Is it enforcement day for Facebook? Several of the top placers on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining apps by monthly active users (MAU) redirect to Facebook’s front page, indicating that the network may have at last taken notice of, and action on, shady tactics used by a particular developer.

We’re not sure, but we think the same developer is behind all the apps in question: Friend Quiz, Friend FAQ, Friend Quizzes – Dating! and Friend Poll!. They’re all among the top ten gainers below:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Static FBML	36,892,114	+9,443,232	+25.60
2.	Friend Quiz	20,667,405	+8,100,641	+39.20
3.	Friend FAQ	13,497,001	+5,736,127	+42.50
4.	Slide FunSpace	23,432,250	+1,705,579	+7.28
5.	Friends Exposed	18,280,121	+1,153,129	+6.31
6.	Marketplace	13,274,027	+1,057,287	+7.97
7.	Friend Quizzes – Dating!	1,001,005	+953,245	+95.23
8.	How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT	1,915,222	+833,647	+43.53
9.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	1,501,781	+746,238	+49.69
10.	Friend Poll!	611,274	+597,203	+97.70
11.	Bubble Island	1,101,968	+594,265	+53.93
12.	Tiki Resort	1,218,159	+575,310	+47.23
13.	FarmVille	83,127,751	+561,878	+0.68
14.	My City Life	3,908,234	+537,319	+13.75
15.	PetVille	19,619,857	+475,914	+2.43
16.	Ninja Saga	3,926,247	+453,121	+11.54
17.	Video 4 You	1,587,038	+410,554	+25.87
18.	MindJolt Games	19,925,788	+398,103	+2.00
19.	Daily Photo	6,659,520	+393,930	+5.92
20.	Translations	379,238	+374,515	+98.75

On Friday, we explained how these quiz apps were subverting Facebook’s developer policies. After Facebook added mandatory opt-outs for users allowing them to decline giving their email address or permission to post to their wall, these apps added in boxes of their own that forced the user to hand over permissions, or else go away.

The takedown will be a big blow to the developer, who is listed on two of the apps as FriendQuizzes, Inc. Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ don’t list a developer name, but all four are identical in form and function. In total, this group of apps had over 35 million MAU, about as many users as Facebook’s third-largest app overall.

One developer’s (self-inflicted) bad luck could be another’s jackpot strike. Topzy, which makes Friends Exposed, should be dancing for joy; its quiz app is very similar to those banned, but it has survived unscathed and free to pick up all the quiz-bereft users. As you can see from its placement at number five above, Friends Exposed was already growing strongly.

Rounding out the top growers this week: Static FBML isn’t worth more than a passing mention, as it’s just a Facebook-built app for customizing Pages that’s indirectly picking up users. Slide FunSpace is coming off a growth binge spurred by Slide figuring how to take advantage of Facebook’s new policies — although, obviously, with more respect for the actual rules than the unfortunate quiz developer. Marketplace has a similar story, except its surge came from a sweepstakes.

Boomerang Networks has spent the last year quietly building an advertising offers service designed to take on established players like Offerpal and Super Rewards. Now, it’s taking the covers off.

Every offers company is busy trying to optimize which ads appear to which users. Boomerang’s offer wall includes thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons so users can vote on which ones they like. That’s the beginning: the company combines this user feedback with user comments, profile data — as Facebook’s and others’ terms of service allow — as well as number of clicks. Then, it analyzes the data to figure out which types of offers make the best fit between the user base (by country, age and sex), the category of application, and the price the users are typically willing to pay for the offers relative to the game. When users interact with the resulting offers, Boomerang gathers more information on their behavior and further optimizes the offers. It also has a customer service team pre-screen for deceptive offers, it says, and won’t repeatedly show offers to users who take them or vote them down.

The company has made internationalization a priority. Chief executive Honor Gunday tells us it has deals with more than 130 advertising networks around the world, so it is able to filter offers to be relevant to users in specific places. He provides a rough breakdown of what this looks like. For medium to high-engagement games in the US, offers can bring in from $1.00 to $1.50 per user; in southeast Asian countries, $0.50 to $0.80; in Latin America, $0.10 to $0.20.

The offer wall includes some other notable features. It has direct payments from more than 60 providers around the world. Although some are available through payment aggregators like PayByCash, Gunday also says that it has brought in some options not available through most rivals, such as Cherry Credits in Southeast Asia. The wall also provides categories of offers by content type and popularity, and shows banner ads. To make the experience easier for users, it also provides a detailed customer feedback form about each offer, and provides a window showing pending payouts and past offer votes.

Users also can click to view a full “customer relationship management” interface showing them the following information about each completed offer: title, date taken, status, earned or expected amount of virtual currency, payout timeframe, and user-generated quality ranking.

Boomerang’s current publicly-named clients include TheBroth and Hitgrab, and is in talks with more. The service is now live for apps on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo. Boomerang has raised a round of funding from angel investors, but the amount has not been disclosed.

In the years following U.S. troop deployments to Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, thousands of former soldiers, both men and women, have returned home to to continue their civilian lives. Some of these veterans return physically injured or paralyzed, others with psychological issues. As these veterans adjust to the civilian life, Facebook has become a tool for them to apply for federal benefits, return to college, search for work and find support from other veterans.

Searching for “vets” or “veterans” on Facebook yields dozens and dozens of Pages and groups, some official, but many simply begun by veterans or others wanting to use Facebook to express pride and support for the armed forces. These Pages and groups are used to share stories, some have formed tight-knit communities where people seem to interact on a regular basis, whereas others have become go-to resource forums.

Organizations and vets use an array of Facebook tools in these interactions, including Wall posts and comments, Groups, and Pages. Both offer discussion boards and ways of posting photos and videos — Groups are more focused on community topics, while Pages are intended to be public, and oriented around brands, organizations, and well-known people. As a result, Pages tend to help veterans make new and unexpected connections.

“I use Facebook while I’m deployed everyday, all day, through chat, messages, pictures and etc. I was on MySpace, but I rarely check it because I’m addicted to Facebook!” Army Sgt. Jose L. Aranda wrote us from his deployment in Iraq, noting that his family, wife and children, are still in Texas. Like many other active duty soldiers, Aranda uses Facebook as a lifeline to his loved ones while away from home.

Aranda, 27, is a native of McCamey, Texas, a town of about 1,600 in Upton County (population 3,149) about 285 miles east of El Paso. He stumbled upon and became a fan of the Upton County Vets Facebook Page, with 101 fans, photos of local vets and some information about the local courthouse; the Page formed late last year.

“I’m proud to say that I have family and friends in uniform besides me that came from where I grew up. Is it comforting? Yes, indeed!” he wrote us, noting that he’s found old friends there he didn’t even know had joined the armed services.

Veterans organizations have also taken advantage of Facebook to reach out to their membership. One such group with a strong Facebook presence was the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Page, which displays its latest public service announcements. The Wall is closed to its 67,824 fans, but posts generate dozens of comments where people ask each other questions, offer resources and have actual discussions, essentially functioning as a discussion board. The Page hosts many such conversations about everything from benefits to politics to job tips on the Wall, although a discussion thread about payments generated 108 comments. IAVA also uses Causes to raise money for their efforts to improve the lives of veterans from these wars and their families.

“Veterans need each other for support and now they’ve found a place where they can come find that — I’ve heard directly from people who’ve found other veterans that they served with 30 years ago and now they became Facebook friends,” said Joe Chenelly, spokesman for Disabled American Veterans, an organization 1.2 million strong with about 9,900 fans on Facebook.

Chenelly said DAV is incorporating Facebook into everything it does, but has also used MySpace (no longer active), LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and Buzz. He notes that Facebook has been the most accessible media to their mostly-Vietnam era membership — people who didn’t grow up with the internet, who find the site easiest to use. DAV’s Facebook presence began as a group last spring, changed to a Page last summer, incorporated some unofficial pages and now Chenelly tells us that the “highest levels” of the organization’s leadership is interested in DAV’s Facebook presence.

“Members, fans, are really using it to talk to each other, about their problems and success and it’s been a great thing for camaraderie, doing a good job of bridging the generational gap,” he tells us, referencing the ages of Vietnam versus Iraq/Afghanistan veterans.

The Wall, in particular, has allowed veterans to help each other, ask for help, find fellow soldiers and ultimately create new connections on Facebook, Chenelly tells us. It has also helped the DAV stay connected to its members needs and get the word out about legislation and other issues.

Unofficial Pages, like the Operation Iraqi Freedom Vets with 611 fans, are also used by veterans and their supporters to gather for comfort and to share information. Veterans tell each other the names of their units, where and when they served, while others thank veterans for their service. The official Paralyzed Veterans of America Page with 3,473 fans, is also a place for veterans and their supporters to gather for comfort, but as the organization strives to improve the lives of paralyzed veterans, sharing resources becomes much more important. Here it’s interesting to note that the Share function, wherein fans can post items to their news feed, has been heavily used in cases of petitions for pertinent legislation, something that’s previously been done via email.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has a Facebook Page with more than 19,400 fans and the Wall is primarily used to diffuse information about veterans’ benefits, news stories, studies, resources, suicide prevention and other health-related information for veterans. Other federal agencies concerned with veterans also have official Pages, including the Veterans Benefits Administration (3,753 fans), Veterans Health Administration (10,700 fans) and the National Cemetery Administration (706 fans). Although fans cannot post to the Veterans Affairs Wall, comments on status updates and other items are active with discussion amongst fans about resources, politics and experiences.

It’s interesting to note that veterans have begun to use the medium of Facebook as a discussion board, largely moving their conversations onto the Wall via comments, as opposed to limiting themselves to structured discussion threads. Governmental Pages seem to be more imposing than organization or fan Pages, as communication appears to be one-way and more tightly-controlled. But on Pages where vets are given the freedom to engage, they are taking full advantage of Facebook’s features and it appears that very meaningful conversations result.

RockYou has been running advertising for other applications on Facebook and social networks for years, but the social application developer is increasing its effort in this direction. It’s launching a monetization platform that includes its existing advertising and offers features, along with virtual currency options, local advertising, and more.

It has a lot of advertising inventory, with more than 121 million monthly users in the United States — spread across its own ad partner applications on Facebook, MySpace and other social networks — and 13 billion monthly global impressions. While most companies on Facebook have chosen to either focus on building applications or providing services, RockYou’s strategy is to do both.

Called the “RockYou Monetization Platform,” the features intended to include something for everyone — and they should be pretty familiar, as much of what the platform includes, like offers, have been available since at least last year. Developers with simple quiz apps, for example, tend to make their money through banner ads; developers with social games tend to make money on virtual currency. So RockYou is making it clearer than ever that it intends to take on the wide range of other companies also trying to serve applications.

We should also note that RockYou is quite active on Facebook, this platform is intended for developers across the web, around the world. For example, the first item below, RockYou game ads, is focused on Flash game developers — the company is running rotating banner ads within these widgets. The suite’s ad inventory mostly monetizes based on cost-per-impression (CPM). More, from the company:

Display advertising

• RockYou Game Ads: Rotating ads ideal for flash games provide increased revenue by up to 50 percent
• RockYou Video Ads: High eCPM video and flash ads
• RockYou Banners: Standard IAB/Facebook compliant banner ads

Virtual currency marketplace:

• RockYou Surveys: Anonymous, spam-free surveys sourced from select brands and research firms
• RockYou Local: Purchasable discounts sourced from over 2,500 trusted brands, retailers, and local merchants
• RockYou Offers: Safe and Facebook-compliant free samples and subscription offers
• RockYou Payments: Trusted and top-performing payment providers

Note that RockYou Offers, as a company spokesperson tells us, is actually a white-labeled version of Peanut Labs’ online local advertising service, Cherry Deals, which just launched last month. Peanut Labs’ sales team has gone out and sold what are essentially group-discounted local offers, so people can earn currency in an online game in exchange for receiving a coupon to a local business. Cherry Deals is the name of the product one the rest of the web. Through the partnership, RockYou will run these local ads as part of the platform on Facebook and other social networks, a company spokesperson tells us.

There’s also another feature, set to be announced later this week: in-game engagement ads. These ads will let a user do something like watch a video in exchange for virtual currency, similar to how offers work but focused on taking particular actions rather than buying something or taking a survey. We’ve been seeing more and more examples of these sorts of ads lately — Facebook has been running its own for a long time, but others, like SocialVibe, are starting to experiment with their own engagement ads for developers.

RockYou raised a $50 million fourth funding round last fall, and is rumored to have annual revenues of between $30 million and $40 million. It has also been busy building social games in the past few months, like Zoo World; today’s announcement shows that it is getting even more serious about monetization services.

In the past week, the social gaming space has seen quite a stir. Not only has there been a handful of significant acquisitions and new numbers from this month’s Top 25 lists for both MySpace and Facebook, but there may be a new social genre boom on the horizon: city building. Big players such as Playdom and Digital Chocolate released their own SimCity-like titles. Here are the headlines for this past week from Inside Social Games.

Monday, March 1st, 2010

• Four for Slide and the ABCs of This Week’s Top Gaining Facebook Games by Monthly Active Users
• Facebook Blocked in China, But Chinese Game Developers Coming to Facebook
• Digital Chocoltate Jumps into Facebook City Building with NanoTowns
• King of KungFu Battles for Facebook Users
• Content-Sharing, Virtual Goods Helped Slide Double its User Base in February

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

• The Top 25 MySpace Games for February, 2010
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for February, 2010
• Hi5 Announces Support for Facebook Platform APIs, Targeting Social Game Developers
• Social Games Plant the Seeds for Growing Online Communities

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

• Big Developers Make Faltering Gains on This Week’s List of Top Growing Facebook Games by Daily Active Users
• Playdom Constructs Its Own Facebook City Builder: Social City
• Playdom Continues Acquisitions with OffBeat Creations Purchase
• Former MySpace CEO DeWolfe Makes Social Gaming Move with MindJolt Purchase

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

• German Developer Plinga Makes Turtle Soup Out of Worms for Facebook Users
• Enter into MMO Ninja Action Against Facebook Friends with Nindou International
• MindJolt’s Value to Buyer: A Whole Lot of Games, and a Platform for Many More

Friday, March 5th, 2010

• Tencent Localizes QQ Ranch to Facebook with Ranch Life
• Virtual Cities and Casinos Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Zynga, Pladom, Other Big Social Game Developers Getting the Most Trademarks
• Social Gaming Roundup: Free Games, the iPad, Assassin’s Creed, and More

Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!

Mobile First is a provider of mobile payment and mobile billing solutions.

LifeStreet Media is a performance advertising platform focused on social applications.

RockYou providers developers with virtual currency and display ad monetization services.

Zong is a provider of mobile payments serving the digital content, social media, and gaming industries.

Offerpal Media is a managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Super Rewards is a monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

Surfpin is a provider of mobile and landline payments for game and application developers.

Social Video Bytes is a new video ad network for social network applications.

AdParlor is an advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites.

SoftLayer provides managed hosting services for social application and game developers.

Gate2Shop is a provider of global and localized payment solutions.

mopay is a global provider of mobile payments for web content.

Facebook Photos Increase in Size – Facebook’s Nathaniel Roman posted a blog this week announcing that the maximum photo size is set to increase by 20% from 604 to 720 pixels in order, “to give you higher quality photos and make viewing them more enjoyable.” The changes are taking place gradually and may affect some users later than others, he wrote. Check our January coverage for more.

Yahoo! Integrates Facebook Connect – This week Yahoo! provided a list of instructions for users to integrate Facebook Connect across a variety of services, allowing people to add Facebook friends’ email addresses to Yahoo! contacts lists. Instructions are available here.

Google News, Facebook Send Traffic to Different Media – Facebook and Google both direct traffic to media sites, but the types of sites they assist are somewhat different, according to a recent blog from Hitwise. Facebook tends to send traffic to broadcast media while Google News sends more traffic to print media web sites. Specifically: “The Wall Street Journal last week received 10.37% of its U.S. visits from Google News compared to only 1.41% from Facebook. The New York Times similarly received more traffic from Google News than from Facebook (5.21% compared to 2.96% of upstream visits). Fox News and CNN by contrast received more traffic from Facebook than Google News. Fox News received 5.50% from Facebook and 1.18% from Google News while CNN received 5.92% from Facebook and 1.77% from Google News.” However, Facebook is a general-purpose site where people share all sorts of links and other information. Google News is a news-focused aggregator — it’s not even clear how much broadcast content Google News even bothers to include. So the comparison is not direct.

Palm Updates Facebook App – Palm updated its Facebook app for all webOS devices this week, including new functionalities for the Wall, inbox, photos, messages, news feed and search. MobileCrunch reported that the new app is fully intertwined with webOS’ Synergy system in addition to being a great improvement over the previous version.

Facebook Mobile Browsing Growing – comScore released a study on social networking access via mobile browsers this week, finding that 30.8% of smartphone users access social networks with their cell phones in January, up 8.3% points from last year that time. Facebook mobile use grew 112% over the past year while Twitter grew 347% in the same time period. About 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook with their handsets in January, compared to 11.4 million for MySpace.

Facebook Looks to Hire Public Policy Managers – Facebook board member and Washington Post chairman Donald E. Graham wrote a blog this week in which he noted that, in the face of growing concerns over online privacy, Facebook posted two job listings this week related to public policy. One is for a manager of public policy to work with regulators/lawmakers at the state/federal levels, also working with pro-consumer organizations; the other is for a public policy associate, who would attend congressional hearings, meet with non-profits and tech lobbying groups.

This is part of a trend for Facebook that Graham notes has been growing its Washington, D.C. presence, “Those jobs would bring Facebook’s staff in Washington to five. It recently hired journalist Andrew Noyes for public policy communications and Tim Sparapani from the ACLU, who is now director of public policy. Adam Conner began the office and deals with lobbying and policy issues including privacy.”

Facebook Blogs About ‘Working With Zuck’ – Facebook software engineer Andrew Bosworth blogged this week about what it’s like to work with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, or “Zuck.”

One, Zuck expects debate, with exceptions. Two, he’s not sentimental, as in he has no problem dropping a product if it doesn’t meet expectations or necessity. Three, Zuck experiences things contextually, in other words, “He rarely makes decisions by talking about products in the abstract and strongly prefers to play with them, often withholding judgment until he does.”

Bosworth writes that Zuck pushes people, expecting people to do more in less time for the good of the company, “Zuck isn’t always right about what that is, he isn’t often wrong,” Bosworth writes.
Not surprisingly, the note is very positive towards Zuckerberg and Facebook generally.

Slide Lays Off Employees – Slide, the online entertainment company, has decided to stop development on social games SuperPocus and Top Fish, which means it will lay off “less than 10%” of employees. Of about 137 employees, about 40 employees are working on the two games; some will be reassigned to work on other projects.

Facebook’s Beacon Lawsuit Nearer to Closure – Last Friday a federal judge stopped short of approving a $9.5 million class-action settlement against Facebook for its Beacon program. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg in San Jose, CA could require Facebook to permanently shut Beacon down and contribute $6 million to a new privacy foundation if he approves the suit; the 19 users named in the complaint would receive between $1,000-$15,000, but no others would receive money, and their attorneys would receive $3 million. Approximately 3.6 million Facebook users were affected by Beacon, which launched in November of 2007, telling users’ friends about their purchases made at retailers like Zappos and Blockbuster while not on Facebook.

Facebook and Hockey Collide – Facebook status updates shot through the roof during key moments of the U.S.-Canada Olympic hockey game recently, especially at 2:29 p.m. PST when the game was tied in the third period and secondly at 2:54 p.m. PST when Canada scored the winning goal. More than 3.5 million status updates were sent during those two moments, twice the pace of updates for that day.

Sunday’s 82nd annual Oscars movie awards has taken a cue from the Grammys and tried to incorporate social media into its marketing package, a move to make itself more relevant to online audiences.

There’s an official Oscars presence on Facebook, on the Celebs and The Academy Pages, in conjunction with ABC which will broadcast the red carpet arrivals before the show Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific Time and livestream it via Facebook Connect. Facebook fans can also submit questions and comments in real time. The 10 movies nominated for best picture also have Facebook Pages and the Celebs Page includes a livestream tab for the Oscars, as does The Academy Page but neither Page goes out of its way to promote it. There’ s also the Official 2010 Oscars iPhone application, allowing users to predict winners, view trailers, get extra information on each film and make predictions then share them on Facebook or Twitter.

Most actors nominated for best actor or actress don’t appear to have sanctioned Facebook Pages, with the exception of Gabourey Sidibe, perhaps an indicator of the disconnect between social media and the Oscars. As far as the movie Pages themselves, it seems that different studios are taking different approaches to how to handle the hype surrounding their best picture nominees.

Sony Pictures produced two best picture nominees, “District 9” and “An Education,” and has heavily promoted both on their respective Facebook pages. Status updates have been very frequent on both Pages and gushingly enthusiastic, several on “An Education” had words written in all caps. What’s more, “District 9’s” Page lands on an Oscar Noms! tab that lists the nominations the film received and the info box on the main page announces the nominations as well.

Some of the other nominees showed their excitement primarily with many, many ebullient status updates and news/reviews of all kinds, as was the case with Summit Entertainment’s “The Hurt Locker,” Lionsgate’s “Precious,” and The Weinstein Company’s “Inglorious Basterds.”

Other Pages were more sedate about the nominations, such as Warner Brothers’ “The Blind Side” announcing the film’s nomination and Sandra Bullock’s on a status update, Paramount Pictures’ “Up in the Air” providing some information about the nominations and Focus Features’ “A Serious Man” also highlighting the nominations via status updates.

Then there was 20^th Century Fox’s smash hit “Avatar,” one of our Top 20 Facebook Pages for several weeks in a row — it didn’t mention the Oscar noms at all.

AdAge reported that this is the first year that the Oscars are getting a social media push, mostly in an effort to save ratings (13% decrease last year) and reach younger audiences, as last year’s viewer averaged 49.5 years old. Part of this push for younger viewers was reflected by expanding the list of best picture nominees to 10 and including films like “Avatar,” “Up,” “The Blind Side,” and “District 9,” and the other part is the willingness to use social media, such as the live stream of the nominations announcements, watched by more than 170,000 people on The Academy Facebook Page.

Given that this is the Oscars’ first Facebook experience, it’s understandable that there’s an element of caution in its implementation. There’s so much more content available on Oscars’ web site that could be transferred to Facebook in meaningful ways that simply hasn’t been done. There are photo galleries of past red carpet outfits, winners, party photos, there’s a video of how the statuettes are made, nominee Q&As, extra content from the nominee luncheon and much more.

Why is none of this content available on Facebook?

It’s an interesting question to ponder, although given the newness of this medium to this traditional event, it’s not surprising. Applications, games and polls are another area that have yet to be exploited by the Oscars this year (not counting the iPhone app); something as simple as being able to superimpose your face over that of an actress wearing your favorite gown could be both relevant and interactive.

Hopefully The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences will learn some good social media lessons this year so that the 2011 Oscars will continue to improve the Facebook experience for fans.

Cities, counties, states and other municipal entities don’t want to be left out of the Facebook rush. They’ve begun to create Facebook Pages for everything from their parks to their police departments to their city councils. Inside Facebook has covered governmental efforts on Facebook before, so this week we thought it’d be interesting to see how cities are using the social network to promote everybody’s favorite public service: public parks.

One surprise was that many of the parks Pages we perused had recently started, something one official we spoke to said was the result of an industry trend towards social media. Most Pages we saw tended to concentrate most strongly on the Wall and photos, a few used notes and none heavily utilized the discussion functions.

The vast majority of governmental entities we found on Facebook were cities, however, there were also some counties and states. Briefly, it’s interesting to note that larger entities — such as New York City, Los Angeles County and the State of Oregon — tended to be less successful at creating a unique Facebook community than others, small towns in particular. This is probably because small communities are already tight-knit and so it’s easier to transfer that closeness to Facebook; case in point, some smaller parks used a photo of staff or a local attraction as a profile picture whereas larger entities almost always used an official logo.

Monterey Park Recreation Superintendent Dan Costley said the idea behind his city’s Recreation and Parks Facebook Page is to create a sense of community apart from the L.A. metropolitan area and to do more with less — as is the norm in California these days. Since January 14 the Page has gathered 222 fans and the city’s population is 61,000. Costley tells us that the parks department went ahead with the Facebook Page after seeing multiple queries about it on industry list serves — going to Facebook is a hot topic in his professional circle, he tells us. And in the face of his state and city’s budget crises, Costley says using Facebook for marketing is a free alternative to fliers or press conferences.

“Literally we were told, ‘If you can borrow something from another department, cut back.’ You can look at something like Facebook and say, ‘Nobody is charging us for this,’” Costley tells us. “So if it helps us save money and send the message to the right people, that’s always going to help us.”

Plans for the Facebook Page revolve around creating a community around the Monterey Park community, such as reporting local swim team results, posting pictures of community events or previewing fireworks for the Fourth of July, posting status updates with city facts (Did you know that Monterey Park is 7.73 square miles in size?) or announcing the 2010 Chinese New Year Festival, he said. Costley wants Facebook to become part of the park department’s marketing strategy and, so far, at least many local politicians have taken note and joined as fans.

Perhaps because creating a sense of community becomes increasingly difficult with more people, larger parks entities have struggled to do so on Facebook.

Los Angeles County’s Department of Parks and Recreation on Facebook went up in March of 2009, but only has 55 fans in a county of almost 10 million people, not surprising given that the Page directs traffic to other web sites. There’s information about the county’s YouTube channel, but no phone number, no information about the parks and most links go to other county sites.

New York City Department of Parks & Recreation didn’t fare much better, with 2,058 fans in a city of more than 8 million, most links leading to external sites and no information about parks on the Page. There were local status updates about weather, lots of events and a MyFlickr tab, however. The State of Oregon has under 4 million people but 755 fans and is also still figuring out how to best use Facebook. Case in point, the Parks and Recreation Department recently debuted an online newsletter “Your Parks Go Guide” on a WordPress blog, directing fans to the blog but didn’t link it the Page’s notes.

These Pages have great information to share – Oregon, for example, offers all sorts of discounted rates to their parks quite often — but have yet to figure out the most effective way to do so; the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible details an array of tools to help organizations do this.

New Orleans’ City Park is the exception to the rule. With nearly 5,000 fans in a city of about 312,000, the Page sees a lot of activity from fans, includes maps of some park areas and frequent status updates of park happenings. This may be due, in part, to a tangential Friends of City Park organization and their efforts on Facebook (with 1,400 fans) to extend their offline mission of preserving the city’s parks.

Nashville (Arkansas) City Park’s Facebook Page is exemplary of how very small communities can take advantage to create an online community around parks. Here what matters is quality, not quantity. This Page has 459 fans in a town of about 4,800 (almost 10% of the population), features a group photo of staff, includes intimate status updates such as “What a BEAUTIFUL DAY to be out in your city park! Come on out and join us!” and has contact information right on the homepage, as well as the Info tab. As a result, the Page has frequent interaction between staff and fans, albeit they probably know each other personally in real life, too.

Other ways to engage fans is to include local content like photos, as evidenced by Dobbs Ferry Recreation Department’s Page (where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg grew up, by the way). This Facebook Page serves a New York community of 11,000 people, 246 of whom are fans, and features a collection of photo albums from the Valentine’s Day festivities at the senior center to the recent 5K to children’s summer camp. The University City Dog Park in Missouri is a membership-based non-profit quasi-public park with 500 member dogs and 109 fans on the Facebook Page. Because this is a very specific community, interaction on the Page is very personal and conversational, lots of discussions take place on the Wall and events/announcements receive a good number of comments.

One final way Indiana’s Valparaiso Department of Parks and Recreation attempts to engage its 411 fans is by utilizing a park-specific poll and an application. The poll asks about park visits and the application on the Create A Parks Profile links to an external web site to keep users informed of parks activities they might like. Unfortunately these extras won’t work unless users are engaged: no one had voted in the poll, although it was unclear how many profiles had been created via the app.

It’s up to each community to figure out the best way to use Pages to promote their parks. Clearly, from what we see, focusing on personal touches for small populations is what’s working best so far.

Zynga ripoffs have returned on this week’s AppData list of Facebook apps still under a million monthly users, in the form of Mafia Wars Weekly Loot Collection. This single app gained almost 900,000 hopeful users over the course of a single week, despite its fairly obvious lack of connection to the real Mafia Wars.

A few weeks back, we were seeing similar apps spring up around FarmVille. Players quickly wised up and stopped using the apps. But although it appears that quite a few visitors to Loot Collection realize it’s a scam, it’s still our top app this week.

Here are the rest of the apps:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars Weekly Loot Collection	948,844	+881,596	+92.91
2.	Friends Quizzes	802,695	+600,568	+74.82
3.	Friend Poll!	611,274	+597,203	+97.70
4.	Мартеници	353,017	+349,509	+99.01
5.	Towner	374,480	+300,446	+80.23
6.	Roulette Madness	941,105	+266,594	+28.33
7.	Glamble	330,973	+235,535	+71.16
8.	Poker Madness	870,977	+233,957	+26.86
9.	MMA Pro Fighter	500,745	+233,384	+46.61
10.	Capitales del mundo!	620,756	+203,713	+32.82
11.	Jewel Puzzle 2	463,724	+155,232	+33.48
12.	Mahjongg Dimensions	551,115	+151,073	+27.41
13.	Okey Oyna	755,140	+139,714	+18.50
14.	Horoscope du Jour	485,343	+138,299	+28.50
15.	Funflow	694,495	+132,088	+19.02
16.	Jumping Dog	501,583	+126,951	+25.31
17.	VIP Challenge	483,558	+126,618	+26.18
18.	Farkle 2	535,710	+119,575	+22.32
19.	Youtopia	669,005	+113,245	+16.93
20.	Dnevni Horoskop ®	113,499	+108,146	+95.28

Although it’s not clear from the names, most of the apps listed are games. We’ll cover those over on sister site Inside Social Games. The remaining five are easily split up: two quizzes, two horoscopes and a gifting app. We’ll look at all of them here.

The quizzes are at the top: Friends Quizzes and Friend Poll!. As you may have guessed from the icons, these two are identical apps. Both are built by a developer called FriendQuizzes.

Like the top app this week, these two appear to be acting outside of Facebook’s platform policies. Facebook recently added a requirement that all apps give their users the option of receiving notifications, and the option of posting to their wall or not. FriendQuizzes has figured out the loophole in those rules. When you first access the app, there’s the Facebook notification asking if it can contact your email, and directly below, a box to enter your email.

The box is by FriendQuizzes, and you can’t progress unless you enter your email (and it checks for fake domains). The same dance follows for wall posting; Facebook gives you the option of posting or not, but FriendQuizzes won’t load its next screen unless you allow posting.

Once you’re into the app, it turns out that it’s pretty much identical to Friend Quiz and Topzy’s Friends Exposed and, two more quiz apps that are in turn nearly identical to one another. But those two have, combined, almost 30 million monthly average users — gained with similar loopholes, similar yes / no question format, similar design.

We expect Facebook to enforce their policies here, shortly.

Moving on, there’s the gifting app, Мартеници. It’s Bulgarian, and doubles as a holiday app; the purpose is for users to give each other martenitsas, small decorative items that are typically handed out in Bulgaria in March. According to our Global Market Monitor report, Bulgarians have just started arriving on Facebook en masse, so it’s interesting to see them have a popular app so soon.

Finally, there are the two horoscope apps we mentioned, Horoscope du Jour and Dnevni Horoskop. These are pretty straightforward, but as you can see, they’re also foreign-language apps, in this case in French and Croatian.