Three weeks ago, Facebook announced significant updates to its promo/sweepstakes policies for Facebook Pages that have very practical impact for marketers on Facebook. For a deeper dive on the rule changes, see our analysis. But essentially, the new rules:

1. Require all marketers to get explicit permission from Facebook at least 7 days before administering any promotion inside Facebook.
2. Prohibit running any contests or promotions that require users to become a fan, interact with a feed story, or do anything else outside an application tab or canvas page in order to enter.

This means that “become a fan” contests, “status update” contests, “photo upload” contests, and any other kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed are no longer allowed. Rather, Pages must send users to a custom application tab to enter contests. This is good news for companies building Facebook Page tools for marketers.

Now, agencies and marketers are trying to understand whether these policies are being actively enforced, as many businesses and organizations have been experimenting with different types of contests to drive traffic and engagement on their Facebook Page over recent months, and several promotions that seem to violate the policies have continued to appear lately.

For example, a few weeks ago, an Ikea store in Sweden ran a promotion on their Facebook Page in which users who tagged photos of furniture with their names first won the items as prizes.  A Facebook spokesperson told us today that the promotion was indeed in violation of the new policies and would not be allowed to run today.

And last week, Gillette, one of the biggest brands in the US, announced a promotion on its Facebook Page, saying, “Become a fan today and you’ll be entered to win a free Fusion MVP,” a clear violation of the new policies. Gilette is also redirecting members from a sweepstakes tab to a signup form on Gillette.com to enter the contest, but the status update still exists on its Page, and is confusing to multiple marketers we’ve heard from. A Facebook spokesperson said he was not able to comment on individual campaigns beyond the Ikea case when we asked earlier today.

However, Facebook did share this statement about the new rules:

“Page administrators should read the guidelines before hosting any contests on their Page. We created the policy to help ensure a consistent experience on Facebook and ensure that eligible Page owners had the information they needed in order to host contests on their site.”

For now, it seems like many marketers aren’t yet aware that Facebook has updated its contest policies, and Facebook is not being as aggressive in policing Page contests as they are on Facebook Platform policy violations, likely because they’re still helping many advertisers figure out the new rules.

Because of this, we expect the confusion to continue. We advise Page managers to abide by the new policies as they plan campaigns. We also expect to see many cases of Facebook making marketers change their contests after launch.

With the amount of time people spend in coffee shops — especially people on computers — it’s not too surprising that many local establishments have Facebook Pages. Last week, we looked at how the largest coffee shop chains are using Pages, and today we’ll focus on what local shops are currently doing with their Pages and offer suggestions to better engage local customers.

While we are only able to skim the surface of all the Facebook Pages devoted to local coffee shops, a number of patterns emerge on what owners are doing. For one, even though they may only have one or a few locations, many Pages have more fans than some of the largest chains we covered in our previous post (one Philz Coffee location, for instance, has 2,350 fans while the Tully’s chain with over 100 locations only has 1,593 Fans).

Here are some key things all coffee shop Page owners should remember:

1. Make sure your contact information, especially address, is completely filled out on your Page. Make it really obvious where people can get your coffee.

2. Share menus and latest coffee creations/flavors by linking to their menu on their web site, publishing changes within the Wall (as Jitterbug Coffee Shop did) if not adding the option as a tab.

3. Include the Reviews app as a tab on your Page so users can provide their own feedback, like what LIFT Coffee Shop & Cafe has done.

4. Encourage fans to upload pictures taken in your establishment, and make sure to do the same as a Page owner. See Murray Street Coffee Shop as one example; this is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to create interaction with fans.

5. Unfortunately, many local coffee shop Pages have tabs that also have no content – Page owners need to keep tabs (sic) on this and remove application tabs that aren’t being properly managed.

6. Remember to get your vanity URL.

7. Make sure to post any events happening at your store on your page, and invite your fans. As Coffeecat shows, the Events tab can also be used to announce poetry reading, acoustic performances and other de rigueur cafe events.

8. Providing incentives for fans in-store is a great way to build Fan loyalty – just remember to stick to Facebook’s new rules about promotionsConsider splitting your Wall into Page owner posts and Just Fans in order to clearly communicate to your fans

Readers: if you are a fan of a local coffee shop(s), what would you like to see improved on their Pages? Please answer (especially if you are reading this right now from a coffee shop) in a comment below.

[Photo via Wireless Coffee.]

Black Friday promotions and the increasingly heated competition between wireless providers helped drive Facebook users to become Facebook fans of brands such as Kohl’s, Verizon, AT&T Share and Gillette this week, according to PageData. As we saw last week, Twilight: New Moon, 2012 and Modern Warfare 2 continued to attract more fans as well, and Texas Hold’em Poker continued it’s steady rise towards five million fans to become the 8th largest fan Page on Facebook.

However, Will Ferrell’s Page took the top spot this week. It appears to have gone on an enormous one day roll of 429,173, almost certainly from Facebook adding unofficial pages for the actor in with his official page. On its own, the page only gained only a handful of fans directly.

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Will Ferrell 891,637 +429,197 +92.81 2. Texas Hold’em Poker 4,710,836 +213,309 +4.74 3. Verizon 581,887 +195,003 +50.40 4. Kohl’s 863,351 +133,831 +18.35 5. Disney 2,403,084 +131,224 +5.78 6. New Moon: The Movie 986,654 +125,941 +14.63 7. Wawa 319,899 +118,968 +59.21 8. Big Prize Giveaways 2,115,870 +110,081 +5.49 9. Mafia Wars 5,912,186 +98,094 +1.69 10. Twilight 4,337,237 +84,104 +1.98 11. Gillette 143,512 +70,874 +97.57 12. Türk Bayrağı 1,952,904 +69,897 +3.71 13. 2012 610,840 +62,501 +11.40 14. The Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe 103,903 +61,525 +145.18 15. Modern Warfare 2 404,830 +55,898 +16.02 16. AT&T Share 138,943 +55,198 +65.91 17. Walt Disney Pictures Backlot 124,792 +50,983 +69.07 18. Cake Boss 246,910 +48,722 +24.58 19. Vodafone it – Mobile people 118,870 +46,028 +63.19 20. Facebook 5,811,336 +43,002 +0.75

The two most interesting Pages this week, however, were certainly Gillette’s and Kohl’s. Gillette posted a message on its Wall on November 24 saying that anyone that became a Fan that day would be “entered to win a free Fusion MVP”, which received 571 Likes and 170 comments, which is good engagement. The problem is, however, that this promotion almost certainly violates Facebook’s latest promotional rules. We suspect that Facebook is giving brands a grace period, as this is not the first apparent violation that we have noticed, and we are currently checking into it.

Another interesting Page this week was Kohl’s. Kohl’s apparently offered a number of email-based in-store coupons as well as 15-30% off online. They’re also running their “Kohl’s Cash” promotion (for instance — buy $50 of merchandise and get a $10 gift certificate, etc). What Kohl’s has been doing with their Page, however, isn’t to use these discounts to attract fans – rather, they are using their Page as a customer service portal, and a rather active one at that. That’s not to say that they aren’t using their Page to broadcast out these offers – they are – but as far as we can see, they are in no way directly leveraging these offers to increase their number of fans. Facebook users are just signing up as fans because Kohl’s is making these great offers while offering good customer service on their Page.

Facebook has been building out its Pages product for businesses, brands, and celebrities since last year — and as the site has boomed to well over 300 million people, Pages have become an increasingly important way for any organization to reach users. Sensing opportunity, a number of companies have been starting up or expanding to provide services for Page owners.

Pages, as opposed to personal profiles, are designed for public conversations between fans and celebrities, companies, non-profits or other people and organizations. The companies that develop products for Pages generally tend to provide a customizable suite of services, including engaging applications like polls and quizzes, moderation tools, and analytics. Conceptually, this is an extension of the online marketing products industry that serves web sites, and similar in some ways to the range of products that have also been coming out for microblogging service Twitter.

Below, we’ve provided brief descriptions of 9 top page services companies, including the specific types of services they provide. Please note that neither the list of companies nor the services they provide are complete. This is rather a snapshot of what we’re seeing in the industry now. Here are the companies, in alphabetical order:

Buddy Media

Buddy Media was originally focused on creating a loyalty program called Acebucks, then became an application developer and advertising network, then followed the growth of pages by creating a platform that offers a range of services to brands, listed below. It now has 40 people in New York, and it has raised $8 million to date from a who’s-who lineup of social web investors. Features include custom pages, custom apps, and custom Facebook Connect integration, Twitter monitoring, targeted Facebook advertising campaigns and analytics. It was worked with a large and diverse group of well-known brands including: New England Patriots, Starwood Hotels, Busch, Fox News and Reebok. More recently, the company launched a custom page for the Twilight series that includes polls and virtual gifts.

Context Optional

In business since 2006, San Francisco-based Context Optional has a long list of big clients, and competes with Buddy Media in many areas. Clients include Travel Channel, Palm, Smart.fm, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Miller and Absolut. The company has developed some of the formative branded apps and app-page integrations on Facebook. It recently launched a new set of tools for page moderation late last month. Other features include custom apps and Connect integration, targeted Facebook advertising campaigns, apps for the iPhone and other platforms, brand monitoring services for Facebook and Twitter, and analytics.

Fan Appz

Fan Appz has been a bit quieter than some of the other companies on our list, but also makes a suite of applications for page owners. These include an app for making a top 5 list, another for making polls, and a third for making quizzes. Page owners can add any of these apps within their page interfaces, via Facebook’s admin settings; celebrities like basketball player Rajon Rondo and comedian George Lopez, as well as the movie New York, I Love You. It has raised an undisclosed amount of money from undisclosed investors.

Involver

San Francisco-based Involver focuses on building custom applications for big brands, with a range of multimedia, polls, and other features. In April, it announced a deal to sell content in branded apps in pages for Us Weekly and a range of other media publications. Last year, it has raised $1.44 million in a first round of funding from angel investors. It has also running surveys, polls, and other features with clients like Domino’s.

LiveWorld

Already an established provider of community and moderation tools for major brands on the web, the San Jose, Calif. company only moved on to Facebook a few weeks ago. It offers a forums app, a question-and-answer app and a third app that solicits users ideas; the company also provides a range of moderation, analytics and consulting services. While it works with eBay and many other top companies on the web, its first and so far only announced Facebook customer is Campbell’s Soup.

theKBuzz

Based in Glendale, New York, the company has traditionally focused more generally on word-of-mouth marketing, including consulting services. On Facebook, it offers a range of services for large and small clients. One set of features is called theFaceLift, and as the name suggests, comes with a long list of detailed features for anyone just starting a page, like customized apps. Additional services include daily page monitoring and monthly reports about things like responses to content and fan acquisition. A long list of clients ranges from 1-800-Flowers to Uno Chicago Grill to Queens Chamber of Commerce.

Vitrue

The Atlanta, Georgia company has a few different sets of software services, some of which also integrate in to Twitter. One is called the “Social Relationship Manager” and it includes ways to customize Pages, plan a schedule of marketing efforts on the page, as well as measure and moderate Page activity. Another, the recently-launched “Fan Management System,” lets a large organization create and manage sets of federated pages for local parts of the business; it includes both a central administrative tool and a customizable interface for individual pages. And, the company has free-standing applications designed for pages, including polls, quizzes, email sign-ups, and more. Clients include Ford, AT&T, MTV, and recently this interesting Yoplait fundraiser. It has raised a total of $12.2 million in funding from venture investors as well as Comcast.

Votigo

Focused on making viral photo and video contests for social media in general, this Lafayette, Calif. company provides a range of customizable features for these contests on Facebook. Pages owners can create custom apps, add the app to their pages, upload their own videos, moderate comments and track usage with an analytics feature. Clients have included Simmons Beautyrest and Kohl’s. The company has raised $1.27 million from Headwaters Holdings.

Wildfire

This small Palo Alto, Calif. company focuses on building customized promotion apps for brands, including sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, and more. Back in 2008 its founders were running a travel adventure company at the time, and were looking for a better way to promote the company on Facebook — them solving their own problem led to creating this company, the story goes. The company was an fbFunder Facebook incubator winner earlier this year, and has been used extensively by Facebook itself to offer app and promotional contests. Other clients include Pepsi and Red Bull.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with Facebook Marketing Service Provider Directory, and the rest of our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

We’re seeing a few distinguishing trends continue this week on our list of the top 20 applications with the most new monthly active users on Facebook. Zynga‘s FishVille continues to surge, crossing 20 million monthly active users yesterday, riding weekly growth of 4.68 million, according to AppData.

The virtual aquarium game is now the eighth-largest app on Facebook. It is catching up with CrowdStar‘s Happy Aquarium, the formative game in the genre and still the largest with 27.3 million monthly actives.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FishVille	20,640,953	+4,682,818	+22.69
2.	Happy Pets	5,134,179	+2,189,637	+42.65
3.	FarmVille	68,612,159	+1,770,275	+2.58
4.	21 Questions	5,162,440	+1,435,470	+27.81
5.	Café World	30,538,671	+1,082,156	+3.54
6.	Zoo World	3,178,335	+1,018,739	+32.05
7.	Snowball Fight	2,300,309	+1,017,614	+44.24
8.	Fish Isle	1,675,730	+1,005,194	+59.99
9.	Hug Me	4,466,232	+812,454	+18.19
10.	Champions Online	1,401,493	+677,693	+48.36
11.	Friend Quiz	7,270,541	+657,976	+9.05
12.	Island Paradise	7,358,436	+648,800	+8.82
13.	Ultimate Slot Machines	697,245	+626,449	+89.85
14.	Happy Thanksgiving!	665,502	+614,784	+92.38
15.	Medical Mayhem	701,038	+571,967	+81.59
16.	Give Hearts	8,603,966	+564,637	+6.56
17.	Facebook for iPhone	18,689,428	+563,461	+3.01
18.	Band of Heroes	1,269,648	+538,476	+42.41
19.	建立你的測驗	809,334	+437,103	+54.01
20.	Treasure Madness	2,004,565	+429,933	+21.45

Meanwhile, CrowdStar’s latest game, Happy Pets, has been coming up as well. It grew by 2.19 million monthly actives this past week to reach 5.13 million, making it the second-fastest growing app. Zynga’s massive FarmVille, however, was in third, with 1.77 million new users for a total of 68.6 million monthly actives.

In terms of non-game applications with growth, we have the usual quiz and gifting and poking apps. One quiz app, 21 Questions, is at number four, having grown by 1.44 million new users to reach 5.16 million; another one, further down, is Friend Quiz. Gifting and poking apps include seasonally-themed Snowball Fight and Happy Thanksgiving!, as well as RockYou‘s Hug Me and 6 waves‘s Give Hearts.

Anyway, back to games. Zynga’s Café World is on the list yet again, growing by 1.08 million to break the 30 million monthly active user mark. RockYou’s new one, virtual zoo-keeping game Zoo World, is also seeing ongoing growth, having grown by 1.02 million to reach 3.18 million in the past week.

Looking on down the list, you can also see a few other striking ones. IGG Inc.‘s Fish Isle has quickly hit the big league’s, after only launching a few weeks ago. The high-quality fish-farming game is only a month old, and an early foray by a massive multiplayer online gaming developer into social gaming. This app, and it’s developer, are off to a very solid start.

LOLapps is also back on the list again, with Champions Online and Band of Heroes both seeing significant growth.

And the new hospital genre of sim game is on, as well. We noted Medical Mayhem last week — it has you run a virtual hospital (fun, huh?) — and it has grown by 572,000 in the past week to reach 701,000. We’re assuming there will be a HospitalVille out within the next few weeks.

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook – December 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, Italian, and print.

The densely-packed Facebook Marketing Bible contains four detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, Tools for Application Developers, and Tools for Webmasters. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

In addition, Inside Facebook is happy to announce that through December 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms). Now that Facebook has crossed the 325 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience inside Facebook.

The December 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Detailed updates on Facebook’s latest home page redesign, and what it means for Page owners and developers. Now that Facebook has moved back to a “Top Stories” view of the News Feed by default, new rules apply for maximizing your reach and engagement within Facebook. We’ve broken down all the new rules and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook than ever before – including details on other new features like status tagging, status targeting, Twitter integration, why marketers should choose Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups, key SEO strategies every Facebook Page owner should know, and the best tools to manage your Facebook Page. See the table of contents below for more details.
• The latest updates on Facebook’s advertising tools, including the Advertising APIs and several powerful new targeting features, like “friends of connections” targeting. Now that Facebook’s new Ads Manager here, Facebook Ads are becoming more efficient to use than ever before. And, with Facebook’s new “connection” targeting, “friends of connections” targeting, birthday targeting, and time scheduling tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in more targeted ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new Promo/Sweepstakes guidelines for Pages. Facebook recently updated the policies that all marketers must abide by when conducting sweepstakes or promotions inside Facebook. We have all the details.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new developer Gift Shop program and “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency payment service for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues) – including Facebook’s latest international currency efforts.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, including the new Live Count widget. With Facebook Connect (now available in dozens of languages) and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
• New tools for advertisers to target their Facebook Ads better than ever before. With enhanced Facebook targeting tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in much more powerful ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• Plus, more updates on Facebook’s new “Fan Badge” widget, website translations functionality for Facebook Connect, recent enforcement actions and rule changes for Facebook Platform ad networks, and more.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $149 with 12 months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

Another week has passed in the social gaming world, and despite the holidays, there’s still quite a bit happening. Understanding the lethargy that sets in after a heafty turkey dinner, here are some quick links to Inside Social Games headlines this past week:

Monday, November 23, 2009

• Beyond Bookmark Me! Become a Fan of This App! Is the Latest Way Games Get Facebook Users
• Fish Games Entertain the Multitudes On This Week’s Fastest-Growing Facebook Games List
• The Latest Stats on Zynga: New Traffic, Revenue and a $1 Billion Valuation?
• Dream World is a Facebook Role-Playing Game That Lets You Control Virtual Combat

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

• With #1 Hit iFarm, PlayMesh Shows iPhone Users Also Like to (Virtually) Farm
• Russian Gaming Company Nival Network Raising $5 Million
• Playfish Preparing to Launch Poker Rivals, Its Newest Facebook Game
• Neopets Creators See New Success on Facebook With Meteor Games

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

• In Search of Benchmark Data for Facebook Game Application Bookmarks
• Football From the Sidelines: GridIron Live
• IF: Facebook Talking to Developers About New Plans for Its Virtual Currency
• More Fresh Fish Among This Week’s Facebook Games With The Most Daily Active Users

Thursday, November 26, 2009

• Vikings of Thule Brings More Play to Facebook Role-Playing Games
• Yes, Virtual Goods in Social Games Are Also Getting Black Friday Discounts

Friday, November 27, 2009

• A Wide Range of New Facebook Games Hit This Week’s Up-and-Comers List
• Two Tips and Two Tricks for FarmVille
• Social Gaming Roundup: Mainstream Virtual Goods, Star Fever Agency, FSU, and More

The latest Facebook redesign test screenshots have surfaced on a few users’ accounts, and in many ways they look like what we’ve seen before. Key Facebook communication channels — notifications, requests and messages — are appearing on the left side of the top navigation bar, a change that went into live testing at least a month ago. The new left-hand bookmark bar now appears, which is something Facebook showed previews of during its developer roadmap event earlier this fall.

But there are clearly some big, previously-unseen changes, at least judging by the screenshots that a French-language tech blog has seen.

Since the last test screenshots we saw, the search box has gotten a lot bigger, and moved from the right-hand side of the top navigation bar over next to the three communication channels. Facebook is increasing the priority of search this design — which should also mean an increased volume of real-time status updates searches as well. Meanwhile, the other items in the top bar have moved right. These include, from left to right: Home, Profile, Inbox, Friends and Account.

The current design also shows you your name in the top nav bar — although it takes you to the same place as Profile does. So the latest design takes out that redundancy. However, the new design now appears to duplicate the inbox, since that feature shows up as on icon on the left-hand side of the bar and in text (“Inbox”) on the right-hand side.

Notifications have until now included items from third-party applications. However, Facebook has separately said that it plans to remove third-party notifications. We assume that only Facebook’s own notifications now appear here, items such as likes, wall posts, comments, and photo tagging.

The Account tab now appears to include everything from the button until now known as Settings.

Among other changes, Photos appears to have a new interface. Instead of a window showing a few albums together with a chronological list of all photos you’re tagged in, you can now apparently view many photo albums at once. In the screenshots, you can also see a new sub-menu for Photos within the new bookmarks colum, where you can sort by things like recently tagged photos, or uploads.

Facebook’s Events app is also getting a change, appearing in the bookmark column and including sub-menus for friend’s events, birthdays and past events.

All in all, we’ve seen most of these changes before, in one form or another. But it’s still not clear which interface iteration will be the one to launch for everyone.

A promising range of new applications has shown up in this week’s up-and-comers list, including some less familiar game genres, seasonal apps and more.

For those who haven’t been following recently, this list is derived by looking at the apps on AppData with between 100,000 and 1 million users, that grew by the most monthly active users in the last week. Inevitably, some apps seen here are simple quizzes or gift-giving types, that have short and uninteresting life-spans. However, this list also provides an early look at high-quality apps that go on to become major hits — like LOLapps’ string of role-playing games released in recent weeks, including Champions Online Diva Life, Yakuza Lords, and more.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Ultimate Slot Machines	484,198	+484,148	+99.99
2.	Medical Mayhem	444,487	+444,186	+99.93
3.	建立你的測驗	600,679	+364,648	+60.71
4.	Happy Thanksgiving!	381,779	+352,993	+92.46
5.	Sexy Santa Helpers	501,685	+349,697	+69.70
6.	Photo Books	498,639	+259,372	+52.02
7.	Snowball Fight!	943,027	+239,335	+25.38
8.	What Type Of Girl Are you?	674,078	+231,229	+34.30
9.	Band of Heroes	881,360	+191,253	+21.70
10.	The Hierarchy	550,764	+187,483	+34.04
11.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	540,930	+179,711	+33.22
12.	Christmas Kisses	176,205	+173,697	+98.58
13.	Ask a Friend	522,568	+171,577	+32.83
14.	Myphotostats	379,006	+150,620	+39.74
15.	BigPrize Giveaways	455,009	+150,102	+32.99
16.	Daily Sex Chance	583,330	+138,475	+23.74
17.	A Special Bouquet Greeting!	774,619	+133,976	+17.30
18.	Бира	134,017	+123,620	+92.24
19.	@Smiles	160,481	+114,702	+71.47
20.	New Moon	282,420	+111,086	+39.33

So today, at number one on the list, we have Ultimate Slot Machines, a game made by Hong Kong-based 6 Waves. In it, you can choose from all sorts of slot machine games like what you’d see in a casino, except you can’t win real money. The game has gone from 0 to 484,000 within the last week, probably partially due to developer cross-promoting it across its dozens of other apps.

In second place, we have Medical Mayhem, made by a little-known developer called Vojo World. Interestingly, the game is being cross-promoted by 6 Waves within the toolbar it runs on various apps. And, similar to Ultimate Slot Machines, this app has grown nearly all of it 444,000 monthly active users within the past week. We’re also interested to see how the medical genre does on Facebook — especially, for American audiences, as Congress debates a major overhaul of the real-life health care system. This game makes you the boss of a hospital (we presume a private hospital, not a government-run one), and tasks you with organizing doctors and nurses to take care of patients as quickly and effectively as possible.

Below these two games, we have 建立你的測驗 (or, “to build your tests,” according to Google Translate). It’s a Chinese-language quiz-creation app that has made this list for the second week in a row, gaining 364,000 new users to reach 601,000 monthly actives. Another non-English app that made our list this week is Бира, or “beer” in Bulgarian. This is the first app from that language to make any of our lists, as far as we know; and yes, it allows you to give your friends the gift of virtual beer.

And, ’tis the season the season for simple holiday gifting apps, including Happy Thanksgiving!, Sexy Santa Helpers, Snowball Fight!, Christmas Kisses and A Special Bouquet Greeting!. Hopefully, these apps have a very happy holiday season; we’re guessing they have a snowball’s chance… of making our rankings once January comes around.

Another notable set of (non-game) apps this week are ones that allow you to print your photo albums, including Photo Books and Myphotostats. The latter is especially interesting because it provides stats on how many people have been tagged in Facebook photo albums with you, and includes the top 3 friends you’ve been tagged with most often.

Finally, we should note that LOLapps has one RPG still on this list, that is close to graduation — Band of Heroes, with 191,000 new users and 881,000 total monthly actives. We expect it to have moved up into the big leagues of apps with more than 1 million users by this time next week.

SocialVibe works with brands to create ways for users to donate money to charity, where users engage in some sort of branded online experience, and the brand make a donation. And for Thanksgiving, SocialVibe has created a Facebook app that is a type of simple fundraising game, raising money for the United Nations World Food Programme.

In Thanksgiving Feast, you and your friends try to create a full meal. You start with an empty Thanksgiving dinner table, then you click to earn some food, like a virtual turkey, yams, or other Thanksgiving fare. Earning food means being presented with some sort of interactive brand advertisement, like a campaign the shoe company Timberland is doing about environmental awareness. You need to engage with the ad — answering a survey question or whatnot — in order to get the food.

Then, you’re taken back to the Thanksgiving table, where you see the virtual food on your plate. From that point, you’re asked to invite more friends to earn their own food.

SocialVibe donates a portion of the revenue from the branded ads in the app to the UN food programme — “For every virtual meal you earn, SocialVibe donates a real meal to a needy family,” as the app’s tagline says. The program, for those not familiar, provides emergency food to families around the world