India hasn’t seen that much Facebook usage — until the last few months, when it’s been taking off. We noted that the service recently reached 7 million monthly active users in the country of 1.2 billion people. And now Facebook is opening an office there, in information technology hub Hyderabad. Aside from its Australia office, this is Facebook’s first office in Asia.

As with its just-finalized office in Austin, Texas, the Hyderabad location will focus on providing online sales and operations services, the company says: “By having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones, we can provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support.” Unlike social game developer Zynga’s recent decision to open an office in Bangalore, Facebook doesn’t appear to be tapping into the company’s inexpensive and technically skilled work force.

Even though the Hyderabad staff will be serving Facebook’s more than 400 million monthly active users around the world, expect many more of those users to be in India.

While its growth exploded around Asia last year, India has been a late bloomer. Google’s Orkut established there there years ago, as have a variety of local social networks. India reached around 3.5 million Facebook users as of the middle of 2009. The service appears to have hit an inflection point recently, though — possibly due to Facebook’s recent mobile push. While most of the country lacks a computer-based internet connection, around half the population has a mobile device. Facebook has provided a variety of mobile web sites and applications, and worked with carriers to allow customizations like SMS; it’s also planning a new site, Zero, that will allow people to access the site with only a minimal mobile data connection. Between taking users from established rivals and making itself broadly accessible, look for lots of growth for the foreseeable future. Already, Facebook notes that India is up to more than 8 million users today.

Having launched a number of popular, official topic pages already, Facebook has another one out today: Sports. It promises to provide periodic status updates about sports, as you might guess — as well as highlight ways other companies are using Pages, Connect and other Facebook services to reach users.

And since the March Madness college basketball “March Madness” tournaments are starting now, that sport is currently receiving the most attention on the page. A “College” tab on it currently shows the fan pages for numerous colleges and their mascots. This way, Facebook can help funnel fans to Pages they may have wanted to join but hadn’t known about.

The new Page has already mentioned the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team’s big winning streak, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s big new video site for the tournament.

Facebook’s other official topics Pages includes one for celebrities, which has 2.54 million fans.

It’s a week of international imports and premieres for social startups. We have seen new levels of quality in synchronous games, automated fighting titles, and even some new lessons in tycoon zoology. Here are this week’s headlines from Inside Social Games:

Monday, March 8th, 2010

• CrowdStar Learns Facebook Zoology with Zoo Paradise
• Mochi Media Announces Social API, $10 Million Fund for Flash and Social Games
• Fast Typing, Cities and Growth from MindJolt on This Week’s List of Fast Facebook Growers by Monthly Active Users
• Gravity Bear Weights In to Social Gaming on Facebook with Battle Punks

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

• Sony Online Entertainment Launches PoxNora on Facebook
• SiXiTs: A New Cross-Platform Startup Founded by Gaming and Visual Effects Veterans
• Super Rewards Brigns Offer Wall Service to Flash Games for the Web

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

• CyberAgent’s Ameba Pigg Virtual World Comes to Facebook as Ameba Pico
• Slides from Presentation at GDC on the State of the Social Gaming Industry
• Facebook Credits Now the First Payment Option in Zynga’s FarmVille Game
• City Building Games Make a Strong Showing in This Week’s List of Top Facebook Gainers by Daily Active Users
• MySpace Looks for More Social Game Developers with Big Platform Upgrades

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

• Feline Frenzy: Robot Wars is a New Facebook Game from Pakistani Developer White Rabbit
• Hi5 Launches Game Developer Program, Offers Special Access to Users and Monetization
• More Speakers, Venue Set for Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco
• Israeli Brewer Uses Facebook Gender Battle Parking App to Promote Beer

Friday, March 12th, 2010

• MyTribe Wants to Be a Complex, Engaging Facebook Game – And Mostly Succeeds
• Playdom’s Social City is the Latest Facebook City Building Game to Get Millions of Users
• Social Gaming Roundup: iPad, Frosmo, Statistics, & More
• Independent Developers Show Strongly on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

Facebook’s Redesign Paid Off With Searches – Facebook’s redesign in early February seems to have paid off, as U.S. search queries grew by 10% last month with 436 million U.S. searches last month, according to comScore. We previously reported that Facebook’s search traffic grew 13% in January with 395 million searches, up from 351 million U.S. search queries in December of 2009.

Facebook Partnering With EventBrite? – Does the screenshot below show an as-yet-unannounced way for people to tickets for events on Facebook via EventBrite? Or does it just show a way for people to buy tickets to Facebook’s developer conference in April, f8. TechCrunch raised the question earlier this week.

Here’s what it says: “Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing. Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell your and put some delightful cash in your pocket.”

Facebook tells us that “EventBrite is currently testing a Connect implementation.  We don’t have anything more to share at this time.” Up until now, Facebook has not offered a way for people with Facebook Events to charge users for tickets. It’s possible that EventBrite is going to be partnering with Facebook to enable ticket purchasing for events. And, of course, it’s possible (and probably more likely) that this is just a Connect integration and nothing further will come of it.

Classmates.com Sued for Privacy Policy – Classmates.com has been trying to make more of its user data public, like what Facebook has in some ways done recently — and it was sued this week for allegations that the company’s new privacy policy violates state and federal laws. The class action suit claims Classmates.com didn’t fully disclose that paying customers would have to opt-out of new Facebook and iPhone applications to keep their data private, violating federal and Washington state laws.

The suit comes in light of Classmates.com trying to compete with Facebook by moving its traditionally paying membership’s profiles to the public eye in January.

Facebook May Sue Over Erroneous UK Story – Facebook’s UK division has reportedly threatened to sue The Daily Mail newspaper over an article that editors published saying that Facebook was an easy way for sexual predators to prey on young girls. A former police detective did the work and said an anonymous social networking site was the medium for his experiment, but editors added the Facebook reference despite being told by the detective that it wasn’t accurate. The title of the piece was changed to, “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you,” and chronicled the detective being approached by older men asking him to perform sexual acts. This is something that’s more difficult for people to do on Facebook, given the service’s privacy restrictions for minors, and emphasis on private, real-world connections.

MSNBC Breaks News on Facebook With Twitter – MSNBC is using an interesting method to engage viewers: breaking news on Facebook with their @BreakingNews Twitter account. An MSNBC spokesman said @BreakingNews is part of the company’s strategy to connect to social media users and become a source for news on social networks.

Interviews with Facebook’s DC Staff – AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher had an interview with Facebook’s Washington D.C. staff this week: Adam Conner, Tim Sparapani and Andrew Noyes. In the video the three discuss Sparapani, Facebook’s Policy Director, did a half-hour video interview about privacy with The Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang and C-Span’s Peter Slen this week.

Facebook Continues Domination of SecondMarket – Private company stock marketplace SecondMarket reported in February that Facebook continues to take the lion’s share of stock sold there. These transactions tripled in February, from $13 million to $43.8 million last month, TechCrunch reported this week, for a total of 48% of transactions. LinkedIn accounted for 18% of the transactions on SecondMarket, Twitter and Zynga 15% each and LifeLock 4%.

Facebook’s domination of SecondMarket, and just about everything else, comes in light of what we reported to be revenues that could exceed $1 billion this year. The company went from $280-$300 million in 2008 to about $600-$700 million in 2009, as sources told us.

Facebook, Google, Sued over Mobile Software – Winksite’s parent company, Wireless Ink Corp., sued Google and Facebook this week, claiming that both infringed on a patent they were issued in October. The patent dealt with the way online content is accessed by cell phones and the complaint was filed on March 9 in Manhattan’s federal court.

LivingSocial Raises $25 Million, Expands – LivingSocial announced a $5 million first round of funding in July of 2008, then announced an equal amount last December in a continuation of the round. Now it has raised $25 million more in a Series B round led by U.S. Venture partners. Money will go towards expansion of LivingSocial’s social group coupon product, Deals, in dozens of U.S. cities by this year’s end, including Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham and San Diego.

Get Satisfaction Goes to Facebook – Get Satisfaction, which has been helping companies collect user feedback for years, has turned its attentions to Facebook with its Support tab — a partnership with Facebook page management company Involver. As part of its Facebook Social Engagement Hub, Get Satisfaction created a tab that may be named for a specific brand on their Page, where customers may discuss products in four ways: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem or Give Praise. Once customers begin to post a question, Get Satisfaction suggests similar threads to give them instant answers; all information from Get Satisfaction is accessible by search engines and people may respond to any thread.

Finally, any of these questions or statements are automatically imported into the brand’s Get Satisfaction web interface.

They’re not good, but they are successful — and that’s all that matters, right? LOLapps is dominating this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps still under a million monthly active users with four quizzes that have picked up a million new users, combined. They all appear to be made with its templating app, Quiz Creator.

You can pick them out below by the identical icon each uses: what tattoo best fits you?, How dirty are you ?, What age will you have your 1st baby ??? and I can guess your name. You can’t see it below, but on our full list, there are four more LOLapps quizzes at rankings 20 to 40.

Here are the top 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Jeux Gratuits	844,778	+721,188	+85.37
2.	Farmville exclusive	667,968	+651,588	+97.55
3.	Music Pets	498,952	+498,952	+100.00
4.	Zoo Paradise	477,274	+427,567	+89.59
5.	Keyboard Mash!	579,322	+346,258	+59.77
6.	what tattoo best fits you?	852,972	+313,179	+36.72
7.	Mahjongg Dimensions	881,454	+308,918	+35.05
8.	All About Me	285,629	+285,629	+100.00
9.	Towner	695,212	+285,410	+41.05
10.	How dirty are you ?	785,470	+249,078	+31.71
11.	Friend Poll!	858,511	+247,237	+28.80
12.	Ameba Pico	241,337	+241,272	+99.97
13.	أعرف صاحبك عايز يقولك ايه ؟	219,371	+219,233	+99.94
14.	What age will you have your 1st baby ???	645,992	+211,715	+32.77
15.	I can guess your name.	715,070	+208,047	+29.09
16.	Top Stalkers	433,212	+191,491	+44.20
17.	MMA Pro Fighter	710,431	+184,397	+25.96
18.	Dedica una cancion	343,213	+178,020	+51.87
19.	Jumping Dog	683,774	+167,712	+24.53
20.	Glamble	521,626	+160,859	+30.84

Our list doesn’t get much more original. The top app, Jeux Gratuits, we’ll cover over at Inside Social Games. It’s followed by Farmville exclusive, which is the most successful recent FarmVille parasite. Facebook hasn’t been prompt in shutting these down lately, but as of publishing this one has been blocked; the enforcement team may simply be concentrating on the fastest-growing parasites.

Following two more games, there’s Keyboard Mash!, by Ingenious Designs. No need for guesswork here: this app is all about mashing your keyboard as much as possible over 20 seconds. It’s following in the footsteps of How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT, which became a runaway success by asking users to type the ABCs. Oddly, another app by the dev, Mash the keyboard to save kittens!, was not successful.

All About Me, another quiz, appears to be on the list due to a data tracking accident; it’s actually shrinking. Finally, there’s Friend Poll! which is — wait for it — a quiz. It’s by FriendQuizzes, which has a couple other successful quizzes, as well.

WildTangent is continuing its foray into Facebook and social gaming, now providing brand-advertising offers on developer Playdom’s Facebook app, Tiki Farm. The tropical island farming game is beginning to feature brands that sponsor particular existing virtual goods in the game. Instead of a user paying for the good, they watch a video or somehow engage with an ad to get it. The first available is an orange tree, sponsored by Herbal Essence.

Although WildTangent has been offering a variety of sponsored advertising services for casual games, massively multiplayer online games, and other web-based games, it began focusing on tighter integration of virtual goods recently with the launch of BrandBoost. While some games may want to have an advertiser sponsor an item, the service can provide free access to a subscription-based game in exchange for watching a brand’s video. Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz is also using the service, during the puzzle-shooter games’ weekly tournaments on Facebook.

We’ve covered a variety of companies beginning to get in to this area. WildTangent’s has an interesting advantage: direct relationships with 75 of the top 100 advertisers in the US, that it has developed over the years it has been running branded ads in games across the web, and through strategic investors like marketing conglomerate WPP. Those ads could be about anything from entertainment like new games and moves, to consumer packaged goods, auto, etc. Many other companies provide engagement-based video advertising provided by other networks, or more general services. WildTangent tells us its brand advertisers are looking for a qualitatively good experience for users, to help increase public perception. Tying a brand to a specific virtual item that a user is already familiar with in a game is one way to make the connection especially clear.

WildTangent charges on a cost-per-engagement basis, using a custom rich media format. On Facebook, it plans to expand to Facebook’s forthcoming 760 pixel width once that becomes available. Although advertisers have sometimes balked at going off an Interactive Advertising Bureau standard format, WildTangent tells us that many of its clients are seeking out these formats, to try to reach users in more meaningful ways. In many cases, the company will initially provide the creative service for an ad, and if it proves to work well, the client will do subsequent ads in-house. The ad format for sponsored items may include an overlay on top of the price the good normally costs, to help show users the virtual value of what they’re getting by watching the ad.

The game has already been in testing sponsored items with FreeRealms; other developers running BrandBoost include Sony Online Entertainment, Outspark and OMGPOP.

While many offer companies are looking for more brand advertising, WildTangent is looking for more inventory — whoever ends up with the most business, more brand ads should mean more revenue for developers. On that note, WildTangent says it is looking at other social platforms besides Facebook, but isn’t saying any more at this point.

Jambool, the payments startup that offers in-game payments on Facebook through a product called Social Gold, recently announced that it has begun offering international currencies for players in other countries. Localized currencies are becoming more important for payments in social gaming, especially with the ever more international audience on Facebook.

The first nine currencies Social Gold is supporting, including the US dollar, are all from either English-speaking countries like Australia or Western European countries like Sweden. But the end plan for Jambool, along with its rivals, is to allow payments from many more of the world’s 150+ currencies.

Vikas Gupta, the co-founder of Jambool, says that offering local currencies is important for selling virtual goods in markets beyond the US. “People will pay more in their local currencies because it’s more clear to them what they’re getting,” Gupta told us earlier this week.

However, he recommended against also trying to tailor the prices to local markets. “If you change prices for different geographies, you’re encouraging fraud,” Gupta said. “I don’t think there’s any need to. You see people paying 50 percent more of their disposable income in a country like China, on games, than they do in the US. That speaks volumes, I think.” What Gupta does recommend is localizing the language and features of games that have large international audiences.

We spoke to Gupta after his panel at that Flash Gaming Summit in San Francisco, where he also gave out some recent statistics from the games his company works with. Purchasing rates are still low, with often times  only couple percent of players making a purchase at all, but a growing number of people that make an initial purchase will buy more.

Following the first purchase 56 percent will buy again, according to Jambool, while another 25 percent will make two or more purchases. The average amount purchased across all these groups is $60, while there’s a significant group of “whales” who spend over $1,000.

Social Gold takes an average 7-10 percent cut from the developers it works with, which includes any fees charged by the end payment companies it works with, like PayPal, Visa or the recently-launched “virtual debt” company, Kwedit. By comparison, the in-house Credits that Facebook pushes take about 30 percent, although apps that use Credits get special promotion in Facebook’s Games Dashboard, and other benefits, like Facebook’s brand.

Along with the increased likelihood of a purchase from international users if they can pay in their own currency, Gupta also says that having an in-game option for a single-click purchase triples the likelihood of a user buying a virtual item. In general, streamlining payments is key for attracting impulsive purchases.

Besides offering advice and design support to game developers, Gupta says that fraud prevention is also growing in importance. More fraud is tied in part to having a more international audience, but it will also be more of a problem if social games become more like MMOs, a trend Gupta expects to take place.

Today, fraud still isn’t much a risk to developers, because virtual currency is usually only good for a single player. But games with more direct interaction between players and second-hand markets for goods quickly find fraud to be a real problem. “As the ecosystem developers, it’ll be a bigger challenge,” Gupta says.

Facebook has just announced a few more details on its 3rd f8 conference coming up next month in San Francisco, and officially opened registration. It’s been a while since Facebook last held an f8, so it’s sure to be a big week. Already, developers are wondering what announcements Facebook will make regarding Credits, location, and the Open Graph API.

Here are the details:

• Date: Wednesday, April 21, 2010
• Location: The Concourse at San Francisco Design Center
• Address: 635 8th Street, San Francisco, CA (Map)

Mark Zuckerberg will be giving the keynote at 10am, followed by breakout sessions in the afternoon on “New Tools,” best practices for building “fast scalable, and engaging products,” and Facebook’s open source products. On Thursday, there will be an “intimate post-f8 Hackathon” that developers can express interest in attending here.

This year, tickets cost $325 for professionals, and $50 for students. Here’s the registration page at Eventbrite, and the Facebook Page for f8. We’ll keep you up to date as more information becomes available.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

For developers interested in digging deep into monetization inside social apps and games on the Facebook Platform and beyond, we’re holding our inaugural Inside Social Apps 2010 conference the day before f8 in San Francisco. At Inside Social Apps, executives from all the largest developers on the Facebook Platform, including Zynga, Playfish (Electronic Arts), Playdom, CrowdStar, 6 waves, Slide, RockYou, Five Minutes, and Lolapps will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective.

For a full agenda of our day’s events, click here. Space is very limited, so we encourage you to register soon.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

While RockYou already provides offers, banners, and other forms of advertising to application developers, it’s added another: a form of engagement advertising, that it’s calling “Deal of the Day.”

The company provides advertisers — especially big brand advertisers — with banner ads that cost based on different engagement actions. These might include a user downloading a coupon, taking a poll, becoming a fan of a Facebook Page, and more. The ads appear within applications from RockYou and developer partners on Facebook and other sites.

Facebook itself offers engagement ads directly linked to Facebook products like events, Pages, and videos.

The ads will be part of RockYou’s various monetization services; earlier this week, it announced others, including virtual currency and local ads.

Growth slowed down in February for most Middle Eastern countries, especially the smaller and more affluent nations that have the most monthly active users on Facebook. We’re taking a look this month at the Arabian Peninsula, plus Egypt.

Three countries in the Peninsula stand out for a high market penetration of over 30 percent: Israel, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. As you can see below, both Israel and the UAE are continuing to pick up significant numbers of users. We don’t expect that trend to continue for too many months more, as most countries have so far topped out at roughly 40 percent penetration.

On the other hand, growth is also slowing a bit for some much larger countries that have low penetration — both Egypt and Saudi Arabia are well under 10 percent. The dip may only be temporary, especially with Facebook putting more resources into the Middle East.

However, there are clearly also some demographic trends at work. Most of the region is sharply defined by income disparities; the citizens of the UAE, for example, are fairly rich on average, while even a wealthy country like Saudi Arabia has only a small upper class. As in other parts of the world, it’s likely that broad swaths of the population in some of these countries are too poor to be online yet.

Note that Facebook counts all the countries from Morocco to Pakistan in its measurement of the Middle East. We’ll be covering the African countries next week, while Pakistan and its neighbors go along with our coverage of Asia. There’s also the matter of Turkey, which we’ve included in Europe. Although quite large, Turkey also has over a quarter of its population on Facebook, making it a force in the region.

Breaking out the Peninsula on its own, there are only about 9 million Facebook users in the region, but about 15 percent market penetration overall. As Facebook expands its advertising efforts in the region, many will be watching growth data to see if Middle East growth is slowing for the long-term, or if this is just a temporary fluctuation. More data  and specific country breakdowns can be found in the full Facebook Global Monitor report.