Regular readers will notice that this week’s list of the fastest-growing apps on Facebook by daily active users is the first of our lists to show up in a week. That’s because Facebook is currently almost two weeks behind in updating its all-important monthly active user stats, apparently due to a bug.

But DAU stats are updating, so we can resume at least partial service — meanwhile hoping, along with many developers, that Facebook resumes regular service soon. Here’s our AppData top 20 list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	MindJolt Games	2,482,408	+323,180	+14.97
2.	Ninja Saga	1,079,620	+259,194	+31.59
3.	Facebook	18,258,900	+191,142	+1.06
4.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	10,818,545	+182,664	+1.72
5.	Causes	1,068,400	+127,187	+13.51
6.	Friend Interview	311,725	+92,506	+42.20
7.	Profile picture analyzer	106,914	+88,676	+486.22
8.	Nightclub City	588,109	+73,683	+14.32
9.	Kingdoms of Camelot	636,047	+62,230	+10.84
10.	My Empire	99,675	+58,927	+144.61
11.	Baking Life	136,086	+56,532	+71.06
12.	HTC Sense	1,003,891	+54,119	+5.70
13.	Family Feud	1,378,028	+53,031	+4.00
14.	Extended Info	57,406	+46,063	+406.09
15.	The Agency: Covert Ops	48,851	+43,534	+818.77
16.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	232,003	+41,938	+22.07
17.	Jumping Dog	74,614	+40,465	+118.50
18.	Ameba Pico	121,113	+35,779	+41.93
19.	Pool Master	145,637	+32,501	+28.73
20.	Good and Evil	40,148	+30,745	+326.97

The top gainer over the past two weeks is MindJolt Games, Facebook’s largest game portal. Following its recent acquisition by a group including several former MySpace execs, MindJolt’s total user count has become more volatile, but it appears that the new management team’s strategies for bringing back the users that it does have more often are successful.

We’ll cover the rest of the games this morning over at Inside Social Games. The next two on the list, then, are Facebook (for iPhone) and Facebook for BlackBerry. The two mobile apps regularly appear on our DAU list; the only thing strange about their appearance is that Mobile, the catch-all app for other phones, hasn’t gained much in a while. Further down, the newer HTC Sense mobile app is coming up fairly quickly, having just topped a million DAU.

Causes looks like it made a significant gain, but don’t be fooled — click through to its AppData chart and you’ll see that it’s down several hundred thousand DAU for the month. However, variations in its DAU have usually happened fairly independently of MAU in the past, the latter stat usually not changing much.

Finally, there’s an app that we haven’t seen mentioned for quite a while on our list, down at number 14. Extended Info, which adds fields to a user’s interests, hasn’t actually gained as many new DAU as you’re seeing. But the sudden spike (taking place in just the last two days) suggests that the app, which was acquired by Sidestep in 2007, has started an advertising campaign.

On top of launching what it calls “simplified” privacy features tomorrow, Facebook is planning to take the changes on the road to Washington, DC, where a number of Congresspeople have recently criticized its recent privacy changes.

A Facebook event page says that the company will host a meeting called “Facebook’s New Privacy Controls Hill Briefing,” that is “open to House and Senate staff only” on Thursday at 4:00pm EDT. The blurb from the post:

The new privacy tools are in response to massive outcry around the latest changes that the company has made. Those issues, which we’ve detailed elsewhere, include the move to make users’ private profile interest public, features that allow some third parties to access some user data without explicit prior permission, and a host of somewhat-related bugs.

Four US Senators were extremely fast to respond to the changes, with New York’s Charles Schumer first calling for “guidelines to be established for social networking sites, like Facebook, on how information can be shared or disseminated to third parties” on April 25, within a week after the features launched. Politicians don’t usually move to call for regulation so fast, which suggests that interests opposed to Facebook have tight connections to the Congressmen. This move by Facebook to provide a briefing, then, is a way for Facebook get more politicians liking it.

In an otherwise bland response to the company’s privacy critics, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberk’s op-ed in The Washington Post yesterday briefly mentioned a change that could significantly impact users and anyone building on the platform.

Beyond repeating that Facebook will soon launch simpler privacy settings (which are due as soon as tomorrow), he wrote that “we will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services.”

That’s just one sentence, so we don’t know exactly how the feature will work. But Facebook has until now required users to go through more complex, granular processes to either limit or uninstall apps that they’ve previously used. It has provided limited means for users to preclude themselves from having to hear about apps that they have not added.

The coming change could mean that there will soon be a way to immediately uninstall every third-party application that users have ever added, including any site that users have somehow connected with. That’s the most drastic scenario, and the phrasing is unclear so we don’t know that it is the case. Facebook could provide other alternatives, like a way for users to limit access to how any developer can communicate with them or access their data, that won’t amount to completely uninstalling the app. It might also have a setting that prevents users from, say, receiving invites to an app from any friend.

Still, we expect the current options to continue to exist in some form, as they provide more flexibility to users.

People have so far only had the option to delete previously-added apps one by one. This interface is tedious for anyone who has added a lot of apps, who decides they want to remove a lot of them. But it also lets them decide exactly what apps to keep or not.

Facebook has also provided some general application privacy settings. You can limit what information you share about yourself with third parties, or what information your friends share about you with third parties. You can also “block individual applications from accessing your information and contacting you,”  block “application invites from specific friends,” and limit which of your friends and networks can see your engagement with applications within the Apps and Games Dashboards.

There’s also a setting where you can turn off Facebook’s new Instant Personalization product — which otherwise allows Facebook to share some user data that it has previously made public with third parties.

All of these settings require a lot of work to use, which is the cost Facebook incurs by offering granular controls to users.

The point of the change that anyone who decides they are sick of Facebook apps and web sites that use their Facebook data will somehow be able to cut off all of these parties with a click of a button. This is a better user experience for anyone who wants to control their privacy settings without spending a lot of time on the interface.

But, all developers could be affected, in the sense that they could lose access to users who may actually want their apps. Users who make the decision to turn off all third-party access may do so simply because they dislike a particular app, and are reacting strongly to that feeling. Maybe they decide they hate all social games, after getting their 200th FarmVille friend request from a large group of old friends obsessed with the game? Or maybe they’re confused by Instant Personalization, and they decide to prevent further confusion about how their data is being shared by cutting off all future access to third parties?

Facebook appears to have resisted providing a universal “off” button for third parties because it wanted the default to get users sharing more, and trying more services — sharing and using third-party apps are core parts of the value that Facebook provides to users, after all. This new settings option, in other words, signals a more conservative approach from Facebook, and shows the paradox of its position. It’s potentially sacrificing some of the core value it provides users and developers in exchange for providing users with more control.

This week’s list of the 20 Facebook Pages that gained the most new fans in the past week shows ongoing trends, according to our PageData analytics service – entertainment Pages continue to get more popular, fast.

The numerous television shows we’ve been seeing are present, along with some popular musicians who have been staples on the list. The growth appears due to Facebook’s recent product changes to Pages, as we’ll explore below. But note that this week, many Pages that were popular before Facebook made significant changes to the product last month, such as Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker and Facebook’s Page, are back as well.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Nike Football 1,124,145 +573,710 +104.23 2. Family Guy 7,396,923 +549,338 +8.02 3. Texas Hold’em Poker 18,620,325 +362,730 +1.99 4. House 6,104,055 +327,857 +5.68 5. Lady Gaga 7,528,890 +325,122 +4.51 6. Justin Bieber 4,165,498 +322,422 +8.39 7. Lost 3,915,342 +298,785 +8.26 8. Grey’s Anatomy 4,306,005 +268,756 +6.66 9. Red Bull 3,752,061 +251,102 +7.17 10. Facebook 9,166,055 +239,867 +2.69 11. Scrubs 3,534,056 +222,486 +6.72 12. Linkin Park 5,281,405 +207,879 +4.10 13. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu 411,944 +203,398 +97.53 14. Taylor Swift 4,674,485 +199,766 +4.46 15. Lil Wayne 4,608,175 +197,620 +4.48 16. South Park 5,320,913 +190,396 +3.71 17. Los simpson 2,611,158 +186,123 +7.68 18. Two and a Half Men 3,089,723 +182,485 +6.28 19. Metallica 3,998,322 +180,778 +4.74 20. Desperate Housewives 1,903,757 +178,069 +10.32

Topping the list is Nike Football, which added almost 574,000 fans to grow to more than 1.1 million with two big jumps over the weekend totaling about 545,000. Nike has been running Facebook social ads with the names of friends who’ve liked the ad and campaigning with some of the world’s most popular football (soccer) athletes. Another possible reason the Page is number 1 this week is that the FIFA World Cup is weeks away.

The Fox shows “Family Guy” and “House” came in at number 2 and number 4, respectively. “Family Guy” added about 550,000 fans to grow to 7.3 million with steady growth and “House” added about 328,000 fans to surpass 6.1 million.

We’ve previously hypothesized that the sudden prominence of TV shows on our list around the time of Facebook’s larger changes to Pages in late April. While we often see random Pages suddenly gain lots of new users, this is usually the result of one-off instances where Facebook consolidates unofficial Pages for a brand with the official Page.

The new changes include Facebook’s decisions to direct all users to match existing profile interests with Pages, starting on April 19. It also changed the nomenclature of Pages from “become a fan” to “like” at the same, an issue we’ve explored elsewhere. The company shortly followed this move with the launch of its social plugins, including the Like button which can allow people to gain access to users, similar to Pages.

The most probable scenario for the ongoing growth of entertainment apps is that because Facebook directed all of its users to convert profile interests into Pages that they like, the most popular profile interests have generated lots of new fans for the corresponding Pages. This helps explain why a range of older shows, like Seinfeld, have also been making the list recently.

Note that although the profile transition tool first rolled out in April, Facebook may have staggered the number of users who got it right away. That would be one explanation for the growth we’ve seen this past week. Another part of the explanation could be that the mass additions to Pages have prompted more interactions between users about the Pages, thereby setting off viral loops of traffic to the Pages that are still happening now.

Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker came in third this week, adding almost 363,000 fans to grow to 18.6 million; the Page has seen steady growth during the past week of promoting big pots, its iPhone app and virtual goods like designer poker chips.

A bunch of musicians were also on the list this week. Lady Gaga, currently on a world tour and thus prominent in the media, took fifth place, adding 325,000 fans to reach the 7.5 million mark. Justin Bieber followed, adding 322,400 fans to grow his base to 4.1 million aided by the debut of a new single, nominations for music awards and appearances on popular U.S. television shows.

Further on down the list was Linkin Park in twelfth place, adding about 208,000 fans to grow to 5.2 million as the band promotes its new Apple device game called 8-Bit Rebellion, featuring the band’s songs. Singer Taylor Swift at number 14, adding almost 200,000 fans to grow the Page’s fan base to 4.6 million; she’s on a U.S. tour and has been nominated for awards. Rapper Lil Wayne followed at number 15; he’s currently incarcerated but has taken to Facebook to promote himself, adding almost 198,000 fans to grow to 4.6 million. Finally Metallica added about 181,000 fans to take the number 19 spot on our list with a total following of just under 4 million fans. The band is currently on a world tour.

TV shows made up the bulk of the list.

“Lost,” which aired the season finale/final episode Sunday on ABC, added about 299,000 fans to reach almost 3.9 million and take seventh place.

Other ABC shows on our list this week, “Grey’s Anatomy” at number 8 adding 269,000 fans to grow to 4.3 million, “Scrubs” in eleventh place with 222,500 ew fans and a total of 3.5 million and “Desperate Housewives” with 182,500 more fans and a total of 3 million at number 20 have all shown big growth on our list during the past few months.

“South Park,” has a link to its Facebook Page on the web site but no widgets that we could see; nonetheless the page added 190,000 fans to its new base of 5.3 million to take the number 16 spot. “Los Simpson,” the Spanish version of “The Simpsons” followed at 17, by adding 186,000 fans to grow to 2.6 million.

Next at 18 was “Two and a Half Men,” a CBS show that directly asks visitors to become Facebook fans and includes a Like button on some content; the Page added 182,000 fans to surpass 3 million.

The random Pages on our list this week included the energy drink Red Bull at number 9, adding 251,000 fans to grow to 3.7 million. The company links its active events from its web site to Facebook and there are a few Facebook share functions there, too. Number 10 was Facebook’s Page, adding about 240,000 fans to surpass 9.1 million, much of this growth may be attributable to the incessant talk of privacy issues these days.

Then there was Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu at number 13, a Turkish politician recently elected to head the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, who pledged to run against the current prime minister during the next election. Kılıçdaroğlu added 203,000 fans to grow to about 412,000 fans.

Appbistro launched at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference Monday with the goal of providing brands a one-stop destination for the applications for Page administrators to enhance their Facebook Pages. Some of the apps are free and others cost money; Appbistro can either suggest apps for Page admins or you can search Appbistro’s marketplace, of apps.

You may search by category or see all apps at once, as of Tuesday there were more than 30 apps available, many of them free, including: Work for Us (free), Payvment e-commerce (free), Storefront e-commerce ($4.95) and Get Satisfaction customer support ($99), for example.

The site is, of course, tightly integrated with Facebook. Once you click on an app, you see a description and rating of the app, screenshots of it and instructions on how to install it to your Facebook Page; there are also other suggested apps and a place to write a review. If the app costs money at this point you also may purchase it.

Appbistro also offers advice for Page admins and information for Facebook developers who would like to submit their app for consideration on the web site. The company was founded by former Facebook employee and Ping.fm creator Ryan Merket and former Zappos consultant Nalin Mittal.

Facebook has been working on a not-yet-launched service called “Questions,” that will have users ask and answer each others’ questions — similar to a few other services that are out already, but maybe more interesting to the average person. Now, a few more details have emerged, though, via a Facebook user who has been part of the feature’s private testing.

Users will be able to query friends, tag questions with topics, and vote responses up or down to surface the best answers with Questions. Despite utilizing a similar interface, a screenshot attained by Techcrunch points to it occupying a niche separate from that of knowledge base Quora, which was recently founded by former Facebook employees Charlie Cheever and Adam D’angelo.

Rather, the feature’s ability to return a consensus on opinion questions and solicit recommendations makes it better poised to compete with Google-acquired Aardvark — although there are some differences in that comparison, too.

The unique value of Facebook Questions is in allowing users to quickly gauge the preferences of their close friends –a starting point for group decision making. Questions will be accessed through a link on the home page’s left sidebar, alongside other core in-house apps like events and photos. According Sid Yadav of New Zealand ,who’s had access to Questions, the full interface substitutes the familiar “What’s on your mind?” input box with “What do you want to know?”, followed by a series of questions which your friends have answered.

The top right of the screen displays a participation counter showing your number of questions asked, answered, followed, and voted on. This feature is absent from Quora and Aardvark and could be used to encourage participation on Questions like Facebook Impact does for invites, though it might make users more conscious of the 20+ hours a month the average users spends on Facebook.

The report suggests that opinion questions regarding pop culture and the idiosycracies of everyday life have been the most common. These are reminiscent of many humorous generic Pages on Facebook (now converted to Community Pages). See, for example, Pretending to Text in Awkward Situations which is liked by 3,740,867 people. Users have liked these sorts of Pages because they can easily share their opinion with lots of of other people. The feature’s popularity suggests that users may gravitate towards low impact questions that don’t require expertise, leaving more room for knowledge-focused services like Quora. Overall, Yadav concurs, saying Questions, “seems to be more intimate/fun/terse than intellectual/useful/detailed”. Although answers certainly vary by individual based on their network of Facebook friends.

Facebook has apparently been working on this project, a successor to its now defunct Polls feature, since 2008. While question-and-answer services like Yahoo Answers have been around for years, and while there are newer rivals, Facebook’s advantage is that it has millions of loyal users and detailed data about them.

Repurposing some of Quora’s interface for a less academic audience could be a great move for Facebook. Questions could generate a wealth of high quality notifications, from ego boosting upvotes to helpful answers to personal questions. These in turn lead to return visits, where reading and composing long answers increase time-on-site. Facebook doesn’t need to directly challenge Quora, or even Aardvark, because they’ll find that while there are only so many experts, everyone has friends with opinions. Allowing users to easily collect and act on the opinions of their friends will make Facebook even more indispensable to modern social life.

Facebook has made email a primary way for developers to communicate with users in the past months, especially following the removal of third-party notifications at the beginning of March. Now, developers are responsible for obtaining permission from users in order to email them, and for subsequently handling all aspects of communication on their own.

An application that has a a few hundred thousand daily active users, for example, may need to send millions of messages every day — everything from people inviting friends to join a game, to reminders about a pending activity, to alerts about a new competition or feature.

AppGoGo is offering a service intended to help developers more easily handle large amounts of email, applying long-standing email technology and practices to the Facebook platform market including an email server, appropriate email standards, as well as templating and monitoring systems.

Email technology has been around for years, so developers might choose to build their own email servers. But there are costs. Internet service providers and email hosting services have technology and rules that are intended to limit spam, phishing and other threats. For example, if you send enough emails to users through a given ISP, and they don’t know who you are, they may think you’re a spammer and block your messages from getting through — a problem that developers may have encountered already.

AppGoGo works directly with ISPs to ensure that messages get through. It provides an IP address that’s recognized by other companies that transmit email, a corresponding identifier where it takes responsibility for sending messages, and a message format that’s recognized by most email receiver services — and direct relationships with ISPs so that it can work through any issues to ensure that emails keep getting delivered.

It also provides a templating service for sending out mass emails, and tracking tools to see information like the locations of people who click on sent emails.

Beyond packaging existing email technology to work best for gaming companies with millions of users, AppGoGo provides developers with an email API that matches Facebook’s now-deprecated messaging API. For developers who were formerly sending millions of messages through Facebook, this will make the transition easier.

The largest social gaming developers are building their own systems; they can afford the cost of learning how to do it themselves. Smaller developers may be able to operate their own email systems without getting blocked by the ISPs or encountering other problems that come with volume. Those companies could use cloud services provided by web hosting companies, and Amazon and Google, to manage all email — the cost structures of those companies’ data services could get high once an app has enough users, however.

AppGoGo wants to find developers who have a lot of email to send, but don’t have the engineering team available to build and maintain an in-house email system. Company cofounder Desmond Cahill tells us that it has a lot of interested developers in the pipeline, with one, Player Axis’ School Vandals, already using it. While there are a range of other companies that provide the same general email services to companies, they typically serve large marketers who want to send out a high volume of identical messages; they don’t typically offer APIs designed for Facebook apps, for example.

Beyond the more technical aspects of email delivery, developers who previously relied on Facebook’s notifications feature, and on other changing messaging channels, like Requests, will need to balance how they email users. If they act too spammy, users can remove their email addresses and quit the application. Cahill says he hopes to help developers find the right balance between email and spam; he’s also getting a lot of interest from developers looking to use email to get inactive users back in games.

AppGoGo is self-funded. Cahill and his cofounders have worked in the email delivery business for years; he was the chief executive of Habeas for 5 years, a company that provided custom email delivery for major brands. While the market is still young, the volume of email on Facebook’s platform and the nuanced needs of developers make AppGoGo a potentially valuable new platform service provider.

For now, the company is focused on Facebook, but it is also looking at offering relevant messaging handling for emails on other social networks, as well as SMS features for developers looking to do mobile communication.

[Editor's Note: The following stats are excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Click here to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

As Facebook continues to grow around the world, and add the bulk of its new users in countries outside of the United States, users’ language may become an increasingly important factor for marketers and developers working within the ever-diversifying ecosystem. As part of our Inside Facebook Gold data membership service, we are now tracking language usage by total audience size, demographic splits within languages, and languages by country, and the data presented in this post is a sample of what’s available through the full data membership offering. Also as a part of IF Gold, we’ll be presenting updates and growth projections in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back to see where the language leaderboard is going in the months ahead!

To capture new market share in countries outside of the United States, how valuable is it to localization and culturalize? What’s the user acquisition potential if your brand or app does decide to localize?

We surveyed Facebook’s top 15 languages, looking at such stats as the absolute number of people using the site in those languages, and the basic demographic splits by language. Note that these numbers reflect how many people have pointed their Facebook language settings to a given language or variant within a broader language group. The table below presents a data excerpt on the site’s top 10 languages.

Facebook’s #1 language is English, with over 52% of the site’s total userbase accessing the site in that language.

In a distant second is Spanish, with a usage rate of around 15% of the total userbase. Note that this number includes totals for all Spanish variants.

After Spanish and its variants, the dropoff is much sharper. The next few languages in the list line up roughly with Facebook’s country rankings. Those are Turkish, French, and Indonesian, with each language accounting for around 5% of the total userbase. In the 7th spot is Italian, with 3.9% of the total userbase accessing the site in that language. Next is German, with around 2.7% of the total userbase.

After German comes Chinese and Portuguese. For Chinese, note that this figure includes both Traditional and Simplified Chinese, although it’s likely that the majority of these users are using the site in Traditional Chinese — which is used in Taiwan and Singapore, both of which are fairly saturated Facebook markets. [Correction: Traditional Chinese is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, also a robust Facebook Market. Simplified Chinese is used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore.]

Here is a look at the what percentage each of these top languages represents out oof the total Facebook audience.

What’s notable about these language stats is not that English is the dominant language of Facebook (that should be obvious), but rather that the next languages in line do not fall neatly in line with Facebook’s list of top countries by overall userbase. That indicates that users in some of the countries that are contributing significantly to Facebook’s “over 400 million” total usage figure are still using the site in English, despite the fact that Facebook is now fully localized in their languages.

As a last note, usage by language gets much more interesting when you start looking at the male / female splits by language, how many users in each of these languages fall into different age groups, and how many people are using the site in each of these languages across Facebook’s top countries.

The full breakdown of Facebook’s top 15 languages, including gender, age, and country splits by language, is only available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service that also includes the monthly Global Monitor report on Facebook’s traffic growth around the world. To get access to the all the data we’re tracking, and to the specific growth projections we’ll soon be adding, please see Inside Facebook Gold at gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t said much publicly in the last few weeks. Many in the tech media have criticized Facebook for this, saying it reflects poorly on the company to not make Zuckerberg more available to respond to criticism in real time.

Today, during a week in which Facebook privacy is the cover story on Time’s print edition, Zuckerberg’s byline is beginning to appear in more public communications. He wrote a guest post in the Washington Post and a well-publicized message to blogger Robert Scoble, acknowledging that Facebook has made “mistakes,” but is going to try to improve its privacy controls by making them more simple.

“In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Washington Post, not on the company’s own blog.

The last few weeks have certainly been a case study for any communications team, and Facebook has been trying to figure out how best balance talking about its product plans with the media cycle that often follows its product announcements. Although there is traditionally a period of sensationalism followed by a period of more thorough reflection, Facebook increased confusion this time around by combining many varied product announcements and changes at f8.

Migrating data on the info tab to “liked” Pages and making them public, announcing the Open Graph API and vision, announcing the Facebook “social plugins,” and announcing the initial Instant Personalization partners made it hard for people to understand which parts of Facebook’s product announcements included changes to the privacy model, and which did not. As a result, concern has become more protracted. Some of Facebook’s own changes were inherently confusing and debatable, such as the change to what user profile information is public. But critics sometimes haven’t fully understood which product or service they need to focus their energy on exactly, leading to even more confusion.

For now, the art of PR has become even more greatly intertwined with the art of product management – at least for Facebook’s privacy team – as Facebook continues to observe user behavior data across its platform and product portfolio and shape the product roadmap based on other inputs. It will be interesting to see exactly what the new privacy controls look like – especially for those that operate services on the Facebook Platform.

Zuckerberg has certainly gained a much bigger appreciation for the role of corporate communications over the past few years, but he still seems to prefer to let his thinking come through in the form of product changes instead of interviews. “I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do,” he wrote.

Carl’s Jr. fast food chain has launched a combination coupon-game application on Facebook called The Wheel of Awesome. The chain’s sister restaurant, Hardee’s, is also participating by allowing fans who use the application to spin a wheel for an instant prize of a discount coupon, or other prizes like Blu-ray players, DVDs, gift cards and coupons for free food.

The Wheel of Awesome launched on May 13 and runs for a month until June 13. First a Facebook user has to Like the Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s Page in order to use the one free spin each player receives. One can earn more spins by inviting friends to use the app.

Once a user likes the Page and clicks to enter they must give the app permission to access their profile information and that of their friends. After clicking the spin button a dancing version of the Carl’s Jr. logo, a smiling yellow star walks out and makes a bit show of spinning the wheel, thereupon releasing thunder, lightening and fire. The app is fairly amusing, also featuring a white tiger with a comically large gold chain around its neck.

The Wheel of Awesome spins and a prize pops up, such as a coupon for a discount on a burger or free fries.

AppData shows that the game has resulted in some gains for the Pages of Carl’s Jr. with more than 195,000 Likes and Hardee’s, currently with 153,100 Likes. This is partially due, no doubt, to user-generated growth. Remembering that, in order to play the game you have to Like the Page, if users want to play again they have a built-in incentive to share the game with friends to do so.

Plus, once you play the app publishes the fact to your Wall and into the news feed.

There’s a good mix of marketing practices at play here, many of which we discuss in the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible. Obviously people love free food, we wrote earlier this year about Context Optional’s coupon promotion for Einstein Bros and Noah’s Bagels; the promotion awarded a free bagel and schmear via coupon to fans. But combining the free coupon with a game throws in an element of entertainment that we saw previously with Del Taco’s Super Special Show, after all there’s no practical reason for a tiger to wear a gold chain other than for a laugh.

So far the promotion seems to have added tens of thousands of fans to Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s Pages and it’s only been a few weeks. At this rate by the time the promotion is over the Pages are probably going to boast hundreds of thousands of fans.