Tracking the innovation between gaming and social networks, Inside Social Games has seen a great deal of new developments this past week ranging from blood sucking vampires to new World of Warcraft feeds on Facebook. Here are the headlines for the first week of February:

Monday, February 1st, 2010

• Solid Gains for Islands, Fighters and Zynga in This Week’s Top Facebook Games by Monthly Active Users‘
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for January, 2010
• The Top 25 MySpace Games for January, 2010
• Hit or Not: A Facebook Role-Playing Game Designed to Help Real Musicians

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

• OMGPOP Gives Users Virtual Currency Bonus for Syncing Accounts with Facebook Connect
• Vivox Raises $6.8 Million for Voice Services in Games
• Bubble Island: This Facebook Title Makes a Classic Arcade Game More Social
• Facebook Application Gating and Gifting Features Shift to Fit Changing Platform Policies

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

• Bejeweled, Happy Baby and My Town Top This Week’s Facebook Gainers by Daily Active Users
• World of Warcraft Launches The Armory Application for Facebook
• City of Eternals, a New Blend of Social and MMO Gaming, Goes into Public Beta
• Kwedit Launches New Direct and Virtual Debt Payments Service

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

• Tiny Town: a New Facebook City Building Game
• Two Simple Facebook Games to Make You Smile
• Hi-media’s Allopass Payment Service Expands in the US, Focusing on Social Networking and Games
• Zynga Brings FarmVille, Social Gaming to MSN

Friday, February 5th, 2010

• City Builders Replace Gangsters on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Ngmoco CEO Neil Young on the iPad, Monetization, and Challenges for New Mobile Developers
• Papermint: An Illustrated, Very Colorful New Virtual World
• Social Gaming Roundup: Valentine’s, Charity, the iPad, and More

Facebook Email-Style Messaging Upgrade Coming Soon? – The company has long suggested that its messaging service could use an upgrade — the feature is an important part of the site, and has replaced email for some users. Now, Facebook is working something called “Project Titan,” and employees are even calling it “the Gmail killer,” TechCrunch hears. Potential features include “full POP/IMAP support” so people could download or otherwise read and respond to Facebook messages from other email clients, and the ability to have your Facebook vanity URL as your email name (yourname@facebook.com). Note: Gmail creator, FriendFeed cofounder and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit says: “No, I am not working on anything related to email :) (nor do I plan to).”

Pew Study: Facebook Most Popular Among American Adults – A study entitled “Social Media and Young Adults” from the Pew Internet & American Life Project was released this week. One finding concluded that blogging has declined for young people but increased slightly for adults 30 and above; the report also noted that wireless connectivity use is rising for young people. A large percentage of American teens, 73%, use social networking sites, 47% of adults do and 72% of 18-29 year-olds use them. Among adults 52% said they have two or more different profiles, with Facebook being the most commonly used online social network, 73% of adults reported maintaining a profile there.

39% of Facebook Users Donated to Haiti – Facebook’s Facebook Global Disaster Relief page, which launched shortly after the recent Haiti earthquake, recently surpassed 250,000 fans. Videos with former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as links to a whole host of charities, are included on the page. A joint survey between Facebook and The Nielsen Company found of Facebook users in the U.S., U.K. and Australia: 32% donated money, 4% donated goods, 3% donated both, 21% haven’t yet given but plan to and 13% donated via text messages — 23% in the U.S.

European Commission to Revamp Privacy Laws in Response to Facebook – The European Commission announced this week that Facebook and other social networking sites may face regulation if they fail to adequately protect users’ privacy. Plans for comprehensive new laws governing data protection and privacy are in the works, given that rules currently date back to 1995. The commission is concerned specifically about Facebook, as well as other social networks, but also other technology, such as radio frequency identification, behavioral advertising and airport security. The changes are set to revise the commissions 1995 Data Protection Directive.

Print Facebook Ads Receipts – Wednesday Facebook announced that a printer-friendly version of billing receipts for Facebook ads. Those who have accounts for Facebook ads may now see a printer-friendly version of their billing manager receipt, which includes a Facebook logo and address and other billing info. The feature is available in the Billing section of the Ads manager for each transaction, the Printer-Friendly Version button is in the top-right corner of the page. Facebook said the changes are intended to streamline accounting and tax processes for customers.

Study Says Facebook is the “Most Dangerous” Social Network – A survey of 500 companies across the globe found that more than 70% reported spam and other infections arrived via social networks in 2009 and 2008, last year 72% of these companies were concerned about security breaches due to employees’ use of these networks. Facebook especially, as 60% named Facebook the riskiest network of the bunch, partly due to the fact that it’s the largest social network and also because new privacy settings expose more member-generated content to the entire Internet. Of course, saying Facebook is the riskiest doesn’t mean that it is actually risky for the typical user.

Facebook Set to be Globe’s News Reader – Facebook is set to become the world’s top news reader, according to a post from Experian Hitwise this week. Although Google Reader has most recently been the leading news reader, last week it only accounted for .01% of upstream visits to news and media websites, whereas this number was 3.52% for Facebook there’s a graph at the link. Facebook, according to Hitwise, was the fourth most popular source of visits to news and media sites last week.

Mystery Facebook Music App Appears, Disappears – This week some Facebook users found a mysterious Music application on their list linking to Facebook.com/music, but it didn’t work, linking instead to the news feed. Facebook then said they removed the application, said it might have been a bug and that Facebook has no plans to launch a music service.

Facebook Moves to Dismiss Click Fraud Lawsuits – Facebook has moved to dismiss litigation brought by several marketers as the result of click fraud this summer, arguing that Facebook’s contract with RootZoo and other online marketers provides that they must pay for all clicks — despite fraud. MediaPost reported this week that Facebook alleges in its motion that cost-per-click advertisers had to check a box agreeing to terms and conditions, including: “I understand that third parties may generate impressions, clicks, or other actions affecting the cost of the advertising for fraudulent or improper purposes, and I accept the risk of any such impressions, clicks, or other actions.” The case is currently pending in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California.

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Facebook’s photo uploader hasn’t had a makeover in years, but the new version — the one that’s been in testing since last fall — is going to be slowly introduced to users in the next few weeks, the company says. People who upload a lot of photos to Facebook (you know who you are) are going to appreciate it.

This is an especially big deal because Facebook is the largest photo-sharing site in the world, with more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month.

The company has rebuilt the uploader to run as a browser plugin, which should mitigate the bugs and other problems that users have sometimes encountered with it to date. To get started, users will need to install the plugin in their browser, a process the company says should only take a couple minutes max.

The top half of the photo uploader interface shows folders in your desktop, the lower half shows you photos to upload. Once you’ve begun uploading, you can navigate from the page, or Facebook, and when the process is done you’ll get a notification saying so.

New Orleans Saints running back Reggie Bush is calling on Saints fans to enter photos displaying their enthusiasm for the team, with three winners receiving an autographed bat that has come to symbolize the team’s battle cry of “Bring The Wood” during the NFL playoffs. The Who Dat Fan? contest is being run exclusively through Bush’s official Facebook fan page and is co-sponsored by Red Bull, who also has a sponsorship deal with Bush, and Activ8Social, which advises both Bush and Red Bull on social media strategy.

Fans are encouraged to submit photos that display their passion for the New Orleans Saints. There have already been hundreds of photos uploaded through the application. (The app was developed by Wildfire Interactive, who has handled other sports-related applications.) Once signing into the app, fans can vote for their favorite photo, with the highest vote getter receiving one of the three custom bats up for grabs. One of the three bats will go to a fan selected at random, while the final bat will be awarded to an entrant selected by a panel of judges.

The bats are symbolic of those handed out by head coach Sean Peyton to every Saint to embody the team’s playoff slogan of “Bring The Wood.” Reggie Bush made the bat famous when he ran out of the tunnel carrying it with him onto the field to start the NFC Championship game.

Bush’s Facebook page has a lot of personal content that’s regularly uploaded by the sports star, and the page has seen a huge surge in fan numbers since the Saints’ win in the NFC Championship game on Jan. 25, more than doubling from 31,000 fans to 81,000 fans. The page has also received added publicity from a couple of recent posts on the Celebs on Facebook fan page, which has a following of more than 2.4 million users.

The contest will run through Super Bowl Sunday (Feb. 7), with the possibility that it may be extended should the Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts.

Microsoft’s display ads began disappearing from Facebook in countries around the world starting at the beginning of the year. Now, the multi-year deal is officially completely done, a premature end given that the terms originally went to 2011. From what we’ve seen so far, most of the vacated inventory will be replaced with Facebook’s own performance ads. With supply going up, performance ad prices will drop for a time, and become more affordable for Facebook advertisers.

This move was expected, because Facebook’s advertising allows for specific targeting based on a wide range of user information, and was probably monetizing better than the display ads had been.

The search deal is a potentially even bigger deal, though. Especially considering the other changes Facebook has planned for search in the next few weeks.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will be providing improved search results in Facebook, using Facebook’s social graph information. From Bing manager John Tinton:

As you know, Bing has been very focused on helping customers make important decisions. We believe that counsel from family and friends can be a big part of that process. Going deeper in web search experiences with Facebook, in addition to the collaboration we announced last October about bringing public data from Facebook’s API into the search experience, will enable us to do great things together for our customers.

You will start to see the fruits of our expanded relationship show up in the Facebook experience over the weeks and months ahead. We are very excited about the work we have done with Facebook, and are really looking forward to the amazing things we can together do for our mutual customers in the months and years ahead.

Facebook data will apparently both shape Bing search results on Facebook as well as well as on Bing’s destination site and other places where Microsoft provides search. All in all, this is looking like a more serious threat to Google’s core search business. Bing already has impressed many with its ability to get good results — the harder part is breaking users’ Google-focused search mentality, and it’s not clear that this is happening either on Facebook or on Bing.com.

However, Facebook has a massive amount of traffic, and its search feature is a core way that users find friends and other information on the site. Bing results have so far appeared at the bottom of the Facebook search page, and within a tab in the page’s left-hand navigation column, but we’re not sure how many Facebook users are using Bing to search the web as part of this. Now we’ll see a larger implementation of Bing, integrated with Facebook — but what exactly will this look like?

We heard a clue about that yesterday. Facebook vice president of product Chris Cox talked about the plans during Facebook’s 6th birthday/product launch party. Here’s the transcript from the video, which you can watch at about 6:00 in, below.

“… [A]nd if we could organize search by people, you could literally start typing somebody’s name – like Nicholas — and see all of the Nicholases in the world ranked according to their proximity to you in the social graph… one degree out and ranked by the people that you know and how mutual they are. This is one of the things that we’re going to be rolling out over next several weeks. We think this is a pretty big innovation not just for the people around you, but for finding restaurants and all the things around you. This is a different way of searching.”

Facebook’s new redesign also features the search box at the top center, and bigger than when it was tucked over on the right-hand side.

Meanwhile, Microsoft will be running the search ads, so it will still be making money on the site. Facebook, for its part, is apparently deepening its reliance on Microsoft for some aspects of its search service, though it has been building its own search technology for years as well.

Mercedes Benz has created a dedicated Facebook page to promote its new SLS AMG coupe. The car features a retro gull-wing door design that hearkens back to the company’s iconic models of the past. As part of the campaign, the company has also released an SLS AMG iPhone application that utilizes the phone’s accelerometer for 360-degree game play.

The Facebook page is a collection of promotional photos and videos of commercials featuring the car and legendary Formula One driver Michael Schumacher. The page currently has about 1,900 fans, and administrators have been consistent in giving fans a steady stream of new content. Mercedes is also using Twitter to promote the car, and the SLS AMG will grace the cover of the upcoming Gran Turismo 5 video game.

Along with a dedicated Web site for the new SLS AMG, Mercedes Benz has put the car in the hands of iPhone owners via a game application. Players will have the chance to pilot the SLS AMG using the iPhone’s accelerometer, and the app also has a multi-player mode to pit your skills against other gamers.

While the page is not directly targeting a North American audience (most of the posts and commercials are in German), the page gives the brand a strong global presence without having to spend extra money for a separate campaign for each region of the world. It’s also a good indicator that up-brands like Mercedes see the advantage of creating buzz through social networking, and it will be interesting to see how much more effort brands like Mercedes Benz put into a Facebook presence and how it translates into actual dollars.

Take a look below for our weekly list of the most quickly growing apps with under a million monthly users on Facebook. We source these lists from AppData, which tracks a number of metrics.

Over on our sister site Inside Social Games, the big news is that Gangster City, the new Playfish challenger to Mafia Wars, has passed a million users. Here, it’s that the list is suddenly free of FarmVille parasites, non-Zynga apps that lure in users with fake gifts purportedly from Zynga’s most popular game. It’s not that Facebook is banning the apps. Instead, users just appear to be getting wise to the scam.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	My City Life	698,494	+535,098	+76.61
2.	Truth about friends	523,925	+523,784	+99.97
3.	Go to Hell	273,931	+257,768	+94.10
4.	FacéDouble Celebrity Look-alike Doppelganger	294,772	+223,025	+75.66
5.	MiniPlanet	558,648	+221,714	+39.69
6.	你問我答	894,879	+159,799	+17.86
7.	Sanalika	501,359	+147,149	+29.35
8.	Horoscope Today	654,510	+146,056	+22.32
9.	Akinator	928,309	+145,403	+15.66
10.	Kingdoms of Camelot	670,480	+133,490	+19.91
11.	The Pink Ribbon	633,857	+119,933	+18.92
12.	FacéDouble Twins Doppelganger	149,280	+116,615	+78.12
13.	Show Some Love!	759,537	+111,542	+14.69
14.	Jumping Dog	108,671	+108,655	+99.99
15.	Funflow	101,589	+101,414	+99.83
16.	Lovers	133,098	+100,885	+75.80
17.	Flowers for Friends	503,076	+100,625	+20.00
18.	Kampanyalar	115,026	+92,508	+80.42
19.	Snaptu	540,236	+90,080	+16.67
20.	SPP Ranch!	186,246	+89,777	+48.20

No apps held over from last week to this one. Despite the lack of Zynga parasites, the usual lack of depth is apparent in most of the new Facebook apps surfacing. One that is fairly interesting, though, is FacéDouble Celebrity Look-alike Doppelganger, which is probably built by the web site of the same name.

The matching technology in FaceDouble isn’t perfect, but the app has borrowed Hot or Not style voting to go through potential pairs. You can also choose to view only friends — although it appears that functionality is broken. It could be that the pairs shown are simply pre-picked, and there’s no technology at all behind the app. You’ll also notice FacéDouble Twins Doppelganger further down, which is itself a doppelganger of the Celebrity app.

Horoscope Today, last week’s number one, has dropped down to number eight, and will probably continue to fall. Arrayed around it are a trio with a little more staying power, and one thing in common: none are in English. They’re 你問我答, Sanalika (in Turkish) and Akinator (in French). Sanalika has been slowly, but steadily growing, while the other two, which are also both quiz apps, are about ready to pass a million users.

Last is Show Some Love!. As you might guess, this is a poke-style app for pestering one’s friends. In exchange for doing so, you get “love bucks”. But users appear to like the app well enough; it has appeared on this list consistently for a few weeks.

Earlier this evening, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the launch of six new products at the company’s headquarters, as Facebook also celebrated its 6th birthday. To watch Zuckerberg and VP of Product Chris Cox walk through each of the new releases, and reflect on the company’s first 6 years – including the day the News Feed launched on September 6, 2006 – check out each of the videos below. At the end, Product Manager Peter Deng and Ari Steinberg “flip the switch,” pushing the new products live.

(For those who don’t see the videos in your reader, click here to view.)

Tonight’s product releases included:

• The new home page to 80 million of Facebook’s now 400 million users worldwide
• Better chat accessibility (“Improving chat is the biggest request we get from our users,” Zuckerberg said.)
• The games and apps dashboards
• New search type-ahead, and a new method of finding and displaying people whether or not they are your friends
• A new image uploader, built from the ground up by Facebook (“We’ve been using an ActiveX control for years,” Zuckerberg said.)
• HipHop, the new project it open-sourced earlier this week.

Zuckerberg also told us tonight that the updated News Feed UI should alleviate a lot of user confusion between the meaning of “News Feed” and “Live Feed,” and that friend lists are getting demoted from the home page because they’ve “always kind of been a power user feature.”

Here’s a look at Facebook’s worldwide audience growth to date:

Facebook is now fully launching the long-planned redesign, with 80 million users getting it tonight — that’s 80 million of the now-400 million people using the site, the company says. The new design is basically what we’ve been examining in detail since the first test screenshots apppeared last October.

Parts of the site that were formerly located in the bottom toolbar — bookmarks, notifications, chat — are now being moved up into the left-hand navigation column on the homepage, or into the top navigation bar. Here are some more details gleaned from Facebook this evening.

First off, a lot more people are engaging with notifications in the new design, Facebook’s Peter Deng tells us, which isn’t surprising since it’s at the top left-hand side of the site instead of the right hand of the bottom toolbar. Notifications for third parties will appear within the new interface for the rest of the month, until Facebook removes them on March 1.

There are a few other new points that the company revealed today. The news feed will now be more clearly delineated at the top. “Credits Balance,” as we noted in an update to our last post, now appears in the drop-down of the new Accounts page on the top right-hand corner. The new search box shows search results for people based on how closely they’re connected to you — how many friends you both have in common, etc. The photo uploader has been rebuilt from scratch, and promises far better performance than the prior one.

While notifications have been moved up to the top, and bookmarks slotted into the left-hand navigation column on the home page, Chat is a little different. The instant message service now appears beneath the new bookmarks section on the home page, and shows you friends who are online and available to chat; the list is sorted by how often to talk to the people, and other factors. Meanwhile, a part of the bottom toolbar is sticking around — pop-up window on the right side of every page, where you chat with people as you use various parts of Facebook or third party apps.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also tells us that the company is planning to roll out “something cool” every month from now on, but no word on what products we’ll see.