A few countries in northern Europe, like Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom, were among the first places that Facebook became popular outside of the United States. But many have relatively small populations, and now growth across the region is more a factor of each country’s overall population.

The number of monthly active Facebook users in Europe was 123 million as of February 1st, a 7.1% increase from the beginning of January, and around 19% of the region’s 648 million people. The countries that gained the most new users last month are also mostly ones we expect to continue growing. They include the UK, France and Germany — and, at number one, Turkey, which is geographically located in both Europe and Asia.

The UK still has the most Facebook users, at 24.3 million, but that’s nearly 40 percent of the 61 million people in the country. It is one of the bigger countries to have this high of a penetration rate anywhere in the world. Typically, from what we’ve seen to date, countries’ Facebook growth slows as they near 50 percent.

France, Germany and Turkey had penetration rates of 24.3%, 8.1% and 26.3%, respectively. Expect more growth from them.

Germany is an unusual country in that locally based social networks established themselves before Facebook started to catch on. But the country’s 15.1% growth rate during January is part of a trend stretching back to last year, and we expect it to continue. In contrast, Russia, another European country with especially local social networks, still has less than a million Facebook users. But growth is also picking up there.

Overall, the 10 countries with the most new users last month were also the ones with the largest populations in the region.

For more details, check out our Global Monitor report, which tracks self-reported numbers from Facebook’s advertising tool. Note that numbers we’ve observed in the tool tend be delayed by several weeks, but otherwise generally match what third-party analytics firms report.

Scrapblog, an online photo sharing service that recently received $2.5 million in funding from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, launched its first ever Facebook application this week, Share the Love.

Share the Love is free and pulls photos from a user’s Facebook photo albums and, with the app’s QuickMix technology, automatically creates a Valentine’s Day-themed digital greeting card. The user then has the option to include up to 10 photos, change the background, add stickers or caption bubbles to the card before publishing it.

Scrapblog CEO Jill Braff said the launch of the app is part of the company’s strategy to broaden its reach beyond their web site into the realm of Facebook, which has become the largest photo depository on the web. Scrapblog wants to be not only a place to share photos, but rather she tells us, an online service for social storytelling with photos.

When a user publishes the Share the Love digital card, it appears on their Wall for all their friends to see, notifies everyone tagged in the photos and also creates a separate photo album for Share the Love photo collages where each subsequent card ends up.

Scrapblog has included elements of social games and virtual goods within the app; each first-time user is granted 100 credits to spend in the Share the Love Marketplace on stickers, backgrounds and text and repeated users of the app earn more points through use, such as sharing your collages. The more points, the more access to exclusive content.

Adding the social gaming element to the mix is another way Scrapblog is trying to help users tell stories, giving them incentives like earned and purchased credits for different content, hopefully enticing users to come back to the app and share it with friends.

Although Scrapblog has more than 6,200 fans on Facebook, most of their traffic is still coming through their web site. Share the Love is a way to branch out, Braff said. Facebook is where most young people share their photos, Scrapblog is hoping to become the go-to means to share them, she added.

“People today are sharing photos digitally and photos are more and more about that moment in time. What we’re trying to do is not just let you celebrate the hallmark holidays with your photos, but experience day-to-day photo sharing in a much wider usage,” Braff tells us.

Eventually Scrapblog hopes to add other features, like music, as well as add other virtual goods in their effort to become a leading digital photo sharing service.

The 2010 Winter Olympics are set to begin on February 12 in Vancouver, Canada. The games, which include cross-country and alpine skiing, bobsled, figure skating, hockey and speed skating, are being promoted by a wide range of official Pages, sponsors, news organizations — and regular people have brought their takes on the Olympics to unofficial Pages.

The official Page for the Winter Olympics has been hyping the games on the Wall by asking some of the 394,000 fans questions, posting videos and updating fans on the Olympic torch relay with photos.

NBC’s official Olympics Page has almost 18,000 fans and has been frequently posting videos and stories, as well as promoting its mobile and Facebook applications, in preparation for the games’ opening ceremonies on February 12. It promises to “inform and engage” Olympic fans and includes a widget to watch the games from Facebook.

NBC also developed an application, Vancouver Olympics, that currently has more than 60,000 fans and is essentially a video box for NBC content from which users may see Olympics video, photos and news.

Visa, an official Olympic sponsor, also got in on the Facebook promotion for the Vancouver games with its Go World Page. With more than 15,000 fans the site has been promoting the games on its Wall but its most prominent feature is the Visa Go World tab, which hosts an array of videos featuring Olympic athletes, as well as information about Visa.

Budweiser is a sponsor of the U.S. Winter Olympics team and added an Olympics tab to their Facebook Page to feature athletes from the U.S. The tab promises to offer “exclusive” live-streamed content from the Olympics and asks Facebook users to vote in an Olympics-related poll.

News organizations are also using Facebook to supplement their traditional media coverage this year, notably the Associated Press (AP) and the BBC have set up Pages specifically for the 2010 Winter Games.

The APs’s Facebook Page is an extension of wintergames.ap.org, an online Winter Olympics content initiative that will collect online ad revenue from more than 900 news outlets. AP’s content includes schedules, results, photos, videos, news and the ability to share all of it with widgets on other Pages.

BBC’s Winter Olympics Facebook effort isn’t nearly as ambitious as AP’s site, focusing heavily on athletes affiliated with the UK. It includes a schedule of the Olympics and BBC’s planned coverage, some photos and videos but isn’t even linked to on the web site for BBC Olympics coverage.

Fans and critics of the Olympics have also gathered on Facebook to make a litany of opinions heard, ranging from standing up for indigenous Canadian’s rights to supporting Irish athletes.

Support The Irish 2010 Winter Olympic Team’s Facebook Page is dedicated to exactly what its name implies and is filled with mostly positive content in support of Ireland’s Olympic athletes. Similar Pages exist for the Olympics and particular groups of athletes therein.

Anti-Olympics groups organized for different reasons.

Olympic Resistance Network has almost 2,500 members who are claim to be organizing resistance efforts against the Winter Olympics, which they say are taking place on “unceded indigenous land” to the detriment of the native community. The group’s slogan is “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land.”

In a similar vein Boycott 2010 Winter Olympics with 100 members says the event is all about corporate greed, expanding tourism at the expense of indigenous lands, increases homelessness, gentrifies poor neighborhoods, increases the privatization of public services and union busting, as well as destroying the environment.

April 20 | San Francisco

As we announced two weeks ago, Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event. We’re excited to see all of the developers and entrepreneurs from around the world that are planning to attend!

In addition to the initial set of 20 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2010, we’re also excited to announce three more speakers today: Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Booyah, Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product at Boku, and Lisa Marino, CRO of RockYou. They will be joining our full list of speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
  
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon

More speakers and a full agenda will be announced shortly.

Finally, a limited set of “early bird” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $279. This price will change after Friday, and space will be limited, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

A limited set of “early bird” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $279. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

Social gaming giant Zynga has acquired Serious Business for an undisclosed amount, the companies just announced this morning. Both companies are based on San Francisco, and the Serious Business team has already joined Zynga at its Potrero Hill headquarters.

Serious Business has a very talented team and has built some hits, especially Friends for Sale, but it’s not huge. It has a total of 6.20 million monthly active users and 838,000 daily active users, according to AppData. The company previously raised $4 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, which is also an investor in Playdom and RockYou. Serious Business’s founders, Alex Le and Siqi Chen, are both former employees of Powerset, a search company that Microsoft acquired in 2008.

Zynga currently has more than 68 million non-deduped daily active users on Facebook, according to AppData, making it by far the largest social game developer on the platform. We estimate the company brought in more than $200 million in revenue last year; it also recently raised $180 million from Russian investor DST.

Serious Business is not the first company that Zynga has acquired. Others include MyMiniLife, a smaller studio that has helped Zynga build popular simulation games like FarmVille, the Facebook app YoVille, and GoPets, a pet-caring game builder that appears to have helped work on the company’s PetVille game…

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games

Last week, Facebook revealed their Hip Hop for PHP compiler software, and today Facebook is announcing another new tool for developers to utilize when improving their PHP websites: XHP.

While Hip Hop for PHP primarily focuses on improving the speed at which PHP is executed on a server, XHP improves the security model and high-level readability problems which are commonly associated with PHP websites. In the post this morning, creator Marcel Laverdet mentioned that the Facebook Lite site was entirely created using XHP.

XHP is described as a “PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid PHP expressions.” According to Laverdet, XHP offers the following advantages over standard PHP websites:

• XHP improves the high-level readability of PHP code, specifically with respect to HTML generation
• XHP switches PHP from a relaxed default security model to a strong default security model (to prevent XSS Scripting attacks)
• Errors in your markup will now be detected on the server at parse time. That is, it is impossible to generate malformed webpages while using XHP.
• You can define your own elements which can condense a complex component into a simple XHP tag.

Even for well versed PHP developers, the above advantages may not be immediately obvious. For more details, the full XHP codebase is available via a Git repository and there is plenty of documentation as well. More information is also available in the blog post published earlier today.

Facebook’s instant message service, Chat, has been live on other sites for more than a year. But now the company is officially announcing that it is available to use within third-party IM clients, and within other IM services. AOL’s AIM is one example, as we covered earlier today.

Like Google does with Gtalk, Facebook is using the Jabber (XMPP) open messaging protocol. So any client that supports Jabber can support Facebook Chat. These include: Apple’s iChat, Adium, Pidgin, Digsby and many others. However, that doesn’t mean Facebook Chat is directly interoperable with other Jabber chat services, like Google Talk.

As seen in the AIM integration, users can also access Friend Lists, so they can see which friends in which lists are available to talk to.

Beyond Facebook Chat itself, Facebook is also offering Facebook Connect for Chat, so others can integrate it into their services, using Connect to verify users’ identities and access their Chat information.

Overall, official Jabber support, plus greater prominence on the new Facebook home page, should boost Facebook’s chat metrics overall in the weeks ahead. Check out the official tour page for more.

On top of Facebook’s new stats last week — the company said that 400 million people are using it every month — there’s another update today. One in four of those users, or 100 million people, are accessing Facebook from a mobile service every month.

In September, Facebook said it 65 million monthly active mobile users out of 300 million monthly actives, which at the time was a 300% increase in mobile users from a year prior.

Which services? Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s VP of Growth, Mobile and International, shared some more details about recent updates. Here are those, including our take:

Mobile sites: Both m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com (the long-existing web version of Facebook for iPhone) have gotten upgrades recently. While the mobile site has 18.2 million monthly active users (MAU) and 6 million daily active users (DAU) according to AppData, we should point out that Facebook also notifies users of the mobile site if there’s a Facebook app available for the handset device they’re using, in conjunction with GetJar. This means that new users to the mobile site are getting redistributed elsewhere.

Texting: In an update to previous stats here, Facebook has worked with more than 80 carriers in 32 countries to let people use texting (SMS) within Facebook, meaning they can do things like update their own status, get texts about their friends updates, etc. Palihapitiya also confirms the launch of Facebook’s URL-shortening service, fb.me, saying the company intends to use it for texts and other mobile notifications (rather than as a direct competitor to Twitter-oriented services like Bit.ly).

Applications: New updates have come to apps for mobile operating systems/devices including Google’s Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia and Samsung; other apps are availalable for HTC, INQ, LG Electronics, Palm, Sony Ericsson and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. Out of all of these, the iPhone app continues to lead, with 26.2 million MAU and 13.7 million DAU as of today — it is one of the biggest and most heavily used apps out of any on the platform, and that’s counting social games. Blackberry’s app comes in second with 13.8 MAU and 8.35 DAU.

Family Tree, a family-oriented Facebook application from New York-based Familybuilder.com, launched an upgrade today that chief executive Ilya Nikolayev tells us this is the latest step in making the company’s genealogical features more collaborative.

“We’ll continue to focus on the social side of things to continue the virality, the growth and numbers, but at the same time we think it’s a good thing to continue investing in the genealogy side of the business,” Nikolayev tells us.

With the new features, users of the app will have more options in building their family trees.

These new features of the Family Tree app, which first hit Facebook in 2007, will center around Facebook Connect and premium content, Nikolayev tells us.  Premium content is set to include different tree themes and colors, more collaborative functionality, different print options, customized family statistics and more integration of the in-app currency, Family Dollars ($10 USD: $100 Family Dollars).

But most importantly, Family Tree users on Facebook can now build their family trees in conjunction with other Facebook users so that a more complete picture of their relations is available to them.  According to Nikolayev, Family Tree incorporated user feedback to the changes in the app, now porting existing tree information so users don’t have to re-enter their family records.

Once this tree is built, users have the ability to zoom in and out of the tree in order to see different parts of their family lineage.  This redesign was done mostly because Nikolayev said the majority of relations added on Facebook were either siblings or cousins, so the traditional model of a family tree – which goes back in time – wasn’t melding well with the social network model.  The zoom feature allows Family Tree users on Facebook to see their family tree as it pertains to their social network connections.

Family Tree currently has more than 7 million monthly active users on Facebook, but also maintains similar apps on Bebo, MySpace, Hi5 and Orkut.  This redesign is part of a larger effort on Familybuilder’s part to integrate more social components into their apps, Nikolayev told us, and more changes to this end are coming in a few weeks.

“We’d really like to tie-in a component that’s more fun, something where you could explore different virtual items and interact with family members in a more fun atmosphere,” he said, noting that Family Tree’s virtual currency, Family Dollars, will be an integral part of these changes. “We’re working on a gaming component within the application that (involves) constructing a virtual representation of the family.”

This week’s list of top gaining Facebook apps by growth in daily active users (DAU), sourced from AppData, may contain a few inaccuracies; Facebook failed to update its stats on several days last week, although we have yet to find out why. But even with the reporting problems, there are clearly a few winners on the list.

Here are the top 20 apps:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	31,937,622	+4,278,734	+13.40
2.	Marketplace	1,270,660	+1,134,658	+89.30
3.	Birthday Cards	2,972,808	+971,030	+32.66
4.	Static FBML	1,273,538	+416,971	+32.74
5.	Friends Exposed	1,792,319	+369,796	+20.63
6.	Facebook for iPhone	13,691,980	+356,757	+2.61
7.	Pet Society	4,198,261	+310,074	+7.39
8.	Incontra gente	271,922	+247,494	+91.02
9.	Which Celeb Do You Look Most Like ?	222,115	+216,620	+97.53
10.	Friend Quiz	1,163,719	+170,062	+14.61
11.	6 waves Apps	168,502	+163,235	+96.87
12.	My City Life	350,224	+148,321	+42.35
13.	Friend FAQ	697,586	+142,856	+20.48
14.	PetVille	4,817,157	+139,421	+2.89
15.	Ninja Saga	518,494	+137,761	+26.57
16.	My Town	634,089	+134,638	+21.23
17.	Family Tree	489,814	+128,598	+26.25
18.	Happy Aquarium	5,843,694	+121,198	+2.07
19.	MindJolt Games	2,618,767	+105,563	+4.03
20.	Demande à tes Amis	106,485	+104,270	+97.92

FarmVille’s stats are a bit off, but the game appears to be making real gains, perhaps in part from its Valentine’s day push and introduction on MSN’s massive gaming network. We talk about it a bit more, along with its social gaming peers, over at Inside Social Games.

Marketplace, number two, has not appeared on any of our lists for weeks. But this week, it spiked up sharply in both monthly active users (MAU) and DAU. Chances are the activity is driven by a week-long sweepstakes featuring prizes like iPhones and Nintendo Wiis that the app’s developer, Oodle, is running.

Skipping down several places, Friends Exposed has shown little growth in its MAU, so its presence may only be temporary or caused by Facebook’s reporting problems. Then again, it also appeared last week at number four, so users may be becoming more engaged with the app; its wall is certainly active enough, its rating is fairly high for an app based around the “quiz” concept.

Incontra Gente, a dating app made exclusively for Italians, is new to the list; it looks like the app is regaining users who left after it recently began experiencing technical problems.

Finally, there’s Which Celeb Do You Look Most Like?, by one Jessica Murdoch, who appears to be a high school student — she used the Quiz Creator app to create the quiz. This falls along the lines of a basic quiz app, but it’s worth pointing out that the celebrity theme is doing well, with a couple more appearing on last week’s list of emerging apps.