Facebook introduced a new, 3.03 version of its native iPhone application over the weekend, with the only changes being a few “bug fixes” and Chinese and Japanese language translations. That doesn’t sound like a huge update — it just means that you can now see Facebook in those languages when you select choose them in your iPhone settings.

But the fact that Facebook did these two translations is pretty interesting for a few reasons.

First, the iPhone app is the most popular native mobile Facebook app in the world, with 17.7 million monthly active users and 8.57 million daily actives as of today, according to our AppData analytics service.

And, up to this point, it has only been available in European languages, including English, Spanish, French, German and Italian, That’s not surprising, considering that most Facebook and iPhone users are in North America and Europe.

Meanwhile, Facebook has been growing fast across Asia, as we covered last week: The region, broadly defined to include the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, grew by nearly 10 million people in October to reach 60 million monthly active users.

So why Chinese and Japanese? After all, Facebook is banned in mainland China, although 58,000 people apparently access it via proxy software last month. And the site has not found its legs in Japan, where it has only 795,000 monthly actives.

The Chinese translation is still a good fit with Facebook’s current demographics, though, because the site is huge in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Pacific Rim countries with a lot of Chinese speakers, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States.

Why Japanese, and not other languages that have lots of Facebook users, like Portuguese, Malay, or Tagalog or Arabic? Facebook, for example, has quickly grown to 7.21 million monthly actives in the Philippines.

One reason may be that the iPhone has been doing increasingly well in Japan, and perhaps Facebook is hoping to capitalize on this success? Japan is one of the most developed countries in the world, and its mobile infrastructure is, too. And also, Facebook’ pseudo-rival, microblogging service Twitter, has been popular in the country for some time, and just got a new Japanese-language mobile site last month.

Anyway, this is all speculation. Also of note is that Facebook apparently has a new iPhone app developer, former Apple software engineer Owen Yamauchi — he recently replaced the app’s creator, Joe Hewitt. Last week, Hewitt announced he was quitting development on the app, out of disgust with Apple’s restrictive app development and approval environment. Yamauchi is now listed as the developer on the official Facebook for iPhone page, this appears to be his first update, and we’re interested to see what he comes out with next.

We’re seeing a lot of familiar pages on our list of the ones that gained the most fans this past week — pages for social games, the Turkish flag, etc. Here’s a look at the most interesting ones, that are showing the most consistent day-to-day growth on our PageData service.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Monster Energy	686,256	+443,926	+183.19
2.	Texas Hold’em Poker	4,237,265	+404,422	+10.55
3.	Lil Wayne	2,586,174	+340,735	+15.17
4.	George Lopez	840,416	+228,732	+37.39
5.	Coca-Cola	3,996,865	+223,299	+5.92
6.	ZARA	1,582,223	+223,006	+16.41
7.	Mafia Wars	5,648,836	+218,872	+4.03
8.	Outback Steakhouse	282,930	+198,603	+235.52
9.	Türk Bayrağı	1,716,267	+176,221	+11.44
10.	Big Prize Giveaways	1,900,238	+125,822	+7.09
11.	Disney	2,139,812	+117,311	+5.80
12.	Sears	142,988	+114,049	+394.10
13.	The Reader’s Nook	180,258	+113,161	+168.65
14.	WONDER GIRLS	175,859	+99,383	+129.95
15.	Lady Gaga	4,346,088	+85,671	+2.01
16.	Disney Pixar	663,141	+75,174	+12.79
17.	Owl City	853,697	+74,553	+9.57
18.	Ryan Allen Sheckler	841,287	+72,017	+9.36
19.	National Guard	156,135	+70,319	+81.94
20.	The Artist’s Studio	88,903	+69,302	+353.56

Comedian George Lopez has a new late-night television show, Lopez Tonight. Perhaps the show, or advertising for it, his page has shot up by 229,000 fans to reach 841,000. Sure, 131,000 of those new fans were added on the 10th of the month, in what was probably Facebook folding in unofficial Lopez pages in to official ones. We normally don’t cover that sort of one-off growth, because it doesn’t signify that the page owner is doing anything interesting. In this case, however, Lopez’s page has continued growing since, by more than 10,000 fans each day. Either Lopez or a representative is keeping the page active with frequent updates. Interestingly, the page also advertisers a new, separate page for Lopez Tonight.

Outback Steakhouse also has a fast-growing page on today’s list; the restaurant chain has been running a giveaway promotion where it promises a free serving of “Bloomin’ Onion” onion rings to the first 500,000 to become fans. The company is not the first in its category to give away free food in order to gain fans, but the concept once again seems to be working. It has grown by nearly 200,000 since last week, to total 283,000 fans.

Disney is also continuing to see strong page growth — by promoting each new movie it releases on its page, instead of trying to create separate pages for each one. That’s a tactic other page owners should consider, as putting all fans into one page means they’re more likely to engage with each other about what you have to share with them. The latest movie appears to be “The Princess and the Frog,” following up on last week’s “A Christmas Carol.” The page, meanwhile, gained 117,000 to end with 2.14 million fans. Disney’s Pixar Studios also shows up on this week’s list, although there’s no big, new reason why, that we can see. There’s no new movie it’s promoting, and instead the featured video clips are behind-the-scenes stuff. Still, the page grew by 75,000 new fans to reach 663,000.

Other consistently-growing pages include musician Owl City and actor Jet Li, both of whom showed up last week. Owl City has a hot single out (or at least some people think so), which explains how it made the list. Jet Li doesn’t have any new movie out, though, so he seems to be growing based on his long-standing international popularity.

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, November 9, 2009

OpenFeint Gold Program Tries to Help Market iPhone Games
EA Buys Playfish in Deal Worth Up To $400 Million
Top Game Growth Slows, More Companies Rise on This Week’s Top 20 List
Playfish COO: EA Acquisition Validates the Future of Virtual Goods in Social Games
Slide Gets Into the Virtual Aquarium Business with Top Fish

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

From Boards to Mobile, EA to Release Classics this Winter
Hive7 Releases New Facebook Soccer RPG: Kick Off
Social Media Study: Women Like Brands, Love Virtual Currency
Popcap Games’ Bejeweled Blitz: A Casual Game That Has Gotten Big and Social On Facebook

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Yack Attack: Weak Stomachs Beware
With Hit Social Game Happy Aquarium, CrowdStar Steps Into the Spotlight
Playdom Raises Big New Round
Pogo Puppies: A Well-Built Pet Game From Fuel and EA

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Which Virtual Aquarium Game is Right For You?
Three More Social Gaming Startups Announced Funding This Week: Wooga, Playfire, Six Degrees
Playdom Buys Green Patch and Trippert Labs — On the Way to IPO?
Law Firm Looks Into Class-Action Lawsuit Over Social Game Scams

Friday, November 13, 2009

Finding the Legit Games in This Week’s Up-and-Coming Apps List
Talking With Accel’s Kevin Comolli About This Week’s Playfish Acquisition
FishVille Gets Millions of Users in First Week, But Sees Slower Growth Than Past Zynga Titles
Satirizing Corporations With RPG Game Ponzi Inc.

Meebo, an instant messaging company that offers an IM aggregator site as well as a toolbar that runs on other sites, has been using Facebook in a few different ways to beef up its features. So we caught up with chief executive Seth Sternberg recently to hear how things are going.

The company, notably, just announced a deal with Nielsen Business Media, and the toolbar will start appearing on the publication’s network of sites, including The Hollywood Reporter, AdWeek and MediaWeek. In case you’re not familiar, the toolbar lets you chat with friends on a wide range of IM networks while using the site that the toolbar’s on; it also lets you share items from any page with the toolbar with your IM friends, or with your friends on Facebook and Twitter (and, also just announced, Yahoo), and with your email contacts. The company currently reaches 34 million people in the US and 94 million worldwide.

In terms of sharing on the toolbar, Sternberg tells us that as a portion all items shared, Facebook and email are about equally popular with mainstream news and social sites, with Twitter being about a third as popular. Meanwhile, for tech-focused news sites, Facebook and Twitter are used about the same amount, with email being the less popular method. In other words, he sees Twitter replacing email for link-sharing among tech-types, while Facebook holding its own among all audiences. He didn’t provide how much sharing happens, but this is still an interesting data point.

Here’s how the toolbar enables sharing. You either need to sign in using both Meebo and Facebook Connect from the toolbar, or have signed in to at least Meebo if not both from the Meebo home site. Once you do so, you’ll be able to see and chat with all of your friends on Facebook’s chat service. In the lower-left hand portion of the toolbar, there’s also an option to share items on the page. If you click on it, you’ll see an interface where you can click on links, photos, videos and other content on the page and share them with your IM friends.

By providing the toolbar for other web sites, and integrating social services from Facebook and other sites, Meebo allows a normally non-social web page to become social. The toolbar also includes a pop-out multimedia ad, and it splits revenue from the ad with partner sites. Social features and potential revenue explain how Meebo is managing to sign up more partners — 100 are already live, with another 150 planning to start running the toolbar.

Also, so far, Meebo has been placing less emphasis on promoting Facebook on its home IM aggregator site, because the chat integration requires users to go through the Facebook Connect sign-in process. Other chat service, like AOL’s AIM and Google’s Gtalk, only require you to sign in using your username and password. However, Sternberg says it plans to give Facebook more prominence in the future.

Facebook grew by 1.5 million people in October across the 15 countries we track in the greater Middle East in our Global Market Monitor. A loosely-defined region stretching from Morocco to Pakistan, it is dwarfed by Facebook’s growth in most other parts of the world. In October currently totals slightly more than 12 million monthly active users, out of the 326 million that Facebook had worldwide by the end of the month.

But the growth seems to be picking up — in September, for example, it grew by  700,000, less than half of last month’s increase. Six countries gained more than 100,000 users in October, including Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco.

Of course, the caveat is that we don’t include Turkey on this list, as it is also part of Europe. In that region, it is the second-largest Faceb0ok country, with 15.3 million monthly active users — more than the rest of the greater Middle East, combined.

Monthly traffic stats don’t necessarily show the overall direction of web companies, but we’re seeing a pattern when it comes to Facebook and its most serious competitors, MySpace and Twitter.

Certainly, new efforts by the latter two sites could change things in the coming months — like MySpace’s music features, or Twitter’s new lists and retweet features. For October, though, the big three data firms, Compete, comScore and Quantcast, are all in agreement, and the pattern is the same one we’ve seen in recent months.

1. Quantcast

Facebook grew to 99.6 million monthly unique US visitors last month, with MySpace falling to 54.3 million and Twitter flat-linking at 27.0 million.

2. Compete

Facebook grew to 3.5 percent to reach nearly 129 million monthly US uniques, while MySpace fell to around 50 million and Twitter fell to 23 million.

3. comScore

Facebook grew to 97.4 million monthly US uniques while MySpace fell to 64.0 million and Twitter fell to 19.2 million.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s own advertiser tool shows that it grew by 6.8% in October to 94.2 million US uniques. This number isn’t always the company’s most current, but it’s the closest we can get to knowing what it is seeing internally. ComScore, as in past months, appears to be getting the most similar results, at least for Facebook. Twitter’s traffic numbers are the hardest to discern here, as a large portion of its users access the site using third-party applications.

We have some rather unimpressive Facebook apps in this week’s up-and-coming list, with some very notable exceptions in the gaming category. At the top is one called Addict, a simple app that calculates how “addicted” you are to Facebook based on your recent activity, the completeness of your profile, networks you have joined, your number of connections (friends), and your number of groups, pages and events. Sounds sort of neat, right?

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Addict	601,398	+601,360	+99.99
2.	Snowball Fight!	454,237	+208,287	+45.85
3.	WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?	256,515	+206,430	+80.47
4.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	910,660	+202,711	+22.26
5.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	201,278	+201,233	+99.98
6.	Farmville Gifts	191,197	+186,157	+97.36
7.	The Hierarchy	188,685	+178,264	+94.48
8.	Band of Heroes	268,629	+161,064	+59.96
9.	Yakuza Lords	929,891	+154,539	+16.62
10.	What kind of mask do you wear?	388,509	+153,351	+39.47
11.	Snowball Fight	151,455	+148,475	+98.03
12.	Acımasız Gerçekler	453,156	+113,470	+25.04
13.	商業大亨Web	348,112	+104,328	+29.97
14.	Icy Tower	832,964	+97,581	+11.71
15.	מגדת העתידות	121,452	+87,545	+72.08
16.	COLLAPSE!	178,408	+83,418	+46.76
17.	Huggles	237,396	+82,101	+34.58
18.	SuperPocus	183,098	+77,729	+42.45
19.	MixPod Playlist	698,581	+77,483	+11.09
20.	What Type Of Girl Are you?	220,128	+76,101	+34.57

Unfortunately, the app generates a ranking of your friends without providing any transparency into how it arrived at that number. So, it could be making up any old percentage for each user. And in case you click around trying to figure out exactly what the app is telling you, you’ll find that the “Continue” buttons you thought might take you to answers are actually quiz ads. Basically, this developer doesn’t seem to be too serious about building a high-quality application, but does seem to be optimizing for some short-term revenue. Having gained almost all of its 601,000 users in the past week, this app might be pulling in a little money.

Moving on… the list, as has often been the case in the past, also has a bunch of other simple apps — mostly quiz apps, based around questions like “WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?” and “Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?” These sorts of apps live and die pretty quickly. There’s also a “Farmville Gifts” simple gifting app. As its page notes it’s “[a]n application that sends FarmVille gifts! However, these gifts can’t be sent to FarmVille.” We expect Zynga will send the developer a take-down notice if it gets much bigger.

However, there are some legitimately interesting apps, too. This list is based on filtering AppData to only see the apps that grew the most, that have between 100,000 and 1 million users — the purpose is to find a few promising ones that are on track to become serious hits.

The Hierarchy, a spy role-playing game from Serious Business, continues its climb. It has nearly doubled from when we noticed it at the beginning of the week, reaching 189,000 monthly actives today.

Two other role-playing games are also growing fast, and although neither lists a developer, both appear to be made by LOLapps. While both have the same underlying interface components (more on that over on ISG), each one has surprisingly striking, unique-looking graphics. One, Asian mafia-themed Yakuza Lords, grew by 155,000 users to reach 930,000 monthly actives. It is on its way to graduating from this list. The other app, World War II RPG Band of Heroes, is smaller but growing relatively more quickly. It gained 161,000 to reach 269,000 monthly actives.

Other notables on this week’s list include Ice Climber-style game Icy Tower, which grew by 98,000 to total 833,000 monthly actives. It’s a simple, arcade-style game. So is COLLAPSE!, which gained 83,00 to 178,000 monthly actives. So far, we haven’t seen many casual games of this sort become big, with Popcap Game’s Bejeweled Blitz being the one exception. Perhaps, though, these games show that the arcade style is in the process of becoming a lot more prominent on Facebook?

And finally, and quite interestingly, Slide’s new magical virtual world app SuperPocus is starting to catch some air. It grew by 77,000 to end up at 183,000 today.

Among the 30 Asian countries we track in our Global Monitor, Facebook grew by 9.6 million monthly active users over the month of October, from 50 million to nearly 60 million people. This is still a small fraction of the region, but there are some key countries starting to see new users. The most notable is Taiwan, which increased more than 50%, or 1.72 million people, to reach 5.04 million people, or more than 20% of the island’s 23 million total.

Interestingly, even though Facebook is banned in China, it grew the most out of any Asian country we track, percentage-wise: 300%, or by 44,000 people, to reach to 58,000 monthly actives. Hong Kong, where Facebook is not blocked, grew slowly, but that’s because it has a 37.7% penetration rate already — there’s only so much room left to grow.

The country with the largest absolute gain was Indonesia, which saw 2.48 million new people, and reached 12.2 million monthly actives. India also saw a notable surge, relatively speaking: It grew from 4.23 million to 5.00 million, which is an increase of 33% but also a 0.4% penetration rate. Vietnam didn’t make the top ten list, but it hit a million monthly active users in only a little over a year of being available.

The region is clearly becoming a meaningful part of Facebook as a site and a company. For example,  there are an increasing number of anecdotal reports about users loving social games. In any case, we’re seeing more and more regional developers building popular ones.

Playdom, the largest social game developer on MySpace and one of the larger ones on Facebook, has confirmed a couple purchases we’ve been hearing rumors about recently. It has bought Facebook game developer Green Patch, as well as iPhone developer Trippert Labs, both for undisclosed amounts.

The company announced yesterday that it had raised $43 million in a first round of venture funding, so it is not wasting much time in putting that new capital to use. Green Patch is a mid-sized Facebook app developer company that has grown from its first game, (lil) Green Patch, to a whole line of games with “(lil)” in the title. The largest today is (lil) Farm Life, a virtual farming game that has more than 6 million monthly active users on Facebook, and 1.27 million daily actives.

“We’ve been close to Green Patch since almost the beginning [of the Facebook platform]. We actually work about three blocks from each other,” chairman Rick Thompson tells us. “We’re mutual admirers.” Both companies have pumped out new titles in popular genres of social games.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games

Following Facebook’s recent Platform roadmap announcements, there has been a lot of developer uncertainty about the best ways for applications to continue to communicate with their users. The many changes are going to affect all applications, but some smaller developers without marketing budgets are particularly worried about retention with users who don’t bookmark their apps.

Currently, applications can send something called an “application-to-user notification” to dormant users. When these notifications are removed (possibly as soon as December), these dormant or occasional-use users may be lost to an application forever. (A developer thread devoted entirely to the loss of application-to-user notifications can be found here.)

However there are some hints in Facebook’s announcements that may offer hope.

Application-to-user messages in the feed?

A phrase buried in the “Prominent new Dashboards” section of Facebook’s recent roadmap announcements names “an additional communication channel, called ‘News’ , where you can personalize text updates for users.” Does this offer the prospect of application-to-user stream stories? Early screenshots of the new design (below) may give another clue.

Notice how the “Games” tab is separated into two sections: “Your recent games” and “Your friends are playing”. The second (lower) section appears to be just the regular stream filtered by games applications, albeit grouped by application, but the top half is something new.

The wording of the examples shown in “Your recent games” is different than the other stories: they’re not activity stories published on behalf of other users, but rather they’re messages talking to the user directly. For example, “Your overall record is 50-33! Your rank is Wordsmith. You’re in 12th place, just behind Jonah!”

This is the kind of information that developers have been placing in application-to-user notifications to date, so will there be a new stream taking on this role? The idea generally conforms with Facebook’s aim of simplifying communication channels to the stream and the inbox, yet would mean there’s not the hard cut-off of app-to-user communication that developers had feared.

The precedent for application-to-user story communication

The idea of more “private” types of News Feed stories isn’t so much a new feature but rather the rebirth of an old one (reintroducing old concepts is not something Facebook has shown it’s averse to doing).

Not so long ago (prior to the June 2008 redesign) Facebook had a similar system in place where developers could publish two types of stories. The first type was for actions of the user that would be published to their profile page. These would also appear in their friends’ news feeds (subject to the feed algorithm). Applications sent these by calling the “publishActionOfUser” API method and they have effectively morphed into the stream stories of today.

The second type of story were for the user to see only and were called by the “publishStoryToUser” method. These would appear on the old “Home”, page mixed in with actions of friends, but were eradicated entirely in 2008.

Giving control to the users

This theory fits with Facebook’s vision of giving the user more control of their experience. If a user wants to play games and complete quizzes all day long, then they can, and applications can publish richly formatted messages in this way to keep them engaged and returning – all without filling up the feeds of their friends. This approach allows whatever apps are the most engaging to the user to have the most presence in this channel.

Additionally, the quality of News Feed stories is generally much higher than notification messages (which are text only and have only had space for little else than “Click here to find out more!” and other strong call to actions to date).

How the stories might be implemented

To speculate even further, these are a few ideas about how Facebook may go about balancing the needs of users and developers in a new implementation (and to reiterate, we have no confirmation on this).

• Applications will likely be limited to publishing only a small number of application-to-user messages per day to prevent spamming. Notifications were limited to one per twenty-four hours, and the previous app-to-user stories were allowed twice. So it seems reasonable to expect a similar level of throttling.
• Recently used (and authorized) applications would be able to publish to this feed without additional user action or permission, although this may be time-limited (to publishing within days or weeks of the user visiting the application). And it wouldn’t just be limited to bookmarked applications only – any recently used applications will be able to use the channel.
• The “News” channel will be private to the user and distinct from the stream of stories from friends (the rest of the News Feed), although the formatting may be very similar or even identical.
• There’s no sign that the stories will appear on the user’s default News Feed. Therefore, users will need to go into the “Applications” or “Games” tab to see them. This will likely make the channel less noticeable than the previous application-to-user stories, and certainly less visible than application-to-user notifications, although arguably those users who do actively check this will be the more engaged ones.
• Expect to see controls for “Hide all stories from this application” to combat misuse.

We’ll have to wait for more information from Facebook before knowing any of the above for sure, but there appears to be every reason to be hopeful that, although dramatic changes are afoot on the platform, developers aren’t being left as high and dry as they may have feared.