While many application developers are hard at work preparing for fall releases, some apps very recently launched on the Facebook Platform are already some of the fastest growing. Let’s take a look at the 15 fastest growing apps on Facebook as of right now:

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		FarmVille	29,261,208	+4,352,887	+17.5	Zynga
2.		Birthday	3,578,953	+1,932,883	+117.4	Anastasia Pelot
3.		Friends!	1,812,111	+1,400,544	+340.3	Suvone Venter
4.		YoVille	13,533,150	+943,543	+7.5	Zynga
5.		Farm Town	17,762,282	+746,032	+4.4	Slashkey
6.		We’re Related	18,848,814	+594,414	+3.3	FamilyLink.com
7.		Mafia Wars	17,172,149	+569,400	+3.4	Zynga
8.		(Lil) Farm Life	1,303,088	+494,772	+61.2	Greenpatch Inc
9.		Restaurant City	10,645,386	+473,678	+4.7	Playfish
10.		Gold Star	726,148	+469,620	+183.1	—
11.		Mobile	9,738,664	+419,436	+4.5	Facebook
12.		Causes	24,830,769	+410,190	+1.7	Causes
13.		My Polls	1,042,832	+388,440	+59.4	It’s complicated
14.		Brain Buddies	3,463,218	+368,182	+11.9	wooga
15.		Mobsters 2: Vendetta	1,036,635	+367,100	+54.8	Playdom

Source: AppData

As you can see, FarmVille, the latest farming game by Zynga, is crushing the growth charts with over 4 million new users in the last week. However, interestingly, new games from Greenpatch and Playdom are ascending the list too.

(Lil) Farm Life, the latest title from Greenpatch, has already reached 1.3 million users in just a few weeks after going live with nearly half a million new users this week. In addition, Playdom’s most recent Facebook title, Mobsters 2, is now in the top 15 gainers list with over 1 million active users, nearly 40% of them new this week.

Slashkey’s Farm Town continues trucking with 750,000 new users this week. It’s up to 17.7 million MAU. And YoVille continues its recent surge as well, adding nearly a million MAU in the last week to over 13.5 million monthly actives overall.

Finally, we’ve seen a couple major spikes in the last two weeks from Birthday and Friends. However, both are using somewhat aggressive techniques to grow apparently. Nevertheless, Birthday has added nearly 2 million users in the last week alone, while Friends has added nearly a million and a half.

For detailed data on applications and developers, be sure to check out AppData. Custom reports are also available – feel free to contact us with questions.

It’s been 10 days since Facebook submitted the new Facebook for iPhone 3.0 application to Apple for review, but contrary to what one might expect, Apple doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to fast-track one of the most widely used apps on the iPhone/iPod Touch platform.

Frustrated with what he calls the “guilty until proven innocent” model of iPhone application approval, Facebook for iPhone developer Joe Hewitt wrote a blog post last night explaining why Apple should trust developers more.

“There are plenty of successful platforms out there which free developers to publish anything, but punish them if they do something harmful,” Hewitt writes. “This allows developers to move fast, fix bugs immediately, get feedback from users at a very low cost.”

The Facebook Platform has always operated this way, and it’s led to an incredibly rapid pace of innovation over the last couple of years. While some Facebook application developers have griped as Facebook has made changes to keep application behavior in check overall, developers have always been able to freely create and update apps on Facebook without going through any pre-screening process. However, it doesn’t appear that Apple will be changing its ways any time soon.

Last week, we gave a detailed tour of the updated app, which brings Facebook Pages, video uploading, events, photo management, and more. Overall, the upgrades should lead to even more engagement while users are on the go. Today, Facebook for iPhone has nearly 12.5 million active users.

Facebook is becoming an increasingly common way to organize events, and now Facebook has made it a little easier to invite groups of friends to many events. A new feature in the “Filter Friends” tab when creating a new event lets users select invitee lists who they previously invited to recent events.

Scheduling large events through Facebook can be a hassle for specialized groups, and previously, the only way to invite a group was to create a dedicated friend list. With this new feature, it’s easy to schedule recurring events with the same group of Facebook friends without having to choose the entire invite list one person at a time.

The tool allows you to pull in a list of people from any current or recent event you’ve created. This can be especially useful for anything from meetings to team sports, where the group you’d like to invite doesn’t necessarily fall under an existing network.

Adding this tool to event scheduling helps fill out Facebook’s feature set to help it better compete with specialized event sites like Meetup. Facebook still has a long way too go before it matches the full services offers by those sites, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Should doctors on Facebook be wary of sharing too much information with patients, colleagues, or representatives of insurance companies?

An article in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Sachin H. Jain explores how Facebook is changing the nature of the doctor-patient relationship and the difficulties of balancing a personal and professional persona in social networking.

Facebook is quickly evolving into much more than a “social networking” site, with more and more people using the site to cultivate a variety of professional connections. But conflicts can arise when your professional and personal worlds intersect, especially when dealing with health and medicine.

When a former patient sent Dr. Jain a Facebook friend request, he accepted it with some hesitation. He was unsure of the patient’s motives, but felt Facebook offered a way to learn a little more about the woman’s daughter, whom Dr. Jain had delivered. However, Jain says he had reservations about inviting a patient into his personal life, as there were some potential ethical and legal repercussions to the online interaction.

“In confirming this patient as my ‘friend’ on Facebook, I was merging my professional and personal lives. From my Facebook page, Ms. Baxter could identify and reach anyone in my network of friends, view an extensive collection of personal photographs, read my personal blog, and review notations that others had left on my ‘wall,’” Jain says. “The anxiety I felt about crossing boundaries is an old problem in clinical medicine, but it has taken a different shape as it has migrated to this new medium.”

It turned out that the patient was seeking some advice, as she was considering entering medical school. Dr. Jain was relieved that the interaction was indeed somewhat professional, but the entire situation showed him how Facebook can break down the barriers put in place to help keep doctors at a safe distance from their patients so as to remain impartial.

For doctors, are also the issues that apply to every professional with a public Facebook profile, including a patient/client having access to photos or posts that could be detrimental to the professional’s image. While it’s always wise to police what you share on Facebook, it can be especially damaging for medical professionals to post questionable material. Should a patient with access to a doctor’s or nurse’s Facebook profile find something that breaches doctor-patient confidentiality, there could be potential legal issues. We might even theoretically see insurance companies trolling doctors’ personal pages for incriminating evidence, and the wrong content could affect the already high price of malpractice insurance.

Dr. Jain was fortunate that his former patient was only seeking advice, but he was cautious and advices others to be careful.

“The issues raised by access to online media are in many ways similar to issues that physicians and medical institutions have dealt with for generations. Physicians, after all, are members of real-life communities and might be observed in public behaving in ways that are discordant with their professional personas,” Jain says. “What is different about the online arena is the potential size of the community and the still-evolving rules of etiquette.”

Glenn Beck is one of the more polarizing personalities in radio and TV, and the right-wing talk show host has brought his name to Facebook and built a strong following. Beck’s Facebook Page is one of the most popular for any political commentator, and has largely become a forum for his more than 290,000 fans to voice their opinions. It continues to gain popularity despite very few posts from Beck.

Posts from Glenn Beck himself are mostly about his appearances, Fox News programming and book and concert tour dates. There isn’t a consistent flow to the posts, which seem to come in spurts. There were eight posts for the month of June, but only one post so far for all of July and August. This hasn’t stopped Beck’s fans from adding their own comments, and he continues to add more fans at a steady clip.

Source: PageData by Inside Facebook

The popularity of Beck’s Page shows just how eager Facebook users are to use the site as venue for political expression. Last week, we saw Sarah Palin’s growing popularity on Facebook, and just yesterday, the same with San Francisco Mayor and California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom. Of course, Barack Obama remains the most popular political figure on Facebook, with over 6.6 million fans – second only to Michael Jackson’s 10.1 million.

Beck is the sort of figure that draws comments from both sides of the political fence, as is evident by the popularity of his radio and television programs. Facebook gives everyone a way to comment on Beck’s views, as there are only so many calls the on-air personality can field during one of his shows.

David Recordon, a long time advocate of “open” technologies and a leader of the OpenID and OAuth movements since their beginning, is joining Facebook, he has confirmed to us. He’ll start work next week as “Senior Open Programs Manager.”  Recordon was most recently a director at Six Apart.

Recordon will continue work on open source and open standards in his new role at Facebook.

“When I look back to two years ago when I re-joined Six Apart, I did so out of an interest in evolving social networking technologies and by working together the industry has made an amazing amount of progress,” Recordon said. “This past year as I’ve worked closer with teams at Facebook, I’ve been impressed by their products, smart people, and innovation.”

Earlier this year, Facebook joined the OpenID board of directors as a corporate sustaining member, and said that users would soon thereafter be able to login to the site via OpenID. One month later, the feature launched.

With Recordon’s hire, Facebook is increasing the amount of “open” DNA in the company. Last year, the company hired Mike Schroepfer from Mozilla, and Facebook has recently been taking steps to allow and encourage users to publish content more openly.

However, Recordon will put a more public face on Facebook’s “open” efforts going forward.

“I hope to build on my past experience in working on making the web more open and useful for everyone,” he says.

We’re still in the early phases of Facebook’s build-out of the commerce side of its business, but it’s clear that between recent test launches of its payment service for developers, Facebook Credits virtual currency initiatives, and last week’s gift shop merchant program, Facebook is thinking a lot about the future of social commerce. Recently, the team hired Prashant Fuloria from Google to manage its payments initiatives, and the company is looking to hire more people to help run its e-commerce programs.

Two days ago, Peter Kafka at AllThingsD reported that before shutting down recently, social payment service TipJoy was in talks with a variety of potential acquirers. One was Facebook, who reportedly submitted a term sheet to buy the company before pulling out. Since then, co-founder Ivan Kirigin has since been hired by Facebook. The company confirms Kirigin is now working in an engineering role – we assume on payment products.

While some commenters initially criticized Facebook for hiring the co-founder of a company it had previously been in talks to acquire, Y Combinator founder and TipJoy investor Paul Graham stepped forward to publicly defend Facebook, saying TipJoy eventually ran out of money and that Kirigin “admired the hackers at Facebook” and wanted to work there.

Last week, on his fourth day of work at Facebook, Kirigin shared his thoughts on the future of social payments when he announced TipJoy was shutting down. Kirigin wrote,

We have decided against continuing to pursue additional funding. After a long and hard look at the market and the situation, we didn’t feel it made sense.

When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. “Simple, social payments” is *the* philosophy needed to do digital payments right, but once a service groks that, they need only to implement it on their own. We’ve been the thought leaders in this space, we see the hype and excitement, and yet we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments – then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

Does Facebook think the same way? While we don’t believe Facebook is building its own payment stack from scratch, we are hearing that Facebook is meeting with a variety of players in the payments industry about potential partnership opportunities.

We think that makes a lot of sense, and we believe it is likely Facebook will launch tests of new payment methods in the months ahead. Currently, Facebook only accepts major credit cards, while developers on the Facebook Platform are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues by accepting many types of direct payments, advertiser-financed offers, mobile payments, and pre-paid cards from users around the world.

It’s too early to tell exactly how more payment methods might be integrated into the Facebook Credit-buying user experience, but given that 70% of Facebook’s audience is outside the United States, it only makes sense for Facebook to make it easier for users to make purchases using whatever payment methods are available to them.

Last week, Facebook launched a Twitter application enabling Facebook Page owners to automatically post links to their content on Twitter as well. While the app included features to filter which types of content posted to your Facebook Page get published on Twitter, it didn’t support personal Facebook profiles.

Now, Utah-based startup SocialToo has just released a Facebook application that does just that. Once you authenticate your Twitter account, you can choose the “SocialToo” app from the Facebook publisher dropdown to automatically post your status updates to Twitter as well.

It’s the simplest syndication app for personal profiles we’ve seen yet – though we expect to see more apps that take advantage of Facebook’s Open Stream API in the coming weeks and months.

Together with Facebook’s Twitter application for Facebook Pages (which could itself be opened up to personal profiles soon), Facebook could become one of the largest sources of tweets within the Twitter ecosystem. Historically, Twitter has been one of the most popular Facebook applications publishing status updates into Facebook.

A few days ago, Facebook and Britney Spears launched a premium line of virtual gifts inside Facebook that made several custom designed, limited edition Britney-themed gifts available to users.

The gifts, titled “It’s Your Birthday,” “Britney Pride,” and “Slave 4 U,” etc., cost 20 Facebook Credits each. That’s currently the equivalent of USD $2.00, or twice the price of most Facebook virtual gifts. The gifts are still available today, and may be for some time.

Since the campaign launched, many other artists have expressed interest in getting into the Facebook gift shop. Facebook won’t say how many of the gifts have been sold so far, but a Facebook spokesperson did tell us that the company will “continue to explore licensing gifts, such as the Britney Spears line, and others such as gifts specific to charities.” Facebook also regularly runs sponsored virtual gift campaigns as part of its core offering to brand advertisers.

The Britney Spears experiment is just one of the many virtual gift shop tests Facebook has been running recently. Last week, Facebook confirmed to us that it is now testing the availability of both third party virtual gifts and third party physical gifts with a limited number of users. It’s the first time items from third party merchants have ever been made available in Facebook’s official virtual storefront, though third parties have been delivering a variety of virtual gifts in Facebook Platform applications for a long time.

We think Facebook is likely to continue testing licensed virtual gifts with more musicians and artists whose revenues are increasingly being derived from merchandise sales. Just as fans are willing to pay a premium for officially licensed physical gifts and decorative items, the same will be true for virtual gifts inside Facebook. Since margins are so high on virtual goods, Facebook is in good position to explore several different licensing models while reaching a uniquely large and targeted US and worldwide audience.

Facebook is becoming politics as usual, and one of the more effective political Pages belongs to San Francisco mayor and California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom. Mayor Newsom’s Page currently has more than 56,000 fans, and there’s a high level of interaction between the mayor’s followers.

Newsom’s Facebook Page includes several several unique features, like a sign up form to become a “Facebook Captain” to “Post Newsom campaign status updates,” “Promote Gavin Newsom to my friends and networks,” “help with fundraising on Facebook,” promote the mayor’s events, and more.

Other tabs allow Facebook fans to donate to Newsom’s campaign, join the mayor’s list of supporters and see upcoming events. There are also several links on each page back to the mayor’s own site.

Most of the posts on the Page’s wall involve information about appearances and issues, and there are always a healthy number of comments for each one. It’s also apparent that the mayor is taking advantage of other tech savvy avenues to reach people, including a recent post on TechCrunch about a new site that offers easier access to San Francisco city data.

While it’s true that Newsom benefits from presiding over one of the most tech savvy cities in the U.S., his Facebook Page is a great example of how a politician can use Facebook to begin building a campaign base and better reach constituents.