April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now only a few weeks away. On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Inside Social Apps 2010 will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map).

In addition, today we’re excited to announce 7 new speakers for the event: Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom and active social gaming investor; Jens Begemann, CEO of Wooga; Alex Rampell, CEO of Trialpay; Steven Goh, CEO of mig33; Jim Bobowski, Director of Online Partner Marketing at Netflix (who manages Netflix’s social network offers); Eric Goldberg, Managing Director of Crossover Technologies; and Benjamin Joffe, Founder of +8*.

They will be joining our full list of 34 speakers listed below.

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• 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
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Jeremy Liew, Managing Director, Lightspeed Venture Partners
  
• 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
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

Finally, a limited set of “early general admission” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $329. 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 general admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $329. 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!

In the frozen void of space, a now derelict mining vessel has had a communications failure. Unfortunately, for engineer Isaac Clarke, the USG Ishimura isn’t quite so derelict after all, as its inhabitants are now the skittering, the lumbering, and the things that hail from the deepest corners of the galaxy.

This, of course, is the basic premise behind the sci-fi, survival horror game, Dead Space from Electronic Arts’ studio, Visceral Games. The folks over at Visceral are looking to spark up some buzz for their next deep space adventure. To do this, the company has worked with Wildfire Interactive Promotions to make, well, an interactive promotion for the upcoming game, Dead Space 2, on Facebook.

The idea is two-fold. The app page contains a contest that is not only intended to get more people talking about the game, but also give players the opportunity to design their very own melee combat move. Essentially, in Dead Space, every little critter wants to eat you and when the player character gets locked into a grapple, they have to use some form of melee move to save themselves and hopefully kill the baddy before it gets back up.

To this end, Visceral Games is looking for player input as to what would be the coolest attack poor Isaac could use. Fans will be able to submit descriptions, photos or drawings, and even video (3D animation or live action) to show what they have thought up. These can all be done through the Facebook app itself after a short registration, and the top 10 will be chosen. From here, the fan-base will vote on which one gets put into the final game.

Traditionally speaking, contests have always been a strong marketing way to get people involved in something. However, with it now on Facebook, players that discover the app will be able to invite their friends to check it out as well. Obviously, this use of the social graph will increase the spreading of this promotion significantly, and hopefully the upcoming game’s buzz as well. Of course, even if you friends don’t want to participate, they can always view everyone else’s submissions. Maybe they’ll even find that video of you making a fool of yourself grappling that invisible lurker!

FarmVille’s growth in new users has at last netted it a significant number of new daily active users (DAU), pushing it back over the 30 million amark and doubling the total DAU of the next-closest app, Facebook for iPhone. The Zynga game leads this week’s AppData list of top gainers on Facebook by DAU.

Besides FarmVille, the list this week is occupied by a number of newer games, some of which we’ll talk about over on Inside Social Gaming. We’ve also registered a definitive gain for Slide FunSpace, which picked up over a half-million new DAU:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	30,806,872	+2,103,410	+6.83
2.	Social City	1,239,331	+1,239,240	+99.99
3.	Slide FunSpace	1,791,231	+636,786	+35.55
4.	Static FBML	5,745,491	+467,665	+8.14
5.	Restaurant City	3,670,846	+358,434	+9.76
6.	Birthday Album	367,764	+350,046	+95.18
7.	Pet Society	4,304,155	+310,402	+7.21
8.	Farmville exclusive	288,097	+287,258	+99.71
9.	Bubble Island	504,192	+259,995	+51.57
10.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	511,414	+234,448	+45.84
11.	iHeart	1,869,150	+203,801	+10.90
12.	Mobile	7,099,193	+198,300	+2.79
13.	YoVille	2,132,214	+191,937	+9.00
14.	Tiki Resort	427,563	+178,463	+41.74
15.	Jeux Gratuits	166,892	+165,108	+98.93
16.	Happy Aquarium	4,693,053	+155,957	+3.32
17.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,305,568	+128,394	+2.04
18.	Zoo Paradise	122,571	+117,895	+96.19
19.	Tarjetitas	220,909	+116,784	+52.87
20.	Blingee Book	218,873	+106,603	+48.71

FunSpace recently shot from about 4.5 million to more than 25 million monthly active users (MAU), the apparent result of a new strategy by Slide. But the media sharing app’s DAU has lagged behind.

Even now, it’s not entirely clear whether all 1.79 million of Slide’s daily users are indeed coming on a regular basis, or if the continuing growth in new users is padding the numbers slightly.

Static FBML, the Facebook-built app for customizing Pages, has fallen to number four from its last-week gain of four million DAU. Following it, after EA’s Restaurant City, is Birthday Album, an app from the fairly new developer 2pad. It’s the dev’s second attempt after Photo Books, a photo printing app that has gained plenty of MAU but almost no daily users.

Farmville exclusive is doing well, but probably not for long; it’s just the latest parasite to pop up around FarmVille. And rounding out the top 10, there’s Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]. This app, by a dev listed as aa, is a friend quiz. We expect several of these to do well in coming weeks, following the banning of Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ, which had 30 million MAU combined.

The number of big social applications that use Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits, continues to rise. The latest is Zynga’s smash hit farming game, FarmVille, the largest application on Facebook with nearly 84 million users a month.

The integration is pretty straightforward, as you can see from the screenshot below. Credits is shown as the first of several payment options — others include direct credit card payments, PayPal, and a variety of other payment services, including prepaid cards and offers.

Zynga has previously been running Credits in some of its smaller Facebook apps, like role-playing game Pirates: Rule the Caribbean. Credits is now also appearing on some of its other big applications, like pet-caring title PetVille. However, it’s not on others, including Café World.

However, Zynga, like Playfish, Playdom and most other social gaming companies on Facebook, is not running Credits exclusively. But another big developer is: CrowdStar.

Clearly, many developers are reluctant to make Credits the exclusive way that companies monetize through virtual goods on Facebook. Facebook takes a 30% cut of all transactions on Credits, whereas third party payments companies typically take far less. Credits could play a meaningful role in Facebook’s revenue growth over the coming quarter – we recently reported that Facebook revenues were $600-$700 million in 2009, and could hit $1.1 billion in 2010.

However, the more users who use Credits, the more it will become the de facto way that they buy virtual currency on the site — which could bring in a lot more money for Facebook. The company is going out of its way to promote this, doing things like featuring games that use Credits within its suggested games list within its Games Dashboard. Fine-tuning apps to include Credits may also make the currency more valuable. CrowdStar’s Peter Relan has previously told us that “once you get over the hump, it’s great, and just as profitable.”

Also, rumors have circulated for months suggesting that Facebook wants to somehow make Credits the only virtual currency available on the site, but we have not been able to confirm anything along these lines.

While Facebook has been widely testing it with app developers since last year, we expect to see new announcements coming about it relatively soon. The company is potentially planning to launch a couple other big initiatives at its f8 developer conference in April, including location services and the  “Open Graph” API. It’s possible that Facebook will use the event to further promote Credits — moving it from a now-huge closed beta test to an open one, for example.

Note: The future of payments in Facebook apps and social games will be a central topic at our upcoming Inside Social Apps 2010 conference on April 20th, the day before f8, in San Francisco. For more details, click here.

Since the new Facebook home page launched a few weeks ago – making a few application bookmarks more prominent on the home page – one of the usability issues with the new design is that it’s been difficult for users to reorder bookmarks on their home page. Instead of allowing reordering, Facebook has only allowed bookmark deleting directly from the home page, making it harder for developers to tell users how to make their bookmark more prominent.

Now, Facebook says on its Developer Wiki that it is “actively building” bookmark reordering for the home page with an estimated launch date of “March.” We’ll let you know when Facebook rolls it out, as many developers will likely want to encourage users to move their app bookmarks up, directly under the Applications and Games dashboard links on the home page.

Facebook is going to launch its location-based features “next month,” according to a report today from the New York Times — a confirmation of many months of rumors that we and other publications have been hearing. Sources close to the company shared specific knowledge of the tightly-wrapped project, including a clear message for developers: Get ready for location at f8, Facebook’s developer conference.

That’s where the new service will be unveiled, according to the report. Facebook will launch a way for users to check in at physical locations and share the information back with their friends on the site (possibly by attaching location data to status updates, for example). Crucially, there will also be a set of APIs so developers can access Facebook’s location service in their own applications.

Developer Impact

But certainly, by providing a location-based service itself, Facebook is making it harder for smaller companies to differentiate themselves through location alone. Foursquare, Gowalla and increasing number of other startups have been building services where users win “badges” or other virtual goods if they use their phones to “check in” at a physical place more regularly than other users. Given the details of Facebook’s plan, it seems the company wants to funnel consumer interest in these types of location-based games through its platform.

Facebook’s social graph likely reflects who many people would want to share their locations with, and for this reason some startups, including Foursquare, Gowalla and the FriendSpin iPhone app, among others, already offer ways to share locations with Facebook  friends — although the effort hasn’t converted to lots of users, that we’ve seen.

The promise is that Facebook’s own service would make location more popular, and so any company that relied on Facebook’s service might somehow ride that wave. On a related note, while Facebook may not be trying to build a location-based game, but game developers and other application companies on its platform could use the features to more directly compete with existing startups. For more, check out our panel on monetizing mobile social applications, happening at our Inside Social Apps conference a day before f8.

Location’s Long Time Coming

Facebook has been looking at location for a long time. But it has delayed launching the service, as many have previously heard, because the company has been concerned about privacy issues. It was also waiting for the concept to become somewhat popularized before launching anything, according to today’s report, something that is not yet clearly happening. But big web rivals have been testing their own location services, and startups are getting in to the fray.

As we covered last fall, the company updated its terms of service to reflect its interest in location:

Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.

More recently, it has been rumored to be looking at acquiring location-based social network Loopt. And VentureBeat today notes, as we’ve heard, that Facebook has been working on a variety of location-related projects internally recently.

Given the lineup of location-based services launching at South by Southwest, a popular media and technology culture conference starting in Austin next week, we expect location — as a concept — to get even more buzz this spring than it has already. In fact, Facebook’s design team will have a location-related presence there, via a partnership with Gowalla. The team made a special set of drink coasters, it’s going to scatter them around the conference, and anyone can redeem the coaster for a free drink from the team; Gowalla is providing digital versions of the coasters, with the same reward.

In any case, f8 is looking like an especially opportune time for a launch.

Bigger competitors are also looming. Google and Twitter, in some sense Facebook’s main competition, both have location-based services already. Google’s Latitude has been out for many months, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on, partly because the interface is always on in the background, trasmitting your location. Changing Latitude to the “check-in” model and making it a more central part of Buzz, its new activity feed aggregator, could be a good way for Google to get in on the location action, as TechCrunch details — but now Buzz is out of the gate, with issues. But expect Google to work hard in this area, especially with its larger push into mobile with Android and the Nexus One. Twitter, meanwhile, has been testing a way for users to show the locations of their tweets for months, and that feature appears to going live for all users soon.

Location and Facebook’s Business

Getting into location will likely help Facebook accelerate into more local advertising. It has already been making location a part of its advertising services, in some sense. Advertisers can target ads on the site based on country, region or cities — as of today, thousands of cities. And Page owners can share news feed items with fans who identify themselves as being in certain geographic locations. Local businesses now have half of the 3 billion Pages on the site, according to Facebook statistics, and make up an increasingly large portion of spending on Facebook’s fast-growing performance advertising service.

A location-based service that allows users to specify where they are down to the building, for example, would provide data to Facebook and advertisers about the places they frequent. This could help Page owners and advertisers target ads to be more relevant.

Facebook has other reasons to want to try its hand at location now. It has quickly grown to 400 million monthly active users (it announced in early February, so the number is likely a bit  higher today). And around the same time it said that 100 million of these people access the service every month via their mobile phones, up from 65 million in September. Meanwhile, more and more mobile devices offer some way to share location. That’s a lot of people who can start quickly sharing their location with Facebook friends.

­Department stores have set up shop on Facebook, launching major brand marketing campaigns in order to encourage their customers to become brand ‘fans’ and deepen their fans’ relationship with the brand.

We recently reported that women in the U.S. constituted over 56% of the overall Facebook population. This demographic split underlines a longtime trend that is especially strong among women between 26 and 44.  Interestingly, this is the exact audience who are most likely to have disposable income to spend and are likely to spend it on themselves. With so many women in this age group engaging actively on Facebook, department store brands are taking notice and responding by driving Page and application initiatives.

We looked at a total of seven department stores that seemed to be focusing most, if not all, their efforts on women: Bloomingdale’s had about 21,000 fans and Macy’s had 256,000 or so (they’re owned by the same company), Dillard’s with under 19,000 fans, JC Penney with almost 784,000 fans, Kohl’s had over 952,000 fans, Nordstrom with almost 55,000 and Sears with more than 158,000 fans.

Most of the Pages: actively updated their status with store deals, allowed fans to post to the Wall (except Sears) and were very responsive to posts/comments. In terms of media, they featured a lot of photo albums, mostly of merchandise, a few dozen videos, links to their web sites. They highlighted specials in some way — either with a tab, a box or an application. Only a few used discussion boards, events or notes frequently but all of them linked to Facebook from their web sites (and vise versa on Facebook) and were pretty active about talking back to the customers who posted/commented on their Walls. Dillard’s included a full-service store on their Facebook Page.

Three of the stores featured specials or apps on their Facebook landing pages; JC Penney included a slide show of swim suits, Macy’s The Daily Fashion Challenge app/game which linked to their site for a chance to win a $500 gift card and Sears promoted “amazing offers” only for Facebook fans.

Apps the stores featured on their Pages were interesting because they had a wide range. Kohl’s had an LC Lauren Conrad tab that included an app to see the making of her collection, in addition to boxes for Twitter and YouTube and videos. Macy’s create a game/app called The Daily Fashion Challenge asking users to create an outfit from merchandise to enter to win a $500 gift card, although the game was played on Macy’s web site, not Facebook, one place the company could make a change to more fully engage their fans. Dillard’s had the most exciting app, an online store, complete with inventory, a shopping basket, and the ability to purchase right on Facebook.

Dillard’s also included an interesting on their Facebook Page, Phoebe “The Fit Girl,” a mascot-like cartoon that helps women find the proper sizes for undergarments; Phoebe even has her own Facebook Page and blog, both featured on Dillard’s Page. The Page also featured a Polls tab with a lot of polls, a signup tab for their email/mail lists, a Twitter tab filled with tweets and an I Do tab for weddings that linked to their web site, strange considering how the company created a store online but didn’t do the same for their wedding registry.

Most Pages built in many, many tabs.

Kohl’s had a Celeb Style tab, Receipt Contest tab, Scholarship Tab, Green Scene tab, Style & Savings tab and a lot of activity on their discussion tab; each of these tabs was well-built with information about the contest, scholarship, green programs or ways to save money at the store. JC Penney had a Weekly Obsession tab for highlighted items, a Spring Poll tab, Style File and Sweepstakes tabs. Macy’s had a tab for prom, a Trend Report tab featuring “hot” merchandise, a Give Back tab for charities on Facebook and a Polls tab that had seen more than 44,500 people vote since August. Sears included tabs for their rewards program, a Theme Song Quiz, a YouTube tab and was the only store to feature a Careers tab.

Compared to some of the other categories of Facebook Pages we’ve investigated, the department stores seem to be on the ball. Dillard’s, of course, took this one step further by featuring a full store on their Page, but they could also have done the same with their wedding registry. Overall, most of these stores incorporated their merchandise and specials into everything they did on Facebook, creating original content to keep fans on the social network and paying attention to what their fans said about and to them.

It’s clear that there are many opportunities for retailers and other brands looking to deepen customer relationships online, and Facebook is presenting an increasingly sophisticated array of possibilities week after week. For retailers looking to take further advantage of Facebook Pages and other features for reaching customers, full understanding of Facebook’s complex marketing tools is imperative. We detail exactly how to market with Pages, apps, and advertisements in the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive toolkit for marketers seeking to launch or improve campaigns on Facebook.

Facebook has expanded its list of “preferred” developers who help brands, celebrities and a wide variety of organizations build applications, Facebook Connect integrations, or custom features for Facebook Pages. This means more visibility for the 36 newly added developer-consultants, so maybe some new clients for them. There are now 50 companies listed, more than half are operating internationally, and in a total of 15 countries.

Facebook created the Preferred Developer Consultant Program last December, and is continuing to accept applications from prospective companies, more here. Our Facebook Marketing Bible also contains a list of service providers that we recommend.

Here are the new companies in alphabetical order, followed by a list of the existing ones. Note the addition of Techlightenment and 77Agency, two companies that provide automation services for bulk purchases of Facebook’s performance ads.

New firms on Facebook’s list:

• 77Agency Ltd.
• Always Be Social by Blueye Creative
• Brand Networks
• Candytech.biz
• Carrot Creative
• Fan Appz, Inc.
• Fission Strategy
• Fluid
• Friend2Friend
• Gamaroff Digital
• GroupCard Apps
• Hearsay Labs
• i2we, inc
• Inigral, Inc.
• Kitoks.com
• Komfo
• KRDS
• Large Animal Games
• Nudge Social Media
• Plexipixel Inc.
• Promoqube
• Ralph
• Resource Interactive
• Sociabliz
• SocialAmp
• Syncapse
• T3 (The Think Tank)
• Techlightenment
• theKBuzz
• Thuzi
• Transpond, Inc.
• VaynerMedia
• Votigo, Inc.
• Wishpot
• Xihit Solutions GmbH
• Zibaba

They’re joining these firms, already on the list:

Large populations and growing internet connectivity are pushing Asia’s Pacific Rim countries to the forefront on Facebook. Our latest stats, for the month of February, show Indonesia and the Philippines picking up a combined three million users, more than the combined growth of the entire mainland.

The Philippines, in particular, are jetting ahead. The country just passed 10 million Facebook users overall; according to our forward projections, that number will be multiplied several times over by year’s end. That growth could be bad news for Friendster, the aging social network that found one of its last bastions in the Philippines. Also, note that the data in the report is based on Facebook’s advertising tool, which typically reports traffic a few weeks behind.

Another sub-region of Asia that’s picking up the pace is the Indian subcontinent. India itself is accelerating slightly; but the country to keep an eye on over the next couple months is Pakistan, which doubled its January gains in February. Pakistan now has about double the market penetration of India, at 1.1 percent — although that’s still very low.

Overall, Asia’s Facebook population grew about 8 percent in February, down only slightly from January. It is our third-largest region with 79 million users, or only two percent of the 3.75 billion people in the region. For detailed stats on each country, check out our full Global Market Monitor report.

A couple athletes, a handful of musicians, two shoe companies and a few television shows, plus list regulars made up this week’s Top 20 Facebook Pages. Zynga’s Mafia Wars continues its domination of the number 1 spot with almost 10 million fans, but its partner in crime for the past few weeks, Texas Hold’em Poker, disappeared from the list this week.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars	9,891,127	+364,698	+3.83
2.	Ricardo Kakà	1,165,322	+343,654	+41.82
3.	Converse	2,286,122	+127,174	+5.89
4.	Justin Bieber	2,052,557	+125,802	+6.53
5.	VANS	558,044	+124,530	+28.73
6.	Selena Gomez	3,797,516	+115,649	+3.14
7.	Megan Fox	6,150,914	+109,452	+1.81
8.	Starbucks	6,125,550	+106,906	+1.78
9.	Lady Gaga	5,566,682	+105,651	+1.93
10.	Facebook	7,577,121	+105,370	+1.41
11.	Skittles	3,994,668	+96,120	+2.47
12.	Michael Jackson	11,220,110	+92,391	+0.83
13.	Lil Wayne	3,306,267	+88,310	+2.74
14.	The X Factor	1,012,492	+86,609	+9.35
15.	Cristiano Ronaldo	3,611,756	+84,537	+2.40
16.	Taylor Swift	3,431,201	+76,443	+2.28
17.	Victoria’s Secret	2,935,646	+74,875	+2.62
18.	The Twilight Saga	5,183,477	+68,185	+1.33
19.	YouTube	4,388,681	+67,086	+1.55
20.	Dr. House	4,975,383	+65,841	+1.34

Two soccer (football) players for Real Madrid C.F. were on the list this week. Brazilian player Ricardo Kaká at number 2 with over 1 million fans and heartthrob Cristiano Ronaldo at number 15 with 3.6 million fans. Although both are fairly popular on Facebook, their rankings this week were helped by consolidations of 63,000 last week for Ronaldo (his page only grew by 84,500 so most of it was attributable to those spikes) and 229,000 on Wednesday for Kaká.

Next were the shoes. Vans, the shoe brand popular with skateboarders, seems to have landed at number 5 almost entirely due to what appears to be a page consolidation on Sunday of almost 123,000 (their total growth this week was 124,530), a large part of their fan base, given the Page has just 559,000 fans. Converse was also on the list again this week at number 3; the iconic shoe company grew by almost 111,000 fans Wednesday, but also recently launched a line of shoes featuring designs from the 1980s band Blondie.

Musicians took up another chunk of the list, with teen crooner Justin Bieber fourth with 2 million-plus fans; he’s been promoting a new single and  upcoming album. Another teenage musician, Selena Gomez, landed at number 6, partly due to growth of 90,000 fans over two days likely due to page consolidations, given her page grew by 115,649 last week. But, Gomez also told her 3.8 million fans this week that her latest album went gold, meaning it sold 500,000 copies.

Rapper Lil Wayne took the number 13 spot this week with more than 3 million fans.  Perhaps Lil Wayne’s popularity grew in response to his sentencing hearing scheduled for last week on a weapons charge, but it was delayed due to a fire and he was able to enjoy a few extra days of freedom. Finally, singer Taylor Swift was sixteenth on the list this week; she currently has more than 3 million fans, is on a U.S. tour and the official Taylor Swift iPhone application launched last week.

List regulars this week included seventh place Megan Fox with more than 6 million fans now, Starbucks in eighth place also with over 6 million fans and Lady Gaga at number 9, trailing slightly with about 5.5 million fans, the songstress is currently on tour and has been promoting her new single/video “Telephone” on Facebook with exclusive stills and updates. Facebook’s fan Page landed tenth and Michael Jackson continues to hang out on the list, currently with more than 11 million fans, at number 12 this week.

Number 11 Skittles now has a Page with 4 million fans and grew by about 96,000 fans last week, about 71,000 of which came from two spikes on Wednesday and Sunday, albeit the company is also giving out coupons for a free packet of candy.

The popular television show “The X Factor” landed at number 14 this week almost certainly due to a Page consolidation; this page grew by 86,000 last week, 82,000 of which were added on Wednesday. Another popular television show, “House,” went back on the air this week after a hiatus, consequently the Page grew by 65,800 fans to land at number 20.

Rounding out the list was the number 17 Victoria’s Secret Page, which probably benefitted by 54,000 adds over two days to bring its total fan base on Facebook to about 3 million. At 18 was the “Twilight” Page, now with over 5 million fans and nineteenth was the YouTube Facebook Page.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars	9,891,127	+364,698	+3.83
2.	Ricardo Kakà	1,165,322	+343,654	+41.82
3.	Converse	2,286,122	+127,174	+5.89
4.	Justin Bieber	2,052,557	+125,802	+6.53
5.	VANS	558,044	+124,530	+28.73
6.	Selena Gomez	3,797,516	+115,649	+3.14
7.	Megan Fox	6,150,914	+109,452	+1.81
8.	Starbucks	6,125,550	+106,906	+1.78
9.	Lady Gaga	5,566,682	+105,651	+1.93
10.	Facebook	7,577,121	+105,370	+1.41
11.	Skittles	3,994,668	+96,120	+2.47
12.	Michael Jackson	11,220,110	+92,391	+0.83
13.	Lil Wayne	3,306,267	+88,310	+2.74
14.	The X Factor	1,012,492	+86,609	+9.35
15.	Cristiano Ronaldo	3,611,756	+84,537	+2.40
16.	Taylor Swift	3,431,201	+76,443	+2.28
17.	Victoria’s Secret	2,935,646	+74,875	+2.62
18.	The Twilight Saga	5,183,477	+68,185	+1.33
19.	YouTube	4,388,681	+67,086	+1.55
20.	Dr. House	4,975,383	+65,841	+1.34