Nokia shutting down N-Gage — The mobile gaming service will be folded into Nokia’s Ovi app store. This is after the handset manufacturer spent millions on building and promoting it. A complex developer platform and competition from the iPhone contributed to its demise, PaidContent details.

The history of virtual farming — Ever wondered where FarmVille came from? Read about the contested history of the genre in Asia, in this fascinating write-up on VentureBeat. One fascinating anecdote is that vegetable-stealing is the single most popular feature in some Chinese version of the game. Perhaps the English-language versions of the game should add that?

PlaySpan announces Nickelodeon deal — Television channel Nickelodeon’s online gaming component, the Nickelodeon Kids and Family Virtual Worlds Group, is going to be using PlaySpan’s payment services. Nickelodeon’s virtual currency, NeoCash, will be available for purchase using 80 payment methods, through PlaySpan subsidiary PayByCash.

Viximo launches new version of its virtual economy tools — These include virtual currency management, analytics, micro-transaction payments and other features. The company also announced a partnership with social network Zorpia.

New Offerpal numbers — The payments company has turned two, and says it has reached more than 160 million users, issued 730 million virtual points, including payments to users in 190 countries and offers in more than 80 countries.

Managing your virtual economy — Want to learn how? Live Gamer chief technology officer William Grosso explains the components in this slide deck he presented at the Virtual Goods Summit earlier this week.

We’re at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco, where +8* analyst Benjamin Joffe recently gave a great presentation on virtual goods in Asian markets. In his 127-slide deck, he breaks down revenue among leading market leaders in China, Korea and Japan, the profitability of industry leaders like Tencent, and much more. He also talks about the cross-Pacific history — and future — of gaming.

Joffe notably calculates that the virtual goods market in Asia is worth $7 billion this year, versus our calculation that the US virtual goods market is worth $1 billion.

At the start of the month, an interesting French game called GooBox – Jeux Gratuits (Play Free) worked its way up to the #23 spot our October Top 25 Facegook Games rankings. Developed by Kobojo, it’s the fourth of five international titles sprinkling that list, and the third most popular new one. Evidently, it was translated to English just this past August, but before even that, the popular French application states that it earned an impressive 3 million users within its first month of existence.

The app is actually a compilation of six smaller mini-games with the whole “Goo” blob-game concept being an underlying theme for many of the visuals. In fact, a goo-creature is also your avatar, leveling up and changing visually as the player earns points, from playing the various games, towards new levels. Furthermore, many of these games ought to be familiar.

The first is a game called Elementz. Frankly, it looks pretty epic, but it really only breaks down to a time-trial rendition of the classic Bejeweled puzzle game. Players must align rows of three or more multi-colored orbs in an attempt to remove as many as possible, thus scoring as many points as possible before time expires. Linking four orbs of the same element together creates a charged orb, that when used in another combination releases a special power, removing multiple, adjacent orbs, and linking five sets off the reaction immediately. Obviously, this isn’t that original in terms of game play, but the visuals are fantastic to look at and it is still a lot of fun.

Of course, one doesn’t have to look very far for originality as the second game on the list, Goo Maze is much more so. Okay, so the concept of running through a maze isn’t that creative, but the presentation of it is wonderful. Players move from Point A to Point B while under a time limit, collecting gems for points and clocks for more time. What is pretty cool, though, is that you’re moving goo through the maze, and with its viscous nature, can expand through multiple paths of the level at once as you navigate your mouse pointer through. In the end, there still is only one path to win, but it does look very nice.

Frankly, of all the games, only two are a little drab looking (but only when compared to the others). The two word games, Word Party and Buzz Word are extremely simple in their design, but this is likely because of the type of thinking involved, so distracting animations and flickering colors would probably end up being obnoxious. The former is a simple word find while the latter is more akin to games like Word Challenge, having the player form as many words as they can within a limited span of time.

It is worth noting, that when one first visits GooBox, the game defaults to French… suffice to say, it makes these games somewhat hard until you notice the language selection in the upper left corner of the app. That said, just make sure you visit the English page.

The last two games are also really fun; dubbed Sushi Panic and Goo Deluxe. The latter has players removing multi-colored orbs of… well, goo, until none remain. The trick is to try and remove sets of two or more (the board shrinks with each removal, making new connections), because removing single orbs can only be done a limited number of times before there are no moves left and it is game over. As for Sushi Panic, this one is aptly named as players attempt to match up four of the same sushi dishes and remove them from the game field by shooting them up to hanging columns of the Japanese entrée. What makes this difficult, however, is that the sushi to be launched moves down an ever quickening conveyor belt. As you can probably guess, this quickly becomes a task of twitch reaction, timing, and visual acuity. Once that belt gets moving, it really is a sushi panic attack.

One way or another, all six games on GooBox – Jeux Gratuits are a ton of fun, and with the goo avatar that levels up as you garner higher scores, there is an added reward to continual playing. In fact, this enhancement is further improved by the ability to compete against your friends’ high scores in direct Challenges as well as simple leaderboard systems. Combine these features with GooBox’s beautiful visual presentation and… gooey, soundscape, it is easy to see how this French title has steadfastly held onto its, well earned, 3 million monthly active users.

In the world of social gaming — an emerging part of the gaming industry where the features are designed around interacting with friends — Facebook has the single largest platform to develop on. So when Facebook makes changes to the platform, like it did yesterday, this world shakes.

The company announced a “roadmap” of many different upcoming changes to the platform that are going to affect social games, though the ways each developer will be affected will vary. A developer with an application that relies on lots of notifications or other very viral features to grow and retain users will certainly be more affected than one that has relied on the occasional friend invite.

But how does it all add up? We get into some of the most significant changes below, but there are a lot of them: 19 items in the queue through early 2010 on Facebook’s official roadmap. Certain ones are going to impact some developers more than others. Depending on how an app has grown and stayed popular, some developers may soon face a “great recession” of sorts, loosely analogous to the multi-industry meltdown that hit the US and world economies in the last couple of years. Instead of industries, its communication channels melting down.

And meanwhile, Facebook appears to be creating a better user experience. We’ve heard “45% of all stream posts were games and a nearly equivalent amount were from quizzes,” at least from one source. Most users probably did not want that ratio of games and quizzes, compared to all of the other activities they might want to see their friends doing on the site — attending events, sharing photos, etc. With the new, “Top Stories” news feed introduced last Friday, the noise ratio from apps has gone way down; and, the news feed is due for more tweaking, Facebook said yesterday.

The roadmap announcement is only a day old, but based on our own observations, and from discussions we’ve had with leaders in the industry, we think that the platform will increase in value in the long-run. Facebook is headed in the right direction with these changes. That said, we also expect the changes to be painful for the ecosystem as a whole. Apps that lose their virality will also see drops in revenue, at least until they figure out the new features, and the offer, payment, and analytics companies that have risen to work with them will at least also be temporarily hurt as result.

Overall, though, we do not believe that a large portion of developers currently working on the platform are going to leave as a result of these changes, nor do we think that the new interest in social gaming from other parts of the gaming industry is going to dissipate. Sure, some Facebook’s changes don’t work so well — see recently re-altered March home page redesign, or Beacon for more on that. Still, the overall trend is that the company is making its platform an increasingly valuable place to do business. The last time Facebook made serious changes to its platform, in 2008, a whole set of poking and profile-box applications got hit hard. One news feed redesign late last year made it very difficult for applications to appear within a user’s home page news feed, for example. After the changes, the more complex social games of today have emerged.

Here is a closer look at some of the biggest viral mechanics that are changing, along with our analysis of how they will affect games.

From notifications and invites to the Facebook inbox:

This is one of the biggest changes for developers who’ve designed and optimized their applications for Facebook’s current communication channels. Notifications and invitations are going away, and are being split up and migrated into 1) inbox messages for user-to-user communication, and 2) emails for app-to-user communication.

Now, there is no more default-on application-to-user communication channel, though developers will be encouraged to establish email contact with users directly. This means the News Feed will become more important, as it is now the only default-on one-to-many channel. Facebook says the changes are expected to go live by the end of the year or early next. All developers should start making plans to rethink and reoptimize immediately.

Among other questions about the changes: How easy this new inbox will be for users to navigate? Or as one of our contributing writers, Eric von Coelln, puts it. “Just as today someone may ignore that they have ’76 Other Requests’ in the upper right corner of the Facebook homepage, just below Friend Requests, will that be any better if you have 76 inbox messages?”

In November, look for the following relevant changes:

- New email permission API (developers can ask users to share their email address)
- Access point to invites will be moved “to either a filter in Inbox or surfaced in the Application and Games Dashboards”
- User-to-user Inbox APIs will be launched

And in by the end of the year, look for these changes:

- Notifications API (both app-to-user and user-to-user) will be removed (note: Facebook says this will happen “30 days after email permission is available”)

A new homepage interface, especially for games:

Facebook is moving apps from the bottom toolbar into the left-hand column, where they’ll appear within a dashboard of feeds from the news feed, as well as Facebook’s in-house apps including events, photos, groups and notes. There will be one feed for general apps, and, in a recognition of social gaming’s importance on the platform, a separate feed for games. From the early mock-up screenshots that Facebook is showing, the games tab will include a sub-feed for all of your games and another one for all of your friend’s games. You’ll also have the option to “bookmark” individual games to appear as their own item within the dashboard.

In other words, developers should consider ways of getting users to feature their own games separately, for maximum exposure on the homepage.
There’s also a “counter” for the number of new items within each. Facebook, per its more general plans to crack down on wayward apps, is also being very strict about how developers can use the counter — it has to be for real things. As Facebook platform leader Ethan Beard said yesterday during the roadmap presentation: “We expect the activity to be a real-world action, we expect that the count should be obvious — the user should have taken the action they always take. Users won’t like applications that always keep this on.”

Spamming the counter does not sound like the sort of viral action that Facebook will allow to happen.

In November:

- New “add bookmark” button
In November/December:

- Application bookmarks moving from the bottom menu bar to the left side of the home page
- Counter API launching (counts can appear on home page application bookmarks)
- Applications and Games dashboards launching

The new news feed is still changing:

Last week, Facebook introduced a new version of its news feed that defaults to “Top Stories,” an algorithmically determined assortment of items shared by your friends. The live stream, meanwhile, includes more types of stories, like groups, events and photos — the items that were in the now-gone “Highlights” section.

Although Facebook has already basically prohibited game players from being incentivized to publish to the stream (or to send invites or notifications, for that matter), it’s not clear exactly how this will be enforced. For example, the “Share the wealth” feature seen in Zynga’s FarmVille rewards any user who clicks, as well as the person who shared it, as this excellent post by social game entrepreneur Jussi Laakkonen notes, may be okay, or it may not be.

While we’ve already covered many of the larger changes in detail, Facebook has provided additional clarity about what some things to expect, and when.

In November:
- Stream story formatting changes (1 image shown by default, few lines of text, 1 action link)

In November/December 2009

- Feed forms cannot be popped open without “explicit user intent” (note: this is a new Facebook policy)

On that last point, many quiz apps relied on the feed form to open, shall we say, without explicit user intent. We expect many of these apps to rapidly decline in usage, once this change rolls out.

Other changes:

The list of things apps can’t do is getting longer. Users cannot be forced to wade through the “invite friend” feature of an app before proceeding to the next page; meanwhile, Facebook also plans to introduce a more refined way of suggesting which friends will appear first within this box (no longer everyone whose last names starts with “A”).

Games can no longer reward players based on the number of friends they get playing. This is something the mafia genre of social games has historically relied on. As Laakkonen describes the situation for many developers: “It will be very painful to change these game mechanics as it means that every single players’ in-game standing and resources will change.”

For those apps that still make use of profile boxes — not many, after Facebook forced most of them off users’ profiles last year — that option is about to end. Application tabs on profiles and pages are also narrowing from 760 pixel-width to 510.

However, pages are getting a little nicer. New application branding on canvas pages is expected to launch within the year, so apps can do things like change the look and feel of its interface. Long-term, developers should also watch what Facebook does with its Open Graph API. Due out in early 2010, it promises to let other web sites integrate key Facebook features, essentially blending pages with the rest of the web.

Conclusion:

Is Facebook going to stay a serious option for social game developers, if not the main option? The iPhone is now allowing free to play virtual goods. MySpace has already become a big platform for some companies, and we’re expecting the new management team to make some positive changes over there — although nothing has been announced yet. Twitter is an interesting venue for social games, although we have little evidence that viable social gaming businesses can currently survive on it.

We expect the next two months, especially to be very tough for many social game developers. But new features, from email to the dashboard to the more nebulous features like the Open Graph API, promise new and more meaningful ways of reaching users — and reach users in ways that users appreciate more than the polluted communication channels of the present and recent past.

Yes, other forms of growing will still favor the largest incumbents, such as advertising on Facebook or cross-promotion between apps. But for small developers, and for companies looking into social gaming on Facebook, these changes amount to a partial reset of the market, and a new opportunity for them to succeed.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Aurora Feint as their mobile, social platform, OpenFeint begins offering new features, and its games department works diligently on its secret projects. Most recently, at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco, DeNA, the operator of Japan’s largest mobile social network and virtual goods economy, has chosen OpenFeint as its partner to break into the Japanese smartphone market. DeNA is intending to make a “multi-million dollar investment in Aurora Feint for a 20% stake in the company.”

Working on both computers and mobile devices, Tokyo-based DeNA is known best for its mobile social platform, Mobage-Town. Powered by free-to-play games, the company boasts a 70% market penetration rate among its teen demographic, generating between 500-600 million page views a day from what it calls its “sticky users.” The company says that Mobage-Town generates upwards of $200 million in annual revenue (despite recent legal trouble with competitor GREE) with a “high” profit margin.

The revenue stems from avatar-related sales, advertisement, and virtual goods, and with over 250 games that vary from simple Flash titles to complex, massively multiplayer worlds, as well as 15 million users, you can bet that these revenue streams are plentiful. Suffice to say, this makes DeNA a good fit for OpenFeint and vice versa.

In order to christen the partnership, one of DeNA’s major partners, and veteran entertainment company, Hudson, has also agreed to use OpenFeint as their platform for their upcoming game line up, marking what Aurora Feint Chairman and founding investor, Peter Relan describes as “a small demonstration of the strength of the DeNA partnership.”

As for the “line up” itself, it’s entirety is yet to be made public, but most people ought to recognize the one that was mentioned. The first Japanese game for OpenFeint, scheduled for launch this Christmas will be the ever popular, and well known, Bomberman. Having been the first games producer to enter the mobile realm back in 2000, this makes Hudson and excellent first developer for OpenFeint in these newer, international waters.

“We believe that OpenFeint is an extremely powerful social networking solution in the ever-changing iPhone market,” says Masato Shibata, Corporate Officer of Hudson Soft Co., Ltd. “We are planning to release several games which utilize this beneficial tool to the fullest extent.”

It’s been a long road for Aurora Feint since they launched OpenFeint over seven months ago. We’re interested to see where this partnership takes it.

It’s easy to gloss over the details of how mobile payment companies design their products to make money. So we took a closer look at mobile payment company Zong‘s new “Zong+” service, announced today. It allows users to pay with their credit or debit cards. Here’s what’s going on, and why it matters.

What Zong already does

If a user wants to, say, buy some more virtual poker chips for a poker app on Facebook or MySpace, or buy Facebook Credits, Zong lets them pay using their mobile phone account. A user first clicks on the Zong logo within the payment wall, pops open Zong’s payment window, toggles the amount of the virtual currency they want to buy, and enters their mobile number. Then, Zong sends a text message to the user’s phone with a unique personal identification number (PIN) for the transaction.

The user takes that number and enters it within the payment window. Their account in the game is then credited with the virtual currency amount that they’d decided to purchase, and their mobile phone account is billed. The mobile carrier takes a 40% to 50% cut of the transaction. While Zong doesn’t ask users to create an account at this stage, users can opt to have it remember their phone number for the next purchase.

How Zong integrates card payments, starting now

If user completes a regular Zong payment, they’ll also see an extra window that asks them to upgrade to Zong+, with the additional enticement of getting free credits equivalent to the amount they already purchased. In some sense, it’s like the sorts of offers often available alongside Zong and other payment methods in games, where you can earn points in a game in exchange for signing up for new services.

If the user chooses to upgrade, they are then asked to enter brief details about themselves, confirming their name and their phone number, and then provide their credit or debit card of choice. The process still utilizes the mobile payment confirmation method, so a credit card purchase will still be confirmed by a mobile PIN text instead of a PayPal-style web purchase.

What does this mean?

For users, the benefit — beyond the free virtual currency — is that they have a single service for doing payments. Carriers often restrict mobile payments to $9.99 or less per purchase, but with these card payments Zong will let users buy much more if they want. For some online games, users may want to spend $40 or $50, and this is an easy way for them to do it.

By pushing card-based purchases instead of mobile-billed purchases, Zong is sort of competing more directly against PayPal (the established leader in web payments). In terms of the interface, the mobile payment method may be easier for some users to do than going through PayPal’s web-based card payment process. Especially if the user is already using Zong but not PayPal.

In terms of competitors, Obopay, for example, offers a mobile billing service that allows a user to provide their mobile number and pay without using their phone. However, that process first requires users to create an Obopay account, as we covered in more detail yesterday.

For gaming companies, and really, anyone else selling something online, another benefit is that Zong+ users do not come with the carrier fees — meaning more money for Zong and the company share. Zong chief executive David Marcus tells us that if around 15% of a game’s paying customers pay through Zong+, the game can potentially double its revenue.

So, will that make the carriers upset about not getting a fat slice? Marcus doesn’t think so, as he sees the additional service another reason for users to pay through a mobile-based system instead of a web-based one. In other words, sometimes a user might want to bill a purchase to their mobile phone, and sometimes they might want to bill it to a credit card. Having the mobile-billing option in place means more users might gravitate towards the service, and decide to bill their mobile accounts more often.

In sum, this is an interesting move by Zong to try to make itself a more central way for people to buy virtual goods and other digital items. The first customers, hi5 and IMVU, are beginning to roll it out now, as are may of the other 1,000 or so developers that Zong works with. We’re interested to see how the new service performs.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

We’ve been busy covering the latest changes that Facebook has announced to its developer platform, but over on Inside Facebook — for our readers here, we’re providing a roundup of those posts. And yes, we’re most certainly planning lots of additional coverage of the platform changes as they impact social games, so stay tuned.

Starting with the most recent, here are our Inside Facebook posts so far:

Facebook Launches Live Status Dashboard for Monitoring Platform Performance

Mark Your Calendars: Planning for Facebook’s Platform Changes Over the Next Three Months

Instant Analysis: Digesting the Implications of Today’s Platform Roadmap Announcements

First Screenshots of Facebook Platform Changes

Our Complete Rundown of Facebook’s Massive Platform Changes

I Got Games has gained 15 million registered users in the last four years through porting Chinese massive multiplayer online games to the rest of the world — its audience loosely parallels Facebook’s, with a third of its users in North America, a third in Europe, and the rest in Latin American and Southeast Asia. And now, having already successfully launched original MMOs, it’s starting to make social games.

The company will launch a new Facebook app this coming weekend called FishIsle. The game will combine the virtual aquarium-caring features of games like Happy Aquarium and My Fishbowl with the more goal-oriented structure of virtual farming games like FarmVille, says Mark Zhang, vice president of operations at IGG’s local office in Santa Clara, Calif.

In the game, players travel across a virtual ocean in fishing boats, nurturing virtual aquatic farms of salmon, flounder, shrimp, jelly fish and other types of underwater life, harvesting each when they’re read. Players can also purchase different types of fishing boats, and decorate their own islands with buildings and other features. The interface shows the game from a 45-degree, birds-eye angle, to add to the feeling of being in an alternate virtual world. The company also plans to roll out more MMO-style features.

The virtual store and some other parts of the interface, in the finest of social gaming tradition, look quite similar to other hits (like FarmVille).

As IGG has done with its MMOs, and as other social games are doing on Facebook, FishIsle will be free to play, and will make money from selling virtual goods.

IGG has twelve studios in China, although it is based on the Cayman Islands, and also plans to roll out 18 more traditional MMOs. FishIsle is its initial move into social gaming, as the company has 7 more social titles planned — also, it built this game in 3 months, Zhang tells us, so expect these other games pretty soon.

To get this first game off the ground, so to speak, the company also plans to cross-promote it within some of its existing MMOs, on its home site and within partner MMO games in the US. Eventually, the company may also look at buying Facebook ads to promote games. It already has 14 successful MMOs, and says it is bringing in “multiple millions” in revenue, with 85% of the money coming from North America and the United Kingdom.

It has raised two rounds of funding totaling $15 million from IDG, Hearst Interactive, and Vertex Venture Holdings (a venture arm of the Singapore government).

[Screenshots via Blend Games]

A few weeks ago, the Science Channel debuted a new game show by the name of Head Games, hosted by comedian Greg Proops. While this normally wouldn’t be on our social games beat, the television show is actually advertising itself in a pretty interesting way; utilizing a game and the ever growing social graph of Facebook.

The show is based around science trivia ranging from biology to astronomy, and considering the host, is intended to be as comical as it is educational. Essentially, contestants attempt to quickly answer questions of a fairly general nature while Proops rolls out a myriad of distracting, yet funny, jokes. Suffice to say, the show isn’t too bad, but The Science Channel is looking for more with a fairly social game of the same name.

The Head Games… game, is yet another external web app to make use of Facebook Connect. Essentially, players log in through a pop-up and invite friends to play simultaneously in a contest of trivia knowledge. The game is broken up into three rounds, with correct answers earning 15 points and incorrect answers subtracting 15. Unanswered questions count as nothing (why is this beginning to sound like a standardized test?).

The first round is dubbed Head Case, and it is your more traditional format. Both players are prompted the same 10 questions and have a mere 15 seconds to answer by clicking on one of three images. Evidently, this is merely just intended to get those brain juices flowing, because while the questions might be a little tough from time to time, it is very simple and straightforward.

Round 2 is actually where the most fun begins because it combines visual acuity, twitch reaction, trivia knowledge, and (to a lesser degree) a bit of memory. This segment is called Head Trip, and the name is certainly warranted. As with the first round, questions are posted at the top of the screen for a limited time, but the answer is located somewhere on three rows of scrolling images. The first person to find and click the right image earns the points.

Of course, this leads to the final round, and if game shows have taught us anything over the years, it is that that final stage can turn almost any competition around. This is the speed round; aptly named Head Bang. In a nutshell, it is almost a reverse of the first round, with a single picture, coupled with a question, and three multiple choice answers. The gimmick here, however, is that you have 50 seconds to answer as many as you possibly can.

The game is pretty fun, and there are enough questions to keep it fresh for a little while. That said, however, it is rather obnoxious that you can only play against your Facebook friends and no one else. Furthermore, you can only play if there is someone in your friend’s list that is online and accepts your challenge. Frankly, a more asynchronous challenge mode, in addition to the live multiplayer, would be a lovely addition. All the same, though, it is certainly a pretty useful way to spread the word of a new show. One might even call it “scientific.” (okay maybe not)

Facebook is hosting a Developer Garage in Palo Alto this afternoon, this time called “Roadmap Edition.” Facebook says it will be giving developers a “sneak peak of the Facebook Platform roadmap,” and we’ll be there with all the details.

While we don’t know what changes Facebook will specifically announce, we have heard from multiple industry sources that the company has been contemplating changes to the Platform recently that could significantly alter the way applications integrate with Facebook’s “viral” communication channels – the notifications, requests, and feed stories that enable much application distribution and re-engagement today.

Earlier tests that we’ve seen in the wild have included new access points for Facebook’s communication channels on the top menu bar in one case, and a missing bottom menu bar in the other, but these are just small tests and aren’t necesarily indicative of any specific site-wide product changes. Others are hearing things that go along with what what we’ve seen from some of the test screenshots, and also mentions that Facebook has been encouraging developers to rely more on getting users’ email addresses directly, instead of relying on Facebook’s viral channels for user communication as developers have since the Platform launched.

Were Facebook to make significant changes to the Platform’s viral channel mechanics, it would be somewhat reminiscent of the spring of 2008, when Facebook substantially redesigned the profile page, removing application boxes, which were then one of the major Platform viral channels, from the profile almost entirely. While last year’s changes caused a big shift in the ways developers thought about designing for application virality (and brought big traffic declines to those developers most dependent on profile boxes), many developers adapted and have since thrived. In fact, 2009 has seen the rise of the Facebook Platform economy to its highest levels ever, primarily through the growth of virtual goods-based games and applications and the underlying payment ecosystem.

Obviously, many of the applications that could be most affected by the changes are social games. Many of the games that have become the most popular and profitable since the Platform redesign in March have been making heavy use of the real-time stream, and Facebook games in general rely heavily on notifications and requests for user-to-user communication. We’ll have all the details as the changes are announced later today.

> Read more on Inside Facebook