There are all sorts of new Facebook mobile apps coming out, in most cases prompted by mobile companies trying to compete against Apple’s iPhone. These apps are interesting, and some might one day be quite popular. But so far, the clearest leaders continue to be the iPhone, followed by Research in Motion’s Blackberry. That’s at least judging by what we see on our AppData service.

But before we get into those numbers, the most recent contenders come from Google’s Android operating system. Motorola recently announced a new phone, Droid, that will launch later this week and come pre-loaded with a native Facebook application. Android, unlike Apple, lets third-party applications run in the background, so you’ll be able to do things like browse Facebook from the app while listening to Pandora. Another Android app, AddressBook by Asurion, launched last week. It includes Facebook’s news feed, full profile information, status updates, notes, and many other features of the site, in a seamless interface together with Twitter, MySpace and other social sites.

There’s also the Palm Pre Facebook app that launched with the phone this spring. It has 272,000 monthly active users. There’s Nokia’s latest Facebook app, which became available with the manufacturer’s new N97 device series this fall. Among the other device-specific apps that Facebook lists on its mobile information page, the Android one has 11,000 monthly active users and the INQ one has 53,000 monthly actives, and T-Mobile’s Sidekick has 171,000. There are an unknown number on Sony Ericcson phones, Nokia phones (note the other third-party Facebook apps in Nokia’s Ovi store), and an unknown number on Windows Mobile.

Still, the only apps we know with millions of monthly active users are for the iPhone and Blackberry — and, okay, Facebook’s mobile web site, which can be accessed from any phone with a web browser. Analyzing the popularity of Facebook on mobile devices is difficult. Facebook doesn’t reveal too much about what’s happening. In early September, it said it had 65 million monthly active users — a large chunk of the 300 million users it announced at the time. Here is the other data it has recently shared: Mobile users are almost 50% more active than non-mobile users, and more than 180 operators in 60 countries are “working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.”

Facebook actively works with carriers to build custom version of its service; some users, for example, might get an app that lets them access some Facebook messaging features via SMS. We’ve heard that some of the recent growth in countries like Indonesia can be attributed to localized mobile apps — we’d be interested to hear more about those if readers care to share in comments, below.

There are other reasons why it’s hard to tell how popular phones for other devices are. For example, Facebook’s mobile web site uses GetJar to identify the device that the user is navigating to it on. There are currently more than 10 million monthly active users on the site, according to AppData. When the user hits the mobile page, they get a notification asking them if they want to download the app for their phone model. So whenever that service accomplishes its goal, a user disappears off into the unknown number of Facebook mobile app implementations out there. Facebook also has made Facebook Connect available for Mobile available, which is how companies like Asurion are accessing the site’s data — Connect means there are an unknown number of third-party apps for devices, developed neither by Facebook nor by device-makers and carriers.

Now, here’s the BlackBerry, coming in at 10.7 million monthly actives and 6.03 million daily active users.

Certainly, we don’t know how big Facebook is on established devices and platforms like Nokia, nor how big the Pre and Android might be one day. So, in first place is Facebook for iPhone, with 16.8 million monthly actives and 8.01 daily actives.

It has been almost a year since we first started keeping track of the top 25 gaming applications on Facebook. In early December of last year, the top game was (Lil) Green Patch, with just over 6 million monthly active users. Today, Zynga’s FarmVille is in first place, with nearly 63 million monthly active users.

How times change. Facebook itself has grown from around 130 million monthly active users to more than 300 million. Social gaming has benefited from this growth, and also likely helped drive it.

Here are the highlights from this past month:

• Beyond FarmVille, Zynga’s Café World makes its debut at #2 with a little over 27.5 million monthly users. A number reached in an amazingly short amount of time, having only launched at the beginning of October.
• Happy Aquarium from CrowdStar represents another booming genre: virtual aquariums. The game comes in at #4 with over 22,409,456 monthly actives, pushing Pet Society, YoVille, and Texas HoldEm Poker down to #5, #6, and #7 respectively…

> Continue reading at Inside Social Games

With nearly 80 million active users in 190 countries and 19 currencies, and a strong record of fraud prevention, PayPal is still the single largest payment processor of virtual currency microtransactions inside Facebook applications – despite not having created any special payment products for app developers. Today, however, the company formally released new “Adaptive Payments” APIs that enable app developers to process PayPal payments on the page, instead of making users leave the application experience to go to PayPal’s site.

Basically, this means the friction associated with using PayPal in-app will go down, making it easier for users to buy more virtual currency and goods in social games. Several Facebook Platform payment companies are expected to integrate the new service, with PlaySpan‘s Spare Change and Super Rewards, as well as FundRazr and Payvment, announcing support today. Most offer and payment aggregators offer a variety of payment options, including services from large payment platforms like PayPal and Amazon, as well as new mobile payment services, prepaid cards, and credit cards, in their payment walls.

Here’s how the PayPal widget looks in a screenshot provided by PlaySpan. (However, this is not yet live in the Spare Change app on Facebook.)

Overall, it’s a big move by PayPal that will help it penetrate even more of the free-to-play virtual goods market in social and online games. In the last few years, a plethora of new payment companies have sprung up to service app and game developers, as we’ve been covering extensively here on Inside Facebook and on Inside Social Games.

Facebook itself is testing its own “Pay with Facebook” API for app developers, enabling Facebook users to purchase Facebook Credits (Facebook’s virtual currency) to spend either inside the Facebook Gift Shop or some inside third party Facebook applications. However, you can’t buy Facebook Credits with PayPal. Many have speculated about whether Facebook wants to built out more of the payment layer itself, but we think the company is likely to do more partnerships with payment companies in the coming year like the one it did with Zong recently.

To dig deeper into the virtual goods market, check out our new report: Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009 – 2010.

Travelers looking for deals in New Hampshire have a new source for discounts — the state tourism department’s Facebook page. The board is now offering its fans savings on attractions around the state with its VisitNH Fan Benefit program.

The state’s tourism board launched a fan page, VisitNH, earlier this year, and now has more than 1,600 fans. The new Fan Benefit campaign launched this week, with the first fan perk being a 50% discount on lodging at the Inns & Spa at Mill Falls on Lake Winnipesaukee. The VisitNH Facebook page promises to offer a new discount to its fans each month, and there’s also a discussion initiated by the page administrators to gain more insight into what sort of deals might interest fans.

The VisitNH fan page seems to have a fairly high amount of engagement for its size, and there are plenty of opportunities for fans to interact through discussions, wall posts and photo albums. There are also several photos of a promotional campaign held by the tourism board to highlight New Hampshire celebrities. Celebs range from comedian Sarah Silverman and documentarian Ken Burns to a camel that climbed Mount Washington.

Facebook has changed the default News Feed for users back to an engagement-based algorithmic approach from the real-time fire-hose that had been in place since March. How should application developers adapt?

One thing developers should consider: how getting users to become a fan of their app’s about Page fits into an overall News Feed plan. Now that notifications are going away soon (see the full calendar of upcoming platform changes here), Page updates will become the only in-Facebook app-to-user communication channel. (Developers can still get email addresses and communicate with users more directly.)

This is something top Facebook app developers Zynga and Playfish are already doing.  As you can see, Playfish has integrated a fan box widget through Facebook Connect, and Zynga has added a link to their about page, at the top of their canvas pages to get more fans:

Playfish’s Pet Society

Zynga’s Roller Coaster Kingdom

In general, this approach could reflect the theory on Playfish’s and Zynga’s parts that getting News Feed presence is going to be easier through Page updates than through explicit stream publishing. Why? Facebook announced last week that it will be implementing a new policy on stream publishing prompts, requiring them to only happen upon explicit user interaction (today, they automatically pop up in user flows often). That change could significantly decrease the number of stream stories published by users – making Page updates the best way to get into the stream.

“Fan pages for BIG games receive HUGE amounts of engagements. From likes to comments these stories may remain in a persons feed for hours,” as commenter Laurent Courtines of AOL Games said yesterday.

You may not have a sweet tooth after Halloween last weekend, but lots of people still do for candy-makers on Facebook. In terms of Facebook pages, most of the big candy brands have vanity URLs and well over 100,000 fans. Of course, three companies make up most of the candy market: Mars, Nestle and Hershey’s. We’ll break them down that way in our coverage.

Fan Pages of Mars Brands

Overall, Mars brands have the largest candy presence on Facebook, including the single largest fan page, Skittles. Other significant pages include M&M’s, Snickers and Twix.

With 3.52 million fans, Skittles currently has the 16th largest following on Facebook overall, according to PageData, more than its closest competitor, Reese’s, which has 1.43 million fans. Skittles has a pretty comprehensive page that includes their “Holla” and “Mix the Rainbow” games. Like a majority of the brands covered here, Skittles leaves their Wall wide open for fans to post. Although this leaves their messaging a bit unfocused, it’s hard to argue with the results they’ve achieved so far.

M&M’s has three official pages. The largest, M&M Fans, has 789,000 fans, and features a wide variety of videos and other promotions from the company. The dryly-named M&M’S Brand Chocolate Candies has 296,000 fans. There’s also a much more interesting one, called M&M’S Racing with Kyle Busch, which has only 5,000 fans.

It’s not clear why M&M is splitting pages into one for “fans” and one for the “brand” instead of having a single page. Maybe they’re approaching one Page like a group? That’s a tactic we don’t recommend. Even so, both are getting good traction, with a number of recent posts on each receiving with more than 200 likes and more than 50 comments. On the “brand” page, one photo album in July about an M&M themed Six Flags has received a strong response with 971 Likes to date. We were a little surprised at the scarcity of videos on the “brand” page, though, as M&M commercials are so famous and well liked. It appears M&M Fans is instead running the majority of those.

M&M’s other page — at least that we’ve been able to find — is M&M’S Racing with Kyle Busch. Although small, it’s a good example of how brands can target Pages at specific niches within their fan base. In this case, it reaches across the aisle to another fan-base, in this case, NASCAR. This Page doesn’t reach too high or too broadly, and the interaction with the dual fan-bases is strong.

Also, the Snickers page, with 266,000 fans has a couple of notable tabs – “Translator” and “Causes”. Translator is a game that lets you translate English into “Snanklish” – we put in ‘Facebook’ and it churned out ‘Social Nutwork’. The Causes tab, for the “Feeding America” anti-hunger campaign, is also a nice touch and one that we did not see on any other candy brand’s page.

Fan Pages of Hershey’s Brands

The Hershey’s main Fan page and the Reese’s Fan page are both similarly structured (perhaps the same person runs both pages?) with Hershey’s currently at 752,000 fans and Reese’s at 1.43 million. Engagement is a bit on the low side on the Hershey’s page, and a little more lively on the Reese’s page. Recent wall posts on both have been alternating between Halloween and college football to promote its “I’m A Big Fan” video contest.

Surprisingly, Hershey’s and Reese’s are the only brands that seemed to be really engaging fans on Halloween – we had expected every brand covered here to be plastering their pages with pumpkins and ghosts, but that just wasn’t the case. The Hershey’s page also does a good job of listing their Events and has half a dozen videos (again, commercials). One nice touch on the Reese’s page is that they’ve set up a landing page in a tab called “Reese’s Home” for new users or web searchers to land on, a strategy that is underused by most Page creators. Other brands in the Hershey’s group that have notable Facebook pages include Hershey’s Kisses and the Cadbury brand — although it’s not clear which pages are for the UK company or the brand that Hershey’s operates in the US.

Fan Pages of Nestle Brands

Nestle seems to be big on promotions, contests and apps on their pages for Butterfingers, Nestle Crunch and Kit Kat. The Butterfingers page, with 387,000 fans, has a video contest and a number of promotions. Nestle Crunch, with 111,000 fans has its “Yearbook” app that let’s you build a yearbook from your grade school days, replete with era clothing.

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor – Current Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

Today, Inside Facebook has released the November 2009 edition of the Facebook Global Monitor, tracking Facebook’s growth in detail around the world. The Facebook Global Monitor tracks Facebook’s international metrics for marketers, developers, and analysts to spot trends and opportunities. A few highlights from the report’s findings:

• Facebook’s growth in Asia continued to grow by leaps and bounds in October…
• Facebook is also experiencing an increase in growth in the Middle East…
• Facebook also hit milestones in Germany, Indonesia, Argentina, India, and Morocco in the last month…

The Facebook Global Monitor is a premium service and newsletter produced by Inside Facebook that provides vital data and insight to media industry executives, global marketing and communications firms, analysts, and developers for whom Facebook’s rapid international expansion poses significant opportunities or threats.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $99 per issue, or $395 for a six month subscription. Future monthly updates will be delivered directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic. (Custom reports are also available.) You can reach us at mail AT insidefacebook DOT com with questions at any time.

Each month, the Facebook Global Monitor provides the latest comprehensive data on the expansion of Facebook’s audience in nearly 100 global markets. In addition, the Monitor provides alerts on breakout and cooling markets, as well as our latest in-house projections on Facebook’s growth in each country 30 days, 90 days, and 12 months into the future.

See the full table of contents of the first newsletter below. All reports are based on primary research by Inside Facebook using data from Facebook, and each section is designed to elucidate key actionable trends.

We believe big opportunities exist for developers and marketers to reach and engage the Facebook audience in these rapidly emerging and expanding markets. Cheers to continued growth in 2009!

The Facebook Global Monitor

Tracking Facebook in Global Markets

November 2009

Contents

I. Introduction: The Year That Facebook Went Global

II. Global Market Report

1. Audience Size Today

2. Fastest Growing Audience

• Last 12 months
• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

3. Market Penetration Today

4. Largest Market Penetration Increases

• Last 12 months
• Last 90 days
• Last 30 days

III. Emerging Market Analysis

1. Growth Projections

• Next 30 days
• Next 90 days
• Next 12 months

2. Technical Alerts

• Breakout Markets: Last 90 Days
• Cooling Markets: Last 90 Days

IV. Regional Summaries

1. Africa

2. Asia / Pacific

3. Europe

4. North America

5. South America

V. Country Updates

1. Argentina

2. Australia

3. Austria

4. Bahamas

5. Bahrain

6. Bangladesh

7. Belgium

8. Bolivia

9. Bosnia & Herzegovina

10. Brazil

11. Bulgaria

12. Canada

13. Chile

14. China

15. Colombia

16. Costa Rica

17. Croatia

18. Cyprus

19. Czech Republic

20. Denmark

21. Dominican Republic

22. Ecuador

23. Egypt

24. El Salvador

25. Finland

26. France

27. Germany

28. Ghana

29. Greece

30. Guatemala

31. Honduras

32. Hong Kong

33. Hungary

34. Iceland

35. India

36. Indonesia

37. Ireland

38. Israel

39. Italy

40. Jamaica

41. Japan

42. Jordan

43. Kenya

44. Kuwait

45. Lebanon

46. Lithuania

47. Luxembourg

48. Macedonia

49. Malaysia

50. Maldives

51. Malta

52. Mauritius

53. Mexico

54. Morocco

55. Netherlands

56. New Zealand

57. Nicaragua

58. Nigeria

59. Norway

60. Oman

61. Pakistan

62. Palestine

63. Panama

64. Paraguay

65. Peru

66. Philippines

67. Poland

68. Portugal

69. Puerto Rico

70. Qatar

71. Romania

72. Russia

73. Saudi Arabia

74. Serbia

75. Singapore

76. Slovakia

77. Slovenia

Purchase this report The Facebook Global Monitor – Current Edition Buy PDF: $99 USD OR Buy 6 Month Subscription: $395 USD

78. South Africa

79. South Korea

80. Spain

81. Sri Lanka

82. Sweden

83. Switzerland

84. Taiwan

85. Thailand

86. Trinidad and Tobago

87. Tunisia

88. Turkey

89. Ukraine

90. United Arab Emirates

91. United Kingdom

92. United States

93. Uruguay

94. Venezuela

95. Vietnam

Footnotes & Methodology

Toys R Us has introduced up its annual Big Book catalog of toys — on Facebook, in a new application developed by Context Optional. The application has its own tab, requires users become a fan of the Toys R Us page and allows fans to browse through the 80-page book filled with deals and discounts on toys, games and more.

The Big Book includes deals on hundreds of popular items found at Toys R Us, Babies R Us and through the companies’ affiliated online retail sites. The application also gives users the ability to shop for the items they find, with a link to the Toys R Us site to complete the actual transactions. The Big Book can also be found on the Toys R Us site, where anyone can shop the early deals without needing to become a fan of the Facebook page.

Anyone browsing the Big Book can also share their favorite deals on their walls and news feeds, and there’s a message that can be placed in news feeds when users initially become a fan of the page through the application. The application is more or less identical to the weekly ads that can be found on any number of online retailers’ sites. Developer Context Optional is no stranger to helping brands with campaigns, creating Facebook applications for everyone from Kraft to the Travel Channel.

The application is obviously aimed at enticing shoppers to spend early for the holiday season, with deals and discounts valid through Nov. 26. The company will more than likely be dropping prices even further on select items for Black Friday, but the move is designed to give shoppers an early option to pick up gifts this season. This is probably just the beginning from online retailers, and we expect to see any number of deals and applications on Facebook as retailers attempt to extend the holiday shopping season to help recover from slow sales this year.

We’ve been keeping track of Facebook’s self-reported demographic statistics on the US market for a while now, and here’s the latest update for November 2, 2009. While Facebook says these stats, provided to advertisers, are not necessarily real time, they do give us a sense of how Facebook is growing.

On the whole, Facebook’s US audience grew by 6.8% in October to 94.2 million uniques (compare to latest data from Quantcast, Compete, and comScore). Here’s how Facebook’s gender and age numbers break down as of today:

(Note: about 5% of users do not report either gender or age, and are not included in this chart.)

Where did the growth come from? Primarily from younger audiences. Males 18-25 led Facebook’s demographic categories this month, adding nearly 1 million monthly active users to over 12 million. Females 18-25 also increased in number by nearly 1 million last month. In addition, women 35-44 showed strong growth, while increases in males 35-44 were lower.

While Facebook is still growing most quickly percentage-wise amongst users over 45 – an interesting demographic trend that started earlier this year – the growth rate amongst users under 18 is also picking up. Interestingly, the growth rate of males 13-35 is faster than females, closing the overall gender gap on Facebook somewhat. Women still represent 57% of the overall Facebook audience.

Overall, 48% of Facebook users in the US today are over 35, and nearly 20% of all US Facebook users are over 45. That’s a good sign for Facebook’s brand advertising business, which has brought 83 of the top 100 ad spenders on board, according to VP of Global Sales Mike Murphy.

In the first of many significant changes that Facebook is rolling out to its developer platform, the company introduced a new home page news feed on October 23rd. This new design makes the default view of users news feed an algorithmically-tuned “Top Stories” feed, with the live stories feed still available through the click of a button on the home page. The change may now be significantly impacting the growth and engagement numbers of applications, although the change is so new that this is the first week where we might see meaningful evidence.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Happy Aquarium	22,752,109	+4,400,134	+19.34
2.	Café World	27,977,880	+4,163,216	+14.88
3.	Quiz Monster	12,302,010	+2,265,815	+18.42
4.	Roller Coaster Kingdom	14,518,281	+2,158,859	+14.87
5.	FarmVille	62,923,096	+1,262,767	+2.01
6.	Death Story	1,055,404	+1,055,388	+100.00
7.	Bejeweled Blitz	10,234,486	+846,585	+8.27
8.	Pet Society	21,521,684	+807,488	+3.75
9.	Causes	35,115,566	+742,522	+2.11
10.	Restaurant City	18,012,216	+557,768	+3.10
11.	Facebook for iPhone	16,788,696	+551,573	+3.29
12.	Island Paradise	4,561,588	+544,542	+11.94
13.	Friend Quiz	4,799,588	+487,141	+10.15
14.	friend.ly	4,218,246	+484,610	+11.49
15.	Halloween Haunting	1,484,842	+466,949	+31.45
16.	QuizBone	824,832	+448,767	+54.41
17.	Mobsters 2: Vendetta	3,934,386	+435,068	+11.06
18.	Who was i, in my past life ?	2,223,331	+393,270	+17.69
19.	Your Marriage	6,769,873	+384,507	+5.68
20.	*Sexy City* (Beta)	2,079,499	+355,051	+17.07

And, so, this past week, applications continued to do very well, according to our top 20 apps list drawn from our AppData service — especially apps of the social gaming variety. At least these games are doing well in terms of gaining more monthly active users, as at least some appear to be seeing their daily active user counts level out despite the growth.

However, given all the other changes Facebook has planned for the platform in the next few months, watch for potentially big shifts in our weekly lists going forward.

For those not familiar, there are a few reasons why the news feed changes could be impacting apps. Top Stories uses an algorithm to figure out what your friends are doing that will be most interesting to you, which is in essence how the news feed worked before Facebook switched to the live stream in March. Now, Facebook has said, Top Stories is based in part on engagement factors like how often you comment or like other peoples items — although the company has not made all of the details of the algorithm available.

Also, both the new Top Stories feed and the live feed now contain photos, events and other content that formerly appeared in the “Highlights” section on the right-hand side of the old home page. Putting all this content into the feeds means potentially less room for the stories that users share with each other about their actions in apps.

In terms of the user experience, the result for most users is that they see fewer stories about apps than before. So in order for an app to maintain its daily user base, people actually have to want to use it.

The fastest-growing game this week is virtual decorating game Happy Aquarium, made by a publicity-eschewing company named CrowdStar. The app has had a few big weeks, and this past one it gained 4.40 million users to reach 22.8 million monthly actives. In terms of daily active users, though, the app has stayed relatively flat at around 6 million.

DAUs also appear to have flattened for Zynga‘s latest hit, Café World. The virtual restaurant game gained 4.16 million to reach 28 million monthly actives. But DAUs have apparently flattened since the redesign went into place, with around 7.76 million as of yesterday.

Going on down the list, DAUs appear to have stayed fairly flat for most games. The simpler apps, however, are getting hit harder. At number three in this week’s list, in terms of MAUs, is quiz-making app Quiz Monster. It gained 2.27 million MAUs, but saw its DAUs plummet from around 1.15 million the day before the new stream to around half that on every day after.