In what could be an ironic turn of events, iLike, the developer of the largest music application on the Facebook Platform with nearly 10 million monthly active users and one of the two applications formerly deemed “Great Apps” by Facebook, may soon be owned by MySpace, according to TechCrunch. paidContent confirms the talks.

Rumors are the deal is in the $20 million range and may close this week. If that number seems low, it is – iLike was valued at $53 million during its last round of funding in 2006, and has raised a total of $16.5 million to date from Ticketmaster, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla, and Scott Banister.

If the deal goes through, it would be new MySpace CEO (and former Facebook COO and CRO) Owen van Natta’s first major acquisition since taking the helm, and MySpace would solidify its position as the leading platform for musicians to build their identity and distribute content across social networks.

It would also be an very interesting turn for Facebook and the Facebook Platform, given the company’s historic reluctance to get involved in the music business directly itself. Last year, rumors swirled around whether Facebook would build its own music application, bless a third party application like iLike’s or someone else’s, or even acquire iLike. However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said publicly since that the company decided to steer clear of music due to the complicated rights issues involved.

Now, it is possible that MySpace will be running what is currently the biggest music app on Facebook by far. We’ll let you know as we hear more.

News is getting more social, and now, news sites are too. Today, The Huffington Post launched a new section of The Huffington Post site called HuffPost Social News that uses Facebook Connect to let users to create a social news page.

With HoffPo Social News, users can now easily share content with their Facebook friends on the site, see what their friends are reading, and engage in conversations about what they’ve read. Here’s how it looks:

The personalized HuffPost Social News pages create a forum for users to converse about news stories they’ve read, and in some cases add their spin or relevant information for Facebook friends to read. Co-founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington says that social media is the next logical step in the evolution of news, according to a guest blog post on Facebook today.

“In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community, and conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience.”

While The Huffington Post site has been using Connect for a while to allow readers to post comments to stories, this new integration creates a more intimate, social setting with added accountability. Since your friends are the main audience and readership of your personal page, they are more likely to take you to task for any added content or comments.

This should create a more involved readership for The Huffington Post, and should lead to more traffic coming from Facebook through shared content in the News Feed.

What kind of click through rates can brands expect to get on their Facebook Page walls? Social media agency Vitrue says the numbers can be pretty high.

Using new URL tracking and a few estimates, Vitrue is claiming that CTRs for content shared on a Page’s wall can be as high as 6.5%. While the numbers are encouraging, the method used to arrive at these numbers uses some facts and some guess work, as it’s impossible to arrive at a definite number when determining how many people are exposed to content in the News Feed.

“If a site has 100 fans and your wall post gets five clicks, that’s a 5% CTR,” CEO Reggie Bradford said in a recent article in AdAge. “But if you assume only about 20% of those folks actually saw the post, it’s really a 20% click-through rate.”

When numbers are broken down by demographic, Vitrue is claiming a 30% rate for users 18-24, 14% for ages 25-34 and 10% for 35-44. Females are more inclined to click though more than males, with 56% of women checking out links as opposed to 44% of men.

Of course, the biggest determinant of click through rate is content quality – and the numbers vary heavily. Wall posts must be relevant, engaging, and appropriate – if not, fans will not only not click, they might also hide your content from the stream altogether.

When we look back in a few years, 2009 will be remembered as the year virtual goods-based businesses exploded on the Facebook Platform.

Whereas 2007 will be remembered as the “wild west” for Facebook’s powerful application viral channels, and 2008 was the year that Facebook stabilized the Platform for long term growth, 2009 has clearly become the year in which sustainable virtual goods-based business models have been developed and are beginning to be scaled.

Let’s quickly glance at the top 40 applications on the Facebook Platform by total reach. While these aren’t necessarily the highest monetizing applications on the Platform, the list shows which types of applications are most popular now a full two years since the Platform launched:

Source: AppData

		Name	MAU	Developer
1.		Causes	24,433,363	Causes
2.		FarmVille	24,322,458	Zynga
3.		LivingSocial	23,988,733	LivingSocial
4.		Movies	20,482,745	Flixster
5.		We’re Related	18,131,449	FamilyLink.com
6.		Farm Town	16,877,110	Slashkey
7.		Mafia Wars	16,508,150	Zynga
8.		MindJolt Games	16,461,693	MindJolt
9.		How Well Do You Know Me?	15,496,280	Unknown
10.		Pet Society	15,480,645	Playfish
11.		Texas HoldEm Poker	15,250,897	Zynga
12.		MyCalendar	13,722,642	MyCalendar
13.		Top Friends	12,574,933	Slide, Inc.
14.		YoVille	12,429,508	Zynga
15.		Restaurant City	10,084,240	Playfish
16.		RockYou Live	10,035,212	RockYou!
17.		Music	9,627,515	iLike, inc
18.		Zoosk	9,422,442	Zoosk
19.		Mobile	9,137,468	Facebook
20.		MyCalendar	8,971,005	My Calendar
21.		Slide FunSpace	8,546,734	Slide, Inc.
22.		Facebook for BlackBerry	8,219,146	Research In Motion
23.		Birthday Cards	7,231,752	RockYou!
24.		Bejeweled Blitz	6,535,047	Popcap Games
25.		FARKLE	6,240,050	Viral, s.r.o.
26.		Give Hearts	5,546,407	6 waves
27.		Barn Buddy	5,525,258	TheBroth, Inc.
28.		YearBook	5,496,727	ClassTop
29.		Sorority Life	5,351,975	Playdom
30.		Bumper Sticker	5,321,315	LinkedIn
31.		Friends For Sale!	4,684,859	Serious Business
32.		Pieces of Flair	4,421,843	RockYou!
33.		Birthday Calendar	4,397,174	BigDates Solutions
34.		Daily Horoscope	4,392,745	6 waves
35.		Geo Challenge	4,256,481	Playfish
36.		Family Tree	4,035,530	Familybuilder
37.		Hug Me	3,763,729	RockYou!
38.		Who Has The Biggest Brain?	3,743,587	Playfish
39.		Word Challenge	3,539,615	Playfish
40.		Biotronic	3,522,093	Metrogames

The majority of these apps and games are monetizing through a free to play virtual goods model. To sum up, here’s how it works: players interested in purchasing virtual items in the app (like functional items to help them complete a quest, decorative items to help them dress up their avatar, or time saving items to help them progress more quickly) must do so with that application’s virtual currency.

That virtual currency can either be earned through in-application achievements, or purchased directly or indirectly through a variety of methods. Users can buy virtual currency with real currency using direct payment methods like PayPal, Amazon, SocialGold, or Google, mobile payment methods like Zong, Allopass, or Boku, stored value cards sold at retail like the Ultimate Game Card, or through an intermediary (“universal”) virtual currency like Facebook Credits or Spare Change – amongst others.

Users who don’t want to fork over cash directly can participate in advertiser-financed offers and surveys managed by firms like Super Rewards, Offerpal Media, Peanut Labs, AdParlor, Gambit, Sometrics, TrialPay, and others. In these cases, the advertiser pays the developer when players sign up for subscriptions or participate in other CPA campaigns, and the player is then credited with the in-game currency.

Of course, free to play virtual goods-based business have been thriving internationally for years – one recent estimate pinned total virtual goods revenues in Asia at $5 billion last year, 25x the US estimate of $200 million for 2008. But the market is really gaining steam in the US this year. Just last week, Piper Jaffray released numbers estimating that total virtual goods sales in the US will reach $600 million in 2009, but we believe those numbers are low.

Ask any sophisticated developer building apps on the Facebook Platform and you’ll hear the same answer: business is very strong. Most of the top social game developers are very profitable, despite major hiring ramps throughout the industry this year. Companies like Playfish, Zynga, and Playdom have dozens of open positions, and many smaller companies are growing too.

Slide, one of the largest developers on the Facebook Platform, recently refocused its model around virtual goods as well. “Think of us like an e-commerce business,” VP strategy and biz dev Keith Rabois says. Several top developers like Slide are also developing parts of the payment layer in-house.

And because top app developers are seeing healthy lifetime user value numbers, they’re starting to spend a lot more on user acquisition too – a good sign of health. Although Facebook itself isn’t in the middle of most virtual currency transactions today (its Facebook Payments program is still in very limited alpha testing with only a few applications), it is deriving substantial revenues from developers paying to promote their applications to new users. For example, here are a few ads live on Facebook today:

Developers’ ad spend is carrying over to Facebook Platform ad networks like those operated by RockYou, Cubics/Adknowledge, and AdParlor as well – the “CPI” (cost per install) market is still alive and kicking.

While not all Facebook applications are going the virtual goods route, it’s clear that social networking applications and games are becoming an increasingly important category for digital goods transactions in the United States in 2009. And as Facebook’s growth continues, things are only looking better and better in 2010.

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Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, August 10

• Building Social MMOs for Facebook: Q&A with Max Skibinsky, CEO of Hive7
• Playfish Joins the Facebook Farming Fray with its Latest Game, Country Story

Tuesday, August 11

• Video From Talk at SGS: Social Gaming Industry Overview and Update
• Xbox Live Begins the Social Transformation

Wednesday, August 12

• MySpace Gets an Injection of Cute with (fluff)Friends
• King.com Launches Games on the Facebook Platform & iPhone

Thursday, August 13

• Brain Buddies is the Latest Facebook Game to Come Out of Europe
• World of Blood, Booted from Facebook, Reappears on Twitter

Friday, August 14

• Zynga Adds Talent with Acquisition of MyMiniLife
• SocialCord Building Content Subscription Platform for Twitter

As we wrote yesterday, Facebook for iPhone 3.0, which will include a spate of new features like Page updating, video uploading, events, likes, and the “new” News Feed, is nearly ready. Tonight, it was sent to Apple for approval – which means it should be available for download in the app store soon.

In the meantime, check out these new screenshots of the navigation screen and status updates in Facebook for iPhone 3.0:

Currently, nearly 12 million people use Facebook for iPhone on a monthly basis. For more details on all the new features, check out our previous coverage as well as the app’s Facebook Page.

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

Allopass is a leading micropayment service for social application and game developers.

Zong is a leading provider of mobile payments serving the digital content, social media, and gaming industries.

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

Zembly is a powerful new application development environment for Facebook applications.

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

Fan Appz helps businesses, celebrities, and brands grow and engage their fan base on Facebook.

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

Rumors are flying that a new browser designed heavily around Facebook Connect called RockMelt is under development, with Netscape founder and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen behind the all-star team of engineers and developers. ReadWriteWeb is also reporting that the team currently handling the venture is made up of members of Andreessen’s former company, Opsware, and it’s new owner, HP, with potential involvement from current Facebook employees. However, one of the Facebook employees mentioned, Joe Hewitt, says he wasn’t aware of the project before yesterday.

RockMelt’s development is still pretty hush-hush, but it’s not too surprising that someone besides Flock is taking another shot at integrating functionality made possible by Facebook’s social graph more deeply into the browser. Facebook has become a robust communication platform for over 250 million active users around the world, and many features like presence, chat, content sharing, and stream monitoring make sense in a browser context.

But perhaps one of the more interesting areas a “Facebook browser” could make an impact is search. Currently, Google pays Mozilla a bounty every time Firefox is downloaded because Mozilla makes it the default search engine in the browser. Maybe RockMelt could be to Facebook what Mozilla is to Google – an important affiliate driver of search traffic. And many desktop applications built on top of the Twitter Search API play an important part of the search ecosystem for Twitter – the same will be true for Facebook.

A variety of other applications are possible too. For example, a “Facebook browser” would probably be able to charge significant CPA rates on traffic it drove to specific applications or Pages through in-browser promotions. We’ll be keeping an eye on RockMelt and will let you know as things progress.

Justin Smith contributed to this story.

Facebook for iPhone 3.0, which will include a spate of new features like Page updating, video uploading, events, likes, and the “new” News Feed, is almost ready for release, according to Facebook’s Joe Hewitt. According to Hewitt, the finishing touches on the app – like translating it into several languages and dropping in updated icons – are “99%” done. However, even when the app is finished, it still needs to be approved for release by the Apple app store team – a process which might take some time.

With nearly 12 million monthly active users, Facebook for iPhone has become one of the most important ways users access Facebook through mobile devices. Facebook for iPhone is now used by nearly 25% of all iPhone owners.

70% of Facebook’s 250 million total users are outside the United States. Facebook’s efforts to translate Facebook for iPhone 3.0 into more languages should help it spread even more. Only about 50% of iPhone and iPod Touch users are in the United States.

What else will be coming in the new version? Here’s a list from Hewitt from earlier this summer:

1. The “new” News Feed
2. Like
3. Events (including the ability to RSVP)
4. Notes
5. Pages
6. Create new photo albums
7. Upload photos to any album
8. Zoom into photos
9. Easier photo tagging
10. Profile Pictures albums
11. A new home screen for easy access to all your stuff, search, and notifications
12. Add your favorite profiles and pages to the home screen
13. Better Notifications (they link to the comments so you can reply)
14. Quickly call or text people right from the Friends page
15. Messages you are typing will be restored if you quit or are interrupted by a phone call

However, Push Notifications will not be included until Version 3.1. This is ironically probably a good thing for Apple, because from what we’ve heard from other iPhone app developers, an app of Facebook’s scale could put pretty significant stress on Apple’s infrastructure.