In the modern, interconnected world of international finance, DST’s investments in Facebook and Zynga are, generally speaking, not surprising. Sovereign wealth funds have billions invested in banks, government loans, and most other assets around the world.

The most striking things about DST are that it’s Russian (not, say, from western Europe or Japan), and that it is purchasing shares of high-profile Silicon Valley web companies.

The firm announced it had led Zynga’s $180 million round, earlier this week, including what we’ve heard is $50 million for employee and investor shares. At the same time, it has continued purchasing Facebook shares from former employees, after having bought $200 million in Facebook company and employee stock earlier this year.

Neither Facebook nor Zynga are planning to go public any time soon, as the companies have been saying for months. These stock sales, as investors will tell you, is a twist on how private companies have normally had liquidity events — typically it’s a sale or an initial public offering.

We caught up with DST partner Alexander Tamas earlier this week. He’s an experienced banker, based out of London, who helped put the Zynga deal together. Here are some key points that he shared with us.

Inside Facebook: Why no initial public offering for Zynga? How did you get involved in the deal?

Alexander Tamas: Zynga didn’t need an IPO, from a business perspective — the main reason to consider it was liquidity for employees and early investors.

We’ve done well with mail.ru and our gaming companies. We’ve seen success from people paying rather than advertising. We thought: this should fundamentally work in the western world. The common thought had been that users don’t pay in western markets. We reached out to Zynga about a deal.

Zynga is going to be acquisitive in the merger and acquisition scene going forward. Right now, we think that Facebook and Zynga are in their really early stages.

IF: Can you tell us any more about the valuation or the terms that stockholders are getting?

AT: We can’t comment on that. We’d agreed we wouldn’t go into detail.

IF: How does the Zynga investment, and the Facebook investment, fit into DST’s overall plans?

AT: We’re looking for extremely high growth profile web companies. We’re pretty agnostic when it comes to the location of the company. We thought Mark Pincus [the founder and chief executive] and the other founders we invest in have a strong vision for the future, rather than trying to sell in one or two years. And in terms of market position, we invest in companies that are at the top. We think that the number one players can get a disproportionate share of the market.

IF: What about strategic relationships between Zynga, Facebook, and other investments? DST has been separately been buying shares in — if not outright owning — Russian and Eastern European social networks and online gaming companies.

AT: I think in terms of openness when it comes to working together. We do facilitate introductions, if that means we do an intro to a company we own in region. We don’t get involved in operations at Zynga and Facebook.

IF: Can you tell us any more about the relationship between Facebook and Zynga, and how the DST connection fits in?

AT: Overall, Zynga is obviously an important part of the Facebook platform, because it draws a lot of people to the site every day.

IF: A lot of publications have covered the ties between DST and Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov. How do you respond to allegations that he has connections with criminal or otherwise corrupt outfits?

He’s a well-respected businessman in Russia. I also think people take him out of context — he’s only one of our investors overall. DST is still controlled by its founders [Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger]. We have a bunch of other well-respected minority investors, like Goldman Sachs [Note that Tamas and another DST partner, Verdi Israelian, have also both worked at Goldman Sachs].

IF: What are DST’s long-term plans?

We’re organized as a company, not as a fund. We don’t need to distribute money to investors. That means we can take 5 10 15 year view on these companies. This is why it’s so important to find founders who are working for the long-term. The way that people get liquidity is trading in DST shares. There may be a DST IPO at some point, which would give our investors liquidity without them having to sell shares in DST.

We’re more like Berkshire Hathaway than a venture capital firm. That’s what resonated with Mark Pincus and Mark Zuckerberg. We told them: “You’ll never have any pressure to sell or go public. You won’t have to do what’s not right for the business.”

Holiday applications continue to grow through holiday season, and so do games and foreign-language applications on this week’s list of the top 20 emerging Facebook applications.

Remember that this is a listing of apps that have an audience of 100,000 to 1 million monthly active users. The numbers used were for the week ending Dec. 17th.

Four holiday apps appear on this weeks list with Christmas Greetings raising 85 percent for first place. Behind it, Ponzi, Inc. a tycoon-game made by Challenge Games, has managed to snag second place. Ponzi has been building speed for a few weeks now, since its release in mid-November, so we expect it to move beyond this list shortly.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Christmas Greetings	899,204	+760,022	+84.52
2.	Ponzi, Inc.	726,421	+354,187	+48.76
3.	Poker Rivals	900,181	+331,733	+36.85
4.	Happy Hanukkah!	384,784	+306,613	+79.68
5.	funbook 非玩不可	313,386	+271,757	+86.72
6.	Top Fish	556,464	+231,588	+41.62
7.	Youtopia	509,619	+200,721	+39.39
8.	Bubble Popp	363,126	+189,960	+52.31
9.	PayPal WishList	575,477	+158,466	+27.54
10.	快打之王	157,432	+154,376	+98.06
11.	COLLAPSE!	564,991	+151,462	+26.81
12.	Ma Fiche	685,289	+134,691	+19.65
13.	Christmas Animations	348,157	+132,318	+38.01
14.	Kingdoms of Camelot	259,938	+124,638	+47.95
15.	ScroogeOmeter	480,395	+122,728	+25.55
16.	Pro League Basketball	608,219	+119,615	+19.67
17.	Happy Habitat	279,742	+115,552	+41.31
18.	Say Merry Christmas	156,786	+112,644	+71.85
19.	Find My Lover	489,920	+110,953	+22.65
20.	eStats pro	331,238	+107,832	+32.5

Poker Rivals is another month-old app to watch. It is now a routine performer on the up and coming list, and comes in third this week with 332,000 new players or roughly 37 percent of its audience.

Happy Hanukkah! is the most interesting success story this week as the app is the only non-Christmas app to break any of our top 20′s this season. The only Hanukkah-themed app to crack the top 20, the app has seen slow build leading up to this weeks numbers. 290,000 people are using the app this week compared to last. Roughly 80 percent of is audience appeared in the last six days.

Two of the fastest-rising apps this week were Chinese-language titles. One, funbook 非玩不可, has grown 87 percent since its release on December 8 for a monthly active user base of 313,386. The Chinese language niche is interesting due to China’s ban of Facebook — these apps are used by people around Asia and the rest of the world. 快打之王, in eleventh place, is a sort of role-playing game and was released this month along with Funbook. It also grew 98 percent in its first week after being released on Dec. 5th, the largest percent increase this week.

Interestingly, PayPal WishList has seen a large boost this year. The seasonal app has seen interest from people wanting to share their holiday wish list this year, however it may also be from PayPal’s contest for users to share their list for the chance to receive $100. The more friends they share it with, the more chances to win. This is a strategy that is becoming very popular with companies and their Facebook pages.

Finally, holiday apps Christmas Animations, thirteenth, and Say Merry Christmas, eighteenth, show up this week. So does eStats pro, which has been around since September 2008. Meanwhile, an app to watch — due to its suggestive nature — is Find My Lover, nineteenth, which matches friends on your account to who would be good to hook up with.

Asian countries continued to see more Facebook growth in November, gaining 3.86 million people to end at 63.5 million monthly active users, according to our monthly Global Monitor report.

However, as we’ve noted elsewhere, November’s monthly Facebook growth number were significantly lower than in the previous half of the year. In October, for example, Facebook grew by 9.6 million monthly actives in Asia. The reason is most likely a reporting bug. We obtain data from Facebook’s advertising tool. It contains estimate of the site traffic by country, but from time to time isn’t fully updated.

It is, of course, possible that Facebook’s growth has slowed in countries around the world. Our overall numbers for November showed Facebook coming in at 338 million monthly active users, while Facebook itself announced on December 1 that it had reached 50 million monthly active users. In other regions, notably, Europe, growth numbers also came in dramatically lower. We’re waiting to see the December stats before jumping to any conclusions about overall trends in Facebook’s traffic.

Here are the countries that gained the most monthly active users in Asia over the course of November.

Indonesia was on top, with 1.68 million new users. The country currently has the largest number of Facebook users in the region with 13.9 million monthly actives. However, this is still only 6.1% of its 229 million people.

Like Indonesia, other countries that have been gaining fast still continued to do so. The Phillipines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand also grew by hundreds of thousands of users. Meanwhile, many countries with relatively smaller populations have hit what may be saturation points. Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia all have a penetration rate of more than 30%; New Zealand, Israel, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, Bahrain and Maldives all come in between 20% and 30%.

The Facebook Developer Garage is coming to Taipei this weekend, where developers in one of Facebook’s fastest growing countries will be able to hear from Facebook itself and network with other developers in the country.

As we detailed last week, Facebook has seen incredible growth in Taiwan over the last 6 months, from 400,000 in June to over 5.4 million today. As a result, many developers in the country are taking interest in building apps and social games for the Facebook Platform, which is much more open when compared to other popular platforms in the region. However, we’re also seeing some interesting and different usage patterns amongst Taiwanese Facebook users so far as well.

This weekend’s Facebook Developer Garage will be on Saturday, 19 December from 1:00pm – 6:00pm at 資策會科技服務大樓創新廳, which is located at 台北市松山區民生東路四段133 號14 樓 in Taipei (Google Map). Here’s the schedule for the day:

Agenda

1:30 – 1:35 Opening
1:35 – 2:15 Facebook Brand Marketing by Alex Wu*, Facebook (In English)
2:15 – 3:05 Panel Talks: Opportunities and Challenges on the Facebook Platform

• 劉威廷, cardinalblue
• 大河馬, cacaFly
• Tony Wang, island7
• tempo, Gamelet
• moderated by Mr.6

3:05 – 3:20 Break
3:20 – 4:00 How Virtual Currency Works on Facebook by Nick Talarico*, Director of Publisher Development, Offerpal Media (In English)
4:00 – 4:40 Lightning Talks
4:40 – 5:30 Networking
* To Be Confirmed

The Garage organizers are expecting as many as 350 attendees. To RSVP, check out the Facebook Event.

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

In the latest move by privacy advocates against Facebook’s recently revised privacy settings, ten groups have filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission. The complaint says that recent changes, which we’ve covered in detail, “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations.”

The complaint was led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Other signees include the American Library Association, the Center for Digital Democracy, the Consumer Federation of Privacy Rights, Privacy Activism, the Privacy Rights Now Coalition, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and the U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation.

Facebook has fired back with the following statement:

We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes, and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.

The company also tells MarketWatch that it has previously talked with the FTC about the changes.

Earlier this month, Facebook released a new set of privacy changes that encouraged users to make more of their information publicly available. The change has been criticized for not clearly telling users what information would be shared publicly. See our full analysis here.

Facebook’s Data Team has just published a report called “How Diverse is Facebook?” in which the company analyzed the surnames of U.S. users in order to estimate a breakdown of US Facebook users by ethnicity. The conclusions? While Whites and Asian/Pacific Islanders have historically been more represented on Facebook compared to the US population, Facebook’s user diversity is increasingly mirroring that of the overall US populace.

The objective of the study was to “understand how different populations of users join and use the service” with the ultimate goal of understanding “how these populations of users are connected to each other.” Overall, the report noted that particularly in the past year, Facebook users “nearly mirror” the diversity of the country, with Whites leading the number of users, followed by Blacks, Hispanics and Asians/Pacific Islanders.

The report also examined “saturation” by ethnic and racial groups, defined by Facebook as a fraction of its users as compared to a fraction of Internet users by ethnicity. Facebook found that Asian/Pacific Islanders have been much more likely to be on the site than Whites over time. Hispanics are currently 80 percent as likely as Whites to use Facebook and Black users are about as likely to be users as Whites.

Facebook’s data on age and gender, which we analyze monthly, is also a valuable tool for developers and marketers looking for understand more about Facebook users.

The authors of the report, Facebook analysts Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow and Itamar Rosenn, used the U.S. Census Bureau’s Genealogy Project’s data set including the frequency of popular surnames with a breakdown by race and ethnicity to analyze users’ surnames.

They pointed out that, while such predictions are often deceiving, they are correct in aggregate, and added that other statistical models were used to mitigate such problems.

In the largest funding to date in social gaming, leading developer Zynga Tuesday night announced it has raised $180 million from a group of investors led by Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies. Some of the money will be used for expansion, but some will also be used to let employees and investors sell a portion of their stock.

The significance of the move, as we covered on Inside Social Games, is that the company is not planning to go public any time soon. With revenue of more than $200 million this year, and the new funding money available for internal growth or acquisitions, it does not have a clear reason to expose itself to the demands of the public markets. In an interview with DST partner Alexander Tamas, he reiterated to us that Zynga — like Facebook — didn’t need the money, but rather wanted to provide liquidity for employees and investors.

The funding will also play an important role in fending off what appears to be increasing competition.

One rival, Playfish, was purchased by gaming giant Electronic Arts earlier this fall in a deal worth up to $400 million. Now, Playfish’s executives are taking leading roles within EA. Not only do they have EA’s money, engineering talent, and marketing muscle, at their disposal, but also EA’s long list of gaming franchises. Perhaps next year we will see versions of, say, FIFA, Madden, or The Sims emerge as Facebook apps, or as sites that allow people to play with friends Facebook Connect.

Another long-time competitor, Playdom, has also recently raised a significant $43 million round with the intention of continuing to grow from its core user base on MySpace on to Facebook.

Meanwhile, a crop of new social gaming rivals have emerged, notably CrowdStar. That company has been able to generate a string of games in the last few months that have grown to millions of users.

And not to be forgotten, other traditional gaming companies are also seeing some good results. Popcap Games, for example, has seen a solid success in the Facebook version of its classic Bejeweled Blitz game. Other gaming companies, from Asian massive multiplayer online game developers to casual and Flash game developers, and virtual worlds, all are increasing their experimentation with social gaming on Facebook.

If Zynga is going to go public, it will need to prove to the market that its popularity and its revenue streams are here to stay. Satiated employees and money in the bank are two key ways for it to accomplish this. Look for it to buy more small game developers that fit into its strategic goals.

“Zynga is going to be acquisitive in the merger and acquisition scene going forward,” Tamas tells us.

Raising the money from DST also firms up the connection between Zynga and Facebook itself. The group of investors that DST led includes hedge fund Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Not only is DST a major investor in Facebook, but Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, is also on Facebook’s board of directors.

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

Facebook sends a lot of email notifications when users post on friends’ walls or comment on status updates. Now, Facebook is starting to let some users reply by email to post comments on status updates, as opposed to having to switch from email to Facebook to do so. However, the test is only available to a small percentage of users so far.

The feature works for any status thread you’re a part of, not just your own status. You may participate by clicking on an email from Facebook in your inbox, hitting reply, typing out your response that will go to a Craigslist-like long-form email, and then hit send. The tests were also spotted by Download Squad earlier this week.

Facebook has just launched an enhancement to the “relationship status” field on user profiles for anniversaries. Now, when users list themselves as in a relationship, engaged, or married, they’ll get the chance to enter their anniversary date as well. Those who choose to do so can show their anniversary on their profile for friends, everyone, or a custom group of friends (depending on their privacy settings) to see. Here’s how it looks:

In addition, Facebook is adding annual anniversary reminders to the “Events” section of the home page – but just for your OWN anniversary. While this will be helpful for not forgetting that special day for yourself, Facebook isn’t adding your friends’ anniversaries to this section yet (though Facebook says it will do so in the future).

Overall, it’s a nice addition by Facebook that should be valuable for users who want to share this information with friends. Facebook has become a very popular way to wish friends happy birthday, and there’s no reason the same shouldn’t be true for anniversaries as well.

Anniversaries could also offer Facebook another way to add incremental virtual goods revenues. Over the last year, Facebook has been building out its Gift Shop, and over recent months has been increasingly promoting virtual gifts on friends’ profile pages on their birthdays (including scheduled birthday gifts). It could easily do the same for anniversaries.

While buying a virtual rose may not earn you too many points with your significant other, virtual gifts could be a nice additional way for friends to celebrate with couples on their anniversary.

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

We often get asked for recommendations about trusted service providers for application development, Page development, and marketing strategy. A list of the companies we recommend is provided in our Facebook Marketing Bible. We also recently published our list of 9 Top Companies That Provide Facebook Page Management Tools.

But today, Facebook itself is starting its own “Preferred Developer Consultant Program” in order to help interested companies and organizations find third party service providers officially blessed by Facebook. The 14 companies included in the program at launch are:

• Archrival
• Buddy Media
• Context Optional
• Fluid
• Involver
• iPlatform
• Kresma Design
• Shuffle Interactive
• Sprout
• StepChange
• Stuzo
• Terralever
• Vitrue
• Wildfire

As you can see, the list includes companies that provide application and Connect development, as well as Page service providers. Eventually, it plans to include more companies in the future, says Justin Osofsky, who works on the Facebook Platform team. Interested parties can register their interest in applying to the program here.

It makes sense that Facebook would create its own list of “recommended” developers. Although the company can’t guarantee their work, it’s a helpful step for the ecosystem overall.