Television literally took over our list of Top 20 Facebook Pages this week, or since our last such post Thursday, when TV shows also made up a significant part of the list.

Eight of the 20 top Pages, compiled courtesy of Inside Facebook’s PageData tool, were television shows this week, thanks to some hefty Page consolidation that occurred on April 21, 23 and 24.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Family Guy	3,249,287	+353,541	+12.21
2.	Texas Hold’em Poker	17,460,949	+329,882	+1.93
3.	House	3,499,961	+224,807	+6.86
4.	Mafia Wars	11,977,985	+188,348	+1.60
5.	Justin Bieber	3,019,457	+161,492	+5.65
6.	The Office	1,501,438	+158,079	+11.77
7.	Lost	2,097,689	+152,876	+7.86
8.	South Park	3,867,550	+152,712	+4.11
9.	LETTERS TO JULIET	172,399	+144,896	+526.84
10.	Reba McEntire	270,627	+135,509	+100.29
11.	Walmart	1,006,938	+122,820	+13.89
12.	Desperate Housewives	555,300	+118,362	+27.09
13.	Two and a Half Men	1,907,230	+116,794	+6.52
14.	Facebook	8,303,857	+116,087	+1.42
15.	Scrubs	2,127,938	+115,312	+5.73
16.	Antanas Mockus	418,680	+104,465	+33.25
17.	Red Bull	2,665,206	+101,157	+3.95
18.	Titanic	2,137,704	+98,679	+4.84
19.	Taylor Swift	3,819,421	+95,296	+2.56
20.	Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III	1,357,055	+90,085	+7.11

Could this be a part of Facebook’s push to reserve Pages for businesses and brands and have fans create Community Pages, instead? Perhaps it has picked TV shows as the first category to consolidate all unofficial Pages for. That could make sense, given that entertainment Pages have generally been more successful than other categories on Facebook. Or, maybe all the growth can be accounted for by very precise Facebook ad campaigns, effective use of the company’s new plugins, or other factors? Here’s a look at some of the TV Pages’ growth.

At the top of the list in first place was the show “Family Guy,” which benefited from the aforementioned Page consolidations to the tune of almost 300,000 across the three days. Its total fan base growth as of a week ago was 353,500, so it seems like that three-day push really gave this Page the edge this week.

But before moving on to the other seven TV show Pages it’s worth mentioning that Zynga’s top games have fan Pages still high on the list:  Texas Hold’em Poker at number 2 and Mafia Wars in fourth place. Both Pages had steady growth over the past few days.

“House” came in third place, adding about 200,000 fans through the three days of consolidations and a total of 224,800 during the past week. In sixth place was “The Office,” which added 138,000 fans during the three days and a total of 158,000 since last week. “Lost” was in seventh place and added about 133,000 fans, growing a total of about 152,800 fans since last week.

“South Park” was in eighth place, also benefiting from Page consolidations, but probably also from controversy over a recent episode that drew protests from Muslims and affiliated groups for depicting the prophet Mohammed. “Desperate Housewives” came in at number 12, growing by 104,000 fans during the three days and a total of 118,000 during the past week. “Two and a Half Men” followed at number 13, benefiting from the surges to add just under 117,000 fans (albeit Charlie Sheen is still in the news with his marital troubles) and “Scrubs” came in at number 15, also with the surges, growing by about 115,300 fans during the past seven days.

A couple movies were on the list, too. “Letters to Juliet,” a new romantic movie that’s been running homepage ads added about 145,000 fans with steady growth and “Titanic,” circa 1997, landed at number 18 — big growth of 98,700 fans thanks to those three days of Page consolidations.

Three singers also made the list this week.

Teen superstar Justin Bieber landed the number 5 spot, adding more than 161,000 fans with steady growth, even as he globe trotted to Australia, where the police canceled a show after fans were injured in the crowd. Reba McEntire, whose Page grew recently, made the list at number 10; perhaps this has to do with her turn as a host for the Academy of Country Music Awards show. Taylor Swift landed at number 19, thanks to some Page consolidation, her popularity and the fact that she’s on tour.

Rounding out the list was Walmart at number 11 with steady growth, thanks in part to a homepage ad campaign that helped add 122,800 fans. Facebook’s Page took the number 14 spot, with 116,000 new fans, Colombian presidential contender Antanas Mockus grew by almost 105,000 new fans to take number 16, Red Bull followed at 17 with small surges from consolidations to add more than 101,000 fans.

Finally, Philippine presidential frontrunner Benigno “Noynoy” S. Aquino III’s Page took the number 20 spot after growing by more than 90,000 fans. This seems to be quite a feat, considering that his Page was shut down after being hacked into. The hacker began deleting Aquino’s fans and consequently the Page is no longer up. Aquino has consistently pulled ahead of his fellow candidates in the race for Facebook fans; the Filipino presidential election is set for May 10.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

One of the main usability problems on Facebook home page has been that users couldn’t easily re-order their bookmarks for applications. But the option has been on Facebook’s roadmap for months, and now it’s live.

If you click on “Edit” at the bottom of your left-hand navigation column on the home page, you’ll be able to drag and drop the bookmarks. From when Facebook introduced this new bookmarks interface in February, the company has only allowed deleting from the home page. Developers didn’t have an easy way to instruct users to make their apps more prominent.

We can expect social games and others to shortly include notices telling users exactly how to make the app the top on the list. However, at least with this implementation, the Applications Dashboard and the Games Dashboard cannot be re-ordered, and neither can the top items like the news feed.

Also, there are only 3 remaining spaces when the minimized view of the column is in place (which it is by default). As a result, the change could help some applications with lots of happy users to promote reordering to, and it could hurt smaller and less popular apps that luckily got one of the first three spots in February.

The Inside Network hosted its first conference, Inside Social Apps 2010, on April 20 this week in San Francisco.

The sold out conference looked primarily at the future of monetization on social platforms by bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs who discussed the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

Our Coverage:

Inside Social Apps 2010: Mark Pincus Keynote on Growing the Social Gaming Industry

Inside Social Apps 2010: Investors Predict Big Acquisitions, Innovation

Inside Social Apps 2010: Mobile Will Become Dominant Form of Social Gaming

Inside Social Apps 2010: Social Gaming’s Expansion in East Asia and Around the World

Inside Social Apps 2010: Offer Companies Look Forward to Industry Growth

Inside Social Apps 2010: Sebastien de Halleux Says Brands Rule, and Social Gaming Will Consolidate

Inside Social Apps 2010: As Social Payments Mature, Facebook Credits Grows

Inside Social Apps 2010: Social Gaming Has an Even Bigger Future

Inside Social Apps 2010: Investors Talk Big Acquisitions and Mixed Opportunities

Inside Social Apps 2010: Social Gaming’s Expansion in East Asia and Across the Planet

Inside Social Apps 2010: Mobile Will Overtake Facebook for Social Gaming

Twitter Tweets

Lots of serious Twitter users were in attendance during the day, as you can tell by checking out the many tweets that include our conference hashtag, #isa2010. Further tweet reading: Webtrends’ Justin Kistner had one of the best live tweet streams of the day, and PIXELearnings’ Kevin Corti put together a solid tweet-based roundup, even though a certain volcano kept him and many others from Europe away.

Coverage From Other Publications

Finally, we had great coverage from a range of leading web and game publications. Here’s the list:

VentureBeat: Zynga’s Mark Pincus: Time for Facebook to choose

VentureBeat: Five ways to make great social games from Zynga’s Mark Pincus

VentureBeat: Copy this: Zynga raises $130K for two charities through social games

VentureBeat: EA Playfish exec: the billion-dollar social game is achievable

TechCrunch: Social Gaming Execs Discuss Growth, Monetization, And The Future Of Facebook Games

GigaOm: Zynga’s Pincus Calls for United App Economy

Justin Gibbs: Xbox live for the web – Mark Pincus keynote

Gamasutra: Zynga CEO: ‘Facebook Is At A Crossroads’

GameZebo: Inside Social Apps 2010 looks to the future of social networks

Games.com: Playfish COO de Halleux talks ‘billions’ and ‘brands’ at Inside Social Apps

Once a Beekeeper: Inside Social Apps 2010: A Recap

Extralives.tv: Inside Social Apps 2010: What’s the Future for Indie Game Developers?

Note: If you’re press and you don’t see your coverage on here, ping us (mail at insidenetwork dot com) and we’ll add a link.

[Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our new data and analysis membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth. Inside Facebook Gold presents weekly in-depth analysis articles exploring the most critical developments impacting the future of the Facebook ecosystem. Click here to learn more.]

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg formally announced the Open Graph Protocol and the Open Graph API, a complementary set of technologies designed to make it easier for the web to be structured in a social way. The Open Graph vision is certainly an ambitious one, and the history of structured web initiatives is littered with the corpses of over-idealistic endeavors.

What makes Facebook’s attempt to organize the web in a new way different? And if it works, what will it mean for the way information is discovered online? Specifically, what will it mean for information that monetizes very well and thus forms the basis of the search marketing (SEM) and search optimization (SEO) industries?

>> Read more of this article at Inside Facebook Gold

Some new users signing up for Facebook are starting to see Pages integrated into the process, including the number of other people who like each Page. The result, for users who select Pages in this interface, is that they’ll see activity from these pages appearing in their news feeds once they finish signing up. This is clearly designed to get people users engaged immediately — and specifically engaged around public topics and brands they’re already interested in.

Most of the options that we’ve seen are celebrities, so we assume that Facebook is optimizing the number of fans around public figures rather than, say, around companies who are trying to market to Facebook users. If you’re a new user, you’ll see this window as the fourth step in the sign-up process.

Other parts of the new interface also show Pages: The second step asks you to enter your high school, your college/university, and your employer. The Pages fill in with actual Official Pages or Community Pages, it appears. While Community Pages don’t have owners, and don’t have a way to publish to the news feed, new users can still go check out the ones via clicking on the links to the added Pages in their personal feed.

One note is that all of these Pages appear to be public by default, something new users may not realize as the fact isn’t disclosed within the sign-up process.

Wildfire Interactive, a social marketing services company that has been active on Facebook since 2008, has just raised a $4.04 million first round of funding led by private equity firm Summit Partners, with participation from well-known angel investors Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut and Gary Vaynerchuk participating.

The company has been steadily building a variety of social media products on Facebook, in email newsletters and on other sites like Twitter. These include sweepstakes, user-generated contests, quizzes, coupons and incentive-based surveys, typically implemented as tabs Pages. The company works with a wide range of big clients, including apps for some of Facebook’s own Pages. It has also been focusing on standardized products that small to medium-sized businesses can use, like this new sweepstakes service it is providing for small businesses in conjunction with Publisher’s Clearing House. Wildfire has also been boosted through being one of the winners of Facebook’s fbFund, which gave it early financing and visibility.

The company says it has been profitable since its early days, and has run thousand of campaigns, including for brands like AT&T, Edelman Digital, Electronic Arts, LiveNation, Pepsi, Sony, Subway, Unilever, Victoria’s Secret, Yahoo!

Treasure Isle did even better over the past week than the one before, easily landing at the top of our weekly list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by monthly active users with well over seven million new MAU. It’s rare to see any app gain users so quickly, and we haven’t seen a game do it since before Christmas. Of course, Isle is backed by Zynga, while Hotel City, at number two, has Playfish / EA behind the scenes.

The two games are followed up by LivingSocial, which doesn’t have a huge company backing it — but it does have money. As we pointed out last week, LivingSocial recently raised $25 million to expand, and it seems to be making good use of the funds. Still, the app has a long way to go to reach its previous highs; a year ago, we were writing about it reaching 10 million MAU.

Here’s the AppData top 20 list:

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain, % 1. Treasure Isle 21,796,889 +7,386,930 +51.26 2. Hotel City 11,658,606 +2,995,518 +34.58 3. LivingSocial 4,733,672 +2,800,117 +144.82 4. Causes 25,369,088 +1,232,852 +5.11 5. Family Feud 2,902,844 +972,936 +50.41 6. Name Analyzer 1,136,818 +950,566 +510.37 7. Zoo Paradise 4,480,205 +627,389 +16.28 8. Tiki Resort 5,842,907 +621,080 +11.89 9. Facebook for iPhone 33,006,112 +575,000 +1.77 10. Mall World 1,434,806 +553,600 +62.82 11. Family Tree 5,564,096 +481,813 +9.48 12. Music 11,826,556 +461,472 +4.06 13. iKarma 1,129,123 +398,390 +54.52 14. Yearbook 3,037,640 +371,019 +13.91 15. Kingdoms of Camelot 2,086,825 +360,963 +20.91 16. Bubble Island 6,055,854 +331,747 +5.80 17. Garden Life 1,132,510 +291,177 +34.61 18. Social City 12,537,726 +286,627 +2.34 19. Fish Friends 1,008,319 +280,969 +38.63 20. Your Luck [daily] 4,237,360 +278,523 +7.04

Causes had its most significant weekly gain in several months with 1.23 million new MAU, although the app is still fairly flat in the long term. Last week was Earth Day, and a few other causes, so maybe users enthusiasm for those topics helped give the app a boost? Keep an eye out on Causes, in any case. Organizations with causes running within the app can post bulletins to their supporters’ news feeds as a result of some of the changes Facebook announced last week. The growth you’re seeing here started happening a couple days in advance of the announcement, so we assume that the app has been growing for other reasons, but we’ll be watching to see if the news feed posting ability has an effect on traffic.

Moving down the list, the Family Feud app continues to boom. The app started growing a month ago, and it’s now at nearly 3 million MAU. As we noted in our original review, the game basically patterns itself after the long-running TV show of the same name. There may be some lessons here for other TV game shows looking to market themselves on Facebook.

Other non-game notables include Name Analyzer, a simple app that tells you “the secret meaning of your name,” iLike’s Music app and lastly Your Luck [daily], an invite and ad-filled app that gives you a random “luck” score every day. As it says, “Many people believe in application generated scores, try yourself to check your luck. Good luck!”

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, April 19th, 2010

• Treasure Isle Remains Far Ahead of the Pack On This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games by MAU
• Big Fish Games Launches Treasure Quest, An Ambitious Meta Game Portal on Facebook
• Former Yahoo Exec Joins Playdom as New CTO
• Big Fish is the Latest Company to Add an Extra Gaming Layer on Facebook

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

• Inside Social Apps 2010: Social Gaming Has an Even Bigger Future
• Inside Social Apps 2010: Sebestien de Halleux Says Brands Rule, and Social Gaming Will Consolidate
• Inside Social Apps 2010: Social Payments Mature, Facebook Credits Grows
• Inside Social Apps 2010: Mark Pincus Keynote on Growing the Social Gaming Industry
• Inside Social Apps 2010: Mobile Will Overtake Facebook for Social Gaming
• Inside Social Apps 2010: Social Gaming’s Expansion in East Asia and Across the Planet
• Inside Social Apps 2010: Investors Talk Big Acquisitions and Mixed Opportunities

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

• Facebook Launches the Open Graph At F8 – Our Coverage

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

• Facebook F8 Panel: Where the iPhone is Lacking, Android May Succeed
• Treasure Isle, Family Feud and Mall World Appear On This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games By DAU
• Playdom Sends Users to the Big City on Facebook
• Birdland Brings Aviaries to the Facebook Pet-Caring Game Genre

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

• Cars, Punks and Portals Are On This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Age of Ocean Uses Facebook for Complex Strategy Gaming
• Zuckerberg: “There’s Just Going to be One Currency that People Use” on Facebook Apps
• Social Gaming Roundup: Zynga Stock, Heyzap, Offerpal, PETA and More

Facebook Lite is No More – Before f8 this week Facebook shut down Facebook Lite, launched in 2009 aimed at helping new users with weak Internet connections have a better Facebook experience. As the company announced on Facebook’s fan Page, “we’re no longer supporting it, but learned a lot from the test of a slimmed-down site. If you used Lite, you’ll now be taken to the main Facebook.com site.”

Facebook Grows DC Lobbying – Facebook’s lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. have been growing over the past year and VentureBeat reported that the company seeks to continue this growth by adding another staffer to their current mix of four employees. The article includes an interesting set of documents that show Facebook has been not only lobbying the Federal Trade Commission, senators and representatives, but also strengthening relationships with intelligence and homeland security agencies. These efforts amounted to $41,390 for the first quarter of 2010; the 2009 total was $207,878. According to VentureBeat, Facebook was the only major Internet company to go after the intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (17 agencies like the CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency.

iPhone Goes Social? – Engadget reported this week that Apple appears ready to “join the social” by integrating “low-level Facebook event and contacts integration” in the iPhone OS 4. These integrations may possibly include unified calendar and contacts apps and a “separate type of contact” specifically for Facebook and a SocialKitInternal.framework file that Engadget noted could hint at integrating Twitter. The story included copies of the associated .plist files from a an iPhone running OS 4.

Facebook Enters Open Web Agreement – Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol is under an open license agreement allowing other platforms to use, adopt and distribute it without fear of patent infringement, according to its decision to join the Open Web Foundation. Jesse Stay reported that, two years ago, Facebook joined Google and MySpace to create the Open Web Foundation which created common web agreements for platform builders, and thus, Facebook’s new features like Open Graph Protocol are available to other platform developers.

DST Buys Into Groupon – Digital Sky Technologies, which bought a $300 million stake in Facebook in 2009, recently invested to the tune of $135 in Groupon, a group coupon buying company that uses Facebook for part of its service. Reuters reported that this money would be used to fund global expansion at Groupon.

Facebook is 40% of SecondMarket Auctions in Q1 – Facebook accounted for more than 40% of all SecondMarket auctions of stock from private companies in the first quarter of 2010. Of more than $124 million trades Facebook’s share grew from 21% in the last quarter of 2009 at $50 a share, a $22 billion valuation for the social network. To compare: 10% of transactions involved LinkedIn and 7% from Zynga.

1.5M Facebook Accounts Up for Sale – Security researchers at VeriSign iDefense discovered a cyber criminal who put up 1.5 million Facebook accounts for sale this week. The hacker, “kirllos,” is said to be from Eastern Europe, used Russian to make his offer on a forum and was selling the account information for $25 per 1,000 accounts with 10 contacts or less and $45 per 1,000 accounts with more than 10 contacts.

“Once you have the name and address and other profile-type information from a social networking site, you can use it to corroborate your way into debit card accounts and bank accounts through social engineering,” said Rick Howard, director of cyber-intelligence at iDefense.

Foursquare Reaches 1M Users, May Sell – This week Foursquare hit 1 million users, adding to speculation of whether the company will be acquired by Yahoo! or another company — or just opt to raise more money. Facebook, among others, has talked to the company, although there’s no acquisition deal currently under discussion, according to TechCrunch. Instead, Facebook may partner with Foursquare and other location companies to federate check-ins and other location data.

100 Most Popular Facebook Names – Blogger Günter Grodotzki analyzed about 120 million Facebook active profiles with profile pictures, found more than 3 million unique first names and complied a list of the 100 most popular. The top ten, in order: David (0.61%), Michael (0.52%), John (0.47%), Chris (0.44%), Daniel (0.35%), Sarah (0.34%), Mark (0.33%), Laura (0.33%), Paul (0.32%) and both with 0.3% Jennifer and Mike.

Last month was a good one for Facebook in Africa, as growth went up in five of the seven countries that Facebook tracks. The group added almost half a million new users during the month of March, according to the latest stats from the Global Monitor data within Inside Facebook Gold.

North Africa is still posting the best numbers for the region, both in terms of monthly active user growth and overall penetration. Tunisia swapped places with Morocco in March to lead with 135,160 new MAU, pushing its penetration up to an even 13 percent. (Note that we cover Egypt, another northern African country with roughly equal growth, in our Middle East post.)

Nigeria remains the third-fastest growing country, with 79,020 new users in March. With a population of 151 million people, it’s almost as big as all of north Africa; however, the country is still working to reach one percent penetration. That leaves it with the smallest relative pool of Facebook users in the African group, a situation likely to persist for a few months.

It’s followed by South Africa, which has a significantly higher penetration but is one of the two countries that didn’t add more users in March than in February, although the difference is only a few thousand MAU. The other country to lose some momentum was Ghana.

Between them is sandwiched Kenya with 32,820 new users and just 1.6 percent penetration — although a user commented last month that polls in the country show that 79 percent of internet users are on Facebook. That may actually be the case, as we count penetration against total population. Kenya could also have many more people connecting on mobile devices, like many of the other African countries.

Last month we forgot to point out Mauritius, which actually has the highest penetration among the African countries, at 13.8 percent. Its population, though, is only 1,268,854 people. Here’s the graph:

At 10,474,660 MAU, Africa remains the smallest world region by number of Facebook users, running about even with the Arabian Peninsula sub-region. However, its penetration, at 2.8 percent, is slightly higher than Asia’s 2.3 percent. The above graph comes from the Global Monitor report, which provides in-depth info on 98 countries, but its original source is Facebook itself, which delays its data by several weeks.