Over the last few weeks, we noticed that former Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist Slash was all of a sudden getting popular on Facebook. Instead of just gaining a couple hundred users a day, he was gaining tens of thousands. But recently, he’s gone from less than half a million fans to more than 1.1 million.

Why? Well, first, we recognize that Slash is a great guitarist, and that people just want to be fans of him because they love him. Second, we recognize that he has a very active page — he’s constantly updating via text messages, even automatically sending his updates to Twitter via his page.

But we also recognize that he’s been active on Facebook for months, yet only recently saw a spike in new fans. So there is likely another cause, or two. We asked readers, and a few people responded to say they’d seen actual ads for Slash’s page on Facebook — apparently ads being run by Facebook itself. Slash may be benefiting from a larger effort by Facebook to promote celebrities.

“A few weeks ago, I noticed that Facebook replaced ads with fan page solicitations,” as commenter Jason F. told us. “I think Slash was one of them. I wonder if that helped seed the audience more diversely than organic growth ala Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolvers’ fan pages would have.”

What does Jason mean by “seeding?” Facebook fan page advertising is not itself necessarily the main explanation for the new growth. Jeff Widman, a Facebook marketing consultant who helps big clients grow pages, has more:

“The Highlight section of Facebook means if you can get a page rolling along at a good clip, you can keep picking up more fans. It’s a solid way for him to basically capture on Facebook all the people who already like him (and are friends with him). I’ve seen some major spikes with my clients when we try to push something hard all at once rather than dribble a little at a time. If they want to spend $1K on ads every month, I tell ‘em to blow it in one week every month.”

In other words, a little bit of growth can snowball into a lot of growth. So the answer to the riddle of Slash’s page growth could really be “all of the above.” First: He is already popular with the general public. Second: He has an active page. Third: He had ads running that apparently were seen by a lot of people. Fourth: Facebook’s viral loops — its highlights, as well as its activity stream — may have allowed the first three conditions to exponentially increase the results.

For page owners looking to grow, this is maybe another reason to buy those Facebook ads, and to think more strategically about ad spending patterns. Or, of course, to figure out who within Facebook decides to promote particular celebrities, as that person now appears to be the equivalent of whoever is in charge of the Suggested User List over at Twitter.

And with that thought, it’s time to rock:

The world’s many Blackberry smartphone devotees can now get a better Facebook app experience. Built by device-maker Research In Motion, Facebook for Blackberry includes a new interface for the news feed home page and feed filters, as well as faster loading. It is already one of the most popular Facebook mobile apps, having grown to 10.1 million monthly active users as of today.

But its big competitor, Apple’s iPhone, has an even more popular app, built by Facebook; and, the 3.0 version, released a couple months ago, has helped fuel a lot of recent growth. In fact, it has been pretty consistently ranking as one of the top 20 growing apps on all of Facebook, according to AppData. While Blackberry has been inching up, the iPhone app grew by 481,000 last week to reach 15.7 million monthly actives.

Perhaps this new version of the Blackberry app will give it a similar boost? Here’s what Blackberry users can now get if they download the new, 1.7 version, via CrackBerry:

• News Feed Support – The ability to set the News Feed as the home page
• News Feed Filters – The ability to toggle between News Feed, Status Updates, Photos & Links
• Caching Improvements – The application uses the device memory more efficiently.
• Feed Pre-fetching – Users will not be required to wait while their Facebook Feeds are updated
• View Profile Menu Option – Clients may easily view their own profile by selecting ‘View my Profile’ from the menu.

You can find the app on RIM’s App World app store, on Facebook, or you can have your phone automatically access it by going to m.facebook.com from your mobile browser. Facebook’s mobile app downloader will recognize your device and ask if you want to make the download.

For some reason, beloved and deceased singer-songwriter Johnny Cash‘s Facebook page gained the most new fans this past week. After at least of month of not growing, it gained around 482,000 in the last couple of days to reach 1.05 million total fans. Perhaps Facebook has just added in some unofficial Johnny Cash pages to give it a boost — something the company often does for official brands.

At number two on this week’s list of the pages that gained the most new fans: Big Prize Giveaways. This page appears to be what it sounds like, which is some sort of prize-giving company. From the page’s self-description: “Big Prize Giveaways, LLC exists to manage exciting promotions on behalf of a handful of promotional partners.” Sure, the internet is full of scammy sites that purport to offer prizes, but this page is legitimate — it even has the Facebook-given vanity URL “http://www.facebook.com/BigPrize.”

So while Johnny Cash and Big Prize are at number one and number two on the list, we’re actually going to have to give another page the title of “most interesting growth.”

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Johnny Cash	1,049,142	+482,212	+85.06
2.	Big Prize Giveaways	1,246,112	+425,591	+51.87
3.	Where the Wild Things Are	1,742,078	+375,518	+27.48
4.	Hamish & Andy	554,490	+269,909	+94.84
5.	Vespa Official	210,236	+175,561	+506.30
6.	Official CHUCK Page	186,831	+174,151	+1,373.43
7.	Slash	1,107,555	+169,733	+18.10
8.	2012	232,700	+168,846	+264.43
9.	Mafia Wars	4,748,505	+104,343	+2.25
10.	Cheryl Cole	629,689	+101,736	+19.27
11.	Halloween	462,072	+88,432	+23.67
12.	Zach Braff	261,467	+88,243	+50.94
13.	Slurpee	1,074,996	+83,613	+8.43
14.	The Breast Cancer Site	535,747	+79,748	+17.49
15.	The Bible	840,191	+74,654	+9.75
16.	Owl City	287,790	+72,569	+33.72
17.	Linkin Park	3,347,335	+70,508	+2.15
18.	Texas Hold’em Poker	3,399,235	+70,378	+2.11
19.	Facebook	5,449,148	+64,590	+1.20
20.	Justin Bieber	788,303	+62,451	+8.60

Where the Wild Things Are hit theaters last Friday, after weeks of television and web advertising, news coverage — and a growing Facebook page. The children’s-book-turned-movie made our list the last couple weeks, and perhaps showing how successful it was on opening weekend, its page has continued to grow. It came in at number one at the box office over the weekend, brought in $32.5 million, and has by many accounts become a cult classic with young adults.

In fact, anecdotal reports we’ve heard include college kids dressing up as the movie’s make-believe monsters, attending the movie, then howling when it was over. The fan page includes a custom-built app where you can insert your profile picture in a cutout-style photo of the film’s star, Max. Maybe the app helped inspire the movie-goers costumes?

The page has continued gaining tens of thousands of fans over the weekend, after an especially massive surge last week. In total, it grew 376,000 to reach 1.74 million fans. We’re very interested to see how well it does this coming week.

In looking at the other pages on this list, the most interesting tend to show consistent growth over a period of days — not just the spikes like what Johnny Cash had. Consistent growth more likely means organic popularity among Facebook users. Keep your eye on 2012, a forthcoming movie about the supposed end of the world: It grew by 169,000, more than doubling its previous size to reach 233,000 fans.

We’ve been chronicling the rise of Zynga‘s Café World virtual restaurant game since it launched at the beginning of the month. By the looks of things, we’re going a lot more chronicling. After growing by more than 10 million users in its first week and a half, the app added nearly 8.5 million more this past week, according to AppData. It has been growing through a mix of promotions within other Zynga apps, ads on Facebook, and, well, being a higher-quality game than many you see on the platform.

It is now the 9th largest app total, and ahead of Playfish‘s Restaurant City rival virtual restaurant game — although that app also made the list, growing by 607,000 to reach 16.8 million monthly active users this past week.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Café World	18,478,368	+8,379,784	+83.0	Zynga
2.		Roller Coaster Kingdom	9,970,808	+3,637,720	+57.4	Zynga
3.		FarmVille	59,655,966	+3,533,559	+6.3	Zynga
4.		Quiz Monster	4,167,117	+3,256,288	+357.5	Quiz Monster
5.		Make a Quiz!	5,574,893	+3,222,468	+137.0	Friendly Quizzes
6.		Quizzer	7,431,333	+1,172,867	+18.7	Quizzer
7.		Quiz Creator	1,500,922	+1,160,222	+340.5	QuizApps
8.		Who was i, in my past life ?	1,265,740	+1,049,625	+485.7	Nikolas Chalkidis A
9.		Horoscopes	5,996,528	+913,515	+18.0	RockYou!
10.		Causes	32,274,113	+866,080	+2.8	Causes
11.		Bejeweled Blitz	8,547,949	+859,612	+11.2	Popcap Games
12.		YoVille	19,565,632	+648,503	+3.4	Zynga
13.		(Lil) Farm Life	5,385,266	+647,573	+13.7	Greenpatch Inc
14.		How Well Do You Know Me?	10,694,699	+633,629	+6.3	How Well Do You Know Me?
15.		Restaurant City	16,807,632	+607,228	+3.8	Playfish
16.		We’re Related by FamilyLink	21,242,251	+531,186	+2.6	FamilyLink.com
17.		Pet Society	20,012,056	+499,821	+2.6	Playfish
18.		What will happen tomorrow with you?	2,102,756	+499,454	+31.2	—
19.		Facebook for iPhone	15,739,684	+481,037	+3.2	—
20.		Country Story	7,869,884	+444,105	+6.0	Playfish

Another Zynga title, virtual theme park Roller Coaster Kingdom, is also seeing a surge. It grew by 3.64 million to reach 9.97 million. And, of course, there is FarmVille, Zynga’s breakout hit virtual farming game. Although its growth was dwarfed by Café World, it is still got 3.53 million new users — and is by far the largest app on the platform, with 59.7 million monthly actives.

The other apps on the top 20 list this week are other games or simple quiz apps. An especially notable one is Bejeweled Blitz, from Popcap Games — the company is a decade old, and has historically been focused on casual games. But it has spent the last year focusing on social games, and raised its first round of funding ever only recently, to try to push that effort harder. Bejeweled, based on the company’s casual puzzle game of of the same name, grew 859,000 to reach 8.55 million monthly actives this past week. That’s is a good sign for the company.

There’s only one app on the list that’s neither some sort of game or quiz app: Facebook for iPhone, which has been showing itself on this list in past weeks, is on again, gaining 481,000 to arrive at 15.7 million monthly actives.

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 12, 2009

Fantasy Sports Made Simple (and Valuable)
Café World Hits 10M, Easily Takes #1 Spot on This Week’s Top 20 Games
Xbox Live Facebook/Twitter Addition Coming on Nov. 17?
China Bans Foreign Investors from Online Games [Updated]
Zynga Trademarks FishVille — Get Ready for a Big Aquarium Game

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Starfleet Commander: A Smart New Strategy RPG from Blue Frog Gaming
Is EA Going to Buy Zynga or Playfish in Social Gaming Bid?
Hi5’s New Redesign: Another Big Milestone in its Gaming Strategy
Funji’s iPhone Game Gets More Social Features

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Dungeon Fighter Opens Virtual Goods Shop
Mochi Media Makes Flash Games More Social with Facebook Connect
Inside Virtual Goods: Tracking the US Virtual Goods Market, 2009 – 2010, Is Now Available
Reef Life: A Multiplayer Fish Game From Storybook Anytime

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Vector City Racers: Online Racing for Kids
Social Gaming, Beyond the Clones
Preview: Turn It Up to 11 with Rock Band on iPhone
Social Games May Be Helping Facebook Gain More Users in Asia
iPhone/iPod Apps Get Free To Play Virtual Goods, Sort Of
Watch Inside Virtual Goods on CNBC

Friday, October 16, 2009

SGN’s Shervin Pishevar, On Virtual Goods in Free-to-Play iPhone Games
Social Advertising Optimizer Sometrics Raises $4 Million
OpenFeint – Putting Developers in the Spotlight
Using Dual-Currency Systems for Better Revenues and Engagement
Social Gaming Roundup: Zynga’s Sehgal, EA Jersey, China Revenue, and Ice-T

Facebook has not only been disabling ad networks that run ads that somehow misuse user data or mislead users, it has been disabling applications that run those ad networks. To help developers avoid the risk of getting shutdown for a rogue ad, the social ad network AdParlor is introducing a new “SuperSafe” ad option, designed to pass any inspection by Facebook.

For now, SuperSafe only includes only ads from major platform developers — Playdom, Zynga, Zoosk and other companies that run the same ads on Facebook itself. The hope is that anything Facebook would run, a third party could run as well without fear of getting taken down. Fazal says the company is looking to extend this program to brand advertisers as well.

However, with such limited and focused inventory, the ads are likely to have lower eCPMS overall.

“There are app developers out there who have decided not to show ads at all out of fear. They do not want to take the risk of being shut down” as AdParlor chief executive Hussein Fazal tells us. “So, we developed a tag such that every single ad is manually picked and approved by our team – choosing from the most reputable advertisers on the platform.”

A few interesting companies have shown up this past week on our Top 20 up-and-coming apps list, including gift-card maker JibJab, Slide’s Rock Riot, a Youtube-for-mobile app, and a religious app. There are also the usual mix of small gifting apps, simple quizzes, and games. At the top of the list, though, is a game called Halloween Haunting, from developers Mob Science. It is a gifting app that aggressively prompts you to send “spooky” gifts to your friends. No doubt, it will continue to grow as Halloween gets closer.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Halloween Haunting	488,640	+321,721	+192.74
2.	Who wants to kill you?	307,816	+228,482	+288.00
3.	Gift App Creator	199,427	+195,215	+4,634.73
4.	Friend Couples!	514,728	+193,242	+60.11
5.	Fish Life	335,451	+171,059	+104.06
6.	Forever Friends	918,898	+110,652	+13.69
7.	Rock Riot	433,357	+107,766	+33.10
8.	JibJab	373,193	+105,476	+39.40
9.	Birthday Countdown	778,344	+104,005	+15.42
10.	Youtube Mobile 3GP	167,387	+103,850	+163.45
11.	O-Meter App Factory	660,472	+103,160	+18.51
12.	Deepavali Greetings	174,622	+83,862	+92.40
13.	How Sexy Is Your Name Calculator	499,833	+74,493	+17.51
14.	Trivias Locas – Trivias, encuestas y tests	664,873	+73,351	+12.40
15.	Tetris Friends	806,507	+72,367	+9.86
16.	Hugging	391,680	+62,157	+18.86
17.	Your Zodiac Profile	249,544	+60,740	+32.17
18.	Friends Quizzes	575,144	+56,128	+10.81
19.	Fairyland	384,098	+54,735	+16.62
20.	Promotions	759,637	+51,995	+7.35

This list looks at which apps with between 100,000 and 1 million users are gaining the most users in a week — this way, we can sometimes spot interesting niche apps, or ones that are headed to gain millions of users. Concerning the others on this list, Slide’s Rock Riot Rock Band-style game grew by 107,000 to reach, 433,000 — it looks like its growth is starting to pick up.

JibJab got its start offering animated, customizable greeting cards on its own web site, but its Facebook app is notable for especially strong growth starting sometime in early September. It is now up to 373,000 monthly actives. The company is no stranger to the Facebook platform, having integrated Facebook Connect some time ago, and having developed a successful holiday gifting app, ElfYourself, last year.

The video app, called “YouTube Mobile 3GP,” is designed for a type of mobile video format used in phones. Basically, it lets users watch YouTube videos from an app within Facebook. This app is growing when it is possible to watch YouTube using other mobile web sites (like YouTube itself). Why? Apparently the social features in the app.

Another notable one is Deepavali Greetings, a gifting app for the Hindu holiday (note that Deepavali is the term for Diwali used in parts of the Indian subcontinent as well as in Malaysia and Singapore).

Overall, the mix today seems a little bit more of a mix than last week.

Facebook and Twitter users now have a way to keep followers updated when flying the friendly skies with a new service from Lufthansa called MySkyStatus, announced earlier this week. It sends status updates to Facebook and Twitter while travelers are in the air; messages include altitude, location and departure and arrival times to keep followers on the ground in the know.

The service is offered exclusively through Lufthansa, but works for any airline. While there are more and more airlines offering inflight internet services, this is an easy way to keep colleagues and followers up-to-date on exactly when and where you are when you’re in the air and can’t update through the Web or mobile phone.

Updating the progress of a flight is may seem like a little bit of overkill, but it can be especially beneficial to those on the ground who are expecting you, or more importantly, waiting to pick you up. As flight times and delays can often alter schedules, having constant updates of exactly when a friend or colleague is landing can help save valuable time lost while sitting in airports waiting for someone to arrive on a flight that has been unexpectedly delayed.

Lufthansa doesn’t have much of a presence on Facebook, but the new service should help bring a little more recognition to the brand within the network to get them a little closer to industry leaders on Facebook like Southwest Airlines and AirAsia. Lufthansa has built-in branding in every update, so even those using the service for flights on other carriers will still be delivering some free advertising.

Red Bull is thanking its Facebook fans for pushing the brand past the 1 million followers mark by hiding free packages of Red Bull Energy Shots across the country and offering them up in a nationwide scavenger hunt. The result appears to be more fans:  Red Bull’s fan page currently has 1.4 million followers, and it’s gaining daily at a steady clip of at least a few thousand new fans a day.

Facebook users can enter their respective zip codes into the Red Bull Stash application on the Red Bull fan page to find clues to the nearest locations of the hidden freebies. Codes on the free packages can be entered into the application to let other scavengers know that those particular stashes have been claimed.

There’s also a section for the lucky discoverers to add pictures of their prizes, and quite a few fans have already laid claim to many of the free packages. One super fan seems to have made it a personal mission to collect as many stashes as possible.

A graphic in the application claims that only about 20% of the free packages have been stashed, so there’s still plenty of Red Bull waiting out there somewhere. This approach to dispersing free goods is certainly different from some of the other promotions we’ve seen recently, but it seems like a great interactive slant that should get people involved.

Facebook only really became relevant to many people in Middle Eastern countries this past spring, when the company introduced Arabic and Hebrew versions of the site. Since then, Facebook has gained most of its 10.7 million users in the region, including nearly 700,000 in the past month. As a sign of its ongoing growth, some countries are now showing high penetration rates.

In Israel, Qatar and the United Arab Emerites, more than 20% of the total population is on the site — putting these countries in the top quartile of the nearly 100 countries that Facebook reports country data on. In Lebanon and Bahrain, it’s more than 15 percent. And, in terms of hard numbers, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan all have more than one million monthly active Facebook users, with the UAE and Morocco getting close. While the region is, overall, not adding as many users as other parts of the world, four countries had growth rates of more than 10% last month: Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

In all, Israel continues to be the country with the most users and the highest penetration. But given the growth rates in other countries — especially Saudi Arabia — this could change in a matter of months.

There’s also a big caveat here: Turkey. It would be in the lead if we were to count it as part of the Middle East. The country gained 1.07 million new users last month to reach 14.5 million people — 20.5% of the population.

And, with the mention of Turkey’s dual-region classification, we should also clarify our own methodology for putting together these numbers. We are looking at what the G8 defines as the “greater Middle East,” which includes North Africa and the Asian land mass as far as Pakistan. Scores of countries in this area do not show up in Facebook’s data, including Iran, so we’re not able to show them here.