Earlier today we brought you the news that an update to the Windows Phone Facebook app was on the way. We were right. It’s here. Before we show you pictures, if you want to force an update to the app, head here. Just in case.

Now, onto the update itself. If you recall, the wide-ranging upgrade affects Pages, Groups, filters, and other Facebook features that the app had not managed properly before. The update, which we haven’t had a chance to install quite yet, is a nice improvement. Of course, how you personally use Facebook will determine if the update is of much use, but we suspect that it will be.

Now, onto some screenshots, via WPCentral:

There are now some 1.4 million active users of the Facebook app for Windows Phone, which means that this update should have a real quality of life impact for a decent chunk of the Windows Phone community. Let’s hope that in the future, Windows Phone won’t lag quite as far behind the apps that rival platforms enjoy.

If you have a complaint with the update, feel free to check out this comment thread to see if you are alone. 

Microsoft may have close ties to Facebook, including its relationship as an investor in the social giant, but that isn’t stopping the company from trying to, in its words, go ‘beyond just a “Like.”‘

Today, Microsoft announced a new program, one that it hopes represents an evolutionary step in what might be called social advertising. On Facebook’s platform, user interactions with brands are employed in various ways to imbue into them an air of authenticity and trust. Six of your friends like Adidas? Well, perhaps they are on to something, and you should try them out for your next pair of kicks.

That’s well and good, and tested I should add, but it only goes so far. In Microsoft’s eyes, there is an implicit, and limiting, one-dimensional quality to a Like; it only says one thing. That’s what Microsoft intends to address with its concept of ‘People Powered Stories,’ and we think that they may be onto something.

In a nutshell, People Powered Stories (PPS) takes consumer reviews and ratings, and uses them as the meat of an ad. I’m sure you had already guessed that, but we have to make sure that all speeds reach the finish line before we can move on at times. From the Microsoft post, here are a few examples:

The Microsoft copy is intentionally vague on where the ads will go live and when, but we talked to its PR and from what we can tel, they will run on various MSFT properties (think MSN, Bing, etc.), and eventually. The post says ‘available next month,’ but to whom, and where, is open for interpretation. However, we do know that third-party companies will be able to use the platform on Microsoft sites.

Is this ‘beyond the “Like?”‘ In a way, but the question of sourcing is critical. Where will the reviews come from? How will Astroturfing be avoided? There’s potential here, the use of ‘real people’ is generally good, but until we have a better framework for the rules that PPS ads will have to run by, we’re reticent to take a firm side on how large an impact this new system will have.

We’ll keep you in the loop as more comes out.

Update: Microsoft PR just reached out to us with a point of clarification. BazaarVoice, Microsoft’s partner in the PPS project, handles the curation of reviews. That’s encouraging, but our larger questions remain; this is one place where a ‘black box’ is unnerving.

It’s Social Media Week right now, and so companies with, what they find to be interesting takes on how to leverage and use new social tools are out in force. I chatted with Nokia today, discussing their own social media strategies, but instead of being fed boilerplate I was told of a wonderous machine.

If you are anything like me, screens entice you, and multi-monitor setups are one of your favorite things. Nokia, it seems, has a similar taste. The company built something called Agora, a six-screened physical installation that tracks conversations about the company, drilling down to sentiment analysis and individual products in the process.

The company has them in several of its larger offices, and has plans to bring them to even more. Now, there’s a clip below, which is, understandably, a bit rah-rah Nokia, but it shows what a large company can do to help bring the external conversation about itself to its employees in a digestible fashion. How to give its workers the real skinny, if you will. We dig.

Social media for some companies is a fearful new world, but one way to make something that appears formidable lose its perceived fangs is to fully understand it. Agora, and other systems like it, could have that effect. Here in the technology echo chamber, everyone uses Twitter and knows what happened to FriendFeed, but we’re the exception and not the rule.

I don’t think that Nokia is likely to licence Agora, but I suspect that any large company could build something similar for themselves. Openness, it’s the new closed.

New platforms often contain apps that, while fuctional, are not exactly bursting with features. So it has been with the Windows Phone Facebook app, an application that, especially given the closeness of Microsoft and Facebook, has been in great need of an update for some time.

Happily, the wait is all but over. GeekWire has a good take on just what is wrong with the current iteration of the app:

The app shows the number of likes but doesn’t let you press to see everyone who clicked. And don’t even try to set the privacy level when you post an update. The settings simply aren’t there. Small things, perhaps, but they’re just a couple of the annoyances that have made the Windows Phone Facebook app quirky to use, to put it politely.

The app, from top to bottom, while being pleasing to the eye, is simply incomplete when paired with the modern Facebook; as Facebook changes, so must the applications that service it. A new version of the app is in the pipes; Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore spun the update as a ‘heart’ from Redmond, to its users: “Yep, it’s true! Facebook is one of our #WP7 sweethearts– watch Marketplace soon for a heart-swelling update of the #WP Facebook app!”

According to its Facebook page, the app should contain updates to the following:

• News feed performance improvements
• New panorama design.
• New profile design.
• Banner Images.
• Improved navigation.
• Pages
• Groups
• View “likes”.
• Feed filters.
• Posting privacy.
• Bug fixing

That’s quite the list, and it does hit on all the current issues that we can summon from memory. Head to the app Marketplace, can you snag it?

Covering how Microsoft covers itself is always a fun game. The company’s ad campaigns tend to have extreme qualities. By this I mean that they are either fantastically good, or perfectly laughable. Today we have the second variety.

We’ll start with the following tweet:

Don’t be the guy who screwed up Valentine’s Day. Treat your lady right this holiday by switching to @Office Web Apps ow.ly/92NYA

— Why Microsoft (@whymicrosoft) February 13, 2012

I honestly thought that Microsoft was making a very meta joke – using the holiday to mock the use of the holiday as a talking point. I was wrong. They are serious. So serious that they actually put together a commercial to explain their message. That message, by the way, is that Office Web Apps handle Excel files better than Google Docs. That should have been the tweet, we think.

But they put out the video so that it would be watched, so who are we to rob you of the experience? Enjoy the awkward:

Now, Microsoft is right. Office Web Apps do a fine job at handling Excel files. Google Docs can have issues. Why they decided to make that point in this way, however, baffles. The last piece to this is that the post that Microsoft wrote as a companion to the video, is perfectly fine. To wit: “Don’t lose your mojo by using Google Docs to share documents. Share your information and ideas with Office Web Apps.” Very reasonable.

But the wrapper that Microsoft picked for this ruined the effect. Holidays are a bad promotional idea unless you sell chocolate. We now return you to your regurarly scheduled programming.

I’ve been critical of Hotmail in the past, given that I find Gmail to be consistently superior from both a product and usability standpoint. However, I now have to admit that Hotmail has been working hard to right its ship. One of the critical components of any good webmail service is spam control, and that’s a place where Hotmail may have found an edge.

Microsoft funded a study, testing the anti-spam prowess of Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Accounts were created, and ‘seeded’ across the Internet in an attempt to draw the bead of spammers. It worked. According to a New York Times article on the report, “[i]n the Hotmail account, 48.57 percent of e-mails in the inbox were spam, slightly less than the 48.88 percent in the Gmail inbox. Yahoo Mail was third with 58.33 percent.”

Now, any normal account on the three services would have a much lower ratio. These accounts were set up to attract and filter spam, so your personal results will be different. That Hotmail won, over Gmail, in this one case, is interesting. Gmail is known for its exceptionally effective abeyance of spam.

I do not interpret the study as proving that Hotmail is now the top spam defender; such a test would be better run on normal accounts and not test scenarios, but I do think that it shows that Microsoft has made real progress in the improvement of Hotmail. Long maligned and ignored by the larger tech community, it remains the world’s largest webmail provider.

Microsoft is obviously proud of its report: “if you use Hotmail for your primary email, you’ll get the best spam protection in the industry – no one does it better.” However, spam prevention is only one feature out of a dozen that determine the quality of an email system. Yet, having been a vocal critic of Hotmail for years now, I am willing to concede that the team is working on ‘doing it right.’ That’s a very healthy change.

This post is just for fun. If you have your serious hat on, you have come to the wrong place. 

The ever connected Paul Thurrott has posted two images to Twitter, dubbing the short collection as “Nokia sends Valentine to AT&T.” Since he was kind enough to make the images public, we felt that we must share them.

They are written from the perspective of Nokia as wooing AT&T. The Lumia 900, Nokia’s next halo device, is headed to the network, and so the timing of this is not accidental; Nokia is very excited to have its handset on the provider. They even sent a cookie. Take a peek:

I’m not much of a person for sweets, so my judgement might be off here, but I really don’t think that a Lumia 900 snack would taste very good. Correct me in the comments if you disagree.

We’re going to leave this here, as it’s a short interlude from heavier topics. You can find all our Windows Phone coverage here.

If this rumor bears out, it will underscore how aggressively Nokia is working to reclaim its past glory and profits. Here’s the skinny: six new phones. Yes, six. Of course, they are not all Windows Phones, but two are, and one is even tipped to be a Symbian handset.

PocketNow, who broke this story, describes the potential release in the following way: “The six devices are supposedly split evenly among smartphones — two Windows Phones and a Symbian — and three S60 S40 featurephones.”

The Windows Phone handsets will garner the most attention, assuming that this rumor comes true. The two Windows Phone devices should include a ‘global’ version of the Lumia 900, allowing it to find international adoption, and not just use in the United States. Also, a low-tier handset called the Lumia 610 may be unveiled.

For Nokia, having those two devices would be a very important change in its handset lineup. A global Lumia 900 would grant the firm the ability to sell its halo device around the world, meaning that it can chase the top dollar in every locale. The Lumia 610 would allow Nokia to sell phones to the lowest segments of the market as well. This would give Windows phone itself massive new latitude, and Nokia a chance to grow its aggregate market share.

Nokia, it seems, wants to attack every mobile pricepoint. It’s audacious, but it just might work.

This post should not be a surprise, but it is certainly something nice. Firefox will not only come to Windows 8, it will do so in style. News broke today that a version of Firefox is being compiled that will meet the ‘Metro’ design aesthetic head on, meaning that the browser will give Internet Explorer a run for its cachet on its home turf.

We expect every browser to have a version that jives with Windows 8′s new capabilities in the future, but to have Firefox preparing something now, before the beta of the operating system is out, is fun; it shows that despite questions of about potential consumer adoption, major platforms are accepting Windows 8 as essentially inevitable.

Internet Explorer 10 will ship with Windows 8. The browser, an evolutionary step forward after the radical changes of Internet Explorer 9, also contains a graphical user interface that is designed to work well with touch.

From its MozillaWiki page, this is what is being cooked:

The feature goal here is a new Gecko based browser built for and integrated with the Metro environment. Firefox on Metro, like all other Metro apps will be full screen, focused on touch interactions, and connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts.

Firefox on Metro will bring all of the Gecko capabilities to this new environment and the assumption is that we’ll be able to run as a Medium integrity app so we can access all of the win32 Firefox Gecko libraries avoiding a port to the new WinRT API for the bulk of our code. (Though we will need to have a pan and zoom capability for content.)

Given that, it appears that what I’m going to call Firefox-on-Metro will be a fully native experience. When we get our hands on an early build, we’ll make sure that you can play with it as well. For now, keep your head down, we’ll have a beta quite soon.

Over the past week, I’ve used no search engine but Bing. Both on my phone, and on my computers, it’s been a Bing world. This week long test came to be during an excellent meeting in Portland. I was enjoying a few cocktails, talking smack with locals and Microsoft PR folk, and said that I was willing to go Bing as a trial. The offer was taken up, and a few weeks later I became a Bing man.

At first, I was afraid. I am a minimalist person. I love blank backgrounds, and so to head into the realm of Bing, which boasts a fuller interface in regards to design flora than Google, was a risk. But we all must take our stripes, and I had made a promise to give this a full try.

That week is up. My use of Bing helped me to write a business plan for a Booth School of Business competition, three essays for UChicago, and around 20 posts for TNW; I’ve put Bing through every daily pace that I can summon. This post is a summation of my thoughts.

On The Whole

Bing is a capable, mature search engine. It serves me nearly every result that I desire on the first try. Just like with Google, you have to learn its quirks, but once you get the hang of finding, and revisiting what you need, it’s perfectly good. Bing is just that: perfectly good. I’ll argue that Google has a slight edge over it in terms of polish, but Bing as a project has truly come into its own.

For your regular searching needs, using Bing is now roughly as good as Google, with a lesser interface. This is fantastic. Google is simply not the only game in town, and that means that both companies will continue to dump money into search. In the end, we consumers are going to continue win.

Bing does have some elements to it that can become wearisome. Google loves to send you to YouTube. They own it. Bing will shunt you to page with your video, but still on its home turf, and then feed you suggestions. That’s annoying; I want to go to a clip, not a Binged themepark of clipage. Let me go. Soapbox failed, and its time to bury the video hatchet. Google Video flopped as well, if its any consolation, Microsoft.

Bing is not Google. Google is not Bing. Both have very different takes on how to present information, but each does a good job at summoning that data.

The Small Things

Bing-in-Chome is pretty damn good. It’s fast, responsive, and I had no problems jumping into the world of Microsoft search. However, Bing is younger than Google, and it shows. While Bing is full featured, and if Google didn’t exist would be hailed as the most important information gathering tool of all time, Google exists. This sets the bar fantastically high, as Google search is fantastically excellent.

To illustrate how good Bing is, and how Google is just a smidge better, let’s talk about site links. If you run a search for Flickr on Google, it will serve you up a sheaf of links to parts of Flickr that you probably want to head to. It saves a step. Bing is not as good at this game. It serves up fewer extra links, less often.

Small quibble? Yes. It’s not unique, however. Using Bing is opening yourself to a grip of wrinkles that Google has smoothed. I called Bing mature earlier. That statement was correct. Google is just ahead in small ways.

What It Means

Talking to the Bing team is to speak to people who get it. In a short call, during which I was introduced to much of Bing, a small bug popped up. It involved Metallica, happily enough. My new Bing friend contact that he was going to have to sort it. We laughed and moved on. I’m sure that he got right on it.

The Bing team is working on building something world class, and they have succeeded. They haven’t yet caught Google in terms of usability, and final polish, but the effort has paid fat dividends. Bing is an impressive product, and one that only occupies the shadows because Google stands so tall.

I didn’t have a single instance in the last week when Bing failed to take me where I wanted to go. That’s a new world. There are now two search engines that are each excellent. I suspect that my favoratism of Google is more based on habit than fair discernment. Perhaps not. Bing however, is, and I use this word knowingly, good.

Let’s see if its market share can tick up enough to get the attention from advertisers that it needs.