In what is an interesting sign of the times, Facebook and Zynga this morning issued press releases announcing that they plan on working together for a long time. It’s the first time Facebook has ever issued an announcement of this type, as the company has historically had a policy of not making many public comments on business issues regarding specific developers.

But both companies apparently were motivated enough to send a signal to the market that despite the recent issues in their relationship, they’ll be working together. For Zynga, the announcement reassures the market that its presence with its largest distribution partner is stable — though there are many outstanding challenges around monetization, platform policy, and user communication that will still greatly affect Zynga’s high level product roadmap, both within its Facebook portfolio and across other platforms and destinations.

For Facebook, today’s release was apparently intended to let the market know that things are still under control with Zynga, despite Zynga’s recent displeasure with the way Facebook has adjusted its platform user communication products, policy enforcement style, and pressure on the use of Credits (Facebook’s universal virtual currency for user purchases of virtual goods in social games). Zynga is not getting any special treatment on Credits terms, Facebook says, but other terms of the deal were not announced.

In general, animosity between the two companies has been growing as of late. But the tension between Facebook and Zynga is natural, as Zynga is currently the largest developer on the Facebook Platform by 5X (by portfolio-summed daily active users) over #2 Playfish/Electronic Arts, according to AppData. More jostling for leverage should be expected: if Zynga is able to preserve its distant lead on Facebook, and build up more of its business off of Facebook, it could get even more aggressive in how it negotiates. But for now, it appears to be living with pretty normal terms.

Nevertheless, Facebook has certainly never announced that it plans on working with a specific developer for 5 years before. We’ll let you know as we learn more about the agreement.

First Choice Power is a Texas electric provider combining social media and Spanish-language marketing in its inaugural Facebook game, the Energía Goleadora Fan Contest.

The Facebook game teaches players ways to save energy, in English or Spanish, and was launched in conjunction with several other Hispanic-oriented businesses, including the Univisón TV network, the Famsa appliance store and soccer team FC Dallas. The person with the highest score in the game — who’s also a Texas resident in First Choice’s service area — wins the grand prize trip to Miami to see an Univisión awards show.

First Choice’s Facebook Page launched in March, followed by the game in April. So far more than 100 people have played, the company tells us. The game is also being promoted in a mini-reality show on Univisión featuring four families who try to save energy. The idea is to market to the 40% of First Choice’s customer base that is Hispanic and bilingual, Andrés Reyes, director of Hispanic marketing tells us.

“We don’t look at Hispanics by language, we look at the Hispanic market by culture. For us it is very critical to have channels where we are communicating in both English and Spanish to establish a dialogue with this consumer,” Reyes explains. “There’s an over indexation of Hispanics on Facebook, we foresee this as continuing to grow.”

First Choice started its conversation with customers on social media with Twitter in December, and currently has 350 followers, and it also maintains a blog and a photo account Flickr, in addition to the Facebook Page with about 200 fans. Some social media response is in Spanish, Reyes said, but most of this conversation is taking place in English. This is to be expected. As we reported in Inside Facebook Gold, only 1.5 million people in the U.S. use Facebook in Spanish.

Playing Energía Goleadora is pretty self-explanatory and includes the usual features, such as a leaderboard and several opportunities to invite Facebook friends to play. Players of the game can select to play in English or Spanish as they go around a virtual house discovering ways to save on the house’s energy bill, such as changing light bulbs for example. Each time you discover a way to save energy you earn points.

So what do people talk to their electric company about on Facebook or Twitter?

“A whole range of responses, from non-profit partners thanking us for grants, customers ask questions about accounts or complain about something they didn’t understand about their bill,” Marketing Manager Catherine Carlton tells us. “Our goal is to educate customers about the market and find out what they want from an energy company to make it more user friendly.”

We haven’t seen utility companies pushing initiatives like this before. However, searching on Facebook yields dozens of results for power companies. Most are small with just hundreds of fans, but First Choice tells us that a power company takes its marketing to social media for the same reasons as do other companies, which is to be where their customers are. Instead of calling a 1-800 number or searching for information on the web site, customers can simply send First Choice a message on Twitter or post to the Facebook Wall in order to get answers or make complaints, Carlton says.The added bonus of First Choice’s social media presence is that it’s bilingual, the company does receive some messages in Spanish. It is set to make information like tips on going green available in Spanish on Facebook in the near future.

Several of Latin America’s largest countries added significant numbers of new monthly active users to Facebook in April, the latest month tracked by our Global Monitor report. Above all others, Mexico’s growth during the month was exceptionally high, coming in second only to the United States in our overall world rankings.

Mexico has led growth for its region for three months now, adding nearly a million MAU during both February and March. But as you can see on our chart below, the country experienced a surge in April of 1,511,320 new users, enough to drive its total penetration above 10 percent.

The growth trend for Mexico is all the more interesting in light of that country’s current unrest. Time reports that Mexican drug traffickers have learned to use Facebook and Twitter to coordinate against government forces; in response, the Revolutionary Democratic Party has drawn up a bill to regulate social networks. But short of a complete ban such approaches have rarely done much more than act as unintentional advertising for Facebook. We’ve also covered how people in the drug cartel-torn city of Ciudad Juarez have been using Facebook to unite against violence.

Although Colombia also accelerated sharply in April, the real growth story is still Brazil, for which we’re showing 632,520 new MAU. There’s a clear growth trend here. In February, Brazil’s Facebook audience grew 9.9 percent; in March it was 14.7 percent, while April rose to 17.5 percent. Although total penetration will remain low for some time for the country, its future on Facebook looks increasingly certain.

Going back to Colombia, it forms a trio with Argentina and Venezuala in that the three all usually show up in the top five growers for the region, but usually swap places as their growth fluctuates. All three have relatively high penetration rates, so we expect that they’ve settled into long-term trajectories. In April, Peru joined in with more than double its previous-month growth.

The only new arrival to the top 10 in April was Costa Rica, which as you can see also posted the highest relative growth rate of the group at 20.5 percent.

Facebook’s penetration into South America (not counting central America and the Caribbean) now stands at 10.6 percent, with about eight percent growth in April. Counting in every country in the Latin American region, it has edged over 50 million Facebook users — a significant number, since Facebook is probably about to announce that it has crossed 500 million users. Our own stats run a bit low since they come from Facebook’s advertising tool, which is typically a few weeks behind.

The data above all is all contained within our in-depth Global Monitor report, with 164 pages of growth statistics and forward projections for 98 countries and five world regions. For more on Global Monitor, check out the details of our Inside Facebook Gold subscription service.

Television shows and musicians held their grip on our list of Top 20 Facebook Pages again this week, edging out all others except for Texas Hold’em Poker. Many of these shows experienced higher growth during the beginning of last week that tapered off during the rest of the week; note that some of the shows are off the air and some of the musicians aren’t currently promoting their music.

We’ve speculated that the invasion of entertainment on our Top 20 Pages list was due to some sort of Page consolidation by Facebook. This list is compiled with our PageData tool, which counts the number of fans added to Pages daily.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Family Guy	6,770,326	+574,947	+9.28
2.	Drake	1,563,689	+519,236	+49.71
3.	House	5,723,204	+360,065	+6.71
4.	Texas Hold’em Poker	18,216,436	+297,424	+1.66
5.	Justin Bieber	3,786,890	+272,069	+7.74
6.	Lost	3,584,775	+245,304	+7.35
7.	The Office	3,136,580	+233,349	+8.04
8.	South Park	5,104,150	+217,510	+4.45
9.	Two and a Half Men	2,877,521	+196,599	+7.33
10.	Desperate Housewives	1,699,602	+191,949	+12.73
11.	Scrubs	3,288,371	+190,731	+6.16
12.	Titanic	3,034,459	+190,343	+6.69
13.	Lil Wayne	4,378,949	+161,046	+3.82
14.	Westlife	230,379	+155,691	+208.46
15.	Taylor Swift	4,443,941	+135,577	+3.15
16.	Pink Floyd	2,853,052	+131,313	+4.82
17.	Bones	1,148,932	+129,416	+12.69
18.	Prison Break	2,374,989	+127,015	+5.65
19.	CSI: Miami	1,450,966	+126,853	+9.58
20.	Muse	2,253,883	+118,020	+5.53

“Family Guy” was number 1, adding 575,000 fans to reach 6.7 million, the Page hasn’t been updated in the last week. Medical drama “House” was third, active on the Wall this week, adding 360,000 fans to its base of 5.7 million. Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker was fourth place this week, adding 297,400 fans to more than 18.2 million, growing by 148,000 fans on Wednesday.

Musicians made up a substantial part of our list this week.

Rapper Drake came in at number two, adding most of his fan base, 467,000 on Friday to grow to 519,200 fans. Teen pop star Justin Bieber took the number 5 spot, adding 272,000 fans to grow his Page to 3.7 million; he’s been on American talk shows this week. Lil Wayne, a rapper who’s currently incarcerated, came in at number 13, adding 161,000 fans to his base of 4.3 million. He’s been promoting himself on Facebook by asking fans to write to him in jail, also by selling a t-shirt with his nickname, “Free Weezy.”

Band Westlife took the number 14 spot, adding most of its fans, 155,700, to its base of 230,400 fans; there was a big jump on Saturday of 149,300 fans. Taylor Swift followed at number 15, adding 135,600 fans to 4.4 million on the Page already; she’s been recently nominated for more music awards. Rock bank Pink Floyd added 131,300 fans to its base of 2.8 million; there hasn’t been any activity on the Page this month. The band Muse rounded out the list at number 20, adding 118,000 to a total of 2.2 million; the band is promoting a new album.

“Lost” is set to end in a few weeks, landing the number spot adding 245,000 fans to its 3.5 million base. At number 7 was “The Office,” adding 233,000 fans to grow to 3.1 million; several of the show’s stars were on talk shows last week. Next was “South Park” at number 8, adding 217,500 fans to grow to 5.1 million fans; the Page hasn’t been updated since April. “Two and a Half Men,” added 196,600 fans to grow to 2.8 million and come in ninth, “Desperate Housewives” was number 10, adding 192,000 fans to grow to 1.7 million and “Scrubs,” which had its season finale in March, took the number 11 spot, adding 190,700 fans to grow to 3.2 million fans.

The 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” came in at number 12, adding 190,000 fans to grow to more than 3 million fans; although there’s never been any activity from the Page administrator on the Wall, fans continue to post there.

Rounding out the list was “Bones” at number 17, adding 129,400 fans to its 1.1 million base, “Prison Break,” a show no longer in syndication, adding 127,000 fans to 2.3 million already on the Page and “CSI: Miami” and number 19, adding 126,800 fans to a base of 1.4 million.

Apple is looking to integrate social networking data from Facebook into its iPhone operating system software, as a wide range of clues have been pointing to over the last couple of months. Now we have another one.

The site Patently Apple has found a patent that the company filed in late 2008, and published recently, describing a range of integrations for syncing with social networks. While the processes could fit with any number of services, the patent uses Facebook as the main example.

It shows workflows where an iPhone user could ask to friend a Facebook user from their device (presumably straight from their phone address book), or sync existing contact information, calendars, photos, notes, app-specific data and other custom scripts.

Other phones have already offered many of these sorts features, but Apple and Facebook provide the best-of-breed features in their respective categories. This is illustrated by the Facebook iPhone OS app — it’s been a hit for years. With 34 million monthly active users and around half that using the app every day, it’s currently one of the most popular on either company’s platform

Look for Apple to reveal more at its June 7 iPhone OS 4.0 launch event.

Facebook is headed towards 500 million monthly active users, judging by where its long-term growth trends are taking it now. Yet recent privacy changes have sparked what appears to be a bigger outcry than ever before.

Some users have very publicly said that they’re going to deactivate, delete or minimally use their accounts. For example, the search term “how do” on leading search engine Google now shows the algorithmically-determined phrase “how do i delete my facebook account.” Sites that provide answers to that question are seeing lots of new traffic.

The changes — for those who missed the widely covered debates — include asking users to make more personal profile data public and introducing more ways that third parties can get access to some user data.

So here’s a closer look at what the numbers and trends suggest.

Web measurement firm Hitwise says today that visits to the Facebook.com domain are up 3% last week versus the previous week, and it is currently receiving 8.59% of all visits to web sites by people in the US. Visits have risen by 8% for May so far versus April, which appears to be slower than the gain it saw from March to April, although more than what it appears to have been seeing earlier this year.

Facebook said last week that it has gained more than 10 million users since its f8 developer conference on April 21st, based on some pointed questions from Search Engine Land‘s Danny Sullivan. But it didn’t provide a total number. It had most recently said it had 400 million users in early February, when the company turned six years old.

The company’s traffic announcements appear to be coordinated with product launches, and to include as many zeros as possible (it has likely held off on announcing 450 million, for example, so it can announce 500 million with a bigger bang). One can interpret Facebook’s phrasing about past numbers to mean that the numbers are tied directly to the day the number is announced, as Sullivan did, but this is not a sure thing; the company has generally avoided being precise with what its numbers are.

However, we report on Facebook’s US and worldwide stats every month, by looking at the company’s advertising tool, and then comparing the numbers with what third party measurement services like comScore, Nielsen, Compete and Quantcast show. Although the tool is typically at least a few weeks behind, the numbers generally line up with third parties, and with Facebook’s occasionally-released numbers. This gives us at least some sense for what the general trends look like.

The most recent data we have is for March (April is due out soon). Only comScore and Facebook’s ad tool show worldwide data, so that’s what we’ll compare with Facebook’s statement that it grew by 10 million in less than a month in order to determine if the latest numbers indicate slowing traffic due to the privacy flare-up.

ComScore reported that Facebook had 484 million users in March. The advertising tool showed 436 million users in its advertising tool a couple weeks ago, which we think reflects its numbers from sometime around that time frame.

From here, the monthly worldwide growth rate gets harder to determine. ComScore showed 472 million uniques in January, then a drop 463 million in February before rising by 21 million in March. We tracked 373 million at the end of January, then 394 million at the end of February before going up by 42 million in March.

The other third party services, which do not provide publicly available global numbers for Facebook, generally showed a slow-down in February with stronger growth in January and March, possibly due to the fewer number of days in February.

There’s no average growth rate to determine from these numbers — just a bunch of fluctuations.

And, there are all sorts of other factors to take into account. Here are a few. ComScore says that users who go to Facebook pages but are not logged-in users may be counted, thus causing their numbers to look high. As we mentioned, the advertising tool does not clearly cover a specific time frame — so growth rates here are not precise. And Facebook’s announced milestones are so irregular that discerning growth trends out of them is currently impossible.

So, given all of these qualifications, we believe that Facebook may have seen a slight slowdown after f8, but it has seen dips before, and we do not have enough information yet to determine if there is a meaningful relationship between traffic and the privacy changes… or if there is even a slowdown.

In a minor news feed design change that appears intended to make stories more diverse and Facebook-focused, the company has begun grouping news feed stories from other apps and sites together.

For example, instead of seeing five tweets from friend who import their messages via the Twitter app to your feed, you’re now more likely to see only one, along with a link beneath it that says “Show 4 similar posts.” If you click on the link, the others will be revealed.

The change applies to both the algorithmic “Top News” view of the news feed (as of last week), along the raw “Most Recent” feed (as of last month). Beyond apps, it affects sites that use Facebook’s Open Graph APIs for user communication.

This might hurt Twitter and other services that revolve around a lot of broadcast messaging through the news feed, such as social games made by aggressive developers. Many apps try to message the stream as much as possible to have users solicit favors from their friends — and thereby engage more people more often. Indeed, a quick Google search shows that a number of devoted social gamers have been creating protests groups and Pages.

The reasons Facebook would implement this change are simple. The company doesn’t want any one third party to dominate users’ news feeds and create a disproportionate amount of news feed content. Instead, it wants a balance of stories coming to users from apps and the web. It also wants to emphasize its own services, like photos, status updates and events — those are not truncated.

Last month at F8, Facebook noted they were updating the way data-read permissions are granted to applications. Up until this point, when a user authorizes an application on Facebook, that application would automatically get access to all of the data that user had permission to read on Facebook.com. With the new authorization model, applications are only granted access to read a user’s publicly available information by default. This includes name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages, according to Facebook.

Developers who do not utilize data beyond publicly available information will not need to make any changes, and thus this update is non-breaking for them. However, for developers who currently rely on simple authorization to gain access to things such as user photos, notes, and extra profile information, this update is breaking. In order to access further user data from the API, developers will need to utilize new extended permissions in conjunction with the new simplified permissions dialog (pictured below).

The new permissions dialog combines what used to be separate permission dialogs into a single modal window, as we’ve covered. It simplifies the way in which extended permissions are granted: developers only need to design for two permission scenarios (all granted vs. none). This new model creates a more transparent platform, with applications explicitly asking for user data they require. Consequently, this allows end users to make more clearly informed decisions whether to trust certain applications or not. The disadvantage to users is the loss of granular control over what an application may access. Developers will likely leverage this loss of granularity in order to garner higher permission conversions on things such as access to user’s email addresses (pictured below).

The new permissions and dialogs are currently in a migration period, set to end on June 1st. Until then, developers may toggle the update on and off from the migration tool on a per application basis. After June 1st, however, the update will be permanently rolled out to all platform applications.

This week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users is led by Frases Diarias, provided that you except (and we always do) the in-house Facebook app Static FBML.

Frases’ growth is quite impressive, since it’s a Spanish-language app. It’s also quite simple, being at its heart a quote-of-the-day service. Of course, when those quotes are posted to the walls of users, it’s no surprise that their friends come flooding in.

Here’s the full AppData list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Static FBML	64,255,954	+1,806,371	+2.89
2.	Frases Diarias	3,215,783	+985,017	+44.16
3.	@Smiles	7,021,456	+436,004	+6.62
4.	Translations	429,162	+428,409	+56,893.63
5.	Yearbook	4,129,220	+422,910	+11.41
6.	Family Feud	4,816,329	+420,998	+9.58
7.	Facebook	34,353,852	+368,754	+1.09
8.	Collect Roses	895,866	+331,196	+58.65
9.	Profile HTML	746,470	+322,983	+76.27
10.	Nightclub City	978,034	+318,460	+48.28
11.	Profile Box	889,474	+301,042	+51.16
12.	Name Analyzer	843,352	+286,941	+51.57
13.	Quiz Planet!	5,138,830	+276,121	+5.68
14.	Big City Life	1,431,276	+239,693	+20.12
15.	Bola	2,572,522	+236,171	+10.11
16.	Kingdoms of Camelot	3,183,890	+193,243	+6.46
17.	Movies	3,928,846	+180,354	+4.81
18.	MindJolt Games	12,959,308	+177,140	+1.39
19.	Tarjetitas	2,106,475	+171,996	+8.89
20.	My Tribe	809,038	+168,444	+26.29

While Frases is exclusively in Spanish, the next app down, @Smiles, seems to have crossed all language barriers in its userbase by offering a pleasant facial expression of the day instead of words.

Yearbook is continuing to take off, offering more or less the same service that Facebook once helped with and Classmates.com exists for: finding school buddies, current or prior. Compete reports that Classmates.com is falling, having just dipped below 12 million unique visitors per month, so it’s not entirely impossible that Yearbook will overtake it at some point.

Family Feud, out for two months now, is actually picking up the pace of its growth — we talk a bit more about that today over at Inside Social Games. It’s followed by Facebook, which appears to have dropped the “for iPhone” appellation from its name in an apparent effort to apply beyond just the iPhone (like for the iPad, perhaps?). As usual, the Blackberry mobile app also grew, although it’s way down at number 26, which you can’t see here.

Finally, keep an eye on Profile HTML and Profile Box, two apps that both allow users to create a custom box of content on their profile. On Friday, Profile Box was in the lead; now the two have switched positions. The race is far too early to call, but whichever of the pair ends up taking the lead will probably go on to become quite a significant app.

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, May 10th, 2010

• The Next Generation Hits This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games by MAU
• Board Game Carrom Comes to Facebook
• Facebook MMOs Go Retro with Fantasy Online
• Training Social Gamers to Become Hardcore Gamers

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

• Jungle Extreme: A Facebook Game that Combines Farming and Survival
• BitRhymes Launches Wild Paradise on Facebook
• Facebook and Zynga Battle Over Credits – and Bigger Platform Issues

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

• Family Feud Takes the Lead on This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games by DAU
• Ok GameStudio Launches IslandFest, a Resort Game on Facebook
• Google Gets Ready For Mobile Social Gaming With Android
• Sibblingz Opens Cross-Development Tool for Multi Platform Social Games

Tursday, May 13th, 2010

• Warpgate HD Offers Galactic Gaming on the iPad
• IGG Launches Four New Social Games on Facebook
• Playfish Digs Into Roman Bureaucracy With Its Latest Release, My Empire
• A Closer Look at IGG’s Newest Facebook Game, Miracle Garden

Friday, May 14h, 2010

• Nightclub City Comes Out of the Dark on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Facebook’s Offers Experiment Continues to Expand
• Giving Your Friends a Fun Education on Facebook with University of You
• Social Gaming Roundup: Mother’s Day, Capcom, Parodies, & More