Something happened back on October 14th: three make-your-own-quiz applications started growing really fast, and they haven’t stopped. Meanwhile, on our list of the 20 Facebook apps that gained the most users this past week from AppData, we’re seeing the usual mix of games, simple gifting apps, and Facebook’s in-house iPhone app.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Make a Quiz!	11,722,723	+4,488,718	+38.29
2.	Quiz Monster	10,036,195	+4,320,448	+43.05
3.	Happy Aquarium	18,351,975	+3,878,861	+21.14
4.	Café World	23,814,664	+3,755,339	+15.77
5.	Quiz Creator	4,748,099	+2,413,570	+50.83
6.	Causes	34,373,044	+1,844,044	+5.36
7.	RockYou Live	8,128,028	+1,539,703	+18.94
8.	FarmVille	61,660,329	+1,337,570	+2.17
9.	Movies	14,340,182	+1,175,306	+8.20
10.	Horoscopes	7,158,456	+874,836	+12.22
11.	Bejeweled Blitz	9,387,901	+672,871	+7.17
12.	Music Challenge	3,274,445	+609,191	+18.60
13.	Who was i, in my past life ?	1,830,061	+469,299	+25.64
14.	Music	11,832,427	+437,692	+3.70
15.	Pet Society	20,714,196	+432,279	+2.09
16.	Restaurant City	17,454,448	+379,576	+2.17
17.	Halloween Haunting	1,017,893	+371,167	+36.46
18.	Friend Quiz	4,312,447	+340,285	+7.89
19.	(Lil) Farm Life	5,767,916	+323,588	+5.61
20.	Facebook for iPhone	16,237,123	+294,116	+1.81

Here’s more on the quiz mystery. Make A Quiz, made by Friendly Quizzes, grew from 2.30 million on the 14th to 11.7 million monthly actives by Sunday; it came in at number one on the list, growing by 4.49 million in the last week. At number two is another quiz app that started growing on the 14th, called Quiz Monster and made by a company of the same name. It started off at 911,000, at that point, and has since grown to 10.0 million, including 4.32 million in the last week. But wait, there’s another quiz app creator on the list. Quiz Creator is at number five, having grown from 322,000 on the 14th to 4.75 million now, including a gain of 2.41 million in the last week.

The timing of all this growth makes us wonder if somehow these apps are connected to each other. Or perhaps there is some sort of particularly aggressive tactic that made this growth possible? None of these apps say much of anything about who the companies are behind them.

And, meanwhile, these apps appear to be losing users quickly. We’ve just added a Daily Active Users feature to AppData, so we can see that all of these apps are starting to fall from the millions of DAUs they recently accumulated. It’s frankly not clear what the future holds for these three apps.

The future is much more clear for some of the other apps on today’s list, however. Virtual fish world Happy Aquarium, made by CrowdStar came in at number three, growing by 3.88 million monthly actives to reach 18.4 million monthly actives. Zynga‘s Café World continues growing, as well, coming in at number four. It got another 3.76 million users to reach 23.8 million monthly actives, outpacing Zynga’s other big recent hit, Farmville. Other games on the list include Pet Society and Restaurant City from Playfish, Bejeweled Blitz from Popcap Games, and (lil) Farm Life from Green Patch Inc.

Non-games are also continuing to do well, including Causes, the app for organizing around causes, as well as Flixster‘s Movies movie-fan app and iLike‘s Music app. And finally, Facebook for iPhone continues to grow fast, gaining 294,000 this past week to reach 16.2 million monthly actives.

Adding Facebook Share buttons to your website has always been one of the simplest ways to let users more easily share content with their friends on Facebook and drive traffic to your site. Today, Facebook is launching two interesting upgrades to Facebook Share that should make it more valuable to web publishers: “live count” widgets and Share analytics.

The new “live count” widgets

With the new “live count” widgets, webmasters can now make it easy for anyone to see the number of times the current URL has been shared on Facebook. It works just like Tweetmeme‘s widget for counting shares on Twitter. Developers can easily implement the widget by adding a couple lines of HTML to their code, and there are a couple different size options to best fit your layout. Here’s how it looks:

We expect the widget to become very popular pretty quickly. Here’s a quick rundown of all the different formatting options for the new share widget:

You can also translate your share button easily by wrapping the text you want to appear in the anchor tags.

Facebook’s new Share analytics

In addition, Facebook today is launching new tools to allow developers to see Facebook Share stats for any URL. Facebook is allowing anyone to see the following stats on any URL:

• a total Share count
• a total “like” count
• a total comments count
• a total click count

Developers should use the REST API or link stats FQL query to get these metrics, which are really powerful (see Facebook’s Developer Wiki for details). Techmeme is already using the REST API methods to analyze sharing patterns on Facebook to select top stories, and bit.ly and awe.sm are using it for analyzing traffic for their own publisher analytics services.

For example, here’s what the results look like for a sample URL:

Facebook is re-explaining a little-known feature that helps friends and loved ones celebrate the lives of users who have passed away. The company has been taking requests to “memorialize” deceased users profiles for some time. But in the redesign it rolled out last Friday, there’s a new “Suggestions” feature that shows you friends who are not active on the site. It asks users to somehow interact with them, doing things like recommending other friends to them, or writing on their wall.

This feature has apparently been making for some awkward moments if you’re friends with someone on Facebook who has passed away, as All Facebook notes.

So the company is reminding users to make sure to tell Facebook if a friend has passed on in order to keep their information out of Suggestions. That form is here. More about the “memorialized” feature, from a company blog post today:

When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased’s privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance.

Generally, this is a graceful way to handle a painful and socially complex circumstance — something Facebook itself became familiar with early in its company history. The author of today’s blog post, Max Kelly, describes how a close friend at the company was killed just a few weeks after joining.

The “memorialized” feature, which even we hadn’t noticed until today, is not the first move Facebook has made to recognize the tragic situations that its users have found themselves in. It introduced a “widowed” relationship status feature just a couple of months ago, for people who have lost spouses.

Businesses looking to make money from their Facebook pages will soon have another way to do so, from an e-commerce payment company called Payvment. On November 3rd, it will introduce a Facebook app that can be integrated into a company’s page, so that a user can shop on the page and make a purchase using PayPal without having to click away.

Other companies, like Alvenda, are already offering similar payment services. Payvment is trying to be a universal sort of payment service, so it lets you store items in its “shopping cart” even if you’re browsing between pages. So you can set up orders from multiple pages then pay all at once.

The service will be free. All that is required is a Paypal account.

Like other e-commerce companies on Facebook, we’re watching to see how this one does. There are a couple of shortfalls that will need to be addressed. According to Payvment’s site, the service does not currently support charging sales tax (support is promised soon), so it will need to be added to the total price of the goods. The service is currently only compatible with transactions in U.S. dollars, something that will need to change to take full advantage of the ever-expanding international reach of Facebook.

Sports application developer Watercooler has raised a second round of funding, as it continues its push into sports-themed social games. The $5.5 million round was led by strategic investor Betfair, a United Kingdom-based conglomerate that runs a variety of sports betting services around the world. Previously, the company had raised a $4 million round from venture firm Canaan Partners.

In this case, though, the Betfair appears more interested in being part of the non-betting market of social network applications, as most forms of online sports gambling are illegal in this country. Canaan Partners also participated in this round, following the $4 million it had previously invested in the company.

“Betfair’s innovative approach to sports and gaming, along with its strong international presence, made the company a perfect fit as we continue to build innovative social games,” said Watercooler chief executive Kevin Chou. So perhaps the company is looking at some form of international expansion?

Watercooler offers hundreds of applications for individual sports teams, as well as tournament games like 2009 Bracket Challenge. Built for the March Madness college basketball tournament earlier this year, that app gained 1.7 million monthly active users at the time. Watercooler has since followed up with the FanSection Fantasy Football 2009 app for the pro (American) football season this fall, which is monetizing through paid premium features.

The additional money and expertise from Betfair could help the company expand its paid services, as the strategic investor generated says it generated nearly $500 million in revenue in its last fiscal year. It currently has 2.5 million registered users around the world and conducts 6 million transactions a day.

In January, Betfair entered the US online gaming market when it bought TVG, a company that runs a large horse-race gambling site and television network, for $50 million.

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, October 19th, 2009

Friendster To Add Virtual Currencies
Café World (20M), Roller Coaster Kingdom (10M), FarmVille (60M) in Top 20 Growing Games This Week
Ngmoco’s New Eliminate Game Looks to Cash in on iPhone Virtual Goods
Facebook’s Redesign Screenshots Show Viral Channel Changes for Social Games

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Scoreloop Launches New White-Label Platform: Core Social
Having Reached Profitability, Virtual World Meez Begins MySpace Expansion
Slide’s SuperPocus App: Its Big New Move into Virtual Goods
Popular Social Games Inspire New Wave of Fan Blogs

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Are You G.I. Joe or Cobra, on Facebook?
Aurora Feint’s Secret iPhone Project Includes a Free-to-Play Business Model
Small Games Portal, Sarien.net, Brings Back Classic Adventures
Zynga’s Vision for the Social Web, in PowerPoint

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Tap Tap Revenge Looks to Stay on Top of Music iPhone Games with Third Version
Gambit, CrowdFlower Bring Online Labor to Game Payments
The Civilization Series is Coming to Facebook!
Playing Word Games with Sea Star Scramble

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Fish World: A Big Fish in a Big Pond
More Rumors on EA-Playfish Deal: Due Diligence, Acquisition Numbers
EA’s Pogo.com Casual Games Site Gets Facebook Connect, Sort of
Social Gaming Roundup: Ning Gifts, Vivox, Zong on IMVU, Raptr
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Last year, social network aggregator Power.com introduced a service that “that solicits, stores and uses Facebook login information to access information stored on Facebook computers without authorization and to display Facebook copyrighted material without permission.” Or so Facebook described Power.com’s actions in a lawsuit it filed against the company last January.

Then, Power.com countersued in July — that suit has now been dismissed by judge Jeremy Fogel of the United States District Court for Northern California.

Here’s what Power.com’s suit was going for, from our coverage then:

Power.com is essentially claiming that the court should force Facebook to allow Power.com to scrape and store user data because 1) doing so is “common industry practice” (citing Facebook’s own contact importer), 2) Facebook’s own terms of service say Facebook doesn’t own user data, and 3) Facebook’s behavior in not allowing it to do so is “anticompetitive.”

Basically, Power.com was trying to make the case that Facebook couldn’t control its users’ data on the site. Here’s what Fogel’s dismissal today (any other ruling would have been surprising):

Good cause therefor appearing, Facebook’s motions to dismiss and strike affirmative defenses will be GRANTED.  Because it is not entirely clear that at least some of the deficiencies in Power’s pleading could not be cured by amendment, leave to amend is appropriate.  Any amended pleading shall be filed within motion is hereby vacated.

Power.com does not currently support Facebook, although it supports other social sites including MySpace and Twitter.

And, here’s the court document:

About an hour ago, Facebook started rolling out the latest set of updates to the home page and News Feed. Along with the switch back to an algorithmically-chosen set of top stories from the real time stream, Facebook also just announced some important changes to feed stories and the feed APIs that developers should be aware of.

First, Facebook has reduced the number of images that can appear in feed stories by default from three to one. Instead, Facebook is now showing a “See More” link that will allow users to expand all three images in line. We reported a month ago that Facebook was telling developers to start using just one image because it wants app feed stories to look less “spammy” and more like Facebook’s own feed stories. Until now, some apps have been publishing three images in each feed item, each the maximum allowable size under the current specs, in order to get more clicks and attention in the stream. Starting today, the maximum size of images in the stream is also being reduced to 90×90 pixels.

Here’s how the old feed images looked:

And here’s the new feed images format:

In addition, Facebook said today that going forward, the only way to publish Feed stories into the stream will be through the stream publishing methods stream.publish, FB.Connect.streamPublish, and Facebook.streamPublish. Facebook says it will be deprecating support for the following APIs on December 20th, 2009:

• Template bundles (Facebook says, “You should start using stream attachments with the stream publishing methods instead)
• feed.publishUserAction
• feed.publishTemplatizedAction
• Facebook.showFeedDialog and FB.Connect.showFeedDialog
• Publisher stories that use templates (Facebook says, “please transition them to use stream attachments“)
• Feed forms that reference the feedStory form and the multiFeedStory form
• One-line stream stories

Finally, regarding the status APIs, Facebook says, “We will still publish stories that call users.setStatus and status.set, but encourage all developers to migrate to the stream publishing methods, as they let you set a user’s status easily.”

Facebook’s newest version of the News Feed, which demotes the real-time stream in favor of the more “traditional” top stories stream, is rolling out to users today starting at 10AM US Pacific Time. Most of the details are as we reported earlier this week, but we do have a little more information now about Facebook’s algorithm for choosing top stories.

As expected, the default News Feed that users will see is becoming “Today’s Top News,” which Facebook’s Peter Deng says will have the “most relevant information” when users get to the site. “The spirit of the change is that you’ll see a summary of stuff you missed while you were gone,” Deng says.

There’s two important points to note about the Top News stream:

1. Stories will be chosen for Top News based on a variety of undisclosed factors, including but not limited to “how many people comment and like” on stories, “who you’re close with,” and “who you interact with frequently,” Deng says. More on that in a moment.
2. Facebook is adding user activity stories back to the News Feed – like friend acceptances, relationship updates, event RSVPs, group memberships, and becoming a fan of a Page. In the real time stream, only explicitly “shared” content appeared in the stream.

The real-time stream will still be available via the “Live Feed” tab at the top of the page. When viewing the Live Feed, stories will now actually automatically appear in real time. And once you switch to the Live Feed tab, you’ll see it by default for the rest of your session.

Here’s what the Top News stream will look like (though note, Deng says there will be a small status update composer by default, like in the Live Feed screenshot below). Note, “Highlights” have been removed and other content on the right side of the page has moved up.

And here’s a view of the Live Feed:

Impact on Developer Ecosystem

Deng says application stories will be selected for display in Top Stories in “exactly the same way as status updates” – meaning the amount of comment and like responses they’ve gotten, how close Facebook thinks you are to the person, and how much you interact with them. We assume Facebook Connect stories will be treated in the same way.

It will be very interesting to see how the changes to the News Feed affect applications that have been optimized for growth largely through the real-time stream since Facebook launched the real-time stream in March. Now that the system has changed again, developers’ incentives are also shifting. As always, those that can navigate the Top News algorithm the best will see disproportionate growth.

Impact on Facebook Pages

Deng says Page stories will also be selected in the same way as status updates and application stories – i.e., depending on how much response the stories get and how much you interact with the Page. However, all Page managers should note that this now means that all of your Page’s updates will now no longer necessarily show up in your fans’ News Feeds in real time (in the Top Stories view).

Now, Page managers need to start thinking about News Feed Optimization (NFO) too. In other words, what do you need to do to maximize your Page’s updates in the News Feed? According to Deng, comments from a user’s friends on a Page story is an important factor in getting it to show up, so encouraging comments and likes more would be a good way to start. Keeping fans coming back to your Page as much as possible is also now much more important.

Going Forward

We think Facebook’s move back to a “Top Stories” default view of News Feed is the right move for maximizing user engagement. Most people simply aren’t able to stay glued to Facebook all day and catch all the content that’s most interesting to them in a real-time stream format, and Facebook says it got a lot of feedback from users that they were missing valuable content they wanted to see.

Now, by keeping the levers behind News Feed behind closed doors, Facebook again has the freedom to do a lot of testing and optimization to increase engagement on the home page by providing the most compelling content to users. Those who depend on the News Feed for their own distribution and engagement will be watching closely.