Applications ranging from friendship to Open Graph to “Twilight” to job searching made our list of emerging Facebook apps by monthly active users this week. However, much of the list was taken up by applications that help users manage their Facebook pages via tabs, iframes, sweepstakes and more.

The apps grew from between 110,000 and 310,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Mejores Amigos	440,000	+310,000	+ 238%
2.	RISK: Factions	620,000	+310,000	+ 100%
3.	Hosted iFrame #3	740,000	+270,000	+ 57%
4.	Shufflr	570,000	+260,000	+ 97%
5.	Candy Dash	780,000	+250,000	+ 47%
6.	Hosted iFrame – Main	420,000	+230,000	+ 121%
7.	Hosted iFrame w/ Social Icon	500,000	+230,000	+ 85%
8.	Static IFRAME Tab : Note Icon	980,000	+210,000	+ 27%
9.	Woobox Custom Tab | Star #2	480,000	+180,000	+ 71%
10.	IFrame tabs	460,000	+170,000	+ 59%
11.	Netflix	870,000	+170,000	+ 24%
12.	Breaking Dawn – Part 1	1,000,000	+160,000	+ 19%
13.	LiveProfile	490,000	+140,000	+ 40%
14.	Sweepstakes	410,000	+140,000	+ 52%
15.	Fan of the Week for Pages	1,000,000	+120,000	+ 14%
16.	NS_EN Play Now Tab	650,000	+120,000	+ 25%
17.	Twoo	870,000	+120,000	+ 16%
18.	World Mysteries	660,000	+120,000	+ 22%
19.	11×11 – Online Football Manager	410,000	+110,000	+ 37%
20.	find.ly	350,000	+110,000	+ 46%

Mejores Amigos topped our list, growing by 310,000 MAU. This app forces users to invite all of their friends before it works. Shufflr, a daily video post, as well as Netflix’s Open Graph integration made the list. An app promoting the release of the next “Twilight” DVD, Breaking Dawn – Part 1, grew. Then there was a mobile messenger, LiveProfile,  dating app Twoo and professional Open Graph integration find.ly that grew by 110,000 MAU, despite the fact that only users that own accounts can use the app.

The rest of the list was composed of page apps. There were iFrame apps that grew from between 170,000 and 270,000 MAU: Hosted iFrame #3, Hosted iFrame – Main, Hosted iFrame w/ Social Icon, Static IFRAME Tab : Note Icon and IFrame tabs. Woobox Custom Tab | Star #2, Woobox’s Sweepstakes and Fan of the Week for Pages allow users to promote different content on their pages.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Facebook now shows some users up to seven ads on one page — an increase from the former maximum six.

Adding more ads to the same page could reduce clickthrough rates because it increases competition and pushes ads down to parts of the page that users might not see, but it could increase revenue for the social network. Advertisers might be concerned that as Facebook increases the amount of information it includes on fan pages, fewer ads can be seen without scrolling. When some fan pages are viewed in smaller browser windows, none of Facebook’s display ads are visible at all.

Timeline pages typically have fewer ads. We’ve seen one to two ads at a time on the new profile, which might be why the company is testing more ads on other pages. Facebook is also testing the orientation of ads on Timeline. Ads have alternated between horizontal and vertical formats in the past week.

The social network earns the majority of its revenue from advertising so optimizing the frequency and positioning of ads is important. Facebook clearly has enough inventory to increase the number of ads it shows on each page, but it must balance that with maintaining quality user experience and a level of performance that will keep advertisers coming back to the platform.

Facebook began displaying six ads at once in November. At that time the Help Center said up to five ads would show on a given page. The Help Center has since been updated to say up to six ads may be shown, but we have seen instances of seven ads at a time.

With Facebook users now able to make posts to previous dates — as far back even as their birth — there is an opportunity for developers to build apps that facilitate this “past-tense sharing.” There are, however, a few issues the social network will have to address in its API to allow these apps to integrate more seamlessly with Timeline.

Shoebox, UrbanSpoon and Wipolo, for example, have all sought to help users fill in their new profiles, but none has been able to do so in an ideal way because of deficiencies in Open Graph.

1000memories‘ mobile app Shoebox is releasing an update today that lets people scan paper photos, upload them directly to Facebook and tag their friends and family. The app prompts users to indicate when the photo is from, but this data cannot be synced with Facebook so that the photo appears in the appropriate spot on a user’s Timeline. 1000memories co-founder Brett Huneycutt says Open Graph does not allow photos to be displayed as big as they are when posted through the Photos API. As a trade-off, Shoebox uses the Photos API instead of Open Graph, but this requires users to manually edit images’ positions on Timeline. Huneycutt says his team is working with Facebook to find alternative solutions.

Another problem with Open Graph is that individual actions are not given much, if any, weight unless users manually adjust settings in the activity log. This makes sense most of the time — people don’t want every song they listen to or article they read to show up as separate stories on Timeline. But when apps want to share more significant actions, there is not an optimal way to do this. For example, if people use Wipolo to indicate trips they have taken, the app will display monthly or yearly summaries of their travel; but it will not feature each trip at its actual date on Timeline. To do that, users need to visit their activity log and select “Shown on Timeline,” but even then the story appears much smaller than if people used Facebook’s native “life events” feature. (See below for images.) The trip also won’t appear on Timeline’s built-in Map.

Developers cannot currently access life events through the API, though the social network has indicated that it is working to provide it. If Facebook offered write permissions for life events, developers could build apps that help users easily fill in their Timelines without formatting trade-offs.

Even when format is not an issue, some developers have been unable to take advantage of past-tense sharing on Facebook. Mobile app Urbanspoon allows users to check into restaurants and select a past date if desired. Although this updates a user’s “Dineline” within the app, the action does not yet sync with Facebook properly if users choose a time more than 24 hours ago. Backdating is apparently only available to select partners, though this is unclear from Open Graph documentation. Urbanspoon senior software developer Brian Dewey says Facebook told his team that it would support the feature in the next few weeks.

The tools and access the social network offers developers will determine if Timeline can truly become “the story of your life on one page,” as it was pitched at f8. Open Graph clearly helps users document their lives moving forward, but developers will need more support from Facebook to build apps to share users’ histories.

How photos display on Timeline using Open Graph vs. Photos API

With Open Graph, images display as a thumbnail and link out to another site.

When apps use the Photos API, images can be shown full size on Timeline and added to a Facebook album. However, apps do not get proper links as they do when using the Open Graph API.

How past trips display on Timeline using a third-party app vs. life events

When users add a past trip via Wipolo, a story appears in the private activity log as so:

It also appears as part of an aggregate story at the end of a month or year:

If a user chooses to show a Wipolo action on Timeline, a small story appears on appropriate Timeline spot, but without the ability to resize.

When a user adds a trip using Facebook’s life event feature, this produces a larger Timeline story that includes a bigger image and the option to resize.

Developers can now request permission to access lists of users’ subscribers and who they subscribe to via the Graph API. Facebook announced this and a few other changes in a blog post Wednesday.

With read permissions for subscriptions, apps can create more personalized experiences for users. They can also track subscriptions over time. Since Facebook does not offer analytics for users who enable subscribers, people could turn to apps to track their growth. Klout might be another third-party that would be interested in incorporating subscriber data because the company could use this information as another factor to calculate a person’s influence.

Facebook also made improvements to the search function on its developer site. Search results now include bugs and technical Q&A from Stack Overflow. Developers can also filter results by type.

The “manage_notifications” permission is now required to read or manage users’ notifications. The change was announced in July 2011 and migration is complete, according to the blog post.

The social network is in the process of deprecating the old page Insights. It confirmed that the old Insights will be completely removed on Feb. 15.

For information about breaking changes going into affect on Feb. 1, visit the Facebook Developer Blog.

Facebook posted engineering, ad and user operations, sales, technical and marketing jobs to the company’s Careers Page and LinkedIn feed this week. The company also changed the category of Platform & Product Marketing to just plain Marketing, in addition to adding several jobs in this category.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Client Partner – Spanish (Dublin), Facebook
• Client Partner – Turkish (Dublin), Facebook
• Client Partner – Czech (Dublin), Facebook
• Client Partner – German (Dublin), Facebook
• Head of Marketing Communications, France, Benelux & Switzerland, Facebook
• Head of Marketing Communications, Germany, Austria & Nordics, Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Latin American Spanish (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Brazilian (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Indonesian (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Thai (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Malay (Dublin)Facebook 
• Analyst, User Operations – Vietnamese (Dublin)Facebook 
• Market Researcher Facebook 
• Quantitative Market Researcher Facebook 
• User Experience Researcher
• Analyst, SMB Growth – German (Dublin)
• Analyst, SMB Growth – UK and Ireland (Dublin)
• Analyst, SMB Growth – Italian (Dublin)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook hired the former social media director from Bloomberg to work as its managing editor this week, according to the company’s Careers page and LinkedIn feed this week. Positions for privacy counsel, product counsel and head of BI engineering disappeared from the Careers page. It appears the company reorganized its advertising operations positions, as several disappeared from listings, and marketing positions also disappeared this week.

New hires per LinkedIn:

Facebook’s heavy push of the subscribe feature has apparently paid off as thousands of journalists enabled subscribers after its launch in September, according to a note on the Journalists + Facebook page.

The social network’s outreach among public figures and the prominence it gives subscribe suggestions on the site show a level of commitment to taking away some of Twitter’s power and preventing Google+ from gaining traction as a source for news.

Journalists like Ann Curry, Nicholas Kristof, Katie Couric and Don Lemon have converted to Timeline and enabled subscribe. Some of these figures have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. More than 90 journalists from the Washington Post and more than 50 from The New York Times have made their profiles available to public subscribers, according to the Journalists + Facebook note. The Washington Post recently published a list of all its staff members who are accessible on Facebook.

Many users have been able to accumulate Facebook subscribers at a much faster rate than they gained Twitter followers. A sample of 25 journalists showed the average journalist had a 320 percent increase in subscribers since November 2011. This is largely due to the “People To Subscribe To” sidebar that shows up on several pages prompting users to follow updates from journalists, celebrities and other public figures. Of course, when one user subscribes to another, it generates a story in friends’ News Feeds in a way that Twitter hasn’t taken advantage of. (Twitter added an activity feed in August 2011, but users have to visit a separate tab to view it.) Facebook has also offered a subscribe button plugin for third-party sites and added a subscribe call to action within its comments plugin and the “page owners” section of pages.

Notably, Facebook has employees dedicated to outreach, not only to bring the right personalities to the platform but also to provide best practices. Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik has been extremely active in sharing examples of how reporters can use the social network and producing resources like the Facebook + Journalists note today, which included recommendations such as “reader shoutouts can increase feedback by as much as 4x.”

Twitter might have to start implementing changes or better courting public figures to convince them not to neglect Twitter in favor of Facebook. Google+ has an advantage with the way Google Search now displays results from its social network, which could help keep it in the race for public attention. But for Facebook, a key point will be letting users choose whether to post to subscribers or friends. Because posts have to be public for subscribers to see them, a user is forced to also share that content with friends. Unlike Twitter, users can only have one profile so they have to mix business and personal. Another issue is that Facebook does not have a way to designate a profile as “official,” which has long been a problem for pages. And because many people who have subscribers also have pages, the social network will need to determine how to balance these in search.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at GREE International, Inc., Spooky Cool Labs, Tapjoy, LolGames, TubeMogul, Inc., IMVU, Addmired, 6 Waves/Lolapps, Funcom Games Canada, Identified, Plumbee, Mobile Deluxe, Game Show Network and Stealth Mobile Startup.

• Director of Business Development

• Marketing Director
• Software Engineer – Games Front End / Unity

• Inside Sales Representative

• Social Media Business Development Lead / Internet Guru

• Sr Java Developer
• Systems Operations Engineer

• Senior Software Engineer

• Technical Recruiter
• Senior Operations Engineer
• Acquisition Manager/Mobile Ad Buyer
• Business Intelligence Analyst
• 3D (Isometric) Environment Artist
• 2D Digital Painter/Illustrator
• 3D (Isometric) Character Artist – Modeler/Animator
• Build/Release Engineer
• Tools Engineer
• Scalability Engineer
• Erlang Infrastructure Developer
• C/C++ Game Developer

• Senior UI Designer
• UI Vector Artist
• Interaction Designer

• Senior Java Programmer
• Senior GUI / Flash Developer Social Games
• Lead Designer Social Games

• Core Software Engineer

• Head of Mobile/Senior Mobile Producer

• Art Director
• Senior Programmer

• Senior QA Engineer-Mobile Games

Stealth Mobile Startup

• Senior Android Engineer

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Tabs, birthdays, greeting cards and several applications utilizing Open Graph comprise our list of the top 20 growing Facebook apps by daily active users. Birthday apps grow by forcing users to invite all their friends before they can use the app. Tab applications are popular among page owners looking to customize their page. Open Graph integrations are designed to maximize Ticker and News Feed exposure.

The titles below grew between 210,000 and 5 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Hidden Chronicles	5,800,000	+5,090,000	+ 717%
2.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	6,200,000	+1,600,000	+ 35%
3.	Static Iframe Tab	3,500,000	+1,600,000	+ 84%
4.	Yahoo!	8,700,000	+1,100,000	+ 14%
5.	Scramble with Friends	1,100,000	+900,000	+ 450%
6.	Words With Friends	8,700,000	+700,000	+ 9%
7.	Netflix	630,000	+520,000	+ 473%
8.	Greeting Cards	450,000	+420,000	+ 1,400%
9.	Bubble Witch Saga	4,200,000	+400,000	+ 11%
10.	MyCalendar – Birthdays	1,400,000	+400,000	+ 40%
11.	Pinterest	1,500,000	+400,000	+ 36%
12.	schoolFeed	2,300,000	+400,000	+ 21%
13.	Greeting Cards	420,000	+390,000	+ 1,300%
14.	BandPage by RootMusic	1,700,000	+300,000	+ 21%
15.	Spotify	4,700,000	+300,000	+ 7%
16.	Washington Post Social Reader	750,000	+290,000	+ 63%
17.	MeinKalender – Geburtstag	520,000	+280,000	+ 117%
18.	MiCalendario – Cumpleaños	760,000	+240,000	+ 46%
19.	Family Feud & Friends iPhone/iPad	780,000	+210,000	+ 37%
20.	MonCalendrier – Anniversaires	350,000	+210,000	+ 150%

Tab apps Static HTML: iframe tabs and Static Iframe Tab grew by 1.6 million DAU. Users are increasingly creating their own pages, and these free applications help them customize those pages with images and other basic functions.

This week’s list also includes Open Graph integrations from: Yahoo, Netflix, Pinterest and Spotify. These integrations allow users to interact with content in a variety of ways that expose content to the stream. 

SchoolFeed, which is a social network within the Facebook platform based on high school affiliation. BandPage by RootMusic is a tab app for musicians who want to manage their Facebook presence. The Washington Post Social Reader app has gained traction by posting to the feed, and inviting users to recruit their friends to the app.

Two greeting card applications made the list, inviting users to send birthday and greeting cards to their friends, resulting in 420,000 DAU for Greeting Cards and 390,000 DAU for Greeting Cards. The aforementioned birthday apps gained between 400,000 and 210,000 DAU, and appeared in English, German, Spanish and French.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

With Open Graph actions, users can now interact with and share things on the web in more nuanced ways than liking or posting. The new dynamics between apps, Timeline, Ticker and News Feed means more options for brand exposure on Facebook, but not necessarily in ways brands can control or own. Instead, marketers will need to think beyond their Facebook pages and consider partnership opportunities with other apps, as well as how to build new experiences for the web and mobile devices that last beyond a single campaign.

A lot of the actions users take in Open Graph apps are going to involve commercial products or entities. People will be able to “watch” movies, “wear” designer items, “drink” beverages and so on. Most of these actions will not be taken within brand-specific apps. Instead they’ll be made via Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Foodspotting and other third-party platforms. As a result, we may start to see more brands directing people to these apps. For example, a movie page on Facebook could link to the Rotten Tomatoes page after opening weekend and tell fans to rate the movie, knowing this will generate additional impressions among a user’s friends. Brands will also be more likely to partner with apps to offer promotions or be featured in some way now that their reach will be much greater. This is because instead of waiting for users to actively share things on Facebook, Open Graph apps can continuously publish lightweight stories about users’ activity. As a result, formerly niche communities like the aforementioned Pose or Foodspotting could become more viable marketing avenues.

Marketers might be tempted to create their own Open Graph apps, but they will need to think more long term than they previously have with Facebook. Timeline apps provide value through use over time, helping users share part of their identity or learn something about their own habits. These apps are not ideal for one-off promotions. If marketers create them solely to take advantage of “frictionless sharing,” users are likely to recognize them as spam.

Another important point about Open Graph apps is that since they benefit from users taking repeated action, they work well as mobile and web integrations not page tab apps. A few of Facebook’s more than 60 Open Graph partners developed canvas applications, but none were using page tabs. We suspect this is in part because tabs apps are unavailable on mobile and pages could be converted to the Timeline format sometime this year. Marketers should be mindful of how much they invest in page tab apps moving forward and instead consider what kind of Open Graph integration or partnerships would be most relevant for their consumers.

See our breakdown of Open Graph apps by category here.

Image credit: Facebook