this and will allow people to share with as narrow or as broad of an audience as they want.

Facebook discussed the new features as broken down into three principles:

1.Control
2 Simplicity
3 Connecting

The changes were initiated by pain points that users made known to the company. The company acknowldged that privacy settings can add up and pile up over time, and not always be as clean a process as one would like. They wanted to simplify this.

Control

Facebook says when people can easily control the audience, they share more and more meaningfully. There is definitely something to that statement. It’s a relevancy issue just as much as it is a privacy one. Certain status updates may be more appropropriate for a certain group of people.

Facebook has removed regional networks. The company says that these generated a lot of confusion and reduced user control. People were joining networks that they were not sure who all was in. It is a fragmented user experience. They say something like 50% of people don’t even join them. They also said the concept doesn’t really fit into the new model.

Simplicity

The new settings make privacy more simple. You can choose between the same set of privacy options throughout different features. There is a single set of privacy controls wherever you are on the site. If you make a change in one place, it stays consitent throughout the entire site. There will be a universal lock icon (as shown in the top image), so that you always know where you can adjust settings. They are consolidating six different privacy pages. For each setting, there is a question mark so you can tell exactly what each thing is for.

As far as sharing options, you can: 

- share with everyone

- share with friends and authenticated networks

- share with friends of friends

- share with your friends (like always)

- customize who all you are sharing with when you have specific pieces of content for sharing with a specific audience

Connecting

During the connecting part of the dicussion, they talked about the transition period, which is definitely important, considering how upset some users got after the big redesign of Facebook.

They are testing six different transition tools that users will see when the settings roll out. Basically, the company is just testing different ways to give users the ability to opt in to settings. They want to make sure that people really understand the changes that are happening.

When Facebook rolls them out, users will sign on to the site, see a transition tool, then they will be asked about settings. Once they provide their preferences, they will get a confirmation. Of course, settings will always be able to be adjusted on a post-by-post basis via the publisher box.

With regards to the "everyone" option, this is divided into two distinctions – minors and adults.

The new privacy settings and controls are still in the testing stages and will be rolling out soon. You’re probably wondering if info will be indexable by search engines. Facebook says "It’s certainly something we’ve talked about, but it’s not like that at this time."

What do you think of the new privacy options? Do you intend to be more open or more private with your updates? What will be your default setting? Please share.

iPhone 3.0 users waiting for an updated Facebook app apparently won’t have to wait too much longer. Its developer Joe Hewitt posted a Facebook note outlining the update’s new features, and saying that it is 98% done.

Here’s a screenshot of the note, listing the features:

As you can see from the above image, a lot of people like this. We’ll see if the enthusiasm translates to actual use of the product.

In other Facebook news, the company is getting ready to roll out some new privacy settings. WebProNews sat in on a conference call discussing them earlier today, and from the sound of it, users are going to have a lot more control over what posts they share with what friends.

Not only will these new settings simplify privacy controls, but they will allow users to keep their status updates more relevant for their friends. You can read more about that and checkout Facebook’s slideshow here.

WebProNews just sat in on a conference call and webcast with Facebook, where the social network’s upcoming changes to privacy settings were discussed. These were designed to give users more control over what they share with whom. Are you looking forward to privacy changes with Facebook? Share your thoughts.

The features were discussed a bit last week, but were elaborated much more in this discussion. The company made clear up front that the changes were not related to talk of a Facebook payment system, and have nothing to do with advertising or info that Facebook will make available to advertisers. Users still have control over what info is shared with advertisers.

Here is the slideshow that was presented:

Facebook says its mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. The new privacy controls enhance this and will allow people to share with as narrow or as broad of an audience as they want.

Facebook discussed the new features as broken down into three principles:

1.Control
2 Simplicity
3 Connecting

The changes were initiated by pain points that users made known to the company. The company acknowldged that privacy settings can add up and pile up over time, and not always be as clean a process as one would like. They wanted to simplify this.

Control

Facebook says when people can easily control the audience, they share more and more meaningfully. There is definitely something to that statement. It’s a relevancy issue just as much as it is a privacy one. Certain status updates may be more appropropriate for a certain group of people.

Facebook has removed regional networks. The company says that these generated a lot of confusion and reduced user control. People were joining networks that they were not sure who all was in. It is a fragmented user experience. They say something like 50% of people don’t even join them. They also said the concept doesn’t really fit into the new model.

Simplicity

The new settings make privacy more simple. You can choose between the same set of privacy options throughout different features. There is a single set of privacy controls wherever you are on the site. If you make a change in one place, it stays consitent throughout the entire site. There will be a universal lock icon (as shown in the top image), so that you always know where you can adjust settings. They are consolidating six different privacy pages. For each setting, there is a question mark so you can tell exactly what each thing is for.

As far as sharing options, you can: 

- share with everyone

- share with friends and authenticated networks

- share with friends of friends

- share with your friends (like always)

- customize who all you are sharing with when you have specific pieces of content for sharing with a specific audience

Connecting

During the connecting part of the dicussion, they talked about the transition period, which is definitely important, considering how upset some users got after the big redesign of Facebook.

They are testing six different transition tools that users will see when the settings roll out. Basically, the company is just testing different ways to give users the ability to opt in to settings. They want to make sure that people really understand the changes that are happening.

When Facebook rolls them out, users will sign on to the site, see a transition tool, then they will be asked about settings. Once they provide their preferences, they will get a confirmation. Of course, settings will always be able to be adjusted on a post-by-post basis via the publisher box.

With regards to the "everyone" option, this is divided into two distinctions – minors and adults.

The new privacy settings and controls are still in the testing stages and will be rolling out soon. You’re probably wondering if info will be indexable by search engines. Facebook says "It’s certainly something we’ve talked about, but it’s not like that at this time."

What do you think of the new privacy options? Do you intend to be more open or more private with your updates? What will be your default setting? Please share.

Facebook is testing a new format for the pages you see when you are looking for you friends. Some people are able to click on the names of people with whom they are neither confirmed friends nor in a common network.

Those with access to the feature will be able to see all of the same info that’s available in the normal search results, but it will be formatted differently, making it easier to see who the person is with a larger profile picture.

"Previously, when you saw the name of someone whose profile was not open to you, it could be a frustrating experience," notes Eric Zamore on the Facebook Blog. "You either couldn’t click on the person’s name or you only saw a small search listing with a thumbnail of a profile picture after clicking on a name. Sometimes, the picture was too small for you to recognize the person, especially if there were multiple people with the same name or if you hadn’t seen the person in a while. We’re testing this new profile view to help avoid these situations."

I don’t think many people will take issue with this kind of change, which simply makes the search process a more pleasant experience, without really giving away any more personal info. That stays the same as it was with the regular search listings.

Only your name, profile photo, networks, and list of friends are included. In fact, if you don’t even want this information to be publicly available, you can limit it in your privacy settings.

This seems like a change that will be welcome by most, and perhaps it will become the standard format in the near future. Facebook has been known to frustrate users with changes to its design. Do you take any issue with this particular change? Tell us.