The company raised initial funding from blue-chip angel investors and since has become profitable. Although Involver was founded in the Silicon Valley the company now employs 60 people and has offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Austin, in addition to San Francisco.

We spoke to Involver’s CEO and co-founder Rahim Fazal as part of our ongoing series of Page management company profiles. Most recently we profiled Big Prize Giveaways and Conversation.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Rahim Fazal: We have built a platform that enables brands to enter the social web and develop direct relationships with their customers. In my mind, that’s the biggest promise of social. Our history as a technology innovator has allowed us to operate at a scale that is unmatched in our industry, it’s why brands like Facebook, Real Madrid, RCA Music, The White House Commission on Remembrance, and award winning agencies like EVB have chosen to work with us.

On top of our platform, we’ve built more than 30 fully customizable social applications for Facebook and the iPhone along with plug-ins for third-party partners, like Get Satisfaction. We support more than 90,000 brands and agencies across a wide range of verticals and sizes — including several companies in the Fortune 10.

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

RF: As I mentioned, we work with over 90,000 brands and agencies and through them we have more than 325,000,000 individuals interact with Involver on Facebook. We feel fortunate to have many great customer successes, some of which have provided great recommendations of our platform.

Recently one of our customers, San Francisco based agency EVB, won accolades for their work with Skittles on Facebook, noting that Involver “helped power some of our more innovative social media ideas.”

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

RF: The industry is growing at an incredible pace, and so is Involver. Here are a few interesting stats about us:

• High level of profitability
• Over 100% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth for the last five consecutive quarters
• 60+ employees
• 5 offices
• 90,000-plus customers
• 325,000,000-plus fan relationships
• 500,000,000-plus pieces of content under management

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

RF: We don’t presuppose a set of success metrics on top of our customer to determine their success. We consult with them on their business, understand the challenge/opportunity and how it relates to their individual success and then define success metrics with them. Generally, we see important metrics related to two or three fundamental sets of actions: acquisition (fans, views, likes, etc.), engagement (interactions, comments, shares, etc.), and conversion (registrations, purchases, etc.).

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

RF: Facebook innovates on the platform at breakneck speed. At any given time, Facebook is optimizing existing features to maximize value to their customers. Features that are core to a particular use-case and common in many Facebook applications may change drastically or be deprecated entirely with little to no notice.

In the past, for example, we’ve built technology to support specific features, such as allowing users to subscribe for updates via app notifications, and then had to work double time to maintain consistency with their intended operation as Facebook changes or removes the functionality.

The lesson to be learned from this is something we agreed to on day one: all development must be forward-thinking, built on an extensible infrastructure, agile, and routinely updated — it’s one of the main reasons our customers choose us, so that we can do all that hard work for them.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

RF: We’ve grown our company by supporting Facebook’s efforts to make Facebook Pages “commercial.” Facebook has done great work encouraging brands to claim their identity, and marketers today understand that you must own your brand on Facebook, along with the entire social web. Facebook’s innovation with Open Graph has been a huge boon, allowing us to provide our customers with tools to engage their audience in a unified manner both on, and off, Facebook.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

RF: As a preferred development consultant (PDC) to Facebook we are made aware of forthcoming changes to Facebook’s platform, and consulted with on the impact of those changes when appropriate, all for the express purpose of making sure that nothing unplanned happens to our customer’s programs. We have a strong relationship with Facebook and that has enabled us to navigate Facebook’s changes with confidence and ease.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

RF: We’d like to continue to see Facebook invest in marketing. We were recently asked to power Facebook Stories. It was a tremendous campaign to work on, and an honor to be asked to power their experience. We believe marketing fuels growth and their growth will continue to support an important channel of our business.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

RF: Our business on, and off, Facebook is all about helping marketers save time and creating efficiency. One of our largest customers recently launched a marketing campaign across Facebook, Twitter, the brand’s website, and Justin.TV. They used our Audience Management platform to moderate customer interaction, measure response, publish update out to the brand’s audience, and display live video content and commenting functionality in multiple digital locations.

Another example of this is the work we’ve done with partners like Get Satisfaction. Together, our two companies are offering a Facebook Page application that gives brands and businesses the ability to integrate their entire customer support experience into Facebook. This application brings the best-of-breed support technology built by Get Satisfaction and deploys it atop the Involver platform, allowing customers to deploy the application to their social profile and unify their support efforts across Facebook, Get Satisfaction, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more. As more applications like this are released atop our platform, you’ll see even deeper integration with other marketing efforts.

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

RF: We have several exciting product improvements and partnerships that will be announced in coming months, but don’t generally don’t discuss new products before their launch.

Facebook Integrates News Stories Into Search

Greenpeace Goes After Facebook’s Prineville Center – Environmental activism group Greenpeace has started a campaign to get Facebook to say “no” to using coal-derived electricity at its new Prineville, Ore. data center. We’ve previously reported that Facebook would be using both renewable and non-renewable energy at the center. What’s more, the center is already doing a pretty good job of being environmentally-friendly by using naturally cold air to cool servers, an evaporative cooling system, re-using server heat for offices and reducing electricity usage.

Latest Facebook Revenue Estimate: $2B – Facebook’s latest revenue estimates for 2010 are hovering around $2 billion, TechCrunch reported this week. We’d previously reported that the company’s 2009 revenues were almost $800 million and that the company was now on track to bust $1 billion this year, although previous reports have also put the run-rate at $2 billion. Most of the company’s revenues stems from advertising. [Image also via TechCrunch]

Facebook Traffic Eclipses Search Traffic at Gawker – Gawker’s marketing team put together some interesting data showing that its Facebook traffic is increasing across all sister sites and also that this social traffic is increasingly more important than search traffic. Specifically, Gawker gets 20 million monthly visits from social sites (up from 10 million last fall) and 7.7 million of that comes from Facebook. [Image via AllThingsD]

Microsoft Founder Sues Facebook – Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, went on a lawsuit rampage last week, filing against against not only Facebook, but eBay, AOL, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples and YouTube. Allen alleges that all the aforementioned companies are infringing on his e-commerce and search patents. These patents stem from Allen’s work at Interval Research in 1992; it closed in 2000 and some of the patents include very general descriptions for browsers, attention managers and alerts to users.

TweetPhoto, Now Plixi, Integrates Facebook – TweetPhoto has changed its name to Plixi and the company enables users to share and interact with photos on both the Twitter and Facebook platforms. Plixi aims most of its products towards Facebook and other social networks, such as its check-in service for photos. The company was founded in 2009 and recently raised $2.6 million in investment from several angels, as well as Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners.

Egyptian Govt Monitors Facebook – The Egyptian Ministry of Interior has created a department especially to monitor Facebook activity in that country, according to Global Voices Online. This department includes 15 people who work 24 hours a day in three shifts, including two police officers and three engineers. They are tasked with monitoring criticism of the current president, Hosni Mubarak, and his son and presumed heir, Gamal.

How to Access Facebook in Vietnam – As we reported at the beginning of the year, Facebook is being blocked by the Vietnamese government. However, the web site Viet Tan has published an extensive guide on how to get around government controls, mainly by accessing “lite” versions of the social network, such as the mobile site. Despite the censorship, Vietnam has 1.2 million users according to our most recent Global Monitor Report on Inside Facebook Gold.

RootMusic’s Facebook Player Collects Royalties – RootMusic launched a YouTube tracks feature allowing musicians to collect royalties on every song played on Facebook. Through the free 520 pixel-wide version of the BandPage media player, musicians can collect revenue from every song played on Facebook; some artists currently using the service include 50 Cent and Maroon 5. See our previous coverage for more details about the company.

Tagging Looks a Little Different – The way Facebook users are tagged in status updates has changed slightly. Whereas previously the names of those you tagged in your status appeared in blue letters, now they appear with a gray background (see screenshot above).

Blacktop Combines Foursquare, Places – Blacktop has created an app for iPhone allowing users to combine Places and Foursquare check-ins into “trips” that may be shared to their Facebook stream or by email. The company is advertising itself as a great way to “tell the story around a vacation, a day trip, or a night on the town.”

Facebook Sues Over ‘Face,’ ‘Book’ – Facebook is suing a number of companies with similar-sounding names. Recent examples that changed their name or may have to include: Placebook, Teachbook, FaceCash and Faceparty.

No Marijuana on Facebook - Facebook has declined to run ads from a group called Just Say Now, which is promoting the legalization of marijuana in California. Initially the company accepted the ads, generating 38 million impressions from Aug. 7 to 16, but then the ads were removed.  The Huffington Post quoted Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes, “The image of a pot leaf is classified with all smoking products and therefore is not acceptable under our policies.”

Politicos and Privacy Problematic – Tim O’Reilly told The Hill this week that he’s concerned that politicians may negatively impact the technology field in their “witch hunt” for consumer privacy.

Flowtown Shares Consumer Media Use – Flowtown is an interesting company that takes your customer email lists and gives you a breakdown of their social media use, influence and demographics. The cost is $17 to $200 a month (plus five cents per new contact), 15,000 businesses are using the service so far and the company received $750,000 in seed funding from Dave McClure of 500 Startups, among others.

Facebook Hires Platform Exec – Katie Mitic has joined Facebook as part of the company’s platform marketing team. She previously worked for Palm and Yahoo. [Image via]

Facebook Won’t Use ARM Chips – The rumor this week that Facebook would be using ARM chips in its servers turned out to be untrue this week. ARM chips take less power than other technologies and are frequently used in smart phones.

WePay Brings Group Pay to Facebook - WePay, the online payment company, announced its Facebook integration today. WePay could be useful for Facebook Events and Facebook Groups, there’s the option to sell tickets and collect money with a bank account or credit card. The company takes a 3.5% or 50 cent transaction fee.

Germany Employers Can’t Screen Potential Hires on Facebook – A new German law bans employers from screening applicants’ Facebook profiles during the hiring process,  although Googling and searching LinkedIn are still allowed. The law comes after several years’ worth of scandals where employers were spying on employees; the new law also prevents employers from video surveilling employees in the bathroom, changing room and break room.

Facebook Edges Out Orkut in India – Facebook overtook Google’s Orkut as the most popular social network in India this week. For more information check out the Global Monitor report at Inside Facebook Gold.

Open Meeting Law and Facebook - The City of Redondo Beach, Calif. shut down its Facebook Page this week after concerns that the Page didn’t meet the state’s public records law. Do comments on the Page count as public record? Could the city delete offensive comments? These were some of the issues at hand that the city’s attorney decided were not worth the legal uncertainty. Redondo Beach remains active on Twitter, YouTube and Nixie.

Peanut Labs Mobilizes for Pakistan – Peanut Labs has organized on Facebook to raise money for the millions of flood victims in Pakistan. The company is taking donations on Facebook hoping to raise $25,000 by Aug. 31. Although co-founder Ali Moiz is a native of Pakistan, the company also donated 10% of its February profits to Haitian earthquake relief. To donate click here.

CampusBuddy, Cramster Collaborate – CampusBuddy, the education-focused Facebook application, has partnered with Cramster the online college help site. The new partnership, according to a blog post from CampusBuddy, will allow each company’s members to benefit from the others’ resources. Cramster will offer its homework and textbook help and CampusBuddy will offer its data from more than 100 million official grade records aiming to help students raise their grades.

Rixty Running Giveaway – Rixty is giving away $750 in Rixty cards, which may be used in more than 50 online games and on Facebook. To enter to win one of the cards click here.

Altoids is promoting the app as a way to help people filter through the many “friends” most users have on Facebook these days so they don’t miss out on hearing from the people they actually care about.

The way it works after download is, it prompts the user to login to Facebook. Then you search for Facebook friends you want to add to the Tune Out list, Altoids recommends no more than 16; updates to each profile are noted with stars. From that point on, Tune Out users will only see updates from these friends in their customized stream, although the list remains alterable.

Using Tune Out allows Facebook users to continue to comment and interact with friends’ profiles, but helps to focus attention on the profiles of their Tune Out list.

The app also works with Twitter.

Altoids only has about 11,300 Likes on its Facebook Page at this point so the app may be meant to help grow the Page’s audience, although the Wall doesn’t reflect much excitement from fans or the admin about the app.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Eminem 11,606,074 +635,401 +5.79 2. Justin Bieber 10,113,499 +473,066 +4.91 3. Lady Gaga 16,391,818 +467,325 +2.93 4. Facebook 17,092,038 +435,673 +2.62 5. Kurtlar Vadisi 470,089 +427,834 +1,012.51 6. Family Guy 15,968,324 +406,750 +2.61 7. South Park 11,454,464 +402,879 +3.65 8. YouTube 11,805,545 +401,116 +3.52 9. Lil Wayne 10,478,458 +371,161 +3.67 10. Shakira 7,351,463 +349,491 +4.99 11. The Simpsons 6,029,872 +346,514 +6.10 12. Linkin Park 11,064,009 +342,581 +3.20 13. David Guetta 7,600,282 +334,852 +4.61 14. Bob Marley 9,415,828 +315,489 +3.47 15. Megan Fox 12,337,506 +312,351 +2.60 16. Dr. House 9,999,521 +301,766 +3.11 17. Two and a Half Men 7,205,059 +301,671 +4.37 18. Cristiano Ronaldo 10,621,939 +301,564 +2.92 19. Rihanna 7,841,078 +301,020 +3.99 20. The Twilight Saga 12,041,737 +297,033 +2.53

Topping the list again this week is rapper Eminem, who seems to be still riding the wave of popularity from his recent single and music video. He added 635,400 Likes, has a total of 11.6 million now — and hasn’t really updated his Page during the past week. Justin Bieber followed in second, adding 473,000 Likes to a Page now 10.1 million strong; he’s been touting awards nominations, been on TV and touring. Lady Gaga was in third place, adding 467,300 Likes, garnering a total of 16.3 million and touring, posting photos of herself and moving ahead as the person with the most Twitter followers this week.

Rapper Lil Wayne took ninth place, adding 371,200 Likes to his 10.4 million; he wrote a letter to fans from jail and promoted a single on his Page this week. Shakira followed at tenth, adding 349,500 fans to her 7.3 million total; she announced new tour dates among other updates. Linkin Park came in at number 12, promoting their new single, its upcoming video and their album set for release next month. The band added 342,600 Likes and now numbers more than 11 million.

DJ David Guetta came in at number 13, seemingly riding his current popularity to the list. He added 334,900 Likes to his Page of 7.6 million Likes. Bob Marley’s Page followed, adding 315,500 Likes to the 9.4 million total; the Page has been promoting various Marley-related information. Rihanna came in nineteenth, added 301,000 Likes and grew to 7.8 million total; she’s been touring and posting photos asking fans to tag themselves.

A handful of television programs made up the better part of the middle of our list this week.

Turkish movie and TV show “Valley of the Wolves” came in fifth this week, adding 427,800 Likes in one day, Tuesday. The Page is heavily promoting the show.

The Pages of these U.S. shows promoted the shows, and their eminent fall premieres on the Wall this week. “Family Guy” came in sixth, adding 406,800 Likes, growing to about 16 million. “South Park” followed at 7, adding 402,900 Likes, growing to 11.4 million. “The Simpsons” came in at 11, adding 346,500 Likes to a 6 million total. The Page for Dr. House, main character from the show “House,” was sixteenth this week, but more likely than not because of a Page consolidation since there was not really any activity on the Page. And the Page for “Two and a Half Men,” was seventeenth with 301,700 new Likes, 7.2 million total and lots of promos for the new season.

Then there was a mixed bag.

Facebook’s Page was fourth, adding 435,700 Likes to a total of 17 million; the company launched its new Places service last week. Fellow tech company YouTube was eighth, adding 401,100 Likes to grow to 11.8 million. Starlet Megan Fox was at number 15, adding 312,400 Likes to grow to 12.3 million; she made an appearance at an awards show and her new movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. Celebrity Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo came in at 18, adding 301,600 Likes to his 10.6 million-strong Page; he’s been posting photos of his training, sponsorship deals and updating about his games. Finally, “The Twilight Saga” Page added 297,000 Likes to grow to 12 million by promoting the movies’ stars and merchandise.

Facebook Places has the potential to change how people find and use real-time information. Instead of chaotically searching various location service venue pages, keywords, or hashtags, users can now find information about real-world events and locations on Places pages thanks to the Places API.

Here’s an example of how that works in action. The SF Street Food Festival was held in San Francisco this weekend, in the heart of a city full of social media users. Beyond featuring a wide variety of great food, it also showcased how people share and consume real-time information.

Waits at some vendors fluctuated from zero to 30 minutes in length through the day, much longer than in previous years when the event wasn’t as well publicized. While many knew the status of the lines at any given moment, finding the most up-to-date information online wasn’t easy. Foursquare and Gowalla venue pages had lots of check-ins, some of which included wait length information. Some people published to Twitter using the unofficial #sfstreetfood hashtag, others “at-replied” @sfstreetfood, while the less savvy simply wrote San Francisco Street Food in their tweet. But none of these sources had all the information.

Facebook Places will. Using the write API, data from across location services can be aggregated to a Places page. Unlike hashtags, which can easily differ from each other and thereby splinter the data, Facebook keeps everything tidy by suggesting the most popular instance of a Place if you try to create a similar one. While there’s no Twitter integration yet, someone could create an system that converts hashtags into Places API write calls. While Places check-ins are currently only visible to friends regardless of your setting, the fact that there is a privacy option to share check-ins with everyone means Places pages are equipped to become public repositories of real-time information.

Next year, users could instead find out about line lengths by viewing the SF Street Food Festival Places page, where they’ll see check-ins with descriptions of the lines from across services, aggregated as they happen. If the creators of the festival have claimed the Place page or merged it with their official Page, it could show official news as well. Since the Places page is a destination linked to from news feed stories, the “Here Now” and “Nearby Places” lists on mobile interfaces, and Facebook’s suggested match-enabled search bar, traffic will all flow to this one central page.

The norms of Facebook Places use are still developing. Many are currently making low-content, description-less check-ins, but warming up to deeper, wider sharing of location info will take some time. Judging by the millions who leave their status updates visible to everyone or publicly post about their current location to Twitter, there are plenty of people willing to create and share this real-time information. But we won’t need search to it.

In the article below, we’ll see how the app fits into the existing career networking ecosystem. We’ll also talk with founder and serial entrepreneur Rick Marini about his views on industry topics like Facebook’s viral channels, the next generation of social games, and the opportunity in utilities.

Marini co-founded personality test site Tickle.com in 1999, growing it to become the 18th largest site on the internet before selling it to Monster.com for more than $100 million in 2004. He and his team of 80 worked at Monster.com for three years before he left with six handpicked employees to found SuperFan. The social entertainment hub lets users create content for the site and spend virtual currency to prove they are the biggest fans of their favorite media, celebrities and more. SuperFan uses Facebook for login and viral distribution of activity and also runs a Facebook application in conjunction with the site.

Marini launched BranchOut.com on July 20th, 2010 out of the same office as SuperFan, and came out of a workplace experience. An associate asked him for a sales lead introduction to a company Marini knew one of his Facebook friends worked at, but he couldn’t remember which friend. He realized an app that listed where your friends worked could not only help people find jobs, like the Simply Hired Facebook Connect site, but could be a career networking platform. The seven person company includes five engineers, and is self-funded by Marini, with no sponsors or advertising.

The definition of “friends” now encompasses professional contacts, and Facebook features like friend lists help users manage distribution of information to segments of their increasingly heterogeneous network. Therefore, as Marini tells us, it makes sense to find career contacts through one’s existing friend network, instead of cultivating a specific professional network like LinkedIn. “I’ll accept anyone into my LinkedIn network,” he explains, “but I’m much more motivated to help my [Facebook friends, who are my] support group get a lead, even friends of friends.”

BranchOut – A Facebook Utility

BranchOut’s primary feature is the ability to search for a company and see all of your friends who list that they’ve worked there. Additionally, if one of your friends installs BranchOut, you can see the work histories of their friends as well. To unlock this second degree of network information, users are encouraged to invite friends to join BranchOut through a multi-friend selector which can send wall posts or private messages, or by sharing a unique referral URL.

The BranchOut home page also features a list of the companies at which you have the most contacts; a feed of showing new friend additions, changes to friends’ work info, and people you’ve recently stopped being friends with; and a quick link to edit your own work info. The “Jobs” tab, powered by Indeed, shows any job postings friends have listed in to help out their network or earn referral bonuses. Adding a job posting is free.

BranchOut’s funnest feature is the ability to browse an archive of all your friends and their work histories. You might otherwise never have bothered to check a new friend’s work info to see he used to work at MTV. Currently, there is no public data on BranchOut, whether from Facebook profiles without privacy restrictions, or from Twitter or LinkedIn. Integrations with those services may be included in the future, though.

Marini says some next steps for BranchOut include internationalization, and adding the ability to search for job titles, not just company names. The company is working with Facebook on how to normalize work info data. Currently, many users haven’t changed their work info since they joined Facebook, or purposefully have self-described job titles like “Under the florescent lights” instead of “Lead Engineer.” BranchOut is considering a “Remind them to update” button, or appealing to Facebook to increase the visibility of “work info change” feed stories which could stimulate these updates.

BranchOut provides career network data for those who don’t want to build up a separate network on a service like LinkedIn. While not as full featured, it focuses on fostering connections, not reading resumes. As long as users have an appropriate profile picture, privacy and reputation concerns are minimal, and they can get career help from friends who want them to succeed.

Q&A on Viral Channels, The Next Generation of Social Games, and Facebook Utilities

Inside Facebook: How do you think the alterations to Facebook’s viral channels have influenced the application ecoystem?

Rick Marini: It forced developers to look for other ways to build their user base. Look at Facebook’s giant user base – less than half of them are playing social games yet a big chunk of the news feed was dominated by game related activity – it made sense to meet the needs of [non-game players]. If there was a benefit for them through marketing revenue, that was a secondary thought. It comes back to great content that users want to share. If you’re a smaller developer you need to step up the content because you don’t have the pockets of the big three [Zynga, Playdom, and Playfish].

IF: What do you think about Facebook allowing developers to request a user’s email address?

RM: The big push for allowing that actually came from developers. Facebook said “we’ll do that, and if the app does the wrong thing, the user will uninstall it.”  The consequence is that Facebook isn’t in the middle being blamed if the developer is being spammy. Facebook acts as the facilitators and not the channel. There’s thousands of developers, lots want that direct relationship with the user, and Facebook doesn’t need to be in between if apps are doing the right thing.

IF: Do you think there’s more innovation to be done around the remaining viral channels?

RM: The invite request channel is now on the lower right rail – it’d be nice to have more prominence, a balance, but I fall on the side of Facebook. I don’t like the idea of spamming for points. If you have a game like Mafia Wars where the larger your crew is the more power you have in the game, you’re so engaged in the content of the game that you want to invite people.

I’d love to see Facebook work with certain trusted, preferred partners who won’t be spammy. It would allow them to experiment with viral channels like direct contacting or removing the invite cap.

IF: What do you think is the next big step for social game developers?

RM: More personalization like friends’ [names and photos] that you can bring into a game as passive players, and games that involve your friends – not just as a neighbor like in FarmVille but as an active part of the game play.

Wonderhill is a favorite. They have some beautiful design that differentiates them from others. I’d like to see devs go to the next generation of design. Wheras the first gen of social games are more akin to a Mario Bros., the next gen in terms of graphics will be more like today’s [console games].  What happened over a ten to fifteen year period on consoles is happening over a three year period with social games.

Console developers spend tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars on a single game. There’s a lot of thought that goes into mechanics and design that should go into Facebook platform games – with that creativity and beauty taken to a higher level – I want to see that happen online. We already saw it with EA buying Playfish – I don’t think it’s the evolution of console gaming going away, but expanding the console offering so you can play on both [the computer and the television].

IF: What do you think of the gaming maturity level of most social game players?

RM: Not necessarily by design but to the benefit of social gaming is that it started pretty simple. FarmVille is a pretty simple game, simple design, but it attracted a lot of people who didn’t come from a gaming background. That’s great because if social games had immediately advanced to the modern Grand Theft Auto level, you wouldn’t have those people playing. Mario was a great game but soon you want faster, prettier, more. If you only give them simple content, then people are going to get bored.

I think people are going to mature — for a lot of people, the first time you play Farmville it’s a little challenging, then you get hooked for several months, then your friends are moving to the next game with better graphics and a little more game play. As that happens, each time you play a new game you’re expecting better graphics, mechanics, music — whatever the new features are will get more complex — games have to do that to keep people hooked. People have a short attention span. If you expect them to play the same game for years – it’s unlikely. Social gaming hasn’t advanced to a place like World of Warcraft but we’re going three to five times the speed.

IF: What game types are going to succeed in the social ecosystem. Is there a place for twitch game styles?

RM: I think the games that require mores strategy and thoughtfulness hook you in much longer, especially if you can involve friends. An easy strategic game is Words With Friends. It’s not twitch like Bejeweled Blitz, it’s something you actually have to think about it, so you can play for months and months with friends.

I think games like WOW — long term strategic games you can build communities around whether a small group of friends or a large community like a tribe or a guild — those are the games that are really long lasting. Plus, with social you can constantly iterate. Unlike a console game which goes out on the shelf, Mafia Wars can keep adding new cities, new challenges and tasks while keeping that community there. Once you’ve got a large mafia, it’s harder to leave because you have to leave a community. If you can hook people into a larger group, you’ve got that social dynamic keeping them there much longer.

IF: What about non-game applications?

RM: Layering utility on top of the platform will be big. Utility spaces include dating and careers. What’s been big on the dot com side that hasn’t been brought to Facebook? We think the utility space will be important in the next ten years.

Facebook, Google Approach Data Centers Differently – An interesting piece in The Dalles Chronicle points out that Facebook and Google have taken radically different approaches to constructing their data centers in Oregon. The article characterized Google as standoffish, secretive and not always smooth with the locals on site whereas Facebook — headed by one of the former leaders of Google’s data center — has sent employees to meet with local leaders and disclosed construction plans early on. In other example, as we wrote previously, Facebook recently co-sponsored a local music event and pie bake-off at its site in Crook County.

Facebook Changes Notes – Facebook has changed its Notes app to allow people to bold, italicize, underline, use bullets, numbered lists or indented quotes without having to use the HTML tags. Users will now also be able to tag Pages in Note. Finally, a new menu on the left side allows for quick perusal of a user’s own Notes, Notes about you or Notes that might interest you.

CloudCrowd raises $5.1 M – CloudCrowd, which networks with workers around the world to bring labor into the cloud, previously raised $5.1 million recently and previously raised $1.5 million, according to TechCrunch. We wrote extensively about CloudCrowd’s business recently, the company bills itself as an on-demand labor-as-a-service crowdsourcing company which uses a Facebook application to assign tasks to workers, more at the link.

Appbistro Raises $550K – Appbistro raised $550,000 in funding recently from a variety of angel investors; the startup is essentially a market of apps for Page developers. Appbistro launched in May, according to TechCrunch, and so far 10,000 apps have been downloaded from the web site.

Rixty: Redeem Coins, Get Facebook Credits – Virtual currency provider Rixty is running a promotion from Aug. 9 through Sept. 7 that combines its Coinstar coin counting kiosks with Facebook Credits. the promotion allows users to redeem vouchers from Coinstar kiosks for Credits, up to 10 free Credits for redeeming their kiosk balance for a Rixty voucher. They can earn up to 105 more free Credits for exchanging these vouchers for Credits at the $0.199/Credit tax, depending on the value of the voucher.

Facebook Seattle Page – Facebook recently opened the Seattle office we wrote about in May and the company consequently published a Page for the office. Thus far the Page has about 530 Likes and Wall content, as well as a note including basic information and a photo of the view from the office.

Facebook Nears Saturation in UK – Hitwise’s numbers in the United Kingdom show that, while Facebook is still very popular, the social network may be nearing saturation. The amount of time people spend on the site decreased slightly and growth has slowed over the past six months. Check out our premium service, Inside Facebook Gold, for more information on growth by country.

eBay Thanks Like Button for Revenue – eBay has reportedly attributed part of its $2.2 billion increase in revenue last quarter to Facebook’s Like button. The Like button has been part of eBay’s Daily Deals or Fashion Vault promotions and company executive say Facebook’s social plugins represent some of the best marketing tools currently available.

Spotify Designer Joins Facebook – Rasmus Andersson, the former chief designer at Spotify, has left to join Facebook as a product designer. At Spotify, Andersson worked on creative and art direction, interaction and graphic design, brand identity and user interaction, among other things. He’ll be moving to San Francisco as part of his new job. On his blog he said that working with basic human needs, such as music and social interaction, has been the focus of his professional life. [Photo via]

Swiss Pharma Censured Over Facebook Info – Swiss drug maker Novartis ran into trouble with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week over a widget on the company’s web site promoting its leukemia tasigna drug. Under current laws drug companies must present the pros along with the cons of any drug in advertisements, but the widget allowed Facebook users to share information promoting the product without any of the warning information. We wrote about the thin line pharmaceutical companies are currently walking by promoting products on social media spaces; the government is still considering regulations for social media drug promotions.

Book Delta Flights on Facebook – Delta’s new Ticket Window app allows users to book flights directly on Facebook. The app is powered by Alvenda.

Shout Out with Shoutworthy - Facebook Connect integration Shoutworthy is set up to allow people to professionally recommend their Facebook friends by profession and broadcast a short message about this recommendation over Twitter and Facebook.

Hospitals Contend with Facebook – Hospital administrators in California, as well as other places, are having trouble controlling what employees post about their work on Facebook. This is a particular problem due to U.S. medical confidentiality laws, especially in hospitals in Southern California where celebrities often go for treatment. So far, hospitals have responded by firing staffers who break the laws by posting photos or other confidential information on Facebook and by mounting their own social media campaigns.

UK’s Panic Button a Success – The United Kingdom’s experience with the so-called “Panic Button” to allow children to report inappropriate behavior on Facebook has been deemed successful by authorities there. The application has been downloaded more than 55,000 times and the 211 reports generated from it were serious offenses, such as “sexual grooming.” More at the link.

New Jersey Police Post Mug Shots – The Evesham Township police have begun posting the mug shots of local offenders, like drunk drivers, on Facebook. CNET reports that, while this is interesting, it does open up a strange can of worms because the photos can be tagged, which could lead to mischief.

Ronaldo Gets 10 Million Fans – Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo passed 10 million Likes on Facebook this week, making him the first non-American person to do so.

Creating applications using Webtrend Apps is relatively simple and requires no coding experience. Users of the self-serve tool can edit the content of pre-made templates for content apps that allow syndication of video, blogs, images, and Twitter; engagement apps like polls, quizzes, user generated content publishers, and landing pages; and conversion apps like coupons, location-based deals, and gifts. The two-pane app editor lets users change content, settings, and styles on the left while seeing the results on the right.

Once finished building, users can publish demo versions of their apps with a 100 impressions/day cap for free, making it easy to see how an app looks and feels in use. Publishing Facebook apps for the first time is a complicated process, but Webtrends takes users through it step by step to ensure things like canvass page URLs and API keys are set up properly.

Companies willing to pay more for professionally built apps can have Webtrends Apps’ full-service team develop apps for them. Pricing for a year of self-service vs full-service for each app type is $1,500/$8,000 for content apps, $3,000/$10,000 for engagement apps, and $4,500/$12,000 for conversion apps.

Bundled with their Facebook apps is a Facebook analytics tool Webtrends released in February that improves on deficiencies of Facebook’s native Insights. It allows clients to see up to date statistics about custom Page tabs and applications such as time on site and what content was shared, as well as integrate Facebook analytics into their web-wide analytics solution.

Webtrends saw brands from all industries looking to make custom apps, but found existing developers to be too slow, complicated, and overworked. The acquisition of Transpond makes Webtrends a good start-to-finish solution for companies trying to break into Facebook or other app platforms. While the apps themselves are relatively basic, the ability to create, publish, and track them with just one set of tools offers simplicity those new to the app scene will appreciate.

The company provides Page management software to brands for use on their Facebook Pages, although it also does work on other platforms, including MySpace and Twitter. Using Wildfire’s products, brands can easily manage all their Facebook content, while coordinating that content with other promotions on other platforms. We spoke to Wildfire’s Victoria Ransom as part of our ongoing series of Page management company profiles, which most recently included Likeable and Vitrue.

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Victoria Ransom: Wildfire is a platform for large brands, agencies and small- and medium- sized businesses to easily and effectively manage their social media marketing needs. We provide easy-to-use, self-service tools for the creation of engaging social media marketing campaigns such as sweepstakes, contests, coupons, group deals, quizzes and many more. Using the Wildfire platform, companies can create social media marketing campaigns within minutes and simultaneously publish them on their Facebook fan Page, on their web site, automatically integrated with Facebook Connect, and on Twitter.

Wildfire is used by companies of all sizes — including tens of thousands of small businesses (mom and pop shops, non-profits and independent marketing consultants) and hundreds of large brands and agencies including Pepsi, Disney, Nestle, GAP, Ogilvy, Publicis and many more. We’ve even run campaigns for Facebook — eight to be exact.

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

VR: Wildfire provides effective and affordable tools for building fans, followers, brand awareness and sales. We’ve helped our clients to build tens of millions of new fans, followers and newsletter subscribers and to drive millions of dollars in sales.

Some example results include:

• A giveaway campaign for Edible Arrangements’ Facebook fan Page, in cooperation with the agency Digital Surgeons, that grew the company’s fans from 5,000 to over 100,000 in just four days. By the end of the one month campaign, the company’s fans had grown to 170,000. In addition, the head of marketing at Edible Arrangements reported double digit sales growth for the quarter as a result of the new customers that were driven in-store to claim their giveaway of chocolate dipped strawberries.
• We ran a coupon campaign on Haute Look’s Facebook fan Page (high to low value coupons and some free) that not only resulted in thousands of new fans, but also resulted in five-fold increase in ROI in terms of product sold and over 20% of purchases were made by first time buyers.
• We ran a coupon campaign on Facebook for a major theatre chain that generated hundreds of thousands of new fans and coupon redemptions in just two weeks.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

VR: Since our public launch one year ago, Wildfire has served tens of thousands of companies and has powered over 50,000 campaigns. We have helped companies to obtain tens of millions of fans and followers and we have gone through tremendous growth on all fronts within the last year.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

VR: The exact success metrics that our clients focus on do vary depending on the goals of the client and the type of campaign they are running. For example, when running a coupon campaign our clients are generally focused on number of coupons redeemed and sales generated; when running a sweepstakes they are focused more on number of fans, followers and/or leads generated. The kind of metrics that our clients typically look at are: Number engagements, number entries, number fans and/or followers, number leads generated, coupon redemptions, revenues generated and word-of-mouth spread.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

VR: Facebook is an ever-evolving platform, not only in terms of major changes such as the new graph API, but also in terms of regular weekly releases that periodically effect all third party developers. Given these challenges, we need to be highly flexible, adaptable and quick to implement changes. It also creates opportunities because among the many benefits we provide for our clients is our ability to stay on top of Facebook’s changes — something that would be challenging for most of our clients if they were to build their own Facebook applications.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

VR: Facebook is undoubtedly one of the most innovative companies in the world and recently they have been launching new, game-changing products and feature enhancements at a rapid pace — everything from social plugins and the new graph API to Facebook Questions and the much anticipated (but not yet official) Facebook location product. We find all of these changes to be exciting but some that have benefited us the most are the improvements to Facebook Insights, the all-in-one permissions dialogue and the new graph API.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

VR: No, we have been able to react and adapt fast enough to Facebook’s changes such that there have not been any changes that have noticeably hurt us.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

VR: Last November Facebook came out with a detailed roadmap that was hugely helpful to third party developers. We’d love it if Facebook would update this more regularly.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

VR: Using our application, companies can easily run campaigns on their Facebook fan Page, Twitter and their web site. While Facebook is a highly important marketing channel for our clients, other channels such as their web site and Twitter are also very important. While some of our clients choose to run campaigns like contests, giveaways and coupons on their Facebook fan Page alone, many choose to create a more integrated experience by running campaigns on the multiple channels that we offer. In this way they can use one campaign to simultaneously build their Facebook fans, their Twitter followers and turn their web site visitors into leads. Our web site option automatically integrates with Facebook Connect, so companies can run campaigns on their web site while still building their fan base and benefiting from Facebook’s social channels such as newsfeeds and friend invites.

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

VR: Wildfire recently launched Group Deals, the first social buying application for Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Connect. With a Group Deal any business, whether it’s a large brand, an agency or a small- or medium- sized business, can easily and cost-effectively sell their product or service by running a Groupon-like deal on their Facebook fan Page or on their website. We also have a number of new and powerful products in development.