AT&T is promoting the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 with a Facebook Connect integration that pulls personal info and photos into a movie trailer for a fictional suspense/action flick called “One Step Ahead.” The film clip is very similar to some recent Connect applications that try to make a connection with users by placing their profile information within videos. The “One Step Ahead” trailer is also being cross-promoted through a series of high-profile television spots, including a few during last night’s Monday Night Football game.

Logging in to the application through Connect puts users in the story as a shadowy main character who is using the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 to elude a team of pursuers that is always one step behind. Your profile photo is seen several times in the high-tech war room being used to track the Bold owner, and the character is even seen sending a text to one of your Facebook friends.

We’ve seen Connect used to pull personal info from Facebook profiles to promote products and events through movies several times in the past, from brands like Doritos, The Discovery Channel’s Shark Week and ABC’s FlashForward. This latest example from AT&T doesn’t really offer anything conceptually new, but it’s the first time the cellular provider has used this sort of Connect integration to promote one of its products.

There’s an option to buy the phone through links to AT&T’s wireless store from the “One Step Ahead” site, as well as a breakdown of the new smartphone’s features and several user reviews. There are not, however, links to any sort of product page or brand page for AT&T or BlackBerry on Facebook. Users can share their video in news feeds and through the usual collection of other social networks, but there isn’t an easy route back to any sort of brand presence on Facebook for further information.

AT&T could have done much better with this promotion, as they have a fairly active user presence on their brand page that could give interested consumers a chance to discuss the new BlackBerry and drum up a little more interest and buzz. There’s also a lack of any sort of link or information on the “One Step Ahead” promotion on the AT&T Facebook page, which would also have helped cross promote both the integration and the new Bold 9700. The BlackBerry Facebook page does have information on the new smartphone, but there is no mention of the new Connect promotion.

While recent Zynga games have grabbed the headlines this fall — first Café World, then FishVille and most recently PetVille — virtual farming game FarmVille continues to grow by millions of users every month. Here’s a closer look at the stats for this social gaming hit.

As of today, the game has 72.9 million monthly active users, according to AppData, making it by far the most popular game on Facebook. The closest has less than half the number of monthly actives — Café World, at 32.2 million. Put another way, FarmVille is played by more than 20 percent of Facebook’s 350 million users every single month. In the “long tail” of social games on Facebook, it is the “fat head.”

Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that the game also has grown to have the most daily active users of any app….

>Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Facebook has so far grouped dairy products together with alchohol and firearms under items that it bans from being promoted through its service. But that is going to change.

The Center for Consumer Freedom, an ambiguously-named Washington, D.C. advocacy nonprofit supported by restaurants and food companies, has been making a push to get Facebook to loosen its terms around what sort of food products can be promoted on Facebook. And the effort seems to be working. The Associated Press covered its complaint, and got the following statement from Facebook’s Washington-based manager of public policy communications, Andrew Noyes.

He said Facebook is trying to comply with “state laws that impose penalties for distributing dairy at a discounted rate.”

“We’re all big fans of strong bones at Facebook,” he added, “and we will soon revise our promotions guidelines to lift the complete ban on dairy and simply prohibit giving dairy away as a prize.” So that’s still not great news for any dairy farmers trying to give away free wheels of cheese, but perhaps ice cream chains like Baskin Robbins will soon begin offering free samples of flavors, like what other food vendors have done?

Here’s the current terms:

Section 2. Prohibitions: You may not publicize or administer a promotion on Facebook if:

2.4 The promotion’s objective is to promote any of the following product categories: gambling, tobacco, dairy, firearms, prescription drugs, or gasoline;

2.5 The prize or any part of the prize includes alcohol, tobacco, dairy, firearms, or prescription drugs; or

URL shorteners, like bit.ly, have become a popular way for people to share links on Twitter while taking up as few of the allotted 140 characters as possible. But saving space is just one of the benefits that shorteners provide. Others include getting traffic analytics like how many people are sharing links from which sites. So it’s especially interesting that Facebook is rolling out what appears to be its own URL shortening service, called fb.me.

A URL shortener makes increasing sense as a Facebook feature, because the site is trying to be more open and connected to other web sites and Internet-connected devices.

Facebook recently began automatically shortening URLs that appear in its mobile interface. So, instead of text link to a Facebook photo appear as http://m.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=35877484&id=1310743&l=a373e8038d, you might see it see as http://fb.me/3Bkj7CW, as Polaris Ventures’ Ryan Spoon noticed (see his screenshot, below).

Fb.me also works as a substitute for any other Facebook page. So if you can write http://fb.me/starbucks instead of http://www.facebook.com/starbucks, as blogger Saad Kamal points out, meaning brands with Pages can more easily do things like share links to Facebook on Twitter.

Facebook has spent the last year improving mobile access to its services through its own mobile web site and device-specific apps as well as through tools for developers, carriers and device-makers to build their own apps and services. A shortened URL makes especially good sense here. In the screenshot, showing Facebook text alerts, you can clearly see that the shortened URL provides a simpler, easier to read user interface.

The company has made Facebook Connect a focus this past year, introducing ways for people to sign in to other sites using their Facebook identities and share information back and forth between those sites and Facebook. It has also been pushing users to be more open, most recently changing its privacy settings to get people to make content they share on Facebook also available on the web. It’s possible that the company will make fb.me the default for any content that users share publicly, in the hopes that the shortened URLs make for easier re-sharing.

It would also not be surprising to see Facebook provide analytics around shortened URLs, especially for Page content so Page owners can track web-wide sharing. Other increasingly common shortened URL features, like customizing the URL ending, would also make sense — especially given the option Facebook introduced earlier this year to let users and Page owners create their own vanity URLs.

The search for “Christmas” yields results for around 500 applications on Facbook. A general search for “holidays” gets around 120 app results. “Hanukkah” or “Chanukah”, yields ten results, which is nine more than Kwanzaa’s one. Meanwhile, “Festivus”, the fictional holiday from “Seinfeld” has four apps dedicated to telling everyone just how badly they’ve let you down this year.

But games are even more popular than the holidays, according to AppData. On our list of the 20 applications that gained the most monthly active users this past week, we first have Zynga’s PetVille, which has grown by 9.31 million monthly active users this past week to reach 10.3 million since launching at the beginning of the month. RockYou’s Birthday Cards is at number two, growing by 7.33 million monthly actives to reach nearly 25 million. However, this number appears to also include a version of the company’s Zoo World game, as it has interestingly built Birthday Cards to include a version of the virtual zoo inside of it.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	PetVille	10,250,099	+9,305,801	+90.79
2.	Birthday Cards	24,957,972	+7,326,053	+29.35
3.	Christmas Cards!	8,271,973	+6,685,908	+80.83
4.	Happy Pets	10,351,430	+2,897,321	+27.99
5.	Christmas Cheer	6,001,424	+2,864,071	+47.72
6.	FarmVille	72,898,865	+2,421,869	+3.32
7.	Quiz Planet!	8,207,512	+2,372,374	+28.90
8.	Christmas goodies	3,334,508	+2,353,762	+70.59
9.	FishVille	26,186,935	+2,144,789	+8.19
10.	Snowball Fight	5,849,404	+2,092,222	+35.77
11.	Zoo World	6,185,092	+2,041,084	+33.00
12.	Daily Photo	6,673,737	+1,653,127	+24.77
13.	Mobile	12,715,798	+1,638,398	+12.88
14.	@Smiles	2,140,122	+1,345,941	+62.89
15.	Fish Isle	3,994,610	+1,321,060	+33.07
16.	Friend Quiz	9,418,596	+1,316,758	+13.98
17.	Santa Yourself	1,499,936	+1,090,353	+72.69
18.	O Christmas Tree	3,349,695	+1,070,131	+31.95
19.	Holiday Drinks	1,555,008	+958,106	+61.61
20.	Friends Exposed	16,393,094	+955,453	+5.83

Note that this list looks at which apps gained the most monthly active users in the last week, while our Wednesday list covers the apps that gained the most daily active users in the past week. The MAU number shows the long-term trajectory of an app’s popularity, while DAU shows how many people love it so much that they come back every day; because users tend to pay for virtual goods within apps they come back to every day, the latter number is a better measure of monetization. Also, our Friday list looks the apps that grew by the most monthly active users each week to end with a total of between 100,000 and 1 million — by looking at this lower range, we can sometimes spot smaller apps on their way to becoming hits.

Christmas Cards! is the highest ranked holiday-themed app in the short history of Facebook applications. Launched in November 2008, it ranks 33rd with a total or 8.27 million monthly active users; it’s actually yet another gifting app made with LOLapps’ popular white-label Gift Creator app. While Christmas Cards may only be useful for one month of the year, but in that one month has a larger user base than the amount of people who bought Modern Warefare 2 in the first month a game taunted with the largest entertainment release of all time.

This year shows that people are using apps to branch out and Christmas is a great trial time for app developers who may or may not commit to further seasons. Of the top 20 for monthly active users last week, six were Christmas themed apps, while another four marched their way up on the back end of the top 40.

Christmas Cheer is the stand out of holiday apps released in 2009. Originally put out in October, the app has seen a rapid rise in the last few weeks, finishing 4th for gaining monthly users and a total of 6 million people using the app in the past month.

Meanwhile, while Christmas apps have a high change of trading positions in the top 20 as Christmas time approaches, things are a little tougher for the other holidays. No other holidays, even a general holidays app, appears on any top 20 lists for December thus far. The best chance is for Happy Hanukkah!, which should up in our up and coming list last week, and went up 95 percent for monthly active users this week. Now about 275,000 people are using the service. Plus, with Hanukkah having a whole week dedicated to itself, there is a good chance for this app to see sudden, maybe staggering, growth in the next two weeks.

Startups Present Facebook Integrations at Le Web – European startups Stribe and Tigerlily won first and second places, respectively, at the Le Web startup competition in Paris on December 10.

Stribe lets you add social networking features to web pages, and includes Facebook Connect integration to help kick-start communities. Tigerlily is a tool set that includes contest and quiz widgets to customize a Facebook page, targeted to media companies and large corporations via free and pro versions.

RockYou Makes Staff Changes –  In an effort to boost its focus on brands at the Facebook app developer and ad network, RockYou made some management changes this week, shifting sales chief Lisa Marino to CFO while executives Ro Choy and Mihir Shah left the company to pursue other social media avenues.

The third-largest publisher on Facebook, RockYou has 52 million monthly active users in the U.S. for such apps as RockYou Live and MyGifts, with a total of 215 million worldwide users.

Broadcast Your Facebook Location — Gowalla has released Mobcast, an iPhone app that allows you to broadcast your location to all or chosen Facebook friends. While the app can constantly broadcast your location to friends, like Google Latitude, but must remain open to do so.

Florida Lawyers and Judges Can’t Be Facebook Friends – News broke this week of a ruling regarding judges’ use of Facebook by the judicial ethics advisory committee of the Florida Supreme Court. The committee ruled that it would “convey the impression” that lawyers who appear before judges were in a special position to influence a judge if the two were friends on Facebook.

Although, the ruling did say judges could post material on their social networking sites, for personal or electoral reasons, as long as it didn’t violate the state’s code of judicial conduct. More on this later.

Friendster bought by MOL Global Pte. Ltd. –  an affiliate of MOL AccessPortal Berhad of Kuala Lumpur , the compan agreed to acquire the social networking site this past week.

The two partnered in October to create Friendster Wallet and a payments platform enabling micro-spending for the 115 million Friendster users and under the new deal the operations of both companies will combine to create Asia’s largest content, distribution and commerce network.

MOL operates and develops and operates payment systems in more than 75 countries worldwide with more than 500,000 payment channels, over 4.5 million transactions per month that process upwards of $200 million dollars a year, according to the company’s web site.

From Christmas Yetis to the Android platform, the world of social games has had an interesting week, from new hires, to new charities, to new MAU figures. In case you missed out, here are this week’s headlines from Inside Social Games.

Monday, December 7th, 2009

• BioWare Gives Facebook Users The Gift of the Yeti
• Finding New Treasures on This Week’s List of the 20 Fastes-Growing Facebook Games
• See You Tomorrow at the MIT/Stanford VLAB Event on Virtual Goods
• Facing Zynga, CrowdStar Aims to Be the “Most Profitable” Social Gaming Company

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

• Sibblingz Introduces Cross-Platform Game Development Framework
• PetVille End Cross-Promotion of Zynga Poker – Is Synchronous Game Play Dead?
• EnerCities: A SimCity-Style Look at Environmental Issues

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

• Dritfing Onto Facebook: Need For Speed Nitro
• With New CFO, Playdom Looking Even More Likely to Go All the Way to IPO
• One Week After Launching, Zynga’s PetVille Reaches Nearly 6 Million Facebook Users
• Hits Hold Steady on This Week’s List of Facebook Games with the Most New Daily Active Users

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

• Irondomain Bring Social Networking to Virtual Basketball Team Management
• IF: As More Asian Developers Build for Facebook, Regional Usage Patterns Change
• Collapse Goes Multi-Platform, Facebook Version of the Game Already Growing
• Should Facebook Create a New Type of Relationship for Game Friends?

Friday, December 11th, 2009

• Mobile Social Game Platform Scoreloop Expands to Android
• FTC Report Illustrates the Hard Problem of Keeping Kids Completely Safe in Virtual Worlds
• Money Themes, Not Christmas Ones, Make This Week’s Facebook Games Up-and-Comers List

WebMediaBrands, a company that publishes sites like mediabistro, learnnetwork, freelanceconnect, and semanticweb, has acquired Washington, DC-based Social Times, publisher of the Social Times and All Facebook blogs, the two companies announced yesterday. Nick O’Neill, founder of The Social Times, will be joining the WebMediaBrands team, which is headquartered out of New York.

Since starting All Facebook in 2007, O’Neill expanded coverage to include MySpace, Twitter, social advertising, and a variety of other topics with Social Times. The company also runs a social media training program called New Media School, as well as an annual conference.

O’Neill says he plans to continue running both sites, and WebMediaBrands CEO Alan Meckler says the company is looking to make more acquisitions. Congrats, Nick!

Shortly after Facebook announced its “Platform Roadmap” a few weeks ago, we detailed 5 Things All Page and Brand Managers Should Know about the recent announcements. Please read that story for our full analysis. But one item, in particular, appeared to be unclear at the time: while we originally understood Facebook’s decision to change the width of application tabs as applying to both user profiles and Pages, Facebook told us then that “Pages will not be changing at this time.”

However, that has since apparently changed. Now, Facebook’s developer documentation says that tab widths for apps on “profiles and Pages” will be changing from 760 pixels wide to 520 pixels wide in “late 2009/early 2010.” We reached out to Facebook for confirmation, and they said that the tab width on Pages will indeed be changing as well.

This is a pretty important change for all agencies and Page managers to be aware of, because this means that all Pages that have created custom tabs (either application tabs or tabs designed around special promotions) will need to be updated to fit the new width. If not, they might look broken or poorly designed.

Facebook hasn’t given a specific date for when the new widths will be rolling out to Pages, but since we’re already in “late 2009″ it could be coming very soon. We’ll let you know as soon as we have more information on the rollout schedule. For now, agencies and page managers should prepare to make the transition even though we don’t know exactly when it will happen.

Christmas is in the air. Three of the top five on this week’s list of up-and-coming Facebook applications reflect the trend towards holiday festivities. With 350 million monthly active users, Facebook is more than ever a popular format for many people looking to spread holiday cheer. We’re interested how sustainable business can be built on top of the holiday theme.

Christmas Kisses doubled its user base last week and has every chance to be in the top 20 apps for overall monthly active users come the next. The app has seen rapid, though steady, growth since about Nov. 22. This week the app raised 49 percent for a new monthly user total of 960,629 people, with about 132,000 using the app every day.

For new readers, this list looks at the Facebook apps that grew most over the past week and ended with between 100,000 and 1 million monthly active users, according to AppData. This view shows us smaller apps that are growing fast, and may be on their way to our top 20 overall leaderboard.

If you’re interested in the bottom line for seasonal apps this year, it would be wise to follow Christmas Kisses developer Mob Science who, of their 13 apps, have five seasonal titles out this Christmas, six if you count the winter-based Snowball Fight. Interestingly, despite the growth of its seasonal apps, the company lost about a million monthly users this last week for a new total of around 13 million monthly average users.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Christmas Kisses	960,629	+468,189	+48.74
2.	Poker Rivals	681,908	+425,075	+62.34
3.	Christmas Greetings	374,541	+357,808	+95.53
4.	Fun Cards – Christmas & More!	836,697	+355,981	+42.55
5.	Find My Lover	443,072	+245,764	+55.47
6.	Super Farkle	848,347	+215,096	+25.35
7.	Windows Live Messenger	746,368	+211,337	+28.32
8.	Pro League Basketball	529,413	+196,565	+37.13
9.	Happy Hanukkah!	193,136	+186,063	+96.34
10.	Ponzi, Inc.	430,715	+177,514	+41.21
11.	Christmas Animations	265,589	+168,243	+63.35
12.	ScroogeOmeter	399,907	+166,953	+41.75
13.	Youtopia	353,498	+160,361	+45.36
14.	PayPal WishList	460,109	+152,780	+33.21
15.	Top Fish	370,557	+137,133	+37.01
16.	Snowglobes!	289,422	+118,167	+40.83
17.	Confession Station	247,972	+116,925	+47.15
18.	Minigolf Party	941,697	+116,497	+12.37
19.	Happy Pets Community	366,604	+115,946	+31.63
20.	Coke Zero Facial Profiler	143,674	+115,882	+80.6

Playfish’s Poker Rivals is one to watch, as well. The game has succeeded in making a decent-sized dent in the popular poker-game genre. Last week was especially successful with 62 percent or 425,000 new monthly active users. Released on Nov.22, the app just barely missed the list of the top 20 daily users on Wednesday, placing at 23rd.

Christmas Greetings was just released on December 3, however it is showing signs of becoming one of the best performing apps released this month, seasonal or not, in terms of monthly average user rate. The amount of people consistently using the app everyday is rather low for a top gaining app, 120,000 approximately. However, with a monthly active user rate of about 375,000 in eight days, it is one of the more promising seasonal apps this year and was the second fastest gaining app this week for monthly active users, spiking with 95 percent.

However, the fastest gaining app of the top 20 – in relation to its size, mind you – is Happy Hanukah!, which placed ninth overall. The app gained 186,063 new monthly active users this week for a total of 193,136. A 96 percent increase since its release on Nov. 11.

Rounding out the top 20 is Coke Zero’s Facial Profiler. The app kicked off in earnest beginning this month after it was able to attract enough people for the app to work effectively. It now has a 143,674 monthly active users. Its daily active users took a large hit, dropping to a little over 6,000 on Dec. 10, from about 42,000 on Dec. 8. This is a reverse of the growth that the app had from Dec.4 to Dec.5, when the app raised with 46,000 monthly average users.

Overall, we see solid gains for most of the upcoming apps this week and especially for Christmas titles, of which seven were in the top 20. It will be interesting to see how people’s use of apps change come holiday time and if any late holiday apps show up in the coming week.