Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games:

• iPhone Game Developers Eye Increasing Monetization Options
• Live from iGames Summit: Lessons Learned – Why iPhone Games Work
• Apple Launches iPhone “In-App Purchase” Virtual Goods Platform for App & Game Developers
• Two New Twitter Games Remind Us of Radio Contests
• Facebook Connect for iPhone Released, Several Games Now Live
• Playfish Announces First Social Game for iPhone and iPod Touch
• SGN Launches Agency Wars & Adds Facebook Connect to iBowl
• InComm Reporting Growth in Game Currency Cards
• In Brief: Virtual Goods Updates from hi5 and OutSpark
• Aurora Feint Launches “Social Platform” for iPhone Games
• Shopping is When Monetization Feels Good

When Facebook launched the new home page last week, it created a major new opportunity for Page owners to reach fans: by updating their Page, fans automatically get updates in their home page stream.

However, for Pages users had “fanned” before the redesign, Facebook automatically turned updates from some Pages off by default – presumably to keep the News Feed from becoming too spammy. Not all Pages were hidden, but we don’t know how they were picked – we’re awaiting word from Facebook on how they chose which ones were turned on and off.

Now, Facebook has updated users letting them know that updates from all Pages they become a fan of from here on out will appear in the News Feed, just like updates from friends. Users can hide updates from Pages they don’t want updates from by clicking the “X”, just as they can for friends.

For many Page owners, News Feed distribution is the most important channel for communicating with users in the new redesign. The way that Facebook handles these kinds of settings has a big impact on a large number of marketers. We’ll have more clarity when we hear from Facebook on the default news feed settings, but for now all new fans should be getting Page updates.

Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our fantastic sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!

Offerpal Media is a leading managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Social Gold is a simple and secure way for developers to integrate virtual currency transactions into games or applications.

Super Rewards is a leading monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

SocialMedia Networks is an advertising network for social media platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial.

AdParlor is a leading advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites.

Papa John’s, which had a very successful virtual goods campaign on Facebook a few months ago that landed it over 200,000 Facebook fans, is teaming up with Coke for a second Facebook drive around the NCAA basketball tournament.

Papa John’s, the “official pizza of March Madness,” is offering all new fans to its Facebook Page a chance to win two tickets to the Final Four in Detroit April 4-6, courtesy of Coca-Cola. The company has been advertising the promotion on Facebook this week.

According to PageData, the Papa John’s page grew by 52,000 fans on Monday, when it launched its advertising campaign.

“The chain particularly values the ‘first-hand feedback’ and ‘uncut rhetoric’ that Facebook users provide on promotions, product launches, customer service and the brand as a whole,” noted VP of Marketing Communications Jim Ensign, according to MediaPost.

As of today, the Papa John’s page is up to nearly 280,000 fans.

With the new “real time” stream on Facebook’s redesigned home page, Facebook is relying less on its ability to algorithmically select interesting content for users and more on users’ abilities to group and categorize their friends to create the most interesting stream. Here are a couple quick tips for customizing it the new Facebook home page to make it work better for you:

1) Hide friends whose updates you don’t want to see.

The easiest way to get started is to hide friends from the News Feed. You’ll no longer see any shared content from friends you hide.

2) Group friends into Friend Lists and use them to filter your feed.

The next step is to group friends into what Facebook calls “Friend Lists.” Friend Lists are private friend groups that no one ever sees but that you can use for privacy – for example, sharing personal content (like photos) with only some of your Facebook friends. You can also use them to create filtered views on the home page stream so that you only see updates from certain types of friends – like “Best Friends,” “Work Friends,” “High School,” etc.

To create Friend Lists, go to the Friends tab and click “Make a New List” on the left side of the page.

3) Change your default home page filter.

You can change the default stream you see on the home page by dragging a friend list or network filter above “News Feed” on the left. Most people don’t know that this is possible, but it’s a powerful feature once you’ve created a friend list you like using a lot.

Now, you’ll only see updates from “Best Friends” (or whichever list you prefer seeing most often) when you load the home page.

You can only currently use friend lists and networks as your default News Feed filter – not applications. However, you can still rearrange applications in the section below friend lists and networks in order to put your favorite ones on top.

It’s now been nearly a full week since the new “live stream” Facebook home page redesign launched to all users. How are users responding?

It’s still too early to tell yet in terms of bigger shifts in audience behavior – but early aggregate data from Compete shows total daily time spent on Facebook is roughly flat since this time a week ago.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t users complaining about the changes. In a Facebook application called New Layout Vote, roughly 850,000 users have expressed their sentiments about the redesign. The results? About 94% of voters say they don’t like it.

However, it’s not the first time a vocal minority of Facebook users have resisted changes to the site’s design. Two years ago, Facebook users initially protested the launch of the News Feed, but then became glued to the site even more because of it. Last year, Facebook users fought for ways to go back to the old Facebook profile design, but growth and engagement have continued to increase since – pages per visit are up by 50% since last summer.

Facebook is of course monitoring feedback through a variety of channels, but the loudest voice will be the way users actually change the way they use the service. We wouldn’t be surprised to see time spent and pages per visit increase similarly over the coming year – but the data will tell the tale.

Kontagent, a recent fbFund winner and provider of “viral analytics” tools for Facebook application developers, is now providing metrics to developers of iPhone applications who have integrated Facebook Connect.

The new service is the first Facebook Connect for iPhone analytics product to launch since Facebook announced the expansion of Facebook Connect to the iPhone with several top iPhone app developers last weekend. Now, Kontagent’s tools enable app developers to track and analyze Facebook application performance across platforms.

As we noted earlier this week, Facebook Connect brings new opportunities for engagement and viral growth to iPhone app developers. New services like Kontagent’s will only accelerate the pace of product development around Facebook Connect on the iPhone.

“These tools level the playing field for many. It has enabled even the smallest developers to gain access to advanced optimization tools that were previously only available to top developers. This is a win-win for developers and users, as more exciting applications arrive on next generation platforms such as the iPhone and Facebook Connect,” says co-founder Jeffery Tseng.

The company will be demoing the new service at the Facebook Developers Garage next Wednesday, March 25 in San Francisco.

While Facebook continues rolling out new features around birthday calendaring and gifting, popular app Birthday Calendar is continuing to grow by taking a road less traveled by most Platform applications: translation into many languages.

With about 7.5 million monthly active users today, Birthday Calendar is the 2nd most popular app for Facebook users in French, Spanish, and Italian (Pet Society by Playfish is #1 in all three). BigDates Solutions, the developer of Birthday Calendar, is using Facebook’s crowd-sourced translation service to let users translate the app into their local language.

Here’s how it looks:

Inside Facebook’s Karl Bunyan recently wrote a tutorial for developers interested in translating their apps. (Facebook’s translation tool is very powerful, but your apps must be built in FBML.) However, as Birthday Calendar is showing, it very well could be well worth your effort.

With over 67 million active Facebook users in Europe, many more Facebook apps would likely gain significant additional traction were they to translate their applications too.

AppData for Birthday Calendar – Last 90 Days

From the “developer tidbits” department, over the last few days Facebook has made a couple of subtle changes to the design of the application canvas page.

Now, when Facebook users are engaging with Platform applications:

1. Application favicons are used instead of the Facebook favicon
2. The title of the page has changed to “[application name] on Facebook” instead of “Facebook | [application name]“

Here’s how the new browser tabs (and bookmarks) look:

RBC Capital Markets analyst Ross Sandler issued a 15-page note analyzing the different reasons Facebook poses a threat to Google this morning.

Henry Blodget over at SAI has all the pertinent slides (as usual), and here are the highlights:

1) Sandler says by RBC projections Facebook could surpass Google in worldwide uniques by 2011-2012:

2) Sandler says Facebook is driving 19% of Google uniques, up from 9% a year ago. (Personally I’m a little confused by what exactly he means by “drive” here, because the data for all entry sources adds up to much more than 100% so I don’t think it’s accurate to call this pure referral traffic. Intuitively this claim doesn’t make sense personally as well.)

3) The report says Facebook and Google are “complimentary” for now, but Facebook is increasingly becoming the “starting point” on the internet for its users:

Google and Facebook are two of the fastest growing and largest companies on the internet, and thus far, Facebook’s ascendancy has likely helped Google gain share. 45% of monthly unique users go directly to Facebook (as a starting page), up from 39% a year ago. At the same time, Google is now driving 64% of Facebook’s uniques, up from 51% a year ago. Google.com, on the other hand, has a consistent 66% of its uniques as a starting page, same as a year ago. Google’s uniques via Facebook are growing at 188% y/y, and  now represent 19% of Google’s traffic (up from 9% 12-months ago)…

Facebook is actually positive and complementary for Google thus far, but that could change if Facebook’s rapid growth trajectory continues on its current path, or if/when social media can find a business model and attract ad dollars from other online media. At the very least, we think Facebook as the “starting point” for more and more users on the Internet could create some multiple compression for Google over time, if the momentum continues.

It’s interesting to see analysts starting to talk more publicly about Facebook these days. The company is very clearly on the radar of the research community on Wall Street.