By taking a look at the fastest-growing Facebook apps with between 10,000 and 100,000 monthly active users, we can sometimes spot hits early, before they hit major growth spurts. However, this past week we saw a few apps that told us something else. People are using Facebook apps for religious and social celebrations around the world. While these apps aren’t likely to stay popular once the celebrating ends, they do show the diverse interests of Facebook’s growing user base — and perhaps the apps’ developers can figure out how to build a longer-term user base from the people they’re getting now.

Indeed, it appears that almost all of the apps below were created through a white-label app called “Gift Creator,” which itself has more than half a million users.

At the top of the list is “Kartu Lebaran,” an Indonesian virtual card-giving app that has grown by 54,000 users over the past week to reach 63,000 monthly active users. The app means “Lebaran card” in the Indonesian language — “Lebaran” is a term used by some Muslims in Southeast Asia for Eid ul-Fitr, a celebration held at the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Eid occurred on the 20th and 21st of this past week, depending on what part of the world you were in. At third place was “حــلـــويـات الـعـيــد” or “Eid sweets” in Arabic. Similar to the Lebaran app, you can give virtual sweets to celebrate Eid with loved ones. The app has grown by 26,000 people over the course of Eid to level off at 34,000 earlier this week.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Kartu Lebaran	62,978	+54,430	+636.8	—
2.		What is your Euro-persona?	65,872	+28,946	+78.4	Mark Burnash
3.		حــلـــويـات الـعـيــد	34,177	+26,523	+346.5	—
4.		Shana Tova! Rosh HaShana 5770	45,932	+24,745	+116.8	—
5.		Amici Secrets	18,977	+16,872	+801.5	Super Apps
6.		My Babybook	49,771	+16,767	+50.8	Poolhouse
7.		CampusBuddy	95,118	+16,465	+20.9	CampusBuddy.com
8.		Kisses & Erotic	34,814	+14,819	+74.1	—
9.		Friendship Appreciation	52,965	+13,636	+34.7	—
10.		Fiestas Patrias	49,375	+13,560	+37.9	Claudio Campis Torres
11.		Vérité ou Mensonge	21,272	+13,133	+161.4	Bien
12.		Friend of the Day	44,887	+12,911	+40.4	Team Moulin
13.		(Lil) Eco Racer	87,725	+12,198	+16.2	Green Patch, Inc.
14.		The Fortune Teller	83,703	+11,936	+16.6	—
15.		Power of Prayer	74,749	+11,431	+18.1	—
16.		Angel Fun	82,489	+11,422	+16.1	Paul Thomas
17.		Pittsburgh Steelers Swag	72,075	+11,386	+18.8	Andrea Massari
18.		SportsButter Football	38,770	+11,245	+40.9	SportsButter
19.		GroupCard	65,563	+11,176	+20.6	GroupCard.com
20.		Animated pets	15,646	+10,987	+235.8	—

Meanwhile, many celebrating the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana made use of the “Shana Tova! Rosh HaShana 5770” app — putting it at fourth place on the list. Rosh Hashana, celebrated between the 18th and 20th of the month this year, is the Jewish-calendar new year; “Shana Tova” means something like “happy new year.” 5770 is this year in the Jewish calendar. As with the Eid apps, this one lets you give virtual gifts to people.

This past week saw ongoing celebrations for Chilean independence day Fiestas Patrias, via the continued growth of an app of the same name. The Fiestas Patrias app grew by nearly 14,000 users over the course of the week to reach nearly 50,000 people total. It’s another gifting app, albeit with national symbols like the Chilean flag instead of Eid cards or whatever, and came in at tenth place on the list.

And for some people, this part of the year marks the start of another, not quite as holy period: Football season. While there are much larger football applications made by companies like Watercooler and Citizen Sports, a couple showed up on this list made by smaller developers. One is Pittsburgh Steelers Swag, an app for giving virtual Steelers gear to your friends — the basic gift-giving app design style. It has been growing slowly and steadily since early August, seeing a stronger uptick this past week: It gained 11,000 people to reach 72,000 monthly active users.

Another football app also appears on the list: “SportsButter Football,” a fantasy football game made by SportsButter. It grew by 11,000 people to reach 38,000 by the end of the week. The two football apps came in at number 17 and 18 on the list, respectively.

In conclusion, now is a good time to be a seasonal app builder, but we don’t expect any of these apps to gain serious long-term traction. However, perhaps we’ll be proven wrong. Perhaps some of these small-time developers will figure out how to leverage their small audiences now into something bigger, later. That would be quite a story.

ConnectionPoint recently launched FundRazr, a new way to collect money through Facebook for everything from sports team dues to charity donations. The application is the company’s first, utilizing the PayPal X platform to make the payment process more interactive and innovative, as well as offering a few extra features for connecting through social media.

Facebook itself has not focused on enabling this sort of payments service. One result seems to be that many organizations use both Facebook and other services for things like event ticket sales. Facebook lets them easily get the word out to a lot of people, but because it doesn’t offer payments, the organizers instead direct people to purchase tickets on third-party sites like Eventbrite.  both a Facebook events page, for e as well as a page on an event-management site like Upcoming; they use Facebook to drive interest, but have to use an outside site to actually sell tickets.

At the heart of the application, FundRazr allows any individual or organization to easily collect online payments. But there are several built-in features that expand this application functionality beyond money collection; analytic and reporting tools give users the ability to track results, and there’s even help when creating a campaign. The application can be tailored to take on unique appearances and functions, as it is designed for social sites and has no set template.

FundRazr is intended for easy money collection for a variety of purposes, such as charity events, sports teams, school clubs, social groups and more. It’s interactive, social focus makes it an excellent way to spread word of causes and campaigns through Facebook, getting out a viral message with a built-in method for collecting donations and payments.

The application is available now in Beta on Facebook; all that’s needed to sign up is a free access code. It should be beneficial to smaller businesses non-profits, school and church groups and anyone operating on a fixed budget without the funds or time to track down donations and payments.

Web publishers have no great way to keep track of how many times articles gets shared on Facebook, as the company keeps that information private. So, if you’re trying to figure out how frequently your content is being shared on Facebook, the best way to approximate is simply to watch your analytics for how many visitors to any given content come from Facebook.com.

Awe.sm has devised a button-style widget called fbshare.me that lets readers share an article on Facebook, and then tracks clicks through that link. The service shows you the total number of times your article has been shared through the button, as well as the number of times those shared links were clicked on. Note that this number includes all shares of your article through Awe.sm, including from services like Sociable and AddToAny.

It’s not quite the same as the Retweet button for articles on Twitter offered by companies like Tweetmeme and Backtype, as those show you the total number of retweets across all of Twitter. But it could shed some light on the world of Facebook sharing.

The button was built as a weekend project on top of the company’s “Aggregate Data” API, which shows you anonymized, aggregated data for a given URL shared through the service. Awe.sm is more generally a URL shortening service with an analytics service layered on top, so this is another way for the company to get traffic to measure. Every time somebody shares content through Awe.sm, a unique link is generated. This link is encoded with metadata about the shared item, including where the link is being shared to — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Among other details, the button comes in either large or small sizes, and also lets you include parameters for Google Analytics.

There are already a number of applications that allow sharing of photos and videos from a Facebook album — including the company’s own widgets. But a new application called Diditz lets you post photos to the web in ways that make them especially accessible.

When you connect to your Facebook page through Diditz, the application automatically picks up your albums and allows you to create pages for them one at a time. You can select which photos from the albums to include on the shared page, add a brief description and searchable key words, then assign your album one of Diditz’s existing categories.

You have the option of sharing the page with only Facebook friends or opening up the page to the public. It’s then accessible from a link that the site provides — and of course you can post the new page to your Facebook news feed. If you choose to allow unlimited access to your page, anyone can find it and view your albums and videos from the Diditz home page. Facebook users that view your pics can even leave comments or post links to your photos in their own news feeds.

The application isn’t fancy, but that’s what makes it appealing. It’s especially useful to businesses trying to reach a web-wide audience. For example, if your album is public, it can be spidered by search engines and so could show up in search results. For those organizations with Facebook pages, there is an option for creating albums intended for pages.

And, for individuals, it’s a great way of sharing select photos and videos with someone that may not have a Facebook account and access to those albums otherwise.

We weren’t able to go to the DEMO startup launch conference down in San Diego this week, so here’s a very brief look at six presenting companies that somehow made use of Facebook. In alphabetical order:

CallSpark: A sort of phone-number search engine, that uses public information as well as your email and social networks like Facebook (presuming you give it access to those place) to quickly find you the number you need.

Date Check: An iPhone app that lets you use a simple piece of information about a person, like their name, to do a wide-sweeping background check on them. Maybe useful on dates, if not beforehand? Made by Intelius, it apparently accesses some Facebook data as part of its effort to figure out who your date actually is.

Diditz: Lets you turn Facebook photo albums into web pages accessible by search engines. These pages can be tagged and redistributed on other sites around the web.

Gelato: A site that automatically aggregate your profiles from a wide range of sites, including Facebook, to present prospective dates with a real-time stream of information about yourself. If your date doesn’t like what they see about you on Date Check, maybe show them this?

ShareGrove: Have private messages with your Facebook friends, but not on Facebook itself.

Twirl TV: Create your own “network,” or collection of TV clips from networks’ web sites, then share them with your friends. This includes a way to find friends on the site who are also on Facebook.

For more, you can find lots of DEMO coverage on conference co-producer VentureBeat’s site.

[Image via DEMO's Flickr account.]

Facebook – or at least a somewhat sensational version of it – is set to go Hollywood. With the long-awaited “The Social Network” going into production next month, Columbia Pictures has announced the actors cast to play Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker and Eduardo Saverin in the upcoming film.

Jesse Eisenberg, who recently appeared in “Adventureland,” will play Zuckerberg, pop star Justin Timberlake is set to take on the role of Parker and Andrew Garfield is slated to play Severin. Rumors had been flying around the Internet, including on Facebook, that the cast had been chosen to play the three founders of the social network site, but Eisenberg, Timberlake and Garfield were only confirmed yesterday.

The book that inspired the movie, Accidental Billionaries: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, is not considered an accurate work by many people familiar with Facebook’s early days. Facebook has consistently refused to comment on it.

Nevertheless, co-producer Kevin Spacey told MTV: “Great story for people that don’t really know how it happened. Very filmic, very modern, very cool.”

The film will be directed by David Fincher, who made his name with dark films like “Alien 3,” “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” though he has recently directed lighter movies, such as  “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Writer Aaron Sorkin, most famous for his writing on the West Wing, will be penning the script of the fact-based drama. This is a bit of a departure — maybe — for Eisenberg and Timberlake, who are more associated with comedic roles; Garfield, however, has a role in the upcoming Terry Gilliam film “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”

The storyline will follow the three co-founders of Facebook from their days at Harvard (filming is said to begin in Boston in a few weeks) and trace the course of events that made the social network what it is today, and the strain that success put on the founders’ relationships.

A few brands have already been testing out a new, direct-marketing unit of engagement advertising on Facebook, but today it is available for anyone who buys Facebook home page ads.

Basically, a company can offer free samples, as Texas Pete has for its hot sauce, via a link at the bottom of the home page engagement ad. Click the link and a pop-out window asks you to enter your address so the company can send you the sample. Home page ad campaigns typically cost at least $50,000. Other brands we’ve spotted using the unit include fast-food chain Chik-fil-A, back in August, and Bear Naked granola earlier this week. It will be interesting to see what other types of subscription-oriented companies make use of it. We expect to see more CPG brands using it as well.

The new unit was officially announced on Tuesday in New York, as part of Facebook’s larger push to promote its services to advertising world. Then, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Texas Pete had given away 5,000 samples of its sauce in just two days, much more than it had been able to before.

The ad unit is not currently available for the company’s self-serve ad system, although one could see it being quite useful for smaller, more local or specialized businesses.

In the ad, Facebook also asks users if they want to use the address they entered to update their contact information — a convenient way for Facebook to gather more accurate data. It also asks them if they want to share the order with their friends. In the ad, however, the company says it will only share your address with the advertiser for the purpose of sending the sample (but not for additional snail-mail marketing, apparently).

When Facebook announced that it had reached 300 million monthly active users last week, it also updated granular statistics about what its users are doing on the site. Here’s a closer look at how these numbers have changed versus the last set the company released in July. Most striking is the increase in overall shared items, the number of photo and video uploads, and the rapid rise in mobile adoption.

As a baseline comparison, we’re looking at these numbers versus Facebook says its overall traffic is. On July 15th, when the last set came out, it said it had 250 million users. So the company’s overall monthly active user base has grown 20 percent. All of the numbers that it updated last week show at least as much growth as Facebook’s overall traffic. In other words, these stats are not growing purely because the total number of Facebook users is growing — instead, it appears that Facebook users actually are sharing more as time goes on.

Status updates: 40 million users are updating their statuses at least once each day, a 25 percent increase from the 30 million who did as of July. [Update: This isn't quite right, as the terminology has changed since July. Now, it says "More than 40 million status updates each day" -- which does not necessarily mean that there are 40 million users updating their statuses once a day.]

Pages: 10 million users became fans of a page each day, up 20 percent from the 8 million who did in July.

Videos: 14 million videos are now being uploaded each month, up from 40 percent from 10 million.

Photos: 2 billion photos are now being uploaded each month, double the 1 billion before.

Shared content: 2 billion pieces of content, whether links, posts, photos or anything else, are now shared each week — doubling shared items as of July.

Mobile: Earlier this month, Facebook said that 65 million people accessed the site through a mobile device. In July, only 30 million people did — that’s a whopping 117 percent increase.

Facebook’s overall goal is to get more people sharing more information, in part so it can learn more about them, and then target ads to them more accurately. The numbers suggest that this plan is working, no doubt aided by ongoing improvements to features like status updates and video uploading. These sharing increases — not just overall traffic growth — could be contributing to Facebook’s revenue growth.

Facebook occasionally folds unofficial pages of brands into official ones. That is what seems to have given JCPenney, Petcentric by Purina, and Red Bull some  significant fan boosts around a week ago, according to PageData. Each of these companies is actively updating their Pages however in order to engage their fans.

Retailer JCPenney has perhaps the most interesting Facebook implementation out of the three. It is running a contest on its page where it asks users to post photos of themselves in JCPenney clothing. Fashion designer Michele Bohbot will pick three finalists for everyone to vote on. The contest started on the 9th and will end on the 30th of this month.

So what have been the results?

The first week saw almost no growth, but then it rose from 493,000 on the 16th to 541,000 on the 17th — again, probably because Facebook folded in an unofficial JCPenney page. Since then, the page has been growing by around a couple thousand fans a day. It’s not clear if the contest or something else is causing the gradual but meaningful new daily increase. At the beginning of this month, the company told Bloomberg that it had bought Facebook ads in August that grew its fan base from 22,000 to where it was before the latest changes. “It’s a much more significant part of our marketing mix and it will continue to be a bigger part of our marketing mix,” said Nick Bomersbach, vice president of the company’s jcp.com web division.

Meanwhile, Purina’s Petcentric page went from a tiny 34,000 fans on September 16th to nearly 131,000 on the 17th. It has been inching up by a few hundred or thousand users since then to reach nearly 139,000 fans today. The company is using the page to promote various sweepstakes it is running on its home site, along with the occasional funny cat video or cute dog photo to keep people entertained.

Red Bull’s grew from 1.18 million fans of its energy drink on September 17th to 1.29 million the next day, and has since continued its normal growth rate of a few hundred to a few thousand people per day. The page has been regularly promoting the activities of various athletes, bands and other people associated with the company, posting photos, videos or comments up to a few times on a given week — something it started doing months ago.

Michael Moore’s latest documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” opens in theaters Oct. 2, and AdNectar has been recruited to help promote the film through a virtual gifts application on Facebook . The app is shared by fans of Moore and the new movie with friends to spread word about Moore’s latest insight into big money in America.

There are several available gifts for Facebook users to share or post to their own news feeds. To further market the film, each virtual gift contains a special extended preview of the movie. This greatly improves the “shareability” of the gifts and should lead to a higher circulation in news feeds and wall posts.

Palo Alto-based startup AdNectar also developed applications for a similar campaign for the new Jennifer Aniston, Aarton Eckhart romantic flick “Love Happens” that gave Facebook users the chance to spread gifts carrying branding messaging for the movie. The gifts also contained a link back to the movie’s Web site, where interested parties could watch trailers and learn more about the film. The program generated extra buzz for the film throughout Facebook, and Moore’s latest work should see similar results from the added online exposure.