Last week, we reported that Facebook wanted to hire two people in Washington, D.C., and then dissected the official descriptions of the positions as best we could.  Still, the bullet points left a lot unclear, so it’s noteworthy that Facebook provided some clarifying paragraphs today.

Adam Conner was the first member of Facebook’s D.C. team, and a post he wrote for the company’s internal blog was actually promoted to its public blog this afternoon.  Conner – who also deserves applause for being a Conan supporter – did a good job of explaining some of his responsibilities and favorite moments.

Here’s one excerpt that reveals just how politically connected Facebook may be: Conner wrote, "The week of January 11-17 was pretty cool, helping to pull together the Global Disaster Relief Page in just few hours.  I went on vacation that weekend and was on the phone in Mexico convincing President Clinton to plug our Facebook page as part of the relief efforts."

As for the more day-to-day stuff, Conner described his duties by writing, "I get to sit in meetings with vaguely important and occasionally actually important people and explain why Facebook is like the wheel or fire and how not using it really isn’t an option anymore."

It sounds like the social network’s well on its way to being omnipresent in Washington, then, especially as it adds two more employees.

When Twitter users go to post a new tweet, they have in the past used a button that says "update" (at least from Twitter.com…that varies when you get into all the different apps Twitter users use). Now, that button says "Tweet".

We’re not sure exactly when the change was made, but it appears to have been very recently, as there is quite an outpour of Tweets from users mentioning that they are now seeing the "tweet" button. Perhaps this is Twitter way of asserting some kind of ownership of the word and the brand that it carries.

Twitter made "retweeting" an official feature last year, after the community-born practice grew to mainstream use.

Interestingly, Retweet.com just sold for $250,000 this week.

The tweet button isn’t the only new thing going on with Twitter’s website this week. Twitter is currently in the process of rolling out geolocation features on the site, after having had such capabilities available via the API since November.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be speaking at SXSW early next week (WebProNews will be there covering it). We may get more interesting news from the company there (some expect an ad platform to be announced).

Update: Looks like some have noticed this for at least a couple days.

StumbleUpon has launched a new advertising system, which the company says helps cost-effectively deliver advertiser content to targeted audiences, while increasing the opportunity for content to go viral.

StumbleUpon finds and recommends ad content it deems relevant to targeted audiences’ interested based on demographic and topic areas. StumbleUpon users by simple nature of the site choose the content topics of interest to them, and are delivered random content based on this). This makes for an interesting way of delivering ads.

"With StumbleUpon Advertising, we’re solving the challenge of how advertisers can get more content that is relevant and impactful in front of their targeted audiences," says StumbleUpon CEO and Founder Garrett Camp. "We are dedicated to providing the tools that help advertisers identify and reach their audiences, measure campaigns effectively and gain real-time user feedback."

"After testing the StumbleUpon Advertising system for eight months, we know it’s an extremely cost-effective way to drive qualified traffic and let the content speak for itself," said Jason Clement, Director of Findability at Wieden + Kennedy. “Since StumbleUpon Advertising targets content to users based on their personal interests, we can be confident that our content is reaching the most receptive audience possible. And when an audience enjoys our content, the reward is a healthy amount of free, organic traffic."

"StumbleUpon Advertising makes it easy and cost-effective to deliver the right content to a new audience of our target users," said Ben Tider, Assistant Director, Audience Development at Time Inc. Lifestyle Digital Group. “With streamlined campaign set-up and management, we can better optimize ads and recommend content based on the individual user. Because readers can self-identify the types of content we show them, they are more engaged and likely to share it with friends."

"StumbleUpon Advertising enables brand advertisers to serve up compelling content while users are searching or ‘stumbling’ around the Web," said Josh Spear, Founding Partner of Undercurrent. "With StumbleUpon Ads, an advertiser’s content is not an interruption, but rather a fully integrated experience that affords an opportunity for additional exposure when audiences like or respond well to the content. It is comparable to a banner that becomes more cost efficient based on positive viewer feedback. The new user interface also greatly enhances the service by delivering advanced analytics and more detailed campaign management tools."

StumbleUpon claims to generate nearly 600 million recommendations per month for its community of almost 11 million members.

Related: About a year ago, we interviewed StumbleUpon’s VP of Business Development about advertising on the site.

Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers.  Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.

According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein’s remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous.  He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I’m really afraid of are social networking sites.  That’s an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."

Klein then explained, "The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . .  Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news.  We don’t want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . .  So I’m far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."

That’s an interesting take on the power of social networks.  It implies – at the very least – that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on.  An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.

On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks’ users can easily – even unwittingly – make or break major corporations.

MySpace launched a new gaming experience at myspace.com/games today. The company says it empowers developers with new tools, analytics, and opportunities for driving usage and revenue.

"Gaming is core to the overall entertainment value of MySpace; we are replicating our success from MySpace Music for this next round of platform improvements," a representative for MySpace tells WebProNews. "Nearly a third of MySpace users engage daily in games and there are more than 28 million active app users on the site." She says the site "offers users discovery and sharing of games in a simpler and cleaner experience."

"Nearly one-third of MySpace users engage daily with games. We believe the new experience will empower even more of the MySpace audience to discover, share, and showcase games, which along with music and movies, are core to our content strategy," said MySpace Co-President Mike Jones. "We’ve been working with our developer partners to understand where they’d like to see MySpace go; based on that feedback we started rebuilding MySpace Games. These are the first steps in offering robust tools for developers to help their businesses thrive."

MySpace says developers can now:

- Review application-specific analytics via a new API, including invitation conversions, active users, notification responses and demographics.

- Build games in rich, 3D-like quality with Unity’s powerful 3D engine and allow MySpace users to access the games with a new plug-in. For example, Paradise Paintball utilizes this technology.

- Encourage cross-platform competition with Scoreloop, which allows games on different platforms to share the same high scores, achievements, challenges and buddy lists.

- Utilize GroovyCortex, which is a cloud-based solution for onsite application developers, to provide low latency push data for multiplayer games.
 
- Track the source of application invitations and utilization to learn how users are finding and choosing specific games.

Along with the new MySpace Games site, MySpace announced a MySpace Games iPhone app, nine new social games, and a Gallery. Earlier this week, MySpace announced that it has the most popular social app on Android.

It appears that the new MySpace Games experience hasn’t fully rolled out yet. 

At the first f8 conference, Facebook Platform was launched.  Facebook Connect was announced the second time around.  And now, as f8 2010 draws near, a report’s indicated that Facebook will finally unveil a feature having to do with users’ physical locations.

Consider the difference someone’s location can make.  Here’s one basic example: Many people would pass over the status update "Kate is warm," but something like "Kate is warm – Miami, Florida" might attract all sorts of attention from Kate’s friends (assuming Kate’s not a Miami native).  Plus it could mean a different set of ads would get shown.

It’s significant, then, that Nick Bilton reported this afternoon, "Facebook plans to take the wraps off a new location-based feature in late April at f8, the company’s yearly developer conference, according to several people briefed on the project."

Bilton also wrote, "The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans.  One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends. . . .  The other will be a set of software tools, known as A.P.I.’s, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users."

As for how Facebook intends to deal with privacy issues, this should be an opt-in feature, effectively cutting off the sorts of protests with which some other changes and Google Buzz were greeted.

Now we just have to wait and see if Facebook actually follows through on these rumors.

Four months ago, Facebook launched something called the Preferred Developer Consultant Program in an effort to point companies and celebrities towards the best developers.  Now, the program’s taking an important leap forward as Facebook’s more than tripled the number of recommended developers.

Facebook started things off with just 14 developers, which seemed like an interesting choice.  Those dozen or so developers couldn’t possibly design too many Facebook pages and/or apps, after all, so was demand negligible?  Were great developers extremely rare?  Or did Facebook just feel like causing a crazy bidding war for people’s services?

Today, the social network granted 35 additional developers "preferred" status, making the situation look somewhat manageable.

Kristin Thayer, a member of the Facebook Developer Network team, also explained that the global community’s needs have been taken into consideration.  She wrote on the Facebook Developer Blog, "Over half of the new Preferred Developer Consultants have international operations and have already built campaigns, community portals, and other social applications in countries like Israel, Lithuania, and Czech Republic."

Thayer added, as well, "If you or your company builds high quality Facebook Connect implementations, Facebook applications, and/or Facebook Pages, and is interested in being included as a developer consultant in this program, please visit the Developer FAQ to learn more about submitting your company for consideration."

Yahoo Mail users should find it considerably more convenient to get in touch with their friends and acquaintances from now on.  Today, Yahoo and Facebook made it possible for those users to add their Facebook friends’ email addresses to their Yahoo Contacts lists.

The benefits should be obvious.  A post on the Yahoo Mail Blog pointed out, "So when you are on Yahoo! Sports and you want to email your old high school buddy that great article on the Winter Olympics, his email address is just a click away.  Or maybe you want to forward your cousin your airplane reservations on Yahoo! Mail . . . . [n]ow you can type the first few letters of his name in Yahoo! Mail and – presto! – his email address from his Facebook profile will appear in your email."

The import process is extremely simple, too.  Users just need to head to the "Import Contacts" page, click on Facebook’s logo, enter their Facebook login info, and wait a few moments for all of the data to transfer.

Whether this development will be enough to make Gmail or Hotmail users give Yahoo Mail a chance is hard to say, but this at least represents a significant step forward in terms of user-friendliness for existing Yahoo Mail fans.

More tie-ups between Yahoo and Facebook are on the way, too, according to Andrew Molyneux, a program manager over Yahoo Mail.

Google Buzz has captured a lot of the buzz around services with "Buzz" in the title (of which there are a few), but before Google Buzz was even announced, AT&T Interactive had already launched a beta version of its latest take on local business search at Buzz.com. Buzz.com has only been available on an invitation basis so far, and will remain that way until some bugs are ironed out, but you may find AT&T’s Buzz becoming a bigger part of your life than Google’s simply, because it will be coming at you from your Facebook friends.

We spent close to an hour talking to AT&T about the product, checking out a demo of the service, and getting a feel for just what AT&T plans to do with Buzz.com. Right off the bat, Charlie Hornberger, director of product development told WebProNews it’s not as much about getting in front of people on Buzz.com, but getting in front of them on Facebook. That’s just for now anyway, it’s already integrated with Facebook, and Twitter is next on the list, he says. Then they’ll figure out what other networks to integrate, whether that be Gmail contacts, instant messenger lists, or anything else.

Buzz.com is focused on only positive reactions to businesses. Users can "favorite" businesses and recommend them to their friends. So as far as reputation management goes, there shouldn’t be too many issues here from the standpoint of monitoring negative commentary. Although if your competitors are getting a lot of "buzz" and you’re not, that may be worth looking into.

Hornberger doesn’t appear too worried about any branding issues around the name Buzz. Jokingly, he said it seems like "if you don’t have Buzz then you have a problem." The very nature of Buzz.com shouldn’t make it much of an issue anyway, because it’s essentially coming at you right in your Facebook news feed. You don’t necessarily have to go to Buzz.com to feel its presence, although he views having buzz.com as a URL as a "great asset," because it "makes sense for this product."

Before you get all riled up with visions of Farmville-style Facebook updates, relax, because Buzz’s Facebook integration is set up to prevent feed-spamming. If a user shares a lot of businesses at a time, it will consolidate these into a single update on Facebook. Some Facebook users may still wish not to see such things, but they can adjust their settings in Facebook the same as with anything else. Frankly, this is adding more value to the user than learning about friends’ pseudo-farming practices, because if a friend recommends a dentist, for example, that might be useful to you at some point.

Businesses will want to make sure they’re listed in Buzz.com, because not only will they be listed in Buzz.com, they’ll be listed right in Facebook users’ news feeds anytime a Buzz.com user "favorites" their business, and shares that with their friends. Hornberger calls it a way to get on Facebook "in the best possible way."

Currently there is not a place on Buzz.com that businesses can go and get listed, but he says there will be soon. However, listings come from the same database that powers AT&T’s YellowPages.com. I’d advise making sure you have a listing there, complete with a link to your site. They are looking at other potential ways to expand listings as well, including potentially, a way for users to submit things besides businesses (like a public tennis court for example).

They will have a mobile web app available in a couple weeks for Buzz.com. Hornberger says they haven’t started on one for the App Store, but even if they do, it will be more for visibility purposes, and the web app will likely provide the better user experience (no mention of an Android app).

For now, you can use Buzz.com if you get an invite. Everyone that gets an invite can send out more invitations. There is a chance you are already seeing people post Buzz.com activity to Facebook. Until the kinks are worked out, it will continue to be on an invitation-only basis, but that will likely change in the not-too-distant future.

Buzz.com could play a significant role in the local search space as it grows, and is probably not something businesses want to ignore. On a side note, Buzz.com utilizes AT&T’s existing partnership with Microsoft by providing Bing Maps imagery, so this could be considered another factor in Bing usage.

Have you used Buzz.com? Share your thoughts.

It looks like Facebook will soon begin trying harder to bend the ears of our nation’s leaders.  Listings for a public policy manager and public policy associate have both been posted on the social network’s "Open Positions" page, and Facebook’s decided that these people will work in Washington, D.C.

This isn’t a simple matter of having a couple of folks sit around, answering questions and maybe defending the company when necessary.  Facebook wants the new hires to be quite active.

The public policy manager will be expected to "monitor legislative and regulatory matters at the state governmental level, participate in federal policy discussions, and lead company’s interactions with consumer organizations," according to the official listing.  He (or she) is supposed to "[b]uild coalitions to advance policy goals of Facebook," too.

As for the associate, this individual is meant to attend Congressional Committees, deal with nonprofits, and help with Facebook’s "election and voter action activities," whatever those may be.  Plus have a sense of humor that his or her boss isn’t required to possess.

Anyway, Cecilia Kang, who deserves a hat tip, noted, "Those jobs would bring Facebook’s staff in Washington to five.  It recently hired journalist Andrew Noyes for public policy communications and Tim Sparapani from the ACLU, who is now director of public policy.  Adam Conner began the office and deals with lobbying and policy issues including privacy."

Facebook and Twitter access via mobile browsers has grown by triple-digits in the past year, according to the latest research from comScore.

More than a quarter (30.8%) of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago.  Access to Facebook via mobile browser climbed 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter soared 347 percent.

"Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web," said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile.

"Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser."

In January, 11.1 percent of all mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via mobile browser, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from the previous year. Much of the growth is due to smartphone owners accessing social networking sites on their mobile browsers. Just 6.8 percent of feature phone users accessed social networking sites on their mobile phones.

Access to the most popular social networking sites via mobile browser continues to see significant growth.  In January, 25. 1 million mobile users accessed Facebook, up 112 percent from the previous year.  MySpace attracted 11.4 million users about half that of Facebook during the month.

Facebook’s mobile browser audience surpassed MySpace in February 2009, three months earlier than the Facebook audience climbed past that of MySpace on the PC-based Internet in May 2009.

Twitter, which has experienced solid growth in both mobile and PC-based visitation, attracted 4.7 million mobile users in January, up 347 percent over the previous year.

Online analytics firm Omniture and Facebook said today they have partnered to offer marketers tools to improve Facebook as a marketing channel.

Initially the two companies will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on Facebook. The partnership builds on Facebook analytics the companies introduced last year to help marketers join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers.

The partnership is aimed at helping companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in an effort to connect and have relevant conversations with Facebook’s more than 400 million users.

“Working with us, Omniture has been able to develop a rich and immersive set of tools that will help our clients better understand the value of their Facebook advertising campaigns,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of business development and monetization.

“By creating a single dashboard to plan, deliver and measure campaigns, Omniture can make advertising on Facebook easier and ultimately increase ROI for clients.”

Omniture customers can now use the company’s SearchCenter Plus, a combination of its search engine marketing management application with added functionality for buying Facebook Ads.

In addition, Omniture customers can now generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as pages and applications.
 

Update: I finally got word back from Facebook, who confirmed that the feature is indeed only a test. "The "Promote" feature is just a test and is unrelated to our Promotions Guidelines," the company says. They  did not give any specifics about a possible full launch.

Original Article: Facebook appears to either be rolling out or testing a feature that lets Facebook Page owners promote specific posts. When you make an update, a link that says, "Promote" can be found by the links for "Comment" and "Like".

Once you click that Promote link, it brings up a dialogue box, which asks you to create an ad, with targeting descriptions, the ad duration, and the maximum price of "Up to $50.00 USD".

Editor’s note: Feel free to become our fan on Facebook, by the way.

You can click on "Edit Ad" to go to the standard Facebook Advertising Page, or you can click "Create Ad" to go to this page:

Interestingly enough, this comes after talk last week about how you have to have promotions approved by a Facebook account representative, which would reportedly cost you about $10k. This would appear to eliminate that notion.

The feature appears to only be available for some admins of some pages. We’re not sure if they’re rolling out the feature or just testing it. I’ve contacted Facebook to learn more about the feature, and I’ll update when I receive a response. Any other Facebook Page admins getting this feature? Let us know.

Twitter is expected to launch an ad platform this month (some have speculated this will happen at SXSW). While this hasn’t been confirmed, the industry has been waiting for quite some time to Twitter to launch such a monetization model.

That’s not to say the industry has been sitting on its hands as it’s waited. Third-parties have taken it upon themselves to offer services for Twitter, that Twitter itself doesn’t offer. That includes apps of course, but it also includes Twitter ads. 140 Proof is one such company, and it calls itself the "first scalable ad solution built exclusively for Twitter."

"The Proof network aggregates the Twitter client and application ecosystem (roughly 100+ million Twitters users) and then segments users into a dynamic audience that advertisers can buy the same way they buy keyword advertising," a representative for the company tells WebProNews. "Advertisers are excited to final have a mechanism for extended their conversations on the Twitter social network and the Twitter ecosystem is eager to have a targeted, non-obtrusive advertising solution that allows them to monetize their applications while still respecting  the ethos of the Twitter community."

The 140 Proof Network features hundreds of advertisers, who the company says are reaching their target markets on Twitter. "Some are large well know brand names that everyone is familiar with and some are small businesses that are trying build their presence on Twitter or advertise in a very local or targeted manner," the rep says.

We asked the company if they think Twitter’s ad platform has a chance to damage businesses like theirs and others that have been making a business based on sponsored tweeting (Sponsored Tweets from Izea comes to mind).

"We welcome Twitter to the advertising world," the rep tell us. "Clearly we think that their entrance in the marketplace is a great validation of what we are doing, but we also believe that the market is large enough to support many major players. Further, we feel that our experienced advertising and engineering team, our advantage of being fully operational for months, and our patented, proprietary technology will give us an advantage over all competitors."

Quite a display of confidence from 140 Proof – an advantage over Twitter at Twitter ads? What do you think?

Each month, we look at Twitter’s growth based on total tweets and new user registrations. This data is supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer for our own Twitter app Twellow.

In February, the number of new registrations fell, compared to the previous month, and tweeting in general rose, but the growth in the amount of tweeting slowed. "New registrations are down for February by 12.2%. Total tweets for the month rose slightly over January at 7.4%, the slowest pace since August," says Daines. "Tweets per user registration remained almost constant, dropping only 8 tenths of 1 percent."

"I did run a survey last month of 9,995 random Twitter IDs and found an estimated 20% of accounts were listed as suspended or not found, so actual registered user numbers probably run at about 80% of the numbers shown, which would be 94.8 million for February," he notes. "Tweets per user registration would be about 20% higher, which would be 14 for February."

Daines notes that he had to make slight adjustments to the past two months. "I had to revise the tweet numbers for December and January down due to a flaw in my calculations for those two months, but the tweets were still up by 16% and 19% for each month respectively."

This month Twitter is expected to launch an advertising platform, and it should be interesting to see the numbers after that. Twitter is also rumored to be readying some new features that have previously only been available via third-party apps.