Facebook to Add Delete Option – Facebook has released a “delete account” option, which would allow users to streamline the deletion of their accounts from the social network. Currently, the process of doing so is cumbersome and drawn-out with several steps. Facebook is testing the option with some users, which says it will “permanently delete your account and all information you have shared.”

Bump Releases Redesign – Bump has overhauled its iPhone app by changing its look, adding new features, allowing Twitter and LinkedIn integrations, chat function, a calendar feature and also allowing unlimited photo and contact sharing.

Info From 100M Facebook Users ‘Leaked’ – Much ado has been made this week about the “leaking” of information from 100 million Facebook users’ accounts. This information was downloaded by security researcher Ron Bowes from Facebook’s user directory, or index of public profile Pages. Which is to say that the “leaked” info was already public, including names, profile pictures and a few of the users’ friends.

‘Owner’ of Facebook Busted for Shrooms – Paul Ceglia is the man alleging he’s contractually entitled to 84% of Facebook per a contract he signed with Mark Zuckerberg in 2003. He seems to have a somewhat checkered past. In 2009 Ceglia was accused of defrauding customers in the amount of $200,000 for not delivering ordered merchandise and he also apparently enjoyed the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms in 1997 while in Texas.

WaPo Further Integrates Facebook, Web Site – The Washington Post announced an expansion this week of its Network News tool, which incorporates social media feedback such as Likes and the Recommend button. Now users may see what’s been recommended across the site, by section; also the Like button is being replaced by the Recommend button. Users may deactivate the Network News box by clicking the red X at the top of the box to manage their preferences. Similar updates were also made to the site’s Twitter integration.

LiveWorld Releases LiveConnect - LiveWorld released a new product this week aimed at helping brands better engage in conversations with fans. Facebook LiveConnect allows brands to unify moderation/administration across Pages and web sites into one system.

iGoDigital Provides Shopping Help, Facebook Integration – This week iGoDigital announced new Facebook integrations for its product recommendation platform. Essentially consumers are presented with direct and indirect product suggesitons from their network after logging in with Facebook via web or mobile, these sugestions take Likes, recommendations and interests into account. The integration also allows for Facebook users to post products on their profiles to solicit or provide advice to their network.

Appssavvy Makes Six More Hires – Appssavvy announced this week that it hired six people who are set to help the company focus on social and mobile media marketing, taking the company’s total employee count past 40. Talent includes: Human Resources Manager Holly Ettenger, Marketing Coordinator Mattan Griffel, Senior Account Executive-Midwest Meghan Kludt, Product Manager Yolanda Ladia, Senior Account Executive Magali Merat and Senior Director of Ad Operations Robin Wilson.

New Facebook Ads Promotions – Facebook has started some new promotions for Page administrators that includes free ad trials and credit promotions, following similar efforts over the years.

Nigerian President Shines on Facebook – Social Times highlighted Nigerian President Goodluck Johnson’s use of his recently set up Facebook Page, noting that the president posts at least once daily and has earnestly tried to engage Nigerians about the intricacies of government policy.

Facebook in Windows Messenger - Windows Messenger incorporated some Facebook integrations this week allowing users to see their contacts’ social network activity. In Messenger, with a new brower plugin, users can see what contacts have shared online and comment on them via Messenger Companion notifications in the upper right-hand corner of the browser window.

Become a Star with Facebook Connect – An interesting Facebook Connect integration allows users and their Facebook friends to star in a movie trailer. The reason seems to be promoting Swiss television shows.

Facebook, NPR and the Media – Facebook launched a Page specifically for media properties this week and some insight as to how media properties use Facebook came from an interview with one of NPR’s social media strategists Andy Carvin. Among the insights was that NPR’s Page was created by a fan and eventually handed over to NPR, the Page now has more than 1 million Likes and provides tips, allows for surveys and pretty basic demographic insights (60% are women, for example). Facebook accounts for 7% of NPR’s traffic, just behind Google, and comments on Facebook are much more common than on NPR’s web site.

Sit on My Facebook, the Video - An interesting mix of social media metaphors roll into one in a new, mildly NSFW music video, “Sit On My Facebook“ by The Scribes. The video was produced by the Pantless Knights.

The Week in Bugs – Facebook experienced an array of relatively minor technical issues this week, that were more notable for how they were perceived. Facebook was preventing people from using the word “Palestinian” in creating Pages, apparently due to an automated filtering system. Also blocked were mentions of Power.com in status updates. However, this latter issue was attributable to the fact that, after Facebook debuted Questions and changed its publisher interface, people were having problems using the tagging option (using @ in front of a name in a status update). This has since been fixed.

Finally, there was a bit of obscenity on Facebook for users who chose the Spanish language option this week. Not only was there explicit curse words, but there were also allusions to sex acts and genitalia. There’s a Facebook Page with about 5,700 people who said they saw the same problems. Gawker attributed the problems to a Turkish web site.

It’s a new example of companies trying to tap into social connections — on Facebook or elsewhere — to connect businesses with customers, and customers with deals.

The conference also featured Twitter discussing their GroupOn-like Earlybird deals, and FourSquare talking about the future of transaction-intiated check-ins. The trend  of the conference shows that social companies see monetization potential in helping businesses not only increase awareness and connect with fans, but in directly facilitating sales.

PlacePop allows business owners to quickly convert an existing loyalty program or create a new one, and have total control over the rewards they offer. Users toggle a switch on each card to share their actions, and can also share photos of their favorite businesses, which PlacePop saw Facebook and Twitter users doing frequently.

The PlacePop website uses Facebook for login, and makes it easy to share your affinity for places you’re loyal to. A PlacePop tab for Facebook Pages could create a powerful link between a business’ communication with customers and efforts to encourage them to visit. Investors see potential too, with PlacePop securing $1.4 million in funding from Ooga Labs cofounders James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky, Affinity Labs Founder Chris Michel, and Bebo Founder Michael Birch.

Twitter launched Twitter.com/Earlybird in early July after analyzing existing promotions run on Twitter and learning what worked best. It seeks to run promotions that stimulate conversation, like their 20% off deal with JetBlue which got users tweeting where they were flying to, broadcasting the deal to their own networks. Earlybird could become a significant moneymaker for Twitter, especially if they give the account representation on the home page.

FourSquare explained that moving check-ins to the point of transaction, instead of when a user visits a business, is core to their future. Its integration with frozen yogurt vendor Tasti D-Lite, which allows users to enable auto-checkin when they use their physical loyalty card to make a purchase has been a success, and they’re considering how to scale it to other businesses. FourSquare’s head of biz dev Tristan Walker admits that they don’t have the staff to help the thousands of companies who request to run promotions each day. This leaves room for loyalty programs like PlacePop where owners run promotions independently.

Facebook has no reason to do an offering, as Zuckerberg owns a controlling stake in the company — the other stockholders in the company have to go along with whatever he decides. By going public, he and the company would be under more pressure to make money by public shareholders, and to handle all the expensive financial reporting that comes with being listed.

However, whether or not Facebook goes public in 2012, or sooner, or later, there have been occasional hints that indicate it is planning to go public at some point (rather than, say, never going public). In 2007, for example, it appeared to be hiring for someone familiar with public company regulatory frameworks. Last fall, it introduced a dual-class stock structure that gave existing shareholders ten times the voting power of new people.

Meanwhile, the company began turning a profit last year, growing revenue from around $700 million over that period to around $1.1 billion this year — or so we reported in March. Given how the year is going with its advertising revenue, and the roll-out of Credits, it could make more this year, with Bloomberg citing sources who think the number could reach $1.4 billion.

With fast revenue growth, no immediate plans for an IPO, and the potential to disrupt advertising and payments across the web, Facebook unsurprisingly has investors excited. Many have bought, or have tried to buy Facebook stock on private secondary markets, helping to drive stock prices high enough to imply steep valuations in the $25 billion range, according to some secondary stock sites. In fact, the company has tried to restrict secondary stock sales, as it has to file financial statements with the SEC if it has more than 500 stockholders.

And investors might soon have another way to get Facebook stock — Digital Sky Technologies, a holding company that a small percentage of Facebook, as well as other popular web companies like Zynga and Groupon.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

English is still by far the most-used language on Facebook, with some 231 million users. However, Facebook just crossed the 500 million user milestone — which means that over half of all users are accessing the site in another language. With an increasingly international audience, where should marketers and application developers focus their attention?

Earlier this week, we detailed the growth of Facebook’s top 10 languages. In a sense, our findings provided an easy answer to the above question. Spanish, with 68 million users, is Facebook’s second-largest language; that’s roughly the population of France. In turn, French is third-largest, with 26 million users. These user groups are easily large enough to warrant attention.

However, large groups of foreign-language users can also be a double-edged sword. On the positive side, people in a particular language group are now together on one platform in a way that they never before have been.

The negative, at least for some purposes, is that the geographic distribution of these users is extremely wide. Very few Spanish-language users are in the United States; meanwhile, even the top five countries for the language only represent about 50 million of the total group:

It’s easy to imagine scenarios in which it would be desirable to reach all of the users of a particular language; educational products, for instance, know no borders. However, a company that can only effectively distribute its product in a certain region — continental Europe, for example — may find it more worthwhile to focus on a concentrated language group like Turkish, in which all but handful of the 23 million users are in Turkey itself.

For application developers and others who want to maintain an online-only contact with their audience, Facebook’s language stats still present some challenges. For instance, Indonesian is now the fifth-largest language on Facebook with 21 million users. Appealingly, the country’s population is known for a willingness to spend online, albeit in smaller amounts than people in richer countries.

However, in an interview on Inside Social Games, Wooga CEO Jens Begemann told us his gaming company has stopped targeting Indonesians, among other Asian groups, in part because the Indonesians who are online are likely to have basic fluency in English anyway, obviating the need for his company to do extra translation work.

Wooga’s plan is to add other language groups in the future, including Portuguese, which grew 11.8 percent over the past month due to new Brazilian users, but for the moment still has only 7.2 million users — not quite enough for the company to invest in the market.

In the end, the decision of which market to invest in should mainly balance the number of potential users, their likelihood to monetize well, and the unique situation of the company planning to localize its product or application. But there are many more potential considerations, including the average age and sex of users in each language group; those metrics are available as part of an Inside Facebook Gold subscription.

With a background in gift card processing for over 250 top global brands, First Data Corporation is experimenting with a new real-world gifting app of its own on Facebook, eGift Social. The app is basically a way to buy your friends ice cream.

Users of the application have to register an account, and if they wish to actually purchase anything, provide a credit card as well. It is worth noting that a credit card is not part of the registration process, so users are able to check everything out before giving out any fiscal information.

Once in, eGift can connect to both the user’s Facebook and email accounts in order to add friends. It is a bit odd that it makes users type in the names rather than present a list like most other Facebook apps, but no matter. Once a few friends are added to the app’s “buddy list,” it’s time to start making people happy.

As it stands, it is possible to send gifts from only one storefront: Cold Stone Creamery. It may be the only partner involved in eGift at this time, but there are still over 1,300 locations across the United States, and… it’s ice cream!

The gifting is all simple enough too. Simply select one (or many) gifts, and send them to the friend of your choosing. The credit card attached to the account will be charged and that user will get the gift instantaneously through either Facebook or email. Then they can take it to an actual brick and mortar local for redemption.

However, all of the new traffic to “Who thinks of you?”, some 712,312 new monthly active users, appears to have shown up in just the past day — which leads us to believe that Facebook may be going through another of its periodic updates or bug fixes, which sometimes end up drastically recalculating the traffic to some apps.

Take a look over the full AppData list; you may notice a few other incongruous apps:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Who thinks of you?	831,333	+712,312	+598%
2.	守衛家園	725,370	+708,996	+4,330%
3.	Market Street	547,474	+547,416	+943,821%
4.	Jewel Box	433,987	+423,273	+3,951%
5.	Office Wars	932,738	+415,127	+80%
6.	Birthday Alert	448,796	+382,358	+576%
7.	Cafe Life	676,692	+376,976	+126%
8.	Incontra gente	657,699	+273,247	+71%
9.	Crazy Taxi	635,996	+244,710	+63%
10.	Knighthood	373,002	+234,580	+169%
11.	Four in a Row	301,561	+232,625	+337%
12.	來問章魚哥保羅	246,536	+228,548	+1,271%
13.	Bingo Island 2	449,900	+226,752	+102%
14.	Tellywood	219,609	+218,679	+23,514%
15.	Platinum Life: Web Edition BETA	719,711	+215,754	+43%
16.	建立你的測驗	922,935	+215,068	+30%
17.	Ask Paul the Octopus !	201,077	+197,016	+4,851%
18.	על כל הקופה	194,200	+194,115	+228,371%
19.	FriendCameo Video Chat	628,653	+190,908	+44%
20.	WestWars	208,938	+186,656	+838%

Picking out a few, Jewel Box, Birthday Alert and Incontra gente all experienced similar one-day leaps. They’re all older apps that appeared to have plateaued or declining growth; now Facebook is reporting huge gains. We’ve seen these sorts of changes in the past, and it usually appears to be a fix intended to make the apps report the correct numbers; with that in mind, we at least now know that the aforementioned apps are of significant size, if not all blazing-fast growers.

Most of the other apps appear to be reporting normal growth. At number two and three, 守衛家園 and Market Street are both games; they are, respectively, a Chinese-language tower defense game and Playdom’s brand-new game, which we also just reviewed on Inside Social Games.

來問章魚哥保羅 is another Chinese-language app, but not a game. Instead, it’s a just-for-fun app that involves asking a psychic octopus the outcome of a question; you’ll notice that number 17, Ask Paul the Octopus !, is the same app in English. The apps are referencing a soccer World Cup meme, involving an octopus that correctly guessed the outcome of eight games.

Here’s the update to the developer policy document:

If you exceed, or plan to exceed, any of the following thresholds please contact us as you may be subject to additional terms: (>5M MAU) or (>100M API calls per day) or (>50M impressions per day).

We asked Facebook for more details on the change. The company’s response:

We recently revised our threshold policy from 5 million daily active users to 5 million monthly active users. We want to work closely with our largest developers in order to maintain a high level of performance, speed and uptime for Facbook Platform. Sudden, unexpected large increases in API usage could negatively impact both developers and users.

Sugar is one of a number of social CRM software providers, all of whom are trying to help businesses to figure out sales leads and other relationships from existing social data.

Sugar says it is slowly building the infrastructure for a more social CRM tool. In future releases of Sugar, it hope to include automatic syncing of social network data into contacts, data-centric social media monitoring, and the ability to track actions like wall posts and messages to contacts the way they currently track email.

Sugar6 provides a web-based, customizable, open source CRM platform for approximately $30/month/user. While some CRM services like Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics are more rigid, and Salesforce charges for simple customizations after a certain limit, it is free to use Sugar6’s Sugar Studio to create coding-free customizations. Those with PHP skills can even alter the source code to make more drastic changes to the platform. This makes Sugar6 a good choice for users who frequently need to adapt to changes, or whose requirements don’t match that of traditional CRM software.

Contact pages on Sugar6 can be customized to include Facebook Page and profile URLs, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn links. If the user has logged in to Facebook on the same browser, and have access to that contact’s Facebook content —because they are friends, the profile is public, or they have relaxed privacy settings— a custom tab allows a user to view that profile from within Sugar6. This could help a user monitor updates from a business partner’s Page, or see that a lead has left a status update saying they are preparing to make a purchase.

Sugar6’s goal is to eliminate the need for using multiple windows simultaneously to manage relationships. The lack of a native authorization system make this a bit clumsy, but usable. A future release that integrates authorization, auto-syncing, and the ability to interact with Facebook, not just watch it, will finally bridge the gap between the wealth of contact and behavior information available on the social network and the software meant to take advantage of it.

National politicians have begun paying more attention to online business in the last couple of years, with Facebook getting special attention around issues like privacy policy changes.

Zuckerberg’s first official trip to Capitol Hill included private meetings with politicians, including with Utah’s Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, as well as other members of the Senate’s Republican High-Tech Task Force. Hatch came out of the meeting talking about job creation, not privacy. “It was a productive meeting that underscored technology’s importance as a key engine in fueling job creation and putting the nation on the road to economic recovery,” he said in a statement, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, other company executives testified along with other technology employees from AT&T, Apple and Google at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about online privacy where senators said they’d be eyeing new online privacy rules by next year.

Democratic Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said during the aforementioned hearing that he was working with Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, also a Democrat, on proposed legislation for 2011. Politico reported that Kerry is likely to have “the full support of the committee’s top Democrats,” who have been involved in several privacy hearings this year. Separate online advertising regulatory bills have been drafted by some members of the House.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor also testified that vague legislation could ultimately harm technological innovation. AT&T’s Senior Vice President of Public Policy Dorothy Attwood and Google’s Engineering Lead for Privacy Alma Whitten had similar messages, advocating a loose regulatory framework around online businesses.

Privacy changes, security problems and other issues — along with rapid growth — have put Facebook in the political spotlight.

Facebook has been busy this year taking on the issue of online privacy, with other executives meeting with the Obama administration. Much of this prepping included hiring people to oversee global policy, D.C. legal expertise and even a California lobbyist. Of course Zuckerberg’s first trip to D.C. coinciding with Senate hearing testimony is also a part of the company’s committment to address privacy.

[Zuckerberg photo via Gabriel Bouys AFP/Getty]

• Roger Chen has joined Facebook as an engineer and comes from similar work at Greater Boston Area Information Technology and Services and Panjiva. He also interned for Qiming Venture Partners and Microsoft and previously did research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
• Jocelyn Goldfein is now Director of Engineering at Facebook, which we previously reported. Her previous work was as a VP and general maanger at VMware.
• Richard Sim has joined the company as a product marketing manager of performance ads; before, Sim held a similar position at Anchor Intelligence, although he also worked as a product manager at MSN/Microsoft and atKeynote Systems.

And, for a closer look at what jobs are opening up in the industry, be sure to check out our new Inside Network Jobs Board.