How much traffic does Facebook now send to other web sites? Analytics firm Compete tells the San Francisco Chronicle that 13 percent of US traffic to big web portals — Yahoo, MSN, AOL — came from the social network in December, the most out of any traffic source. What does Facebook itself report about this data?

The company doesn’t typically share a lot of about the traffic trends it sees internally, but we can glean some new information from the Statistics page it occasionally updates. Facebook usually updates some stats on the page when it makes larger announcements about its traffic, and it did so earlier this month when it said it grew from 350 million monthly active users at the beginning of December to 400 million now. Out of all of the items with new numbers, content-sharing (like posting links to content on a web portal from within Facebook), is way up. So are stats for Pages.

We go into more details below, based on our ongoing coverage of these stats as Facebook has updated them; for reference, see our posts covering the other updates, from last December, September and July.

All in all, Compete’s content-sharing data appears to be directionally correct, as it and other third-party data services usually are about Facebook traffic.

Status updates: In December, Facebook said that more than 35 million users update their status every day. This number has not changed today, so either the number of people posting status updates has not gone up along with its 25% user growth, or Facebook hasn’t updated the stat, or both. However, Facebook says that the number of status updates is going up, from 40 million in September to 55 million in December to 60 million as of February. The rate of status-updater growth appears to have slowed considerably, in contrast to the site’s overall growth. It’s not clear why, although a series of news feed and home pages changes starting last fall have de-emphasized status updating as a feature.

Photo uploading: The rate of photo uploading also continues to grow, although not as fast as it had earlier this year. Now, Facebook says more than 3 billion photos are being uploaded every month, up from 2.5 billion in December, 2 billion in September and 1 billion in July.

Sharing pieces of content: Defined as “web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.” — so, the source of the new traffic Compete is showing to portals — this category has been seeing massive growth. Facebook reported 1 billion items shared a week in July, 2 billion shared a week in September, then a big jump to 3.5 billion in December, and another big jump to 5 billion a week as of earlier this month. This is a key metric in Facebook’s vision of helping people to share more, and the many big and small changes the company has been making to the site are apparently having a significant impact.

Events creation: For whatever reason, Facebook has only intermittently updated this stat, and it hasn’t done so since December, when it said 3.5 million events were created every month. It didn’t report new numbers in September, but it said 2.5 million as of July. Growth here hasn’t been huge, as far as we can tell; the new home page redesign makes events more prominent, so perhaps we’ll see more stats, soon.

Pages: There are now more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook, nearly double the 1.6 million it reported in December. While it didn’t previously disclose the same Pages stats, Facebook began doing so that month; compared against the latest update, they show new pattersn. Pages that Facebook defines as local businesses went from 700,000 actives to 1.5 million. In other words, local businesses comprised half of the overall increase in active Pages over the last couple of months. Facebook separately says that the average user becomes a fan of 4 pages every month, double the December average. However, it has not updated the number of fans from December, which as 5.3 billion.

And, for a fun look at just what the latest updates looks like in graphical form, check out this guest post from Muhammed Saleem on Mashable.

Facebook has taken data from status updates to report post what our grandmothers have been saying all along: people who are in a relationship or marriage are seemingly happier than the rest of us.

Lisa Zhang, a University of Waterloo student interning on Facebook’s data team, posted the Valentine’s Day note in which she said happiness of Facebook users was measured by analyzing positive and negative words in status updates as defined by it Gross National Happiness Index during one week in January. This was done by computers with personally identifiable information removed, she noted, claiming it didn’t invade users’ privacy.

The hierarchy goes like this: married people are happiest, followed by people in a relationship, although married people tend to be older and, Zhang notes, older people tend to be happier. The corresponding gender breakdown: men are more positive then women when in a relationship or married, but more negative when married or engaged.

People in open relationships seem to be the most miserable, according to Zhang’s post, with men being the saddest in these pairings. Women reported being in open relationships 40% more than men, she wrote.

Those in open relationships had even less positive status updates than widows, than those with “it’s complicated” as their status, and than singles (who comprise 30% of women and 40% of men on Facebook). Widowed people showed less emotion, positive or negative, overall, she wrote.

Facebook users who do not disclose their relationship status are 50% more negative than everyone else, Zhang wrote.

It’s always insightful when Facebook releases analysis of user data, but it’s important to keep in mind that this information in and of itself is skewed. A Facebook status update can be seen by friends, family and the family of one’s spouse — people may be posting positive status updates to be seen by others even if they are not happy on the inside. Judging “happiness” in its absolute sense is something that is arguably outside of Facebook’s scope.

While there may be some correlation between offline/online and personal/private lives, Facebook has fast become another kink in the social fabric of our culture — one more way for people to express joy, save face, or make a mistake. What happens to a husband doesn’t post something positive about his wife leading up to Valentine’s Day? Probably nothing good.

BMW is sponsoring a Facebook contest that will send the winning contestant to check out the company’s headquarters in Munich, including the Welt, its flagship showroom and customer service center. The BMW Expert Challenge gives fans of the brand a chance to answer five questions, then invite three friends to help answer 15 more (5 each). The contest is being held to celebrate the fact that the BMW fan page will soon be 500,000 strong.

The contestant with the most correct answers will be entered to win the grand prize — a four day, three night stay in Munich and a tour of the BMW facilities. The winner will also have a chance to meet the BMW Facebook team. As there are sure to be a number of fans that are able to answer all the questions, the winner will be drawn at random.

The contest is easy to find from the BMW fan page with its own dedicated tab, and requires you to answer five questions about BMW, then call on three Facebook friends to answer five more questions each, and so on and so on. While the rules state that the success of your teams’ collective answers is what makes you eligible for the grand prize, the trip is only for one person.

What BMW has really done is create a contest that will yield some valuable contact information for a fairly focused demographic. Most of the questions are very company and brand specific and are probably only easily answered by die-hard fans (or experienced Google users). And while the prize in very nice, it isn’t something that would necessarily appeal to anyone and everyone, like giving away a free car.

With the specialized questions and prize, it’s more likely that those taking the time to complete the questions and pass them along to friends are truly fans of the brand and therefore more receptive to future marketing and ad campaigns.

Sweepstakes never get old. The top Facebook app on this week’s AppData list of gainers by monthly active users (MAU) has more than doubled its already-substantial userbase by offering a giveaway of items like the new Google Nexus smartphone and the Nintendo Wii.

In our reckoning, that makes Marketplace, at number one, a bigger winner than any of its users that get lucky:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Marketplace	7,955,387	+4,425,145	+55.62
2.	Static FBML	18,612,620	+4,150,931	+22.30
3.	Birthday Cards	49,135,859	+3,304,530	+6.73
4.	FarmVille	79,331,014	+2,653,765	+3.35
5.	Calendario de Amigos	9,864,730	+2,216,219	+22.47
6.	Zoo World	19,499,210	+1,490,899	+7.65
7.	Which Celeb Do You Look Most Like ?	1,603,189	+1,244,080	+77.60
8.	Incontra gente	1,323,692	+1,164,630	+87.98
9.	Photos I Love!	2,769,597	+935,305	+33.77
10.	Facts about friends	913,983	+913,821	+99.98
11.	My City Life	1,633,798	+835,234	+51.12
12.	6 waves Gaming Network	903,498	+754,810	+83.54
13.	MindJolt Games	17,149,554	+695,479	+4.06
14.	Yearbook	6,049,041	+688,002	+11.37
15.	Friends Exposed	15,255,305	+663,046	+4.35
16.	Demande à tes Amis	635,674	+574,506	+90.38
17.	Facebook for iPhone	26,851,685	+553,594	+2.06
18.	PetVille	18,682,529	+548,893	+2.94
19.	Friend Quiz	11,124,995	+535,702	+4.82
20.	Texas HoldEm Poker	25,833,621	+527,263	+2.04

Of course, it’s a bit odd that Marketplace has to find ways to market itself, since the app by Oodle is one of the few Facebook appears to list by default, as its in-house classifieds section.

Number two, Static FBML, has appeared consistently as one of the top growers, probably because it counts users who interact with Pages modified with the customizing app. And number three, Birthday Cards, is the RockYou card-sending app that had previously held the top spot on this list for weeks.

We spend some time talking about the second rise of FarmVille over on Inside Social Games, but suffice it to say that the Zynga game may not be done taking over the world yet. Below it is Calendario de Amigos, which might briefly fool you into thinking it’s one of the biggest foreign-language apps. It is, by measuring MAU, but by our measurements only three percent of its users come back on a daily basis.

Finally, we’ll point out Which Celeb Do You Look Most Like?, a simple quiz created by a high-schooler — not as an example of an app with staying power (it’s not) but as evidence of what might well be a hidden craving for a good celebrity-focused app on Facebook.

Be they kids games, Chinese developments, or simply looking to share a little Valentine’s love, the stories from Inside Social Games have covered quite the variety of topics over the past few days. Here are the headlines for this week in the social gaming space:

Monday, February 8th, 2010

• RockYou Owns This Week’s List of Top Facebook Game by Growth in Monthly Active Users
• Moshi Monsters: a Growing, Educational Virtual World for Kids
• Madden Football Coming to Facebook
• China’s Social Gaming Ecosystem: Talented Developers, Limited Platforms

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

• STi Turns Pre-Paid Calling Cards into Game Cards for Virtual Goods with Zeus Research
• Tapulous’ Riddim Ribbon – Hot Beat or Bust?
• Offerpal Uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to Provide Online Work for Earning Virtual Currency
• Battle Defenders Brings Social Tower Defense to Facebook

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

• FarmVille Plows Back Into the Lead on This Week’s List of Top Gaining Facebook Games by Daily Active Users
• Social Games Come to Football Through Canadian Site
• With Waf Waf the Dog, French Developer Adictiz Brings Punting Game to English Audiences

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

• Zynga Acquires Serious Business, Gets Even Bigger
• Bret Terrill, Charles Hudson Moving On After Zynga Acquisition of Serious Business
• CrowdStar Getting More Acquisition Intereste, but May Raise Funding
• More Details on Inside Social Apps 2010 – Coming April 20th in San Francisco
• China’s Social Gaming Ecosystem: Weak Financial Incentives & New Markets

Friday, February 12th, 2010

• Slide Glides into This Week’s List of Top Emerging Facebook Games
• Blizzard Gets Social with a Big Overhaul of Battle.net
• Social Games Get Affectionate with Valentine’s Day
• Social Gaming Roundup: World of Warcraft, Booyah’s MyTown, Patents and More

ComScore: Facebook on Top Since May – comScore reported that Facebook experienced triple-digit growth in the U.S. in 2009, sitting on top of all other social networks since May of last year. Facebook finished with 112 million visitors in December, up 105% from the previous December in 2008; Facebook also grew “substantially” across almost all performance metrics, including unique visitors, page views and time spent on the site.

The average minutes per usage per day is up, the average usage days per visitors is up, and the amount of time spent on Facebook grew three-fold in the span of one year.

Massive Facebook Data Set for Academic Release – Pete Warden, a former Apple employee and game developer, is set to release data on 215 million public Facebook accounts to the academic community this week. Warden wrote on his blog Wednesday that he was hoping to have released it then, but he’s incorporating suggestions that came in after he published a “How to Split up the US” post Saturday.

One of these suggestions comes from Facebook, he says. They “asked for a little more time to check the privacy implications.” The data set includes friend, fan and name data from the 215 million profiles, as well as much more, and concerns some people like Michael Zimmer because of the implications for user privacy.

Zimmer writes that Warden exploited Facebook’s infrastructure to access public profiles without having to be signed into a Facebook account and that this data set may be problematic to those in it, “It is impossible to predict who might use Warden’s dataset and to what ends, but this threat is real.”

Play Facebook Photos in a Slideshow – A Facebook Slideshow prototype was released recently that allows you to view photos in a slideshow as opposed to having to click through. After activating the prototype you click on “Play,” located in the upper right-hand corner of your photo to see a new photo every five seconds.

[Image via TechCrunch]

Facebook’s Lexicon Disappears – Facebook’s Lexicon tool that provided information on site-wide trends disappeared this week, as spotted by Steve Rubel. Facebook provided the following message: “Thank you for your interest in Lexicon. We are removing the Lexicon product from Facebook for the time being. We may bring components of Lexicon back in the future, but we are focusing development on our analytics tools for Page owners, advertisers and Platform developers.”

This may be because Facebook doesn’t want to appear to support data mining of the stream with its own tools, even though that’s what marketers would ideally want. However, it might also mean that an even better tool than Lexicon is in the works.

Qik Allows Facebook Comments – Mobile video sharing company Qik announced a new Facebook integration that allows users to see comments on Qik videos posted on Facebook. Video comments in Qik are automatically posted onto Facebook videos as well.

A Peek Into Facebook User Testing – Newsweek’s Nick Summers got the chance to see how Facebook conducts its user testing recently, recounting his experience in a blog about the company’s user lab in Palo Alto. Summers said the user lab occupies two narrow side-by-side rooms, one for engineers and the other for users, with a large display for the engineers that duplicates usage from the user’s monitor.

Facebook engineers apparently do care about what users experience on the social network, Summers said they groaned when a first-time 24 year-old named Mark had trouble uploading photos, “We gotta change this,” they said. But, Summers also plainly points out that Facebook has always done what’s best for Facebook, noting that moving the notifications menu to the left of the page brings with it a 10% increase in clicks.

Facebook Talks Internal Dashboard – On Thursday engineer Michel Novati discussed Facebook’s internal dashboard at length in a note on Facebook Engineering’s Page. Internal dashboards have to primary functions, he wrote, to allow non-engineers to build dynamic pages completely in the browser without having to rewrite code and to give engineers the chance to break down complex tools into simple widgets.

Facebook can be a valuable tool for non-profits worldwide, as the recent Haiti earthquake fundraising has illustrated, yet many non-profits may be unsure how to proceed with social network marketing. Millions of dollars were raised in the immediate aftermath of the January earthquake after Facebook users populated the network with status updates imploring friends to donate money with text messaging.

But you needn’t wait for a natural disaster to make Facebook work for your non-profit. There are many different ways to utilize the service for your non-profit, from creating an application to setting up a store or even buying Facebook ads.

If your non-profit is already on Facebook, or if taking your non-profit’s message to Facebook is something you’re planning to do, these tips can help you strengthen your social network presence.

Facebook has directly catered to non-profits present on the social network with a resource page, facebook.com/nonprofits, specifically to help them use the site. It includes the latest examples of how many organizations are using Facebook today. Be sure to take a look for more information.

1. Create a Facebook Page

You may or may not already have a Facebook Page, but there are a few good reasons to create a Page as opposed to a Group. First off, Pages allow you to publish directly into the news stream where you can engage your fans with a variety of different media, such as videos, polls and status updates. Secondly, Pages allow you to analyze how fans are interacting with your page via the Insights Dashboard, giving you instant feedback to help you adjust your method. You can also do things like buy advertising on Facebook for your Page to increase your number of fans (more on that below).

2. Use Causes

Causes launched in 2007 to help Facebook users be able to make a difference without having to leave the social network. The application markets itself as a way for anyone to make a difference using Facebook to tell friends about causes, ask them to donate and generally get the word out, according to their page, “Causes was founded on the belief that in a healthy society, anyone can participate in change by informing and inspiring others.”

Anyone can create a user-created advocacy group on Causes and administrators of those groups post announcements and communicate with members of that cause through email and Facebook notifications, foster discussions, share information, sign petitions and fundraise. Its Nonprofit Partner Center includes features to help organizations with multiple chapters better manage the app.

3. Make Your Facebook Page Unique

If you’re just going to duplicate what’s already on your web site on Facebook, you’re missing the point of taking your message to a social network. The idea is create content that’s Facebook-specific and build a community there. It’s easy to just point fans back to your web site, but these Pages tend to be less interesting than ones that keep users engaged on the same page with unique content that’s not on their web site.

The Facebook Page for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, for example, posts almost daily content that is Wisconsin-specific. This includes stories about local politician’s state income taxes, national stories about Wisconsin’s political battles in Washington, a commuter rail project and much more information not found on the party’s web site.

Depending on what your organization does, this could mean anything from sharing fun facts about a political cause to posting pictures of rescued animals to offering a special t-shirt to Facebook fans.

4. Be Active

Use your Page to give Facebook users an idea of what your organization does in real life.  Plug events, fundraisers, meetings and other activities. Publish insightful and interesting information in your status updates, ask your fans what they think with polls or when you post videos, photos or other links. Ask your fans to utilize the Share options when you publish to your Wall, so that friends in their networks can also find out about your organization.

Livestrong, an organization that works to fight cancer founded by superathlete and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong, has more than 738,000 fans and is a very active Facebook Page. The Wall is updated daily — sometimes several times a day— not only with posts but also with replies to comments, with administrators answering fans’ questions and referring them to cancer resources. Posts offer all types of information from celebrities’ experiences with cancer to events to merchandise suggestions to fundraising tips and information on discrimination in the workplace for people fighting cancer.

In other words, Livestrong’s Facebook Page is active in all types of ways to keep their fans engaged, which is reflected in the personal way many of them engage with the Page.

5. Talk Back

Livestrong is also exemplary of how to talk back to your fans. Many of Livestrong’s fans share very personal information on the page, to which admins reply with information or condolences. If you’re trying to build a community on Facebook that requires conversation, in other words, you need to talk back and Livestrong is a good example of how to do so.

You don’t have to answer every single question or respond to all your fans’ comments, but an occasional reply gives the impression that an organization is engaged with its fan base and interested in what they have to say. And that’s important because, well, Facebook is a social network (emphasis on the social) and communication is at the core of social networks.

6. Create an App, Game or Quiz

Finding new and creative ways to engage your fans is an important part of fostering an active Facebook community that will want to take their engagement from the virtual to real world by becoming involved in your group physically or fiscally. One way to do this is creating an application, game or quiz that fans can use once, or ideally, several times. This can include creating fun content that they can post to their Walls so friends in their networks can also learn about your organization.

A few examples are the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) quiz, What Do Quizzes Really Know About You?, which asks questions about Facebook privacy. Once the user completes the quiz, the results are publishable to their Walls for all of their friends to see, thus increasing the likelihood that more people will visit the ACLU’s Facebook Page.

Another way to go is to create little gifts for your Facebook fans that they can share with their friends, (RED) helps fight HIV in Africa and created an application called (RED) Kisses that fans may use to send different types of kisses to their friends. This type of app is usable an unlimited number of times and is published to the user’s Wall for their network of friends to see each time.

7.  Add a Store, Donations or Other Boxes

(RED) included another good feature on their Facebook Page: a store. Adding a store or donations box right on your Facebook Page makes it easier for fans to buy merchandise or give money to your organization. In (RED)’s case not only was the store there, but it was prominently included on its own tab. Sometimes one click away is too many, but if there’s a store prominently displayed on your Page, either on your profile page or as a tab, fans don’t have to leave Facebook to participate with your group.

There are all types of features you can add to your Page that allow your fans to feel ownership of your organization, like a fan badge or a sign petition box for their profile pages. The added bonus of this type of promotion is that, whether it’s published to your fan’s wall or their profile page, it also gets lots of new eyeballs to notice you.

8. Heed Feedback

It’s important to monitor your Facebook Page to see what’s working and what’s not. Do your video posts get more comments than your blog posts? Are fans checking out your Causes page or your store? Also, as the administrator of a page you can always check the Insights Dashboard for specific information on the age, sex and location of your fans to see what’s working with different groups. Times change, and so does Facebook, so if you are interested in a long-term presence there it’s important for you to notice what’s working for you and adjust what isn’t.

9. Segue Into Other Media

President Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign utilized social media to the max, not only focusing on Facebook and Twitter, but utilizing text messaging, email, phone calls and even its own unique social network. But moving from one media to several starts with just one piece of information.

Although you want to create a unique Facebook experience for your fans, you can also use Facebook to branch out into other media to communicate with them and FORGE, a non-profit that works with displaced communities in Africa, is a good example.

As seen above, they recently asked fans on their Wall to sign up to add FORGE to an email signature campaign to raise money for their organization. Use Facebook to get your fans’ email addresses, or ask them to sign up for your SMS service to take your organization’s campaigns to other aspects of your fans’ media usage and become an even more active part of their lives.

Another way to reach into other media is to sync your Page’s content with other media your organization may use, such as Twitter or a blog. Facebook enabled syncing status updates with Twitter feeds in August and the option to import a blog to Facebook has been around for a while as well.

10. Buy a Facebook Ad

Facebook ads — displayed on the right-hand side of a user’s Page — are an easy, economical and effective way to increase your fan base or visits to your page. The self-serve advertising system allows you to place orders for people (or profiles) that match whatever demographic requirements you may have, mothers of children with a certain illness for example, and you’re only charged for performance.

CHERUBS, an organization created to support congenital diaphragmatic hernia research and awareness, ran a Facebook ad recently that piqued this reporter’s interest, leading to the discovery that this congenital deformation occurs when a developing baby’s diaphragm fails to form or to close totally, allowing abdominal organs into the chest cavity. I may never donate to the group, but one of their objectives is to create awareness, and they did so with the help of a Facebook ad.

Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and several brands and businesses are using Facebook to give people on the network a chance to send special gifts to the ones they love, pick up a little something for themselves, or even send a Valentine’s wish to an unsuspecting civil servant. Campaigns vary from contests to games to simple well-wishes in updates.

Target Spreading The Love To Charities

Using the advertising power of both the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day, retailer Target is using a Facebook application called the Super Love Sender to disperse $1 million to a number of charities. The application allows users to choose from three different video cards, featuring football players in full pads with pink wings performing dance routines, singing songs or reciting poems. You can also add a photo that will be featured in the skits and send the Valentine’s video card on to your Facebook friends.

During the card creation process, you can choose your favorite among five charities to receive a portion of the $1 million donation. How much money each charity receives will be determined by the percentage of votes it receives.

Send A Photo-Filled Card On Facebook With Scrapblog

Online photo-sharing service Scrapblog gives Facebook users the ability to put a personal touch are their Valentine’s Day messages by creating photo collages through an application called Share The Love. The app grabs images from your Facebook photo albums, giving you the choice of up to 10 images. You can then customize the Valentine’s Day-themed card with stickers, various backgrounds and captions.

The photo cards are displayed on your wall, and any tagged friends in the photos are also alerted. There are elements of social gaming built into the application, and the more cards you create, the more points you amass to unlock exclusive content and features.

Facebook Keeps Your Valentine’s Day Virtual Gifts A Secret

Facebook offers a virtual gift giving service that allows you to schedule a birthday gift for your friends as much as a week in advance, and they’ve extended the service to include Valentine’s Day gifts. You can send the specially-themed gifts now, and they’ll appear as a wrapped present until Feb. 14. The gift message includes a link that gives the recipient a chance to easily send a gift of his or her own to the Valentine’s Day admirer.

Love Yourself And Win An iPod from eBay India

To promote its online auction service, eBay India is giving away a couple of prizes to Facebook users who express their love for themselves through status updates. The user that gathers the most likes for their update, which must include a reason they love themselves as well as a special eBay India tag, will receive an iPod Touch. The administrators will also choose an update that they feel is the most creative, and that winner will get a Sony Playstation Portable 3004. The campaign is a way to plug the auction site, as each update and like will include a link to eBay India through the tag.

Skittles Promotes Random Acts Of Kindness

In on of the most unique campaigns of the lovers’ holiday, Skittles is calling on all Facebook users to create a Valentine’s Day message that will be sent to a predetermined parking enforcement officer. Made with the help of Involver, the contest will give one lucky meter maid thousands of messages from random people as part of Skittles’ Mob The Rainbow campaign. The current count is well over 21,000 messages created, all of which will be presented by Skittles to the civil servant on Valentine’s Day.

You can send a message of 140 characters or less directly from the Skittles fan page or have them generate one for you. There’s also the option of mailing in a Valentine’s Day card to the Skittles offices in San Francisco. With more than 3.7 million fans of the Skittles brand on Facebook, the potential number of Valentine’s Day cards could be huge.

Facebook announced that Facebook Chat could now be integrated into third party IM clients earlier this week. No longer are you restricted to using the official Facebook site to interact with chat. Facebook Chat now utilizes the XMPP Chat protocol, which allows users to immediately reap the benefits of the release — without having to wait for developers to update their chat clients.

Any third party IM client (such as Pidgin, iChat, Adium, Digsby) can now utilize the Facebook Chat service.  Below, we detail the setup process for the popular Pidgin IM client, though the generic server details are enough to connect through any client supporting XMPP or Jabber (see step 3).

• Protocol: XMPP
• Username: [your current Facebook username] (see step 1)
• Domain: chat.facebook.com

1. Currently, you’ll need a Facebook Username (ie, facebook.com/mikeknoop). If you haven’t already set one up, click here to do so.

2. Open up Pidgin, Click Accounts, then Manage Accounts. Now click Add.

3. Fill in the Basic tab with the following details:

• Resource: [unused, you may leave blank]
• Password: [your current Facebook password]

4. On the Advanced tab, make sure all SSL options are unchecked.

5. Click Add. You’re done!

Note: If your client does not support XMPP but supports Jabber, simply use [username]@chat.facebook.com as your Jabber ID.

You’ll notice that your buddy list is now automatically populated with your Facebook friends who are online.

Growth is up significantly this week for the top emerging apps on Facebook, meaning those still under a million monthly average users. On average we’re seeing a third more new users in each position than last week, although relatively few apps have been on the list before.

We source this list from AppData, which can give you more in-depth stats, and we’d also recommend you also take a look at our roundup over on Inside Social Games, where we discuss the comeback of Slide with its emerging games SPP Ranch!, Top Fish and SuperPocus. Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Facts about friends	906,932	+906,770	+99.98
2.	6 waves Apps	722,993	+656,229	+90.77
3.	FacéDouble Celebrity Look-alike Doppelganger	879,297	+584,525	+66.48
4.	Demande à tes Amis	397,171	+364,373	+91.74
5.	SPP Ranch!	512,307	+326,061	+63.65
6.	World of Warcraft Feeds	427,084	+315,812	+73.95
7.	Polls	988,474	+300,949	+30.45
8.	FacéDouble Twins Doppelganger	432,921	+283,641	+65.52
9.	Go to Hell	524,283	+250,352	+47.75
10.	World at War	688,268	+243,158	+35.33
11.	Kingdoms of Camelot	843,103	+172,623	+20.47
12.	Funflow	270,873	+169,284	+62.50
13.	Lovers	299,220	+166,122	+55.52
14.	Live Positively	305,056	+147,550	+48.37
15.	MiniPlanet	699,992	+141,344	+20.19
16.	Address Book	236,601	+120,731	+51.03
17.	Top Fish	488,668	+116,918	+23.93
18.	MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes	171,960	+116,492	+67.74
19.	Dress Me Up	472,486	+108,620	+22.99
20.	Di la Verdad!	110,675	+102,137	+92.29

Facts about friends is on the list because of a tracking error, which we seem to be getting from Facebook fairly regularly this month. It’s the only app incorrectly showing 100 percent growth, but a few others have hiccups in which their Facebook stopped updating stats for several days.

Next up is 6 waves Apps, which is a dashboard for the (occasionally Chinese-language) developer 6 waves. The app itself isn’t much to look at, but it’s a good indicator of how quickly the company is growing; it has now produced 130 apps, of which a couple dozen are fairly successful. The top app, Give Hearts, has eight million users; the dashboard’s components are shown below.

Glancing down, you’ll find World of Warcraft Feeds, by famed game developer Blizzard itself. As the name suggests, this app yet another way for World of Warcraft players to spend more time thinking about World of Warcraft and, as the app description puts it, share their “proudest in-game moments” — check out our full review for more.

Finally, there’s a trio of note. FacéDouble Celebrity Look-alike Doppelganger, as we noticed last week, is itself a doppelganger of FacéDouble Twins Doppelganger. These apps appear to be achieving mitosis, because they’re joined this week by MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes. All three (or more) will likely die of starvation in the end, as users appear to be bouncing out as quickly as they arrive.