It’s with mixed feelings that we announce today that Inside Facebook writer Jessica Lee is leaving us. Since joining us earlier this year, Jessica has done a great job analyzing the ins and outs of the Facebook Platform ecosystem. However, Jessica has just been hired by Facebook itself, and today is her first day on the Facebook Platform team where she’ll be working on the verification program. Big congratulations to Jessica, but we’ll miss her!

With that, we’re also starting the search for a new contributing writer today. If you’re very analytical, passionate about the future of Facebook and the social web, and love to write, please check out our job description. Current/former management consultants and research analysts are especially welcome to apply. While we certainly don’t guarantee that the position will lead to a job at Facebook or at other companies in the industry, we will guarantee that you’ll learn a ton and have fun here. We look forward to hearing from you!

This past week saw two brands notably continue to gain more fans on their Facebook pages, according to our PageData service. One, Cadbury’s Wispa chocolate bar, has been getting a boost from a limited-edition caramel version that recently hit stores. The other, Coca-Cola’s vitaminwater, has been running an extended campaign asking Facebook fans to help it choose a new flavor of watery beverage.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	3OH!3	745,969	+267,381	+55.87
2.	Cadbury Wispa	669,894	+220,219	+48.97
3.	vitaminwater	901,747	+158,525	+21.33
4.	Mafia Wars	4,243,237	+120,044	+2.91
5.	Red Bull	1,292,565	+114,590	+9.73
6.	Skins	526,350	+113,124	+27.38
7.	Petcentric by Purina	137,289	+108,805	+381.99
8.	Taylor Swift	2,199,789	+96,807	+4.60
9.	David Guetta	1,157,878	+77,005	+7.12
10.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,106,094	+70,637	+2.33
11.	Facebook	5,152,498	+64,143	+1.26
12.	JCPenney	547,403	+56,943	+11.61
13.	Celebs on Facebook	1,351,078	+56,728	+4.38
14.	The Bible	538,931	+56,376	+11.68
15.	Dr Pepper	870,977	+54,900	+6.73
16.	House	2,199,241	+54,747	+2.55
17.	Türk Bayrağı	459,585	+53,145	+13.08
18.	Total Wipeout	359,033	+51,628	+16.79
19.	iTunes	1,966,977	+49,330	+2.57
20.	Lady Gaga	3,963,305	+46,874	+1.20

Wispa, a chocolate bar available in the United Kingdom, has also been available in the caramel “Gold” version since September 8th. Since then, the Wispa page has grown from 266,000 fans to 670,000 fans today, with 220,000 joining in the last week. The original bar was re-introduced in 20070, years after being discontinued due to the Facebook-based activism of its devotees. It was originally meant to be a limited edition, but it stayed so popular that Cadbury decided to make it a permanent part of its product line. Perhaps, as we’ve noted before, the surge in the page’s fan base could convince the confectioner to make Gold permanent, too.

Meanwhile, vitaminwater’s growth last week — up 159,000 to reach 901,000 today –  is more straightforward. The company has built a slick Facebook app, connected it to its Page, and promoted the whole thing in television commercials featuring stars like rapper 50 Cent (who owned a large chunk of the company before it sold to Coca-Cola) and basketball star Steve Nash. So growth is not entirely organic, but that’s fine. The more fans vitaminwater can get, the more it can learn about those fans and figure out what sort of new flavor to come out with. Ultimately, this can mean better sales for the company. It’s a fascinating experiment that we’ve covered in some detail already.

Note: Wispa and vitaminwater are actually at number two and number three for this past week. Number one goes to electronic rock group 3OH!3, which saw a sudden leap from 481,000 to 746,000 over a few days last week. Given the very slow rates of growth on the page before and after these spikes, we’re assuming that Facebook has folded some unofficial pages for the group into the official one.

This past week was typical, in terms of which Facebook applications we saw gain the most users. Social games of various genres continued to gain millions of users. Similar to past weeks and months, Zynga’s virtual farming game FarmVille grew by 5.11 million monthly active users to reach 46.0 million, and the company’s role-playing mobster game Mafia Wars grew by 2.05 million to reach 23.2 million. They came in at number two and number four on our top 20 list.

However, number one goes to RockYou’s Birthday Cards, a full-featured virtual card-giving application. It was gradually declining over the last few months, started growing at the end of August, and reached around nine million users as of the first week in this month. Since then, it has for whatever reason found the curve in the hockey stick of growth: The app has gained 5.23 million MAUs in just the past seven days to reach 16.3 million.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Birthday Cards	16,273,979	+5,276,859	+48.0	RockYou!
2.		FarmVille	46,048,437	+5,111,332	+12.5	Zynga
3.		Your Indian Name!	4,132,326	+4,132,058	+1 541 810.0	AppSphere Inc.
4.		Mafia Wars	24,239,040	+2,051,778	+9.3	Zynga
5.		My Fishbowl	3,302,112	+1,568,713	+90.5	TwoFishes Interactive
6.		Causes	30,188,784	+1,459,385	+5.1	Causes
7.		Restaurant City	14,359,677	+1,291,766	+9.9	Playfish
8.		Country Story	6,207,442	+871,019	+16.3	Playfish
9.		YoVille	16,291,957	+769,233	+5.0	Zynga
10.		Pet Society	17,669,556	+705,753	+4.2	Playfish
11.		Horoscopes	3,084,299	+676,227	+28.1	RockYou!
12.		Music	10,338,786	+649,598	+6.7	iLike, inc
13.		Texas HoldEm Poker	17,199,654	+578,952	+3.5	Zynga
14.		(Lil) Farm Life	3,132,399	+558,930	+21.7	Greenpatch Inc
15.		What Type of Wife are you or will you be?	894,967	+540,820	+152.7	—
16.		Tattoodle	5,032,939	+535,049	+11.9	Make The Web Better
17.		Animal Paradise	2,043,280	+523,034	+34.4	Rekoo
18.		What’s your Actual Age?	1,220,122	+492,216	+67.6	q
19.		Kad Raya	504,166	+431,307	+592.0	—
20.		Give Hearts	6,932,658	+429,392	+6.6	6 waves

Number four, Your Indian Name!, has seen even sharper growth, and quite abruptly at that. The app translates your name into Hindi, and lets you very easily post that information to your Facebook wall. It grew from 265 users to 4.13 million by the weekend (there may be a problem with the data here). The app’s creator, AppSphere Inc, has 57 total applications by our count.

Seven apps in total gained more than a million users. At number five was My Fishbowl, made by TwoFishes Interactive. The virtual aquatic life game had been slowly growing from nothing in early August, until September 15 when it hit its stride, er, stroke. It grew by 1.57 million to reach 3.30 million MAUs. Keep an eye on this one.

At number six was Causes, one of the only non-game apps on the list. It grew by 1.50 million to reach a stately 30.2 million MAUs. At number seven was Playfish’s Restaurant City, the virtual restaurant game grew 1.29 million to reach 14.4 million.

E! Online supplemented its coverage of the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards with a widget allowing viewers to comment on the proceedings through Facebook or Twitter. The Live Stream widget allowed viewers to share comments before during and after the siring of the Emmy awards. The site integration gave users the ability to view comments by source: Twitter, Facebook or only celebrity Tweets.

The page was used to cover all aspects of the night’s award ceremony, with red carpet photos and stars’ comments and a running update on winners. Comments were posted on E!’s Live From The Red Carpet page before and during the Emmy Awards presentation, with Facebook and Twitter users chiming in on everything from what the stars were wearing to their reactions when the winners were announced. The widget followed the model from many that have used for live broadcasts by various networks, although there was no option to track only Facebook friends’ posts.

The pre-show festivities generated a lot of comments through both Facebook and Twitter, but there seemed to be extended lulls in Facebook posts throughout the show. Twitter traffic was heavy all night, but eventually began filling with the usual spam. It’s unclear whether or E! Online was experiencing trouble with their Facebook connection, or if viewers were just more interested in using Twitter to stream their comments.

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, September 14, 2009

• Cops & Robbers, Facebook Style
• Play4Iran: A Twitter-Based Iranian Political Action Game
• Finnish Social Games Developer Ironstar Helsinki Continues Expanding
• ToyBots Woozees: SGN’s Secret Project Connects Physical, Online Toys
• Zynga Goes to the Mattresses: 22 Lawsuits Filed This Year, and Counting

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

• Fatfoogoo Expanding into Social Games
• EA Executive Joins Outspark
• Zynga Bringing Offers In House with DoubleDing?
• Come2Play Adds Virtual Currency Monetization Platform

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

• Tapjoy Releases Free Version of its Ad Optimization Platform
• PlaySpan Survey Shows Some Interesting Virtual Goods Stats
• Notes from GDC Austin: Juicy MMO and Virtual World Monetization Numbers
• MySpace Exec Jason Oberfest Joins Gaming Company Ngmoco

Thursday, September 17, 2009

• Conduit Labs Raises $3 Million
• USA Network Continues Social Gaming Expansion with New Deals
• Korean Game Company Nexon Grows in Europe

Friday, September 18, 2009

• A Look at Social Games from Japan
• Forget Those White-Label Games, Check Out LOLApps’ Diva Life
• Social Gaming Roundup: Playfish and Playdom Expand in SF, and more

Facebook Platform Program Manager Josh Elman, who has been with the company since early 2008, has decided to leave Facebook. Elman, who worked on the launch of Facebook Connect and has been focused on helping large developers like the Huffington Post, JibJab, and others launch Connect integrations since, says he is primarily looking to return to a more hands-on product role. Elman’s last day at the company was Friday, and he says he and Facebook are parting on positive terms.

Prior to joining Facebook last year, Elman was head of product management at Zazzle, and before that was a senior product manager at LinkedIn. At Facebook, he has played more of a product marketing role, helping “almost everyone” who has used Connect. While Elman hasn’t finalized his next move yet, he says he is exploring several “exciting opportunities.”

“Josh was a great illustration of an ideal Facebook Platform team member,” says Keith Rabois, VP of Strategy and Business Development at Slide, one of the largest developers on the Facebook Platform, of Elman. “It was obvious that he cares deeply about Facebook succeeding with their Platform and developers succeeding with their businesses. Even when we disagreed with Josh, which could be quite often, he was quite transparent about Facebook’s reasoning and principles, and was willing to genuinely listen to developer feedback and try to accommodate developers’ interests.”

Elman leaves at a time when the Facebook Platform team has stabilized following Ben Ling’s departure last August. After Ling left Facebook to take the Director of Partnerships, Platform, and Syndication role at Google (where he worked previous to joining Facebook), VP of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage took over as interim head of Facebook Platform marketing until Ethan Beard moved into that role in January of this year. Around the same time, Mike Vernal took over for Charlie Cheever as head of Facebook Platform and Connect engineering. Justin Osofsky also joined Beard in Platform marketing after a year in business development in May.

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Facebook tried to create a new form of advertising in 2007 with the launch of Beacon. In conjunction with a number of big-name brands, Beacon automatically tracked Facebook users’ actions on other sites, then displayed that information to their friends back on Facebook. The program is now officially dead.

A class-action lawsuit filed in 2008 has been settled today. There are two parts. One is that Beacon, as it has been, will be fully shut down — only a few accounts are still open and those will be closed. The other part is that Facebook will, from our understanding, fund an independent foundation to the tune of $9.5 million. The foundation will itself fund projects and initiatives that promote privacy, safety, and security causes.

The case was settled, not lost by Facebook. Here’s what a company spokesperson told me when I asked for more detail:

While we don’t admit any wrongdoing in this matter, we did want to get the episode behind us. And, we were particularly interested in an agreement that creates a foundation that has value for all users rather than just a few individuals.

The settlement has not yet been approved by the judge, and the case was just filed. It took place in the Northern District of California part of the US District Court, San Jose Division. We’ll update with a link to the settlement when it becomes available.

The original filing described some elements of Beacon that were particularly troublesome to the plaintiffs, per the original lawsuit. From that filing, via Justia:

Plaintiffs alleged that Defendant Facebook, Inc. and Defendants Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliates (i.e., Blockbuster, Inc., Fandango, Inc., Hotwire, Inc., STA Travel, Inc., Overstock.com, Inc., Zappos.com, Inc. and Gamefly, Inc.) violated their privacy.

More on the original lawsuit, via CNET:

If the user was not a member (of Facebook), Facebook still obtained the notification from the Facebook Beacon Activated Affiliate. Information regarding user activities was sent in real time to a third party Web site–one which was not open or active in the user’s browser, and one which, in many cases, the user may never even have visited or heard of.

Facebook’s side of the story is that the company made a number of adjustments to Beacon in the weeks and months following the launch that met many user demands. This case was filed long after much of the outcry about Beacon had ebbed.

Future plans

I asked about the impact of this ruling on Facebook’s current efforts to share data with third-parties, including Facebook Connect. Here was the response.

Beacon was about our users’ actions on third-party sites. Facebook Connect is about using Facebook infrastructure to give users significant control over how they extend their Facebook identity on the web, and share their experience back to friends on Facebook

More statements, these from Barry Schnitt, Facebook’s Director of Policy Communications.

We learned a great deal from the Beacon experience. For one, it was underscored how critical it is to provide extensive user control over how information is shared. We also learned how to effectively communicate changes that we make to the user experience. The introduction of Facebook Connect – a product that gives users significant control over how they extend their Facebook identity on the Web and share experiences back to friends on Facebook – is an example of this. We look forward to the creation of the foundation and its work to educate Internet users on how best to control their privacy; engage in safe social networking practices; and, generally, enjoy themselves more online by having knowledge that gives them a greater sense of control. We fully expect the foundation to team with other leading online safety and privacy experts and organizations that have been working diligently in these fields.

As Facebook has grown around the world in the last couple of years, international developers have taken a deeper interest in building applications on its platform. We’ve already covered a big one out of Hong Kong, called 6 Waves, but there are many others. Most notably, we’ve recently discovered a company called 3happybytes out of Argentina — a country that has been seeing a boom in web technology recently.

The company’s suite of applications currently reaches 26.7 million monthly active users, making it the fifth largest Facebook developer by portfolio-summed MAUs, according to our AppData analytics service. Certainly, as with every other developer on the list, some users have installed more than one app made by the company, so its monthly unique visitors is likely lower.

The company was founded earlier this year by Walter Souto, Javier Pelitz, and Fabian Muller. However, its web site only lists an email address.

So, what sort of apps does the company make? Very simple ones, from what we’ve seen. We’ve just started tracking the company, so our historical data is limited. Still, three of the company’s apps are among the fastest growing on the Facebook Platform. One, Friend of the Day, has quickly surged to nearly six million MAUs over the last few days. You simply install the app and it automatically tells you who your top friend is that day — it apparently decides from among your friends at random. Another app, Enemy of the Day, is basically the same concept. Install the app and find out who the company has randomly decided is your top enemy. It has grown from 5.67 million three days ago to 6.56 million today.

A third is called Death’s Time. It rather humorously randomly decides on a date and manner of death for you. Personally, it predicts that I will die on April 18, 2024, at 10:23 am. The cause of my death? “Motorcycle accident while dressed as Elvis.” Sounds plausible. Other people seem to be amused, too. It has grown from 9.9 million MAUs three days ago to 10.9 million today.

For all of these apps, and presumably the five others, you are asked to post the results — your top friend, your top enemy, your cause of death — on your wall, as well as on the wall of your friend or enemy. The simple, sensationalistic nature of these apps, combined with the ease of sharing your activities in them with your friends, appears to be driving the company’s growth.

Certainly, these apps are not as elegant as some of the games or utilities coming out on the platform today. They are more reminiscent of the early days, years ago, when nearly every developer was making simple, spammy apps. Still, perhaps the company can convert all of these users into something more sustainable. For now, it appears to be making money from a wide variety of remnant ad networks, quizzes, and the like. Perhaps, one day, it will grow into a more complex gaming company and start doing what many others already are — offering virtual goods that people are willing to pay for.

Facebook brought all its employees together into one building back in May, after having the various groups that comprise the company scattered throughout downtown Palo Alto. Now, architecture blog ArchDaily has given a glowing review of the new building, highlighting some of the details that make Facebook’s new offices unique.

The 150,000 sq. ft. building was once a high-tech manufacturing facility, and many of the original materials were re-purposed or recycled. The redesign is the first completed under the 2008 Palo Alto Green Building Ordinance. Designers Studio O+A polled employees throughout Facebook and kept everyone updated through photos and posts on the progress of the redesign.

The overall flow of the building is very relaxed and inviting, with executive offices located centrally to provide better access to all employees. The rest of the facility is mostly open work spaces and seating and congregation areas. Employees are encouraged to move furniture as they see fit, write on some walls and add art where needed.

Overall, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants to be careful that the new building doesn’t give employees the feeling that the company has “arrived,” but instead left the new offices relatively plain.

“I want to remind people…we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” he recently said.