A new version of Facebook’s iPhone app is now available in iTunes. It follows up on the one released a couple of weeks ago by adding support for Apple’s new iOS 4 software. The new 3.1.4 version includes features enabled by the latest version of the operating system, including fast application switching and high-resolution icons. It also has some minor bug fixes and translations into Russian and Korean — two of the few markets that Facebook has yet to do well in.

The previous release included the ability to watch videos, view and write on Events walls, and upload photos up to 720 pixels wide.

Along with many other apps, this one appears to have been undercounting monthly active user data until the middle of last month. A change on the 16th showed it with 54.1 million MAU, up from a slowly-climbing 37.1 million MAU the previous day, according to AppData. It now has 56.3 million MAU. The daily active user count did not see a similar surge, growing slowly to 20.6 million today.

Facebook is moving to a simpler data authorization model for third-party access to user data as we’ve been covering since the company announced the change at its f8 developer conference in April. The new model is coming today, as planned.

Developers get access to basic information, including names and friend lists, with the change, but are required to ask for all specific pieces of extended data — and it’s all within a single interface. This replaces the platform’s previous multi-step process that could allow developers to obtain more data access, possibly with less clarity around what data users were sharing.

[Editor's Note: Facebook's growth and traffic stats in India 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.]

We estimate Facebook’s country market penetration monthly as part of the Facebook Global Monitor report. Typically, market penetration figures are determined by the percentage of the population that’s on Facebook. For most of the developed world, this metric provides a good view into Facebook’s popularity. But what about poorer countries, where many people lack internet connections? Measuring Facebook’s popularity, in these countries, quickly becomes complicated.

It’s more than a merely academic question. On Monday, we reported that Facebook’s new office in Hyderabad, India will hire up to 500 people. The office will serve as a global sales and operations node — but it also seems likely that Facebook has some confidence that India’s penetration levels will rise, providing a viable market for the company. So today, we’re taking a closer look at India’s present, as well as its possible future.

At first glance, Facebook appears to be a failure in India, which is well known as one of the two bastions of Google’s Orkut. Out of a total population of 1.14 billion people, India has only 9.5 million Facebook users — a market penetration rate of only 0.8 percent.

The story changes when we begin looking at India’s much smaller internet population, for which we’ll use the World Bank estimate of 51.7 million. Here’s how India’s growth on Facebook looks over the year when using that number:

Other estimates of India’s internet population vary — a more recent measurement by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) puts it at 71 million — but any measurement we could use shows a penetration of at least 10 percent, growing fairly quickly. This is especially impressive considering that most data connections in India are not broadband.

India’s internet penetration will rise over time, and it’s likely that a significant number of its citizens could be internet-connected within a few years. However, an even more interesting consideration is the growth of the mobile web.

While wireline connections are few and far between ( a fact that also reveals part of the problem in connecting more Indians to the internet) wireless phone ownership has grown by leaps and bounds. India added 16 million wireless users in May alone, according to government statistics, which count 617.5 million wireless users as of June, over 50 percent of the population.

The problem is that few of these wireless connections are being used for data; another IAMAI study, from January, showed that only two million users make significant use of their mobile internet connections. However, as you can see on the IAMAI chart at right, the younger generations — those most likely to be using Facebook — are the heaviest mobile data users. Yet another study predicts 260 million mobile internet subscribers in India by the end of 2015.

For Facebook, these various statistics won’t add up unless the social network can easily connect with users, load data and, most importantly, serve ads. That’s where Facebook Zero comes in: a stripped-down version of the site that some have suggested could become Africa’s Agora. India’s population being larger than that of the entire continent of Africa, it’s not unreasonable to consider that the country is more important to Facebook.

Much of this could take place without anyone realizing — Facebook currently offers no public accounting of how many users access it through mobile connections. What is clear, however, is that mobile is Facebook’s market of the future, at least for countries like India.

We’ll be publishing Facebook’s latest global traffic growth data tracking the site’s growth in markets around the world, including India, in the July edition of the Facebook Global Monitor report. The Global Monitor is available as part of a membership to Inside Facebook Gold. To learn more or join, please visit gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook

Most people use Facebook to connect with friends, including long-lost ones, and the company’s contact importing tool has been a key way to help them do so. Users can import address books from their phones, or email and instant message services. Beyond having the option to invite these friends to Facebook, directly, the company also puts this information into its “Phonebook” and uses it to provide more relevant friend suggestions to users and their Facebook friends.

But sometimes users find particular friend suggestions to be a bit odd. Maybe they see a suggestion for someone they don’t know — or know but don’t want to be friends with.

If you’re a Facebook user seeing unwanted Phonebook contacts or friend suggestions, one option that Facebook has provided for awhile (albeit a bit obscurely) is for you to delete your imported contacts.

But first, be sure to note the consequences. If you use Phonebook to make calls to Facebook friends from a mobile device, removing imported contacts may remove some friends’ phone numbers if you imported contacts from your phone. If you’ve been liking the friend suggestions tool, well, you’re about to make it less relevant to you. That’s not all. Facebook uses your imported contacts to try to make more relevant suggestions to your existing Facebook friends, so deleting your imports may make the feature less valuable for them, too.

All that said, here’s what to do: Go to this page, called “Remove Imported Contacts” and click on the “Remove” button. In order to get all the imported contacts out of your Facebook mobile app, though, you’ll also need to delete that data directly from the device.

LivingSocial Deals, the group coupon arm of LivingSocial, just expanded their services to the United Kingdom by opening in London today. The company is set to go live in other major UK metropolitan areas, such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, as well as dozens of other global markets in the coming year.

We’ve written previously about LivingSocial Deals and its main rival, Groupon — the former company got its start building Facebook apps, and continues to rely on Facebook friend connections to help users share group deals with their friends. In April we reported that LivingSocial had raised millions, $49 million total to date, in order to expand its Deals service. This is LivingSocial’s first international market, whereas Groupon has already opened in Canada and many other countries around the world.

Essentially both companies provide similar services, in that they offer the users of their service special geographic-specific deals and incentives to get their friends to also purchase the deal. In LivingSocial’s case the user may get the deal free if they can cajole three of their friends into also buying it. While LivingSocial Deals home base has been Facebook, it is also available on Twitter and mobile devices.

These deals often include restaurant deals, but also services such as discounted spa treatments and activities such as golfing specials. London’s addition to LivingSocial makes it the twenty-seventh city to provide the company’s Deals.

Six weeks ago, Facebook updated its developer roadmap, stating at the time that access to invites will be moving to a “new notifications area” in June (and that other requests would be phased out and replaced by updated Share dialogs in July).

Since then, however, Facebook hasn’t made any further product changes. Why?

Some large developers in the ecosystem say that the delays are largely due to the pushback that the proposed changes are getting from developers. Invitations are still an important communication channel for many apps, and especially after the removal of app notifications, further removals of invites (or at least, easy access to invites) at this point would be like throwing salt on the wound.

We asked Facebook about the timeline, which has been adjusted multiple times since it was originally announced last fall. “We are pushing this back a bit and will update the roadmap soon,” a Facebook spokesperson says. So, developers should still expect these changes will be coming down the pipe.

One other important thing to note is that as Facebook has updated its home page since the original announcements, invites/requests have also started to get new real estate in the bookmarks area of the home page (i.e. “Friends (1)”), thus making the old access point (which used to be on the top right of the home page) no longer the only way to access Facebook requests. However, we’re not seeing app requests displayed in the same way here on bookmarks.

We’ll let you know as we get any more word from Facebook on the Platform team’s plans to update the way that app invites work.

Facebook’s performance advertising system has been growing along with the company’s user base. Now, more companies — from established advertising and search marketing firms to first-time entrepreuners — are competing to provide ad optimization services to the growing body of Facebook advertisers.

The latest company to emerge is Nanigans, out of Boston, and founded by serial web entrepreneurs. It claims to have been working with top developers during its private beta period, and now it’s making itself available to the public. It claims to get better results than competitors because it includes a tracking pixel that partners run within apps and web sites, showing whether users who clicked through performed certain actions, like taking a tutorial or buying a virtual good. It is trying to optimize around monetization actions, especially for gaming companies that provide virtual goods on and off Facebook.

Partners can, among other options, choose to run campaigns based on cost per install or cost per action, dividing campaigns across apps. For example, a developer bids $1.00 to run ads that reach a certain subset of users, then decides to put $0.75 of that dollar towards CPI ads in a game, with $0.25 for CPA ads. While many developers pay based on CPI now, the promise of Nanigans’ approach is that companies can better target which ads appear in front of which users. This way, they can fine-tune virtual goods pricing and other aspects of an application to make a profit off of the ads.

The opportunity on Facebook has only been emerging within the last 12 months or so, starting when it launched a private beta of an advertising API last year. The Ads API allows service providers to sell bulk quantities of ads directly to clients, rather than an advertiser having to buy each ad manually within Facebook’s performance ad purchasing interface. Larger advertisers, whether game developers, local business, brands, or anyone else, can put their money to work much more efficiently by buying a variety of campaigns, iterating on text, images, links and other ad information, based on who clicks through and what actions they take.

The model has been proven by Google and other companies that offer performance ad networks; Facebook’s ability to target ads based on detailed social information about users is proven to be even more valuable for some types of advertisers. Watch for the competition in this area to heat up this year. We’ll be looking at Nanigans’ product in more detail as part of our ongoing coverage of Ads API service providers; for more, check out our profile on a rival, Techlightenment’s Alchemy, last week.

Portuguese soccer/football star Cristiano Ronaldo topped this week’s top 20 Facebook Pages, as measured by our PageData tool, which counts the number of fans added to Pages over the course of the week. Along with Ronaldo were plenty of musicians and television shows, a few movies and a couple of big name brands.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Cristiano Ronaldo 5,501,159 +706,747 +14.74 2. Eminem 5,025,018 +632,476 +14.40 3. Michael Jackson 13,658,874 +623,294 +4.78 4. Lady Gaga 9,364,119 +610,233 +6.97 5. Toy Story 1,850,907 +605,149 +48.58 6. Family Guy 9,760,125 +603,141 +6.59 7. House 7,698,594 +502,556 +6.98 8. Vin Diesel 9,201,245 +423,927 +4.83 9. The Twilight Saga 6,816,509 +423,788 +6.63 10. Megan Fox 7,811,613 +410,076 +5.54 11. Starbucks 8,330,042 +386,271 +4.86 12. Disney Pixar 2,168,971 +381,295 +21.33 13. Facebook 10,371,902 +381,042 +3.81 14. Drake 2,679,464 +377,556 +16.40 15. Justin Bieber 5,602,360 +375,282 +7.18 16. Lil Wayne 5,882,988 +341,514 +6.16 17. Metallica 5,000,900 +324,165 +6.93 18. Glee 3,701,682 +311,661 +9.19 19. South Park 6,347,643 +304,871 +5.05 20. Skittles 5,337,394 +303,421 +6.03

Ronaldo was number one, at least on Facebook this week, as the Portuguese soccer team continues to advance in the World Cup in South Africa. He added 706,700 fans to grow the Page’s fan base to 5.5 million.

About a third of the list was taken up by musicians. Eminem, who just released a new album, took the number 2 spot, adding 632,500 fans to surpass 5 million fans. Michael Jackson was third, adding 623,300 fans to reach a total of 13.6 million; the one-year anniversary of his death was recently. Fourth was Lady Gaga, on a North American summer tour, adding 610,200 fans to get up to 9.3 million.

Drake added 377, 600 fans to grow the Page to 2.6 million by promoting his new album this past week to land at number 14. Justin Bieber followed at 15 adding 375,300 fans to reach 5.6 million fans; he’s also promoting a new single and music video. Lil Wayne took the number 16 spot, adding 341,500 fans to surpass 5.8 million fans; a friend is updating the Page for him, promoting his November release date party, the BET music awards, a letter to his fans from prison and other updates. Metallica followed at 17, adding 324,100 fans to pop past 5 million; the band is currently on a world tour.

Movies with youngish audiences were also on the list this week, namely “Toy Story” at number 5 adding 605,100 fans to reach 1.8 million and the studio that produced it, Disney Pixar, at number 12 with 381,300 new fans and 2.1 million total. Also, the eminent premiere of The Twilight Saga’s “Eclipse” this week put the movie at ninth place on our list this week with 423,800 new fans to its 6.8 million base.

A good number of television shows popped onto the list this week. “Family Guy” came in at number 6, adding 603,100 fans to 9.7 million. Seventh was “House” with 502,500 new fans and a total of 7.6 million; the show’s been promoting its “appisodes” for iPhone and the main character, Nurse Jeffrey. At 18 was “Glee,” adding 311,700 fans to 3.7 million and promoting its recent awards nominations and upcoming Comic-Con appearances. “South Park” came in at number 19, adding 304,900 fans to grow the total to 6.3 million.

A sprinkling of celebrities on the list this week, Vin Diesel at number 8 with about 424,000 new fans and a total of 9.2 million, as well as Megan Fox at number 10, who added 410,000 new fans to reach 7.8 million by promoting her new movie, “Jonah Hex.” The rest of the list included a few random Pages. Starbucks came in at number 11, adding 386,300 fans to now count 8.3 million; the company’s been promoting its brand with musician Sarah McLachlan. Facebook’s Page added 381,000 fans to reach 10.3 million this week at number 13. Finally Skittles rounded out the list at 20, adding 303,400 fans to now boast 5.3 million.

Social game developer CrowdStar is cementing its existing status as the lead test partner for Credits, Facebook’s virtual currency. The two companies have signed a deal where the developer will exclusively use Credits as the paid virtual currency in all of its games for the next five years. It has already been using Credits exclusively since this past December, and claims that its average revenue per user (ARPU) has gone up by almost 50% as a result.

CrowdStar has been in a good position to try out Credits, because it gained most of its users last fall; developers that got established earlier have tended to invest more money in their own monetization services. Many are concerned about the cost of Credits, including the 30% fee that Facebook takes out of all purchases of the currency as well as the loss of control and breakage. By starting fresh, CrowdStar has less to lose even as it sees what it can gain.

Facebook is testing many different ways of making Credits valuable to developers, like a broad variety of payment methods, Facebook’s brand, high-quality offers, purchase volume discounts and free advertising. The announcement today is intended to highlight how it is making “liquidity” happen — the more users who have Credits to spend, the more sense it will make for developers to plug in to it, just like businesses gravitate towards broadly available fiat currencies, such as the dollar or Euro.

While CrowdStar could be seeing the benefits of Credits from other factors, like improved interface design, its relationship with Facebook does look beneficial to the company. It’s not just seeing higher revenue, it is seeing new growth — Facebook heavily promoted its Hello City simulation game this past month, for example, and that probably helped it grow quickly to nearly 5 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Other developers are being enticed to make Credits the exclusive paid currency in their games, and we expect more announcements on that front in the future.

A big question remains: How might Facebook require Credits? Whether or not is allows non-Credits payment options, like PayPal or third-party offers, is not clear. Not making Credits the mandatory way to put money into the virtual economy of a game means less liquidity; by having other payment options, developers also don’t have to pay Facebook a 30% cut, and instead pay out far smaller revenue shares directly to payment offer providers. Facebook tells us now, as it has in recent months, that it has not made plans one way or another. Here’s the company’s statement, when we asked for more details on how developers can implement the currency:

Facebook Credits give people an easy to use and trusted way to buy and spend virtual currency inside applications, such as games. We believe Facebook Credits are a great way for application developers to handle transactions within their games and we are testing many different ways for developers to integrate Credits. We have no plans to require developers to use Credits as their exclusive in-game currency. Some developers today are choosing Facebook Credits for transactions within their games, while others are supporting Credits as a way to purchase their own in-game currencies.