Top Facebook game developer Zynga was sued for copyright infringement by rival Psycho Monkey last February. It was accused of copying the popular — and lucrative — Mob Wars game in its own creation, Mafia Wars. That case was only recently settled, but in the meantime, Zynga has turned around and filed 22 copyright and trademark lawsuits against other developers.

One suit, against leading rival Playdom, has been gaining some attention. But Zynga has also sued other well-known developers, including Greenpatch Inc, makers of (Lil) Green Patch and the increasingly popular (Lil) Farm Life — that suit was the most recent, filed on August 7th. July was a far busier month, when Zynga filed 14 suits.

However, many of the defendants are clearly not in the right. All of the July lawsuits, for example, appear directed at individuals who operate second-hand poker chip sites. These companies are trying to resell virtual poker chips in and out of Zynga’s poker applications on Facebook and MySpace. This activity blatantly breaks the company’s terms of service, if not state and federal gambling laws.

Neither Zynga nor other companies we’ve spoken with have commented on the lawsuits. Zynga is, of course, the dominant app developer on Facebook. It has nearly 110 million monthly active users across its Facebook apps — although some of those users are double-counted — and we’ve heard it’s on track to make upwards of $200 million in revenue this year. The next largest developer rival, Playfish, has less than half the number of portfolio-summed users, with 51.5 million actives.

Zynga’s size means it is both the biggest target — including for developers looking to rip off its brand, code or virtual goods. But its size, and revenue, also means it can best afford to be the plaintiff in lawsuits.

Last week, Facebook announced that it was launching “status tagging,” a new way to tag friends, Pages, groups, and events in status updates much like mentions on @twitter work. Now, the feature is live for all users.

Here’s how it works: when writing a status update in the publisher, you can tag connections by using the “@” operator to select any friend, Page, group, or event in a dropdown menu. When a connection is tagged, its name is automatically linked, and your post also shows up on their wall. When you’re tagged, a notification is sent to you as well, and you can remove tags of yourself in others’ posts. It’s a very engaging and powerful way to include friends and connections in status updates.

It’s important to note that Facebook is enabling status tagging for all of a user’s Facebook connections – not just friends, but Pages, groups, and events as well. This means Page managers will now have a major new channel for tracking comments and feedback about their brand or business.

Until today, brands have been able to track posts and comments made on their Facebook Page directly by fans, as well as search public comments made by Facebook users through Facebook’s new real time search. However, starting today, all @ tags will appear on the wall of the Page as well, even though users never visited the Page. That’s a big deal for Page administrators hoping to gain more insight into how they’re being talked about inside Facebook.

This past week was not surprising for those of us tracking Facebook application growth. Social games continued to account for almost all of the top 20 fastest-growing apps on the platform, according to our AppData analytics service — especially the virtual farming genre of social games.

Zynga, as it has over much of the summer, maintained the number one spot with FarmVille. The app grew by 3.83 million people over the last week to reach 41.5 million monthly active users. But FarmVille is not the only farm game on the top 20 list. Country Story, made by Playfish, came in at number eight. It grew 640,000 users over the past week to reach 5.44 million monthly actives. A new entrant, Greenpatch Inc’s (Lil) Farm Life, grew 445,000 to reach 2.65 million. So although FarmVille is growing much faster than its rivals on the Facebook Platform, it does not have a complete virtual farming monopoly.

Only a few non-games made the list. At number four was Causes, an app to help organizations gain Facebook supporters. It grew 1.30 million people to 28.9 million monthly actives. And once again, Facebook’s own mobile apps continue to grow. Facebook’s iPhone app grew 400,000 to 13.6 million, similar to growth it saw last week, making number 17 on the list. Facebook’s more general mobile app, Mobile, barely missed this list by coming in at number 21. It grew 262,000 to reach 10.7 million.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		FarmVille	41,484,832	+3,825,667	+10.2	Zynga
2.		Birthday Cards	11,779,352	+3,318,808	+39.2	RockYou!
3.		Mafia Wars	22,419,441	+1,703,730	+8.2	Zynga
4.		Causes	28,929,195	+1,299,468	+4.7	Causes
5.		YoVille	15,649,707	+870,439	+5.9	Zynga
6.		Restaurant City	13,214,400	+859,905	+7.0	Playfish
7.		Animal Paradise	1,619,071	+732,149	+82.6	Rekoo
8.		Country Story	5,447,634	+624,243	+12.9	Playfish
9.		Tattoodle	4,570,791	+579,586	+14.5	Make The Web Better
10.		My Fishbowl	1,961,422	+560,558	+40.0	TwoFishes Interactive
11.		Pet Society	17,052,474	+546,214	+3.3	Playfish
12.		What’s your Actual Age?	821,193	+476,938	+138.5	q
13.		Horoscopes	2,491,015	+467,037	+23.1	RockYou!
14.		Music	9,761,196	+449,626	+4.8	iLike, inc
15.		(Lil) Farm Life	2,647,109	+445,665	+20.2	Greenpatch Inc
16.		Texas HoldEm Poker	16,673,582	+412,394	+2.5	Zynga
17.		Facebook for iPhone	13,662,024	+400,518	+3.0	—
18.		Brain Buddies	4,635,662	+348,529	+8.1	wooga – world of gaming
19.		Mobsters 2: Vendetta	2,081,968	+329,533	+18.8	Playdom
20.		Pandora’s Box	2,275,932	+271,666	+13.6	3happybytes

Palm is promoting their new phone, the Pixi, with a Facebook application called Runway Wars. It encourages users to vote on the best-dressed celebrities attending the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week events happening now in New York. The Pixi is Palm’s follow up to the Pre, featuring the same Palm OS, with a sleeker form and optional designer back plates (thus the tie in with Fashion Week).

The Facebook app is a simple bracket-style “tournament” that gives Fans of the Palm page a chance to decide who’s hot and who’s not. Every time you vote on the celebrity fashion matchup, a post goes into your news feed to let your friends know that you’ve just weighed in on who’s fashion forward. There will be several rounds of voting until an eventual winner is crowned.

Palm’s Page also features news from Fashion Week, as well as an introductory video that highlights the features of the new Pixi. Palm has done a good job targeting the perfect demographic for their new fashion-conscious phones, and though Runway Wars is pretty simple as far as applications ago, it has all the right components needed for broader appeal.

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

Monday, September 7, 2009

• The Most Popular Girl in Pet Society
• Q&A with Playfish: Quiztastic’s Growth, International Users, and More

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

• Faunasphere: A Casual MMO from Big Fish Games
• Re-Entering the Gaming World: Canadian Developer Sarbakan Games
• Vitaminwater Uses New Game App for Market Research

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

• FooPets Moves to Asia
• IBT Games Releases New Developer Tools
• Role-Playing Games Go To The Hospital With Swabs Online
• Riot Games Raises $8M, Goes After China Gaming Market

Thursday, September 10, 2009

• Hit Machine: OMGpop’s New Multiplayer Music Game
• Muggmaker, for Creating Custom Caricatured Avatars
• TibiaME, a Mobile Multiplayer Fantasy Game, Sees Fresh Growth

Friday, September 11, 2009

• PaymentPin Brings Landline, VoIP Options to In-Game Payments
• Build-A-Bar on Facebook Needs More Construction

A clever new app on Facebook, called FanCheck, gained five million users on Sunday, according its creator, a company called Smile.

Why the growth? The app lets you see which of your friends spend the most time posting and commenting on your profile wall, and also lets you see who spends the most time posting on your friends’ walls. It’s a new way to monitor friendships, shall we say. The app used to be called “StalkerCheck,” the company says, until Facebook made Smile find a less menacing term.

As of today, the app has 15.1 million monthly active users. The way it works is that you give the app permission to access you and your friends’ data through Facebook’s Platform APIs, then it calculates who has spent the most time interacting with you. The result is a thumbnailed, ranked list of your friends. You can also see the same rankings for anyone you’re friends with.

I imagine this app has been making and breaking some relationships lately. Personally, I learned that my younger sister is my number one “fan!”

FanCheck accesses user data through Facebook’s Stream API, which lets apps access the “stream” of activity on users’ profiles. The official description on the app:

This application ranks your friends based on how often they interact with your Facebook wall. Interactions counted include wall posts, comments, likes, gifts and other public items posted to your wall. We do NOT count page views or private messages.

And, an important note. The app appears to be growing through a clever use of photo tagging. At the bottom of your top fans list, there’s a button that says “click here to share and tag this as a Facebook photo.” This means the app turns the rankings into a single photo, then tags it with all of your friends names so it appears on their profile walls. We’ve seen a few other apps using the same viral mechanism in the last several days.

Facebook may have launched Lite and a bunch of other new products yesterday, but here’s another recent change that the company quietly introduced. It’s a new dialect available for English speakers, a way to automatically turns words on the site upside down and backwards.

And, it’s yet another joke language for the site. Another one, “English (Pirate),” has previously launched but is still in “beta”. Both dialects are available as options in Facebook’s language-picking feature.

Corporations and big businesses are turning to Facebook to promote their brands, but one lawyer in Massachusetts is using the site with some success to add to his client list. Richard Vetstein began his private practice, the Vetstein Law Group, about 6 months ago, and has been promoting his practice and blog through Facebook, where he has a little more than 600 Fans. It’s unusual for a small legal practice to have numbers this high, and Vetstein attributes a commitment to the Page and a high-profile recommendation for his large Fan numbers.

While Vetstein is bringing in new potential business to his page, he is also using it to build stronger relationships with current clients.

“People do business with people that they like,” Vetstein said in a recent ABAJournal.com blog post. “Facebook enables you to get to know people in a way that strengthens the overall relationship.”

Vetstein’s success on Facebook is an extension of his traditional approach to business; he is a self-proclaimed networker, and used all the available tools on Facebook to get in touch with people in his email lists, as well as his past and present friends. He also received a nod from David Barrett, director of social media legal marketing at the Rainmaker Institute — who touts 11,800 LinkedIn connections.

The Massachusetts Real Estate Law Blog, which Vetstein authors, is also posted on the Fan page, and Vetstein notes that this has also helped the page’s search ranking. He also uses the Fan page to post notes about his practice and related legal topics.

Using Facebook to promote a legal practice has the potential to be a powerful tool to attract new clients, but it does raise a few questions. There could be possible problems with personal and professional relationships becoming intertwined, much like the concerns recently raised over Facebook pages for those in the medical field.

Facebook has quietly introduced a way for you to find friends in particular cities. It’s a new version of a feature it had removed when it deprecated the “networks” part of user profiles a few months ago.

Within the Friends page on the site, you can now filter friends by the city the live in. Slightly older versions of this page — which itself is a new version of an older friends page — only offered ways to browse based on college, high school and workplaces. The new feature could be especially valuable for people trying to find long-lost friends who might be located nearby.

Back when Facebook had regional networks, it didn’t offer this sort of filter, but offered a more general tool where users could see who else was in the regional network. This new feature is actually more precise, by showing you not just regions — which had grown to include entire countries — but just the city you list on your profile.

Facebook Lite is a simplified version of the site, and it just came out of beta today, rolled out for now to English-speaking Facebook users. Although Lite is primarily intended for people with slow internet connections, especially in other countries it also reflects large-scale design changes that Facebook is gradually in the process of making.

Perhaps the most striking example of this more geological change is the home page News Feed in Lite, although the difference is not obvious at first.

And, there’s a big follow-on question here. Where users will be able to find applications and Pages? More on that in a moment.

In the March redesign, Facebook got rid of its algorithmically-enhanced feed, the one that showed a wide range of photos, status updates, who your friends just became friends with, romantic entanglements or disentanglements, and much else. Instead, the feed was just mostly status updates and posted links, with friends-of-friends and most other items chucked over into an auto-tuned right-hand column called Highlights. Upon launch, some users complained about the deluge of information in the new stream; instead of seeing the most interesting things their friends were up to, users saw the most recent things.

In Lite, Facebook has done the feed differently from what it currently is on the main site. The News Feed is called “All Stories.” Highlights actually still exists, but it’s a button right next to All Stories on the upper part of the site, called Top Stories. Click on it, and instead of the raw stream, you see the Highlights algorithm presented in a stream form. This top-button navigation is more like a feature Facebook had in a News Feed design years ago, as well as FriendFeed’s top stories feature.

The content of both feeds are also different in Lite than on the home site. Items from events and birthdays — two of the only apps on the site –  appear at the top of the new feeds.

I asked Facebook about the changes and a company spokesperson responded “we’ve heard the feedback about people preferring the algorithmic method that was news feed versus the stream. We’ve been working on the right way to balance that on the site.” The company has previously hinted at the same thing, shortly after the March changes resulted in a user uproar. In June, we heard that Highlights might be moved back into the stream as part of a move away from the raw stream — in some sense, Lite is an implementation of that.

What About Apps and Pages?

However, Lite is missing lots of things, including apps and Pages. There’s no easy way to find apps, because the bottom app toolbar is gone, apps don’t show up in Facebook’s auto-complete dropdown in search, and no items about apps currently appear in the News Feed. But not just third-party apps are missing. For example, Facebook’s popular Groups and Chat applications are also apparently too heavy for Lite, as are the friend filters it emphasized in the March design.

So, Lite will have to gain some more features if it hopes to offer the same richness of experience as the main site.

When I talked to Facebook today, the company re-affirmed that Lite is still what it was envisioned as — a simpler, faster way for new people in other countries to use the site. “But clearly, there’s some value to making it available to everyone in the world,” said the company spokesperson, “and like any product, it will continue to evolve. We’re not currently focused on integrating Platform, but we might integrate elements of Platform, or other apps from Facebook.”

If we’re looking at an early build of Facebook’s future, one can guess where missing items might go. Notifications have a new page, which you click to directly from a small link at the top of the News Feed. Unlike the current version, you can see all of your notifications at once. But there are no notifications from apps in it. Facebook could easily add app notifications in here, if it wanted to.

In sum, Lite is is what it is for now. Rather than Lite gaining more features in the future and becoming Facebook main site, Facebook will probably make its existing site lighter of features. In this sense, launching Lite to the world is just another way for the company to test out what changes are worth making. So, app developers and Page owners should have no cause for alarm.