The Facebook Developer Garage New York City is happening tonight, and over 300 attendees from New York’s large Facebook development and marketing community should be in attendance.

The agenda for the evening includes:

• A presentation on Facebook Connect by Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin with Sam Lessin, CEO of drop.io, and Suleman Ali, an early Facebook application developer who sold his apps to SGN
• A demo of Zembly, a new set of tools for Facebook app development
• A profile of Buddy Media, a leading app-vertisement firm
• “Apps to Watch,” the best Facebook apps from the NYC area

The event is happening at Sunset Terrace (61 Chelsea Piers #2, NYC), and the doors open at 6:30pm. For more info on the venue, check out the event page!

Facebook announced another contribution to the open source community this weekend with the open sourcing of its Scribe Server. The source code is now available on SourceForge. What does Scribe do?

Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine.

Basically, Scribe is a good way to get large volumes of messages from large numbers of servers. It’s not reliable enough for database transactions, but it works pretty well for things like a News Feed. Scribe will most likely be interesting to developers building large scale communications systems or doing large scale data analysis, though Facebook’s Robert Johnson says Facebook uses Scribe for “over 100 use cases.”

This week, Inside Social Games looks at the top games on Facebook, Come2Play’s new multiplaer API, and chats with the CEO of GamerDNA. Check out the latest this week from ISG!

• Top 25 Facebook Games for October 24, 2008
• Western MMO Lord of the Rings Online Adds Social Networking
• Come2Play Now Features A Multiplayer API
• Industry Perspectives with Jon Radoff, CEO of GamerDNA
• Hatchery – Like Pokemon, But Still Early On
• Lucky Strike Bowling Looks Great, But Plays Simple

While we’ve been tracking the impact of the Facebook redesign on the application economy closely, we turn our attention now to social games. How has the Facebook redesign affected the top game developers on Facebook? Inside Social Games has just released the October Facebook gaming charts, and many of the results are interesting:

• Lil Green Patch extended its lead by nearly half a million monthly active users to 6.5 million total, remaining the biggest game on the Facebook Platform. Green Patch also quietly released sister title Lil Blue Cove recently, which has been growing quite quickly.
• Kidnap broke onto the charts with over 2 million monthly active users. Interestingly, Kidnap was originally developed as a sponsored app by Context Optional for the Travel Channel. It’s not the first time that’s happened, Area/Code developed Parking Wars for A&E earlier this year and it grew to over 500,000 monthly actives.
• Playfish‘s Pet Society gained nearly 750,000 monthly active users since last month to reach nearly 2.5 million in October, while Who Has the Biggest Brain lost 600,000 to 2.9 million. Overall, Playfish retained its leadership position with 4 apps in the top 10.
• Several large games saw drops in their monthly traffic numbers – Owned, Friends For Sale, Nicknames, and Speed Racing.
• Zynga had a mixed month in terms of growth, but held its position with 4 games in the top 25. Texas HoldEm held at 5.1 million monthly actives nicely, and YoVille grew by over 350,000 users to over 2.3 million. However, My Heroes Ability fell by 300,000 and Scramble by 250,000 during the same time.
• Two additional games emerged on the leaderboards as well. TheBroth’s KickMania and Tetris Online’s Tetris Friends each showed impressive gains of around 750,000 monthly actives, starting from scratch.

As KickMania, Tetris Friends, and Kidnap show, ample opportunity exists for new games to emerge and grow quickly – even on the new Facebook. At the same time, top game developers must build increasingly engaging and social experiences to stay on top – otherwise, Facebook game audiences can fade away quickly.

Ultimately, there is a lot of volatility atop the gaming charts on Facebook currently, but the social gaming space on Facebook remains alive and well.

Affiliate marketers will try to find inventory any way they can, but those trying to find leads through Facebook applications are not likely to find much long term success.

While Facebook has allowed developers to monetize their application canvas pages however they like, the company has been very protective of the profile page and viral communication channels. Many application developers have successfully sold “sponsored gifts,” but placing ads that link directly to affiliate landing pages in notifications or wall messages has never been treated as a generally acceptable practice.

However, that’s not stopping some people from trying. Just today, the myTV video sharing app sent an announcement linking to this sponsored links page for plasma TV’s on BizRate (see above).

Ultimately, Facebook has invested significant time and human resources to create a low-spam environment – a massive challenge for a service operating at this scale – and has too much at stake. Facebook’s combination of automated and manual detection systems are likely to prevent this kind of affiliate marketing from ever becoming very widespread.

As the World Series kicked off last night with a 3-2 win by Philadelphia over Tampa Bay, thousands of Phillies and Rays fans were congregating inside Facebook applications rooting their teams on.

Watercooler, the largest developer of Facebook applications for sports fans, has created applications that allow users to connect with fellow fans, send “smack talk” to friends, and play fan games inside Facebook. Users can also prominently display their fan activity for their favorite teams on their Facebook profile so that everyone knows who they are rooting for. Collectively, the company has created applications for fans of over 700 sports teams around the world. (Full disclosure: I work with the company.)

How does the on the field competition compare to the fan race on Facebook? As of today, the 125,000 monthly active users of Watercooler’s Philadelphia Phillies Fans application are dwarfing users of the Tamba Bay Rays Fans application by a large margin. If the teams’ fan following on Facebook is any indication of what may happen on the field, it looks like Tampa Bay may be in for a short series!

Although there has been a lot of speculation in the last few weeks, the long term impacts of the profile redesign on the Facebook platform have certainly yet to be fully felt. Since the redesign fully rolled out a few weeks ago, there has been significant outside scrutiny of the little publicly available evidence that has indicated upticks for some apps (like Causes, which we profiled yesterday), and major traffic drops for others.

Today, we shift our focus to the top 3 apps on the Facebook active user leaderboard as well we three mid-sized applications to get a better cross section of application traffic patterns over the past 30 days.

Super Wall (RockYou!)

While some hypothesized that Facebook’s enhanced Wall and Publisher integration would threaten the major “wall” apps, Super Wall has thus far proven those fears to be unfounded. Over the past month, Super Wall has trended slightly upwards, coming in with roughly 18.5 million monthly active users as of today.

Top Friends (Slide)

Included in the profile redesign was a tweak to the Facebook’s own friends box. The update allowed users to specify which and how many friends’ pictures appeared in their own friends box – functionality that previously only Top Friends provided. Over the past 30 days, Top Friends has trended downwards, falling from 19.5 million monthly actives to roughly 16.8 million monthly actives as of today.

Slide FunSpace (Slide)

Slide, which recently announced distribution partnerships with several media outlets, has for the past month experienced a significant downturn on Slide FunSpace (formerly FunWall), another one of their core properties. The app has fallen from 20.8 million to 15.2 million monthly active users, nearly a 37% decline.

Movies (Flixster)

Flixster’s Movies application is on a sharp upswing, with a jump from 4.86 million to 5.86 million monthly actives. That growth has come mostly during the past 10 days.

Word Twist (Zynga)

Word Twist, a part of the Zynga game network, has remained almost perfectly flat, resting at 650k MAUs.

Dog Book (Refresh Partners)

Finally, Dog Book suffered significant loses, falling from nearly 464k MAUs to 320k MAUs, nearly a one-third drop in traffic.

Conclusion

This handful of apps may not be indicative of the platform at large, but their performances do paint a mixed picture of the ecosystem’s overall health. While it may be appealing to simply state “apps are dead” or “apps are up,” the real story is thus far less definitive. It is clear, however, that the Facebook Platform has changed, and applications need to adapt to the new Facebook dynamics and integration points to continue to grow and prosper.

Earlier this summer, Facebook application developer SpeedDate was temporarily suspended from the Facebook Platform. The reason? Allegedly the company bought several Facebook applications with large user bases and holistically replaced them with a copy of the SpeedDate app. Users were surprised to find that their previous apps had been renamed and switched into a completely different application.

However, it appears as though SpeedDate is not deterred from doing more similar acquisitions. This time, it’s apparently buying and switching Oregon Trail, previously developed by kickflip. Tonight, Oregon Trail users were sent the following announcement:

Next week, Oregon Trail’s name and functionality will be changed to SpeedDate. Data entered into the original app won’t be used anymore. Soon you’ll be able to try SpeedDate, the fastest way to meet new people, so stay tuned! P.S. If you want to opt-out of this app, instructions can be found here.

Buying Facebook apps is apparently a cost-effective method of customer acquisition. However, it remains to be seen whether Facebook will intervene in these kinds of transactions now and in the future as it has in the past.

While some application developers are claiming that the Facebook Platform is “dead,” that’s not quite true for everyone. While many developers have experienced a dip in traffic since the Facebook redesign, many are still growing – and a few are growing quite rapidly.

One such developer that has experienced anything but a slowdown since the new Facebook launched is Causes. In the last 30 days, Causes’ traffic (counted by monthly active users) has increased 200% – from 3.1 million monthly users on September 22 to 9.3 million today. That’s by far the biggest jump we’ve seen of any application in the last month.

Here’s the Causes traffic chart for the last 30 days (click to zoom in):

Why has Causes done so well, when others have suffered traffic drops? Here are a few possibilities:

• Causes is riding the wave of interest in and grassroots activism around the US elections, particularly the sky-high level of interest on Facebook in the Presidential election, foreign policy issues, and numerous local ballot issues.
• Causes, along with iLike, was named one of the two inaugural “Great Apps” by Facebook back at f8 in July. Facebook’s Ben Ling (now at Google) said at the time that Great Apps appear more like native Facebook applications, meaning they “gain visibility similar to that of our own applications.” It’s possible that Causes is seeing some of the benefits of its Great Apps designation, either through increased News Feed distribution, greater profile publisher visibility, or higher communication channel limits.
• Causes has made some design changes that have led to significantly increased viral growth.
• Unlike applications that depend more on the profile box, Causes’ usage dynamics are more dependent on requests, notifications, and wall posts.

While we await comment from Causes on what exactly is causing the rise, it’s clear that some applications are still growing quickly in the new Facebook world.

Why do you think Causes has shown this kind of astounding post-redesign growth?

Facebook tonight launched an update to the way Feed stories work that could allow app developers to get more engagement from the Feed.

“Action Links” are a new addition to Feed templates that allow developers to include an array of actions profile viewers can take in response to a feed item. For example, this feed item can be enhanced by adding “Listen,” “Buy,” and “Review” action links. Action links will always appear after a default “Comment” action link.

Action links are a nice minor enhancement to give developers more hooks into applications from the profile page, now that boxes have largely disappeared from the redesigned profile. For specs on how to add action links to your feed template bundles, check out the Developer Wiki.