This week’s list of the fastest-growing Facebook apps still under a million monthly users is pretty well packed with games, but we’ll try to point out the few non-game apps to be seen, while also picking out some interesting games.

As you can see by looking at the top of the list, city life is the theme, with Big City Life and Nightclub City bracketing Translations — which only appeared because of a stats error. Playdom built Big City Life, and also has its fingers in Jungle Life through its Metrogames investment.

Here’s the AppData top 20 list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Big City Life	711,997	+471,481	+196.03
2.	Translations	426,955	+426,308	+65,889.95
3.	Nightclub City	361,981	+273,370	+308.51
4.	Jungle Life	264,271	+214,062	+426.34
5.	Lettr’IQ	184,347	+173,182	+1,551.12
6.	天書奇談 2.0	681,465	+109,590	+19.16
7.	Pet Forest Online	449,292	+108,976	+32.02
8.	My Vineyard	496,918	+107,549	+27.62
9.	My Casino	445,595	+102,914	+30.03
10.	機器人 大戰	287,755	+97,120	+50.95
11.	Friend of the Day!	633,645	+96,528	+17.97
12.	Profile Box	199,355	+93,520	+88.36
13.	Welcome Tab for pages	209,181	+91,282	+77.42
14.	NanoStar Siege	269,157	+90,349	+50.53
15.	Treasure Quest	105,114	+83,383	+383.71
16.	What is your soul like?	119,689	+79,460	+197.52
17.	MonstrosCity	231,923	+76,244	+48.98
18.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	290,250	+74,072	+34.26
19.	Football Mania	266,425	+73,662	+38.21
20.	Snaptu	879,758	+69,519	+8.58

Lettr’IQ is worth a try even for those who don’t consider themselves gamers; it describes itself as a “mix between Tetris and Scrabble”. Unfortunately, the French / English-language game appears to be a bit spammy. And on that sad note, we’ll save the rest of the genre’s commentary for our post at Inside Social Games.

Down at number 11, we find our first real app, Friend of the Day!, which is quite similar to Lover of the Day in that it just picks out a random friend to make a wall post about.

Profile Box is a lot more creative: it allows users to add a custom content tab to their page. And that app is followed directly after by Welcome Tab for pages, which claims to be better than Facebook’s in-house Static FBML app for both creating and watching over a custom Page.

The only other significant non-game app today is Snaptu, a mobile connection app that’s older than anything else on the list, having just passed a year in operation. But following a long plateau, its user numbers finally appear to be creeping up again.

After many months of rumor, speculation, and even some evidence, Facebook is finally preparing to launch a location service of some sort. The details are still not quite clear, but AdAge has an article out today with more information.

Apparently as part of the launch, Facebook is partnering with one of its long-time advertisers, fast food chain McDonald’s. From the article:

As early as this month, the social-networking site will give users the ability to post their location within a status update. McDonald’s, through digital agency Tribal DDB, Chicago, is building an app with Facebook would allow users to check in at one of its restaurants and have a featured product appear in the post, such as an Angus Quarter Pounder, say executives close to the deal.

There is actually a location-oriented app live already as a tab in McDonald’s Facebook Page, as GigaOm spotted. You can enter your zip code… but the app hasn’t fully launched, so you’ll just get a message asking for more feedback and telling you that McDonald’s is expanding its “local Facebook reach.”

We discovered Facebook documentation for developers last month that allows them to input location information including geographical coordinates and addresses. “This is useful if your pages is a business profile or about anything else with a real-world location,” the documentation says.

Facebook has played around with a wide variety of ideas for how to implement location. Among other ideas — according to reports — it has looked at acquiring location-based startups like check-in game Foursquare or mobile social network Loopt, and it has considered ways of providing a federated system so that other companies can share location data back and forth with it.

The move into location advertising suggests that the company will be competing against many smaller location startups for these dollars. Facebook’s leverage isn’t just that it has more than 450 million monthly active users around the world. It also has many direct relationships with advertisers large and small — companies that have Pages on the site to reach Facebook users, and who spend money on home page brand advertising or on the company’s performance ad system. McDonald’s, for example, has 2.2 million fans on its Page, and it has run Facebook advertising in the past; AdAge’s sources say that its new location app “was negotiated as part of a bigger media buy on Facebook, and McDonald’s will be the first marketer to take advantage of the service.”

Facebook otherwise does not appear to have plans to charge for the service directly, same as how it doesn’t charge for Pages or access to its developer platform.

On a final note, the way that the McDonald’s app is described sounds more like an experiment than the full product. Some users who go to McDonald’s and decide to share the fact with their Facebook friends may not want to have a big ad for a hamburger appear on their wall, for example. The possibility of such an ad could even discourage them from checking in. Foursquare and other startups have experimented with running incentivized ads, like ways for users to get free or discounted items at stores if they check in often enough. We expect Facebook to try out a range of location integrations with marketing partners, if not with location startups and other developers. We’ll be covering these efforts as more information becomes available.

Facebook quietly began introducing another way to encourage Page administrators to buy advertising in its performance ad system recently. Once you post a status update on your Page, you’ll see a new option beneath the update, only visible to you: the word “Promote.”

Clicking on it will reveal a window asking you if you’d like to buy advertising promoting the Page and the status update. The window shows the current targeting parameters of the ad, a mock-up of what the ad will look like once it’s live, the date range for when it will run, and the maximum cost.

The mock-up itself is what you’d expect: the name of the Page and a link to it, the status update itself in the body, and your personal Like of the page.

If you click “Create Ad,” you’ll be taken to the ad purchase page. If you click on “Edit Ad” you’ll be taken to the Facebook advertising creation tool, with Facebook’s preset parameters in already. You can then alter them to suit your purposes. If you’re not interested, of course, you can click “Cancel.”

The point is to get admins buying more ads in order to reach new or potential fans. Larger Page owners may prefer to use more scalable automated services for their advertising. Smaller ones, like local businesses, may find this useful though, as it could remind their Page admins to buy ads for particularly interesting status updates, such as coupons or sales.

If you’d like to learn more about how Page owners and advertisers can optimize their marketing campaigns Facebook, you may be interested in the Facebook Marketing Bible, our comprehensive guide for marketing your company, brand, or app on Facebook.

Thanks for the tip, Richard and Jeff.

Web sites that have integrated Facebook’s new social plugins, especially its new Like button, appear to be benefiting — more users are coming from Facebook to their sites, for example. But we’re also hearing mixed messages from some Page owners about the benefits of Facebook’s recent changes, including lower growth in their fan counts. Some developers say they’re seeing the same things.

There may be some confusion among users about the new interfaces, and the meaning of the term “Like.” Facebook tells us it is tweaking the products to improve results.

First, a quick review of the relevant changes and launches. The company originally used the term “like” as a simple feature in its news feeds (which it borrowed from FriendFeed). If your friend posts a funny status update, for example, you can click on the “Like” button. Doing so shows your name beneath the status update, along with a thumbs-up. The action also generates a story about it that appears in your personal profile feed, and in your friends’ news feeds.

The company has expanded the Like concept in a couple ways within the last several weeks.

One is that it has changed the terminology around its fan Pages from “Become a fan” to “Like.” So if you find a Page for a new music group and you want to become a fan, you click “Like” at the top. This means you’ll show up as a fan on that Page and in your personal profile, and a story about the action will appear on you personal profile feed and in your friends’ news feeds.

Facebook also recently required all users to alter how they provide information in their personal profiles. It asked them to list Pages in their personal profiles in place of their existing information. So if you previously listed your hometown, the education institutes you’ve attended, your favorite food, music, movies, etc. you either had to match these items with Pages or you had to delete them.

Then, Facebook launched the Like Box button for other web sites. The button, and the other social plugins, have appeared across more than 50,000 web sites since the product launched two weeks ago. You’ve probably seen them on your news sites of choice. If you click on the Like button on a news article, you’ll generate a story about this in your personal profile and in your friends’ news feeds. (Note: companies can also alter the Like button to have it work the other way, so that when you click the Like button on another web site, you become a fan of its Page. However, it is not clear if this practice is widespread enough to have an impact at this point.)

In sum, Like now means users are either just sending out a lightweight message to their friends, or also becoming a fan of a Page. The difference between the two is not always obvious to users, so they may find themselves unintentionally becoming fans of Pages when they just mean to share the information with their friends, for example. The transition of personal profile information to Pages also appears to have confused users about their relationships to Pages.

The combination of all of these changes may be causing some users to first check to see what Pages they are listed as being fans of within their profiles, then going to those Pages and un-Liking them. This would explain the fan drops that some Page owners are reporting — although the only data we have to support this is anecdotal descriptions from users and Page owners.

Facebook says that is continuing to test and refine the Like Box plugin. At first, the company showed the Like button with a solid blue background if the user had already clicked on it. It changed this on Monday, so now you’ll see “You Like This” if you’ve clicked on the Like button — unless you click the button to become a fan of a Page, in which case the button will disappear. If you want to un-Like your Like in the Like Box, click on the button again. If you want to un-Like a Page, you scroll to the bottom of the left-hand navigation column and click “Unlike.”

While many western and central European countries have long ago reached put equal or greater portions of their citizens on Facebook as compared to the United States, Germany has lagged behind, clinging to its native social networks. But our latest edition of the Facebook Global Monitor suggests that the German trend is reversing, with over 10 percent growth in April 2010, up from about seven percent in March.

Growth for Germany has risen throughout the year, allowing the country to finally crack 10 percent penetration; if it accelerates through the summer, it’s conceivable that Germany will cross 20 percent before Christmas. However, there’s still the possibility that its growth will take a sudden dip down the line — just as we’re seeing this month with France, which fell from a high of 1.2 new monthly active users in March.

Following Germany is Turkey, which brings up an interesting point: it could be that Germany’s large Turkish population is helping drive growth on Facebook. But Turkey’s growth as a percentage of its population was actually pretty slim in April; the country simply has a much larger population than its entirely European neighbors. That’s also the case this month with the United Kingdom.

Spain and Italy are both keeping up their steady growth rates, which date back several months, while Sweden showed up out of nowhere with almost 10 percent growth for April — its overall penetration is already rather high.

One thing we’re not seeing nearly as much of for April as in March and February is growth in eastern European countries like Romania — which just made it on — and Bulgaria. We’ll likely see those countries come up from time to time, but with smaller populations and fewer people on the internet than the richer countries to the west, they’ll struggle to put large numbers of people on Facebook.

It’s also worth looking into our post from two days ago about recent fluctuations in Facebook’s numbers. Following an unexplained dip in February, Facebook appeared to regain its footing in March, along with the other major social networks. Our data is sourced from Facebook’s advertising tool, which runs a few weeks behind, so there could be some residual effects from either month in the traffic stats.

The full Facebook Global Monitor, May 2010 edition, is available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data and analysis membership which also includes analysis on developments, risks and opportunities in the Facebook business ecosystem

Facebook has begun to ask some users if they’d like to make the site their browser home page, via a note that is appearing above their news feeds.

When a user logs into the site, a dialog box appears asking you to make Facebook your home page. “Come here often? We’ve noticed you use Facebook regularly. Set Facebook as your homepage to make getting here faster for you.” Then there’s a button with two house icons that reads, “Make Facebook my Homepage.”

The result, of course, is that users who come back to Facebook by default when they launch their web browser are more likely to engage with the service than users who have another site set as their home page.

Other companies have done this before, most notably Google, and it seems a logical step given how popular Facebook has become in the U.S. and around the world. On the other hand, many users have probably already made Facebook their default home page on their own.

Given Facebook’s message, it is apparently using traffic data to figure out which users are returning to the site frequently but have not already made Facebook their home page.

Thanks to Bert for the tip.

Now that Facebook’s big launches at f8 are done, the company is starting to move forward with its broader development plans — or at least the timeline for them is getting a little clearer

The company  updated its developer roadmap on Monday to indicate that the removal of profile boxes will be happening sometime in “Mid 2010,” along with updates to canvas pages and profile image sizes. While vague, the new date suggests the changes won’t be coming as early as this month.

For those not familiar, here’s some more background. From now on, tabs will be the only way to integrate applications. Boxes, the Boxes tabs and the information sections will be removed. Profile boxes were largely removed in 2008, although users and Page owners have still been able to add them. When Facebook introduced the roadmap, it said it planned to finish the job, albeit earlier this year.

One important new note for marketers here: the planned reduction in pixel-width on Pages will now be a little less. “We previously stated that profile tabs would be shrinking to 510 pixels. Our latest designs indicate they will instead be 520 pixels,” Facebook’s platform team says on the wiki entry about the Boxes switch. “We’ll keep this page updated with the latest information.”

Meanwhile, the new design for the application canvas Pages is getting pushed back to the middle of the year; the point of that change is to “better highlight an applications brand.” The last change, a small reduction in the size of profile photos, is also set for the same time.

Beyond everything that launched at f8, there’s not much else new. The big changes to Invites and the Share feature are still slated for May, with the Requests change coming after that. Invites will be moved to the inbox; other requests will be deprecated. Facebook wants developers focused on its other communication channels, including email, the news feed and the app dashboards. On top of the removal of third-party notifications in early March, the requests change could affect app traffic. Developers should plan accordingly.

Facebook is expanding in the Pacific Northwest beyond its new data center in central Oregon. It’s opening up an engineering office in Seattle, Wash. with the intention of doing some local hiring.

All big technology companies have offices around the US and the world. Facebook, more than many companies its size, has kept most employees at its Palo Alto headquarters, at least until the last several months. Its user and revenue growth have made expansion a requirement and an opportunity.

Seattle has a strong technology culture due to the engineering schools like the University of Washington, and leading technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon. “We’re looking for a handful of stellar engineers to form the initial team,” long-time Facebook engineer Ari Steinberg says today. The branch should open this summer, once the company finds office space. It plans to hire around 30 years over the coming year, according to TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington, who is coincidentally also moving up there.

Steinberg will lead the team, with the help of locally-based Hadi Partovi. An interesting twist here is that Partovi was most recently the cofounder of iLike, the reigning music application company on Facebook, that was bought last year by social network rival MySpace. He and his brother and iLike cofounder Ali recently left MySpace. They’re serial entrepreneurs and angel investors who trace their tech experience back to Microsoft. Hadi Partovi is taking an advisory role with Facebook, with the purpose of helping the office do more networking and hiring in the Seattle area.

Facebook has been growing in every direction recently. Its number of monthly users has climbed to what we believe is near 500 million people distributed around the world, around 117 million of whom are in the US. Its revenue is also growing. The company is likely to pass $1.1 billion in total revenue, according to our calculations and other estimates.

Its head count and office space has grown to match. The company expanded down the street from its Palo Alto headquarters to a massive new office building in March. It also has continued hiring for other offices abroad, including its regional headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, a new office in Hyderabad, India, and an unannounced office in Singapore (but not that rumored office in mainland China).

Facebook has been busy expanding nationally as well, with some form of presence in most major cities. Austin, Texas is the most recent new location in the US, with an office there expected to hire hundreds of employees.

Another interesting note is that this is the first satellite office for Facebook’s core engineering team. Other engineering positions have been limited: it is hiring some technical employees for the data center in Prineville, Oregon; it has localization-focused engineers in Tokyo that work to “adopt unique Japanese culture and modify Facebook to best fit” the country’s custom; it has also been hiring sales engineers and other technical support staff in Dublin, and likely other parts of the world.

The company continues to say that it has one engineer for every million users. Going by its last official announcement about its total user count — 400 million — that means around 400 engineers. However, the engineering team has likely grown with the rest of the company, which we understand to have more than 1,300 employees overall by this point. The engineering count is more likely to be around 500 at this point. The new Seattle office, in other words, will be a small but significant portion of the company.

[Seattle skyline photo via dherrera_96]

More data is starting to come out about how Facebook’s new social plugins are impacting other sites around the web. The buttons, as intended, appear to be sending more Facebook users to other parts of the web, especially media sites.

IGN.com, a News Corp.-owned web site that covers media, digital distribution and video games, gets around 29 million monthly unique visitors. Two weeks in to using the plugins, it told ClickZ that it experienced a 20% increase in referral traffic from Facebook via the button. It’s not clear how much traffic that actually is, but it’s something.

The plugins, including the Like button, Recommendations and Activity Feed, were released at f8 on April 21 with 75 partners, including CNN and Levi’s, as we previously reported, and were implemented across 50,000 web sites within the first week of their introduction. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg predicted at f8 that the plugins would receive a billion impressions in the first 24 hours after launch — this happened. The caveat is that some  portion of the impressions were generated simply because people went to web pages that included the Like button but did not actually engage with it.

Facebook says its users have an average of 130 friends, with 25 billion pieces of content shared monthly by the 400 million-plus users on the service. The plugins, in one form or another, let you see overall Facebook user activity on other sites. The real value comes, though, when a user is signed in to Facebook and goes to another site. They show you what your Facebook friends have liked, shared, or otherwise engaged with on the other sites.

Referral traffic is enhanced because the plugins also make it easier to share activity back to Facebook for your friends to see and click through. If, say, you hit the Like button for a news article, a link to the article will show up in your personal profile’s stream of activities. It will also show up in your friends news feeds, at least in the unfiltered “Most Recent” view; the “Top News” view of the news feed doesn’t appear to show Likes very often. However, the other sharing widgets — like the Activity stream showing full shared links that your friends have posted to Facebook — are quite likely to show up in Top Stories.

Media sites were the subject of an interesting analysis by Mallary Jean Tenore at Poynter. She found that, while some companies like ABCNews.com were enthusiastically embracing them, others like ESPN.com were being more cautious, and still others like The New York Times were developing ways to add even more socialization and personalization to the plugins. While the report focused on percentage gains rather than hard numbers, the changes appeard

One week into the plugins’ release, April 28, Tenore reported that ABCNews.com saw a 250% increase in referrals from Facebook. The company’s web site changed to feature an “ABC News on Facebook” module very prominently allowing those signed in via Facebook Connect to see numbers of people who liked a story; ABCNews.com also experienced a 50% boost in referrals from Twitter and Digg by adding those buttons to their stories.

“We’ve opted to place the Facebook recommendations higher than the most popular recommendations,” Jonathan Dube, vice president in charge of ABCNews.com told Poynter. “We believe that recommendations from people who are friends of yours are probably more likely to be stories that you’re interested in than a general ‘Most Popular’ list.”

CNN and The Washington Post were partners with Facebook when the plugins launched and both seemed to be very careful with how users perceived the plugins accessing their Facebook data. For CNN’s part, the module displaying stories recommended by Facebook friends on the right side of the company’s home page allows only a Facebook user’s friends to see their recommendation on the site. CNN used the “Recommend” button instead of Like, as it would be strange to like a story about the Haiti earthquake, for example.

“We really respect our users and we want them to feel open and engaged but not forced,” Jennifer Martin, senior director of public relations for CNN Worldwide told Poynter.

The Washington Post, on the other hand, allows anyone to see who likes something but includes an opt-out button giving users the option to hide the company’s Network News module featuring Facebook-recommended content. This module also helps readers stumble onto more content.

But, for The Post, money is definitely a factor when it comes to the plugins. Raju Narisetti, The Washington Post’s managing editor explained that by increasing engagement the company can attract more advertising and Facebook is an important way to do that.

“A lot of our content is circulated on Facebook, so we ought to make it easier for our readers who are on Facebook to share content and also see what their friends like and are reading without having to leave our site,” he was quoted as saying. “For a free site… more engaged readers have an impact on its ability to attract more advertising and thus help fund more content creation.”

So, taking media companies as an example, Facebook’s new plugins seem to have the potential to actually help businesses sell themselves to customers (or readers, etc.). Once people are able to intertwine Facebook with their preferred web sites, it would seem, the sites experienced increased traffic that may, in some cases, lead to more business. That’s at least what some managers are hoping for.

The potential for these plugins to generate revenue is just beginning to be explored. As we saw with Levi’s and their implementation of the plugin, the Like button is also particularly good for products. Yet, there are more subtle ways the plugins can help companies. The Activity Feed, for example, may expose a visitor to a web site to something they didn’t even know, or remember, they needed or wanted. An increase in traffic at a news site may allow a company to charge more for advertising. And there are, obviously, many more possibilities.

Media companies proved to be an interesting example, we’ll be on the lookout for more as web sites continue to develop around the plugins. For a more in-depth look at how plugins may affect the future of the web check out our premium service Inside Facebook Gold.

The iPhone has been on a tear of late, at least on Facebook. This week’s list of the most quickly growing Facebook apps by daily active users is led off by Facebook for iPhone, which now has 17.5 million users that log onto Facebook every day.

Conveniently, the rest of the list reads like a smartphone market share report. At number three, Facebook for BlackBerry is also doing well; and down at number eight the HTC Sense, based on Google’s Android operating system, is quickly gaining.

Here’s the AppData list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Facebook for iPhone	17,551,260	+641,661	+3.79
2.	FarmVille	27,123,996	+566,014	+2.13
3.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	10,067,975	+237,652	+2.42
4.	Big City Life	141,217	+130,465	+1,213.40
5.	Nightclub City	126,175	+107,101	+561.50
6.	Country Story	840,738	+102,426	+13.87
7.	Mall World	438,712	+99,149	+29.20
8.	HTC Sense	807,113	+87,535	+12.16
9.	Bola	382,367	+86,773	+29.36
10.	@Smiles	541,075	+83,645	+18.29
11.	Zoo World	1,754,619	+78,655	+4.69
12.	MindJolt Games	1,862,986	+72,924	+4.07
13.	Jungle Life	64,419	+61,635	+2,213.90
14.	Hotel City	2,924,446	+54,612	+1.90
15.	Kingdoms of Camelot	493,456	+52,833	+11.99
16.	Lettr’IQ	53,822	+51,707	+2,444.78
17.	My Top Fans	181,824	+42,591	+30.59
18.	Games	307,578	+38,712	+14.40
19.	Quiz Planet!	262,636	+38,341	+17.09
20.	Ameba Pico	83,943	+37,052	+79.02

As you can see, FarmVille is high up, but its actual change in traffic is insignificant. There are also several brand-new games that appear, but as we explain over at Inside Social Games, it’s too early to tell whether they’ll hold onto their new DAUs.

Unfortunately, the games dominate most of the list. Only a few non-game apps stand out. @Smiles is one, with an interesting spike in DAU that seems independent of its monthly active user number, which has hardly budged over the past month. The poking app seems to be benefiting from allowing user-generated content.

Skip nine spots down to find the only other app of note: Quiz Planet!, which is, interestingly, showing the same phenomenon as @Smiles, just to a lesser degree. In this case, we’re not sure why, although there does seem to be an odd chain letter spreading like wildfire within the reviews of various quiz apps.