Facebook has begun a roll-out of ads to the news feed today, but the units are not called Sponsored Stories – as some anticipated. Instead, they will labeled “Featured” to distinguish them from earned media messaging that users sometimes see.

Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, explains the terminology.

“Since people can see marketing messages from both Pages they have and have not Liked elsewhere on Facebook, we want to make it clear that marketers can only pay for stories to be featured in your News Feed if you have explicitly liked the Page,” Ta said. “And because you are always connected to your friends, we are also labeling stories from your friends that have been paid to be featured in your News Feed as ‘featured’ to keep things consistent.”

You can see an example of the new Ads above. For the above ad to appear in your News Feed, two things need to happen. First, you must have already Liked the Ben & Jerry’s Facebook Page, or one of your friends must have interacted with the Ben & Jerry’s Page. Second, Ben & Jerry must have chosen to have the ad promoted to users who have Liked its Page.

Facebook has updated its Help Center with information about the new featured stories. Facebook also lets users know they can click “hide” to remove individual stories, limit the volume of stories by subscribing to “only important posts” or unfriend the person or unlike the page that generated the story.

Websites like Groupon and Living Social have exploded onto the scene in recent years. They help businesses raise their profiles through discount offers. Now, Facebook will soon start testing its own service in several U.S. cities: Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco and San Diego.

The company already offers Facebook Deals through Facebook Places, its check-in service. Its new daily deal service will work with Deals, though it will be very hard for Facebook to steal first place from market leader Groupon. Still, whenever the social network enters a new market, it has one huge advantage: 600 million users and counting.

Daily-deal services supposedly account for a third of all the ads on Facebook. Clearly the social network wants to take down the competition, but it wants to make sure its generating that extra revenue before it does.

“Local businesses will be able to sign up to use this feature soon and people will be able to find deals in the coming weeks,” the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said in statement today.

Facebook hopes to avoid pitfalls, such as those Groupon encountered when some small businesses were so overwhelmed by customer responses they could not keep up and ultimately suffered losses.

Facebook plans to sell the deals through its own sales team, as well as working with partners such as Gilt City, Home Run, Pop Sugar City, Tippr, KGB Deals, Plum District, Reach Local, Zozi, and Open Table.

With more than 600 million users, Facebook certainly has the critical mass and the social mojo to tap into the booming online deal market and compete with market leaders Groupon and LivingSocial. Facebook will showcase deals and encourage users to share those deals with friends. What’s going to lead to this program’s success is that users can “unlock” a deal and share that discount with friends. Facebook testing showed that people were more likely to buy a deal if one of their friends bought it first. It makes perfect sense: Getting that great deal on dinner for one just isn’t as fun if you can’t share it with others.

Carolyn Everson, vice president of global advertising sales and trade marketing for Microsoft, is leaving the company after just seven months. Everson was responsible for the multibillion dollar ad campaign for the launch of the Bing search engine.

Facebook confirmed Everson’s hiring yesterday, and noted that she will report to a former Google employee, David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations.

This move may make things a little awkward since Microsoft invested over 240 Million in Facbook back in 2007. Facebook released the following statement:

“Microsoft was one of our earliest partners and is still one of our most valued. We have a long and strong relationship that includes search ads on our site, a social layer on Bing search results, and a deep and popular integration with Xbox. They are a leader when it comes to unlocking the power of social for their already popular products and services. We look forward to continuing to expand our relationship with them.”

Facebook will soon require that application developers only use in-app advertising from it’s approved vendors list. Not on the list: Google.

It’s not a huge secret that Facebook and Google don’t get play nice with each other. Just in the last few months, the two Internet giants have poached one another’s employees and gone to battle over open email standards. This week, Facebook took its latest silent shot at Google.

In a blog post, Facebook said it has modified its rules and now requires that apps with in-app advertising can only use Facebook-approved companies, or companies willing to sign off on the company’s Advertising guidelines by February 28th. However, the newly created list has two omissions: Adsense and Double Click, both owned by the largest advertising company on the Web: Google.

“If your ad provider is not on this list, we encourage you to contact them to determine if they are planning on signing our terms,” writes Allison Hendrix of the Facebook application verification team.

Voting has been underway on Facebook’s official sports page. Since Friday, people have been able to vote on commercials scheduled to air during Super Bowl XLV. The ad that receives the most “likes” by Thursday, February 10th, will become 2011′s Facebook Replay winner.

This is the first time the social network has been apart of the Super Bowl craze, and for good reason: The day the Steelers and the Packers advanced to the Super Bowl, about 4.6 million people shared their thoughts and experiences with their Facebook friends. Combined the two teams each have over a million fans on their pages.

What’s your favorite Super Bowl ad this year? Cast your vote at the Facebook Sports page..

Facebook announced that it is rolling out a new ad format called Sponsored Stories, which allows advertisers to prioritize content from the News Feed by turning your Facebook activity into promoted content.

How does it work? Lets say one of your Page updates, Likes, application interactions or Place check-ins mention a participating brand, that story will appear in the column at the right of your friends’ News Feeds. “For example,” writes Advertising Age, “if Starbucks buys a ‘sponsored story’ ad, the status of a user’s friends who check into or ‘like’ Starbucks will run twice: once in the user’s news feed, and again as a paid ad for Starbucks.”

Sponsored Stories are seen only by your friends that would normally see your stories in their News Feeds. However, at this time, there is no op-out for new feature according to the product’s help page.

Check out the video below for more information:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZuiC8WVOw&feature=player_embedded