This week’s list of fastest-gaining apps on Facebook by daily active users doesn’t contain any big surprises. Most of the significant entries are new games, a category that is having a particularly booming week.

As usual, mobile apps also figure prominently, with Facebook (for iPhone) leading the non-game apps at number two. The only oddity this week is that HTC Sense, which mostly serves Android phone users, has blown past Facebook for BlackBerry with over twice as many new DAU. As we recently noted, Facebook for Android is also a significant app, although Facebook has thus far had a bug in that app’s reporting.

Here’s the AppData list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Hello City	619,495	+321,453	+107.85
2.	Facebook	19,138,717	+273,557	+1.45
3.	Static FBML	4,747,235	+241,322	+5.36
4.	EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars	430,985	+229,086	+113.47
5.	Birthday Cards	791,670	+169,834	+27.31
6.	Baking Life	414,130	+150,693	+57.20
7.	HTC Sense	1,322,860	+131,794	+11.07
8.	Fashion World	192,629	+113,620	+143.81
9.	Millionaire City	168,003	+84,135	+100.32
10.	Lovely Farm	84,118	+76,718	+1,036.73
11.	Zoo Paradise	900,202	+67,749	+8.14
12.	Vampire Wars	459,100	+65,315	+16.59
13.	Bola	665,127	+60,637	+10.03
14.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	10,736,621	+57,644	+0.54
15.	Games	601,892	+56,412	+10.34
16.	Crazy Cow Music Quiz	176,075	+44,996	+34.33
17.	Animal Paradise	759,290	+41,817	+5.83
18.	Happy Aquarium	2,603,572	+39,953	+1.56
19.	Zoo World	1,259,674	+38,318	+3.14
20.	Likeness	144,327	+37,507	+35.11

Hello City, a city building simulation, is the overall leader, with the next closest game being EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars. Both of these games are maintaining a lead they assumed earlier this week; and they’ve probably been joined by Zynga’s FrontierVille, although reporting problems are affecting that app’s stats for now. However, there are several less known titles further down, like Millionaire City and Lovely Farm. For more coverage on those, check out our sister blog, Inside Social Games.

Birthday Cards, at number five, has long been RockYou’s biggest app. However, it’s currently down over 10 million MAU, and almost a million DAU, from its peaks. Over the last week, it has recovered some DAU, although that state of affairs may not last. Zoo World and Likeness, way down at numbers 19 and 20, are two more RockYou apps with similar stories. You can see the general trend in RockYou’s DAU chart, below.

Unfortunately, that about covers it for the non-game apps, unless you don’t count Crazy Cow Music Quiz as a game; as trivia, it’s arguably not in the same category as a farming or town management title. It’s also one of the few apps on Facebook to include a significant amount of popular music, although it escapes licensing requirements by only playing short clips.

Performance advertising, and the offer walls that are familiar pitstops for many social game users, have been central to the discussion on monetization of social platforms since last fall. When criticism of low-quality and less-than-transparent offers came to light in that season’s offers controversy, developers, payments providers and observers wondered if the offers concept could regain not only its public image but also its monetization potential under new policy restrictions.

This spring, Inside Network held a sold-out summit on the growth and monetization of apps and games on social platforms. Inside Social Apps 2010 presented speakers representing many of the leading companies in the social gaming industry, including veterans from payments and monetization.

Alex Rampell, CEO and co-founder of TrialPay, shared his thoughts in a panel discussion looking at performance advertising within social apps after the offers controversy and Facebook’s advertising policy changes. Others speakers on this panel included George Garrick (CEO, Offerpal Media), Adam Caplan (VP Virtual Currency, Adknowledge), Lisa Marino (CRO, RockYou), Jim Bobowski, (Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix), and Jay Weintraub (Founder, LeadsCon)

A clip of the highlights from this presentation:

Alex Rampell also spoke with us in an exclusive interview backstage about where he thinks offers will go next, and how brand advertisers and monetization companies will need to work together to optimize the performance advertising of tomorrow.

Rampell’s full interview covers:

* How online advertisers can profit from social game users’ transactional intent
* What lessons publishers and monetization companies can learn from offline complementary goods and services
* Why he thinks both advertisers and users shouldn’t write off offers yet

The full interview is available through Inside Facebook Gold.

Users are seeing more faces than ever in their feeds as Facebook complements more stories with multiple profile picture thumbnails. Friendship confirmation stories now display thumbnails of your friend’s new friends, and rows of thumbnails (we’ve seen as many as 17 at once) accompany profile pic change feed items. While currently contained to rather benign stories, the potential inclusion of the thumbnails in other stories raises the question: has Facebook developed a new form of peer pressure?

Long considered an element of good web design, thumbnails are more vivid than text. But unlike symbolizing a blog post or navigation button with an illustration, profile pic thumbnails allow websites to align content with identities. Profile picture thumbnails don’t just represent, they endorse. Including more of them in the news feed could help inspire group behavior, leading users to perform an action because it seems like everyone else is. Adding rows of convincing faces to other stories could be a compelling way to motivate users toward more serious actions like RSVPing for events or Liking Pages.

Liking other people’s comments — it’s a feature that people have been asking for since back when FriendFeed came out with the “Like” button, years ago. Now it’s finally going to happen, on Facebook.

In a post today, company engineer Tom Whitnah says that it is rolling the product out gradually, so many users won’t see it yet.

Whitnah writes, “Similar to liking other content, when you click “Like” on a comment the commenter will receive a notification. Other people who can see the comment based on its privacy setting also will be able to see who has liked the comment.”

This is a commonly requested feature that we expect users will adopt pretty quickly.

Did May’s very public backlash against Facebook’s April privacy changes and product launches actually affect traffic? The web measurement results are coming in now. ComScore was the first web measurement firm to weigh in, and it showed that Facebook gained 8.6 million monthly unique visitors to reach around 130 million.

Two other firms, Nielsen and Compete, have now released their own data for the month, and they both show slower Facebook May growth than Comscore. Triangulated, however, they and comScore show three contradictory trends. Here’s the data; note that we’ll do a full look later this month, once the fourth firm we track, Quantcast, makes its May data available.

Nielsen shows Facebook growing by 2.91 million, from 122.3 million uniques in April to 125.2 million, in the US. This is slower than the 5 million that Nielsen showed Facebook gaining in April, but around the same as what it gained in February, and much more than the 2 million it lost in March. In this context, May’s traffic was pretty good for Facebook.

ComScore, meanwhile, shows a dip in February but a solid rise starting in March, as we recently covered.

Compete‘s data for May adds a new twist. It has Facebook gaining 2.1 million users, from 121.7 million uniques in April to 123.8 last month — from there, the similarities with Nielsen’s data end. It shows Facebook’s traffic rising and falling during 2010, starting with 121.2 million in January, and this is not what the other firms show.

But that’s not the only twist – Compete seems to have chopped off 10 million or so users that it had previously counted for Facebook. As of April, for example, it showed 135 million uniques, and in March it showed 132 million.

Ignoring methodology-based differences between these firms, the trend is that May was a good but not exceptional growth month for Facebook.

Context Optional acquired unwrap inc., maker of Facebook application platform Buzzeo, today in an effort to continue the development of its Page management offerings.

The Palo Alto-based Buzzeo created a service for creating, managing and launching a variety of Facebook applications, primarily for e-commerce but also polls, product listings and others. The two companies noted in separate press releases that Buzzeo and Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite are a “natural compliment” to each other.

Unwrap inc. cofounders Waynn Lue and Joshua Reeves will join Context Optional as leaders in product development, marketing and engineering and Reeves tells us the two have already begun several projects. Previously, Buzzeo has been used by Ben & Jerry’s and Gold’s Gym on Facebook. Apps built by the company have generated more than 41 million installations by Facebook users to date. Buzzeo’s web site noted that new “features and frameworks” are set to be introduced in the coming weeks.

Reeves says negotiations with Context Optional had been taking place since February, but finalized this deal recently after entertaining various offers. Unwrap inc.’s primary focus has providing been small businesses easy social media management capability, Reeves tells us; he and his partner felt Context Optional was the best place to apply what Buzzeo had created to serve its customers.

This acquisition is one more step on a path that Context Optional has been traveling since 2006. We also recently spoke to Context Optional chief executive Kevin Barenblat about his plans for the company — this article is the first in a series we’ll be running on Facebook Page management companies.

Context Optional was one of the first Page management companies to develop around Facebook, consequently he tells us the company has been better able to turn lessons into innovations.

“Big change was driven by the launch of Facebook’s platform,” Barenblat says. “It was a huge shift in how easy it was to share, and so compared to the work we were doing on other platforms like MySpace, Facebook was just much more compelling.”

Most recently, Facebook’s Open Graph social plugins opened up new ways for Context Optional to help brands better interact with their customers by adding social context to its web site.

“It’s no longer enough to consider messaging to ‘fans’ of a brand; you now need tools to tune your message for specific objects that are liked,” Barenblat explains.

Highlights about Context Optional:

• Its first application for a Facebook brand Page, Open Table, launched in 2007; the company has since launched more than 50 and the unwrap inc.’s acquisition is sure to add greatly to this figure.
• Its first Facebook game, Electronic Arts’ Smarty Pants, was released in 2007.
• The company manages applications for tens of millions of Facebook users, 12 million alone for its Travel Channel Kidnap app, 3 million of which are monthly users.
• Clients include numerous Fortune 500 companies, from Bank of America to Ford to McDonald’s to Microsoft and Target, across multiple platforms, not only Facebook but also on MySpace and the iPhone.
• Chase Community Giving was another milestone, as it was one of the biggest crowd-sourced philanthropy efforts ever.
• Context Optional launched its Social Marketing Suite in February, allowing brands to mange, build and moderate their own Pages. The suite gives brands more control to target certain geographic groups, do-it-yourself quizzes/polls/contests or tracking fan comments.
• The addition of Buzzeo to Context Optional allows the company to continue to focus on innovating Page management and adds an element of app expertise to the mix.

Facebook’s plugins are creating more ways for marketers to reach the service’s users. Barenblat says the Like button holds the most promise because it’s set to become the most widely adopted plugin. Furthermore he tells us that the current set of three plugins are “the tip of the iceberg” as far as Facebook’s reach into the wider web and “their true potential will be revealed when developers can author customizable plugins.”

Looking to the future Barenblat tells us Context Optional has “a pretty aggressive product roadmap that will offer more and more functionality to brands who are looking to leverage Facebook for marketing and engagement.”

You can read more about Context Optional’s past marketing efforts in our Best & Worst Facebook Marketing report.

[Context Optional logo, Barenblat photo and suite images via Context Optional]

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

We recently conducted an independent survey of Facebook users assessing their attitudes toward ads on the site. We’re sharing an early preview of the results here.

First, a few demographic notes on our respondents. 73.9% of respondents said they use Facebook multiple times a day, and so make up part of the most active segment of the site’s userbase. 53.7% of our respondents were male, and 46.3% were female. 87.8% were between the ages of 13-25 and while 12.2% were over 25.

What do you think of Facebook ads?

Most people are hesitant to proclaim their love of advertising, but what’s notable here is that over half of all respondents are ok with ads on Facebook. 53.5% responded that they felt “neutral” and “didn’t mind” the ads they saw while visiting the site.

What type of ads do you like least?

Nonetheless, note that 40.3% of respondents did answer that they ‘disliked’ ads on Facebook. A subsequent question asked them which ad type they liked least. User-reported results indicate that ads for destinations within Facebook are preferred to ads where a click takes the user elsewhere. 62.7% of surveyed users said that ads to visit other websites, outside of Facebook, were their least favored ad type.

What type of advertised products do you like least?

For this survey, we distinguished between the type of ads and the types of products they promote. We grouped advertised products into five categories: games, movies or tv shows, foods or beverages, dating sites and education programs or job sites. Of these categories, dating sites were least popular. 46% of respondents answered that dating sites were their least favorite type of advertised product. Next were education programs and jobs, followed in a distant third place by games. Movies, tv shows, foods and beverages were rated as the least offensive product types.

Survey results also addressed these follow-up questions:

What type of ads do you like best?
What type of advertised products do you like best?
What type of ads do you click on most?
How often do you click on an ad because your friend liked it?
What improvements would make you like ads more?

While you can’t necessarily change the product you’re advertising, there are some ways to improve how users perceive your ads.

For example, users indicated preference for some ad types over others, so it may be possible to adjust the ad type you’re using for a better outcome. Our full survey results show some promising takeaways on users’ most preferred ad types and advertised product types.

Keep in mind that these are user-reported responses, and so reflect users’ self-perceived attitudes toward ads, not necessarily their actions. However, these qualitative results can serve as a useful overlay to the ad performance data available through the Facebook Insights dashboard.

The full results of this survey, as well as extensive demographic data for Facebook’s audiences around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please see gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook

Back at f8, Facebook announced the new Graph APIs, a new set of APIs designed to provide simpler ways for Facebook Platform developers to interact with Facebook data compared to the old REST APIs.

While many developers have started testing code using the Graph API, some are reporting significant slowness with the new APIs when used with Facebook’s latest PHP SDK.

In particular, one of the largest developers on the Platform showed us unit tests that produce the following results:

• Old API, basic FQL query: ~0.1 second response time
• Graph API: ~2 second response time
• Graph API, same FQL query: ~7 second response time

We’re sure Facebook is working to improve response times – a Facebook spokesperson says they will have updates on this soon. But as a result, this developer is unable to start moving onto the new Graph API in testing environments, much less in production, for now.

It should be noted that this test was specifically run via Facebook’s PHP SDK. We’ll let you know as we hear from more developers moving code onto the new APIs.

Update: “We’ve seen some issues with less frequently used features, however we are continuously working on improving performance for all of our API methods,” a Facebook spokesperson says.

Facebook users can now record voice messages and post them on the walls of friends through Voice Wall, a newly released service from Society.me. Users call a designated phone number, select a friend using a touch-tone system, and their voice message appears in a streaming audio player on the friend’s wall. Voice Wall equips Facebook with an intimate communication medium that could prove especially useful to mobile users without a smart phone or data plan.

Voice Wall offers functionality in exchange for a user’s mobile phone number, email address, and constant account access privileges through the Facebook Platform. One shortcoming of the service is that the wall posts contain bland, uninviting auto-populated text which users can’t alter.

Links on the wall posts feed back to Society.me’s core product, a question and answer site focused on quickly returning a large volume answers, sometimes at the sake of quality. They also provide a service called fb140, which lets you to quickly find and follow any of your Facebook friends who have Twitter accounts.

Voice Wall’s streamlined interface offers a warm, familiar way to interact with friends in addition to Facebook’s native text, photo, and video. It could facilitate sending very personal birthday messages, or allow users to recount a story with their own vocal inflection. It joins Facebook Text Messages and 0.facebook.com as a way for mobile users without reliable internet capabilities to interact with the site. While productivity-focused YouMail allows users to save, forward to email or post existing voicemail to their own wall, its complex web interface and lack of sharing options make Voice Wall more versatile when it comes to Facebook.

If 2009 is remembered as the year that casual gaming stormed social platforms, 2010 is quickly becoming the year that the industry started to mature. Facebook is getting more involved in the monetization ecosystem, last year’s hit games are fighting for their lives, and new developers and games are climbing the leaderboards. At the same time, the M&A ecosystem is alive and well, as larger players are consolidating smaller studios and teams, and large media companies and traditional game developers continue to plot their social gaming strategies.

Get the Annual Membership Get Annual Membership (Includes Report + 3 Additional Quarterly Issues): $2,495 $1,995 USD* OR Buy Single Report: $995 $695 USD* * Pre-order discount ends June 21, 2010. All pre-ordered reports will be delivered on June 21, 2010.

That’s why we’re excited to announce a new original study in our Inside Virtual Goods series that is exclusively focused on spending and usage patterns in the social gaming market, entitled Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience. It will be released in one week on Tuesday, June 22, but is available for discount pre-order now.

Most of the studies on player spending and usage patterns in social games over the last year have actually been conducted by industry vendors. Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience is our exclusive independent look at the virtual goods spending and behavior patterns of social game players on Facebook — data you won’t find anywhere else.

About the Report

Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience gives you an inside view of the market at this critical juncture in the intersection of social networking and online games.

We have surveyed nearly 2,000 players of social games on Facebook from around the world and across the demographic spectrum. Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience is the most in-depth independent survey of player behavior and spending patterns in the social gaming market.

What We Cover

1. Spending Habits and Payment Methods in Top Games – It’s easy to compare games based on audience numbers, but which games monetize better? What payment methods do players use most often in top games? We investigate how spending patterns compare across top social games.
2. Frequency of Play and Methods of Game Discovery - As Facebook cuts down on developer access to viral channels, designing an engaging and viral game is becoming both increasingly important and challenging. We investigate which games people play most frequently, and which methods of social game discovery are most effective for top games.
3. Demographic Differences by Region, Age, and Gender – While the social gaming market is becoming increasingly global, the audience is also becoming increasingly diverse by age and gender. How do different segments of the audience differ in terms of spending and usage patterns inside social games? We take an in depth look.
4. Brand Recall for Social Games – How important are brands, and how well can users identify developers of top games? We investigate brand recall amongst social game players.

See the full table of contents below:

Table of Contents

I. Methodology and Respondents

1. Introduction

• About Inside Virtual Goods
• About the Authors
• Survey Objectives

2. Research Methodology

• Target Population
• Respondent Acquisition Method
• Survey Structure
• Potential for Bias

3. Survey Respondents

• Description of Total Respondent Population
• Total Number of Respondents
• Overall Breakdown

II. Overall Results

4. Favorite Game

• Distribution of Favorite Game
• Frequency of Play
• Favorite Game Discovery
• With Whom Do You Play?
• Spending on Favorite Game

5. Payments

• Frequency of Payment Methods

6. Play Patterns, Spending, and Brand Recall for Top Games

• Frequency of Play in Top Games
• Spending in Top Games
• Aided Brand Recall for Top Games

III. Demographic Differences in Usage Patterns and Monetization

7. Regional Differences

• Game Discovery and Spending
• Favorite Game
• Payment Types

8. Age and Gender Differences

• Who are the Social Gaming “Whales”?
• Spend Across Games

Index of Charts and Graphs

• 4.1 Distribution of Favorite Game
• 4.2 Frequency of Play of Favorite Game
• 4.3 Method of Discovery of Favorite Game
• 4.4 Who Players Play With
• 4.5 Monthly Spending on Favorite Game
• 5.1 Frequency of Payment Methods
• 6.1 Frequency of Play in Top Games
• 6.2 Spending in Top Games
• 6.3 Aided Brand Recall Rates for Top Games
• 7.1 Method of Discovery of Favorite Game By Region
• 7.2 Who Players Play With By Region
• 7.3 Monthly Spending on Favorite Game By Region
• 7.4 Favorite Game By Region
• 7.5 Most Popular Payment Types By Region
• 7.6 Frequency of Offer Use By Region
• 7.7 Frequency of PayPal Use By Region
• 7.8 Frequency of Credit Card Use By Region
• 7.9 Frequency of Mobile Phone Use By Region
• 8.1 Top Spenders By Gender
• 8.2 Top Spenders By Region
• 8.3 Number of Games on Which a Player Spends More Than $25
• 8.4 Frequency of Top Spending By Game and By Gender
• 8.5 Proportion of Top Spenders Who Report Spending on a Given Game

Appendix

• Survey Questions

More Data, More Actionable Insights

In 2009, social games began to show what kind of value can be created on top of social networks. 2010 will be an even more important year.

Social gaming, powered by virtual goods, is this year’s industry to watch. If you’re involved, or are considering jumping in, Inside Virtual Goods will be one of your most important tools.

One year of original data and exclusive in-depth reports delivered on a quarterly basis is $2,495 and contains:

• A detailed overview of the current state of the industry
• Specific estimates on market size by segment
• Diagnosis of key opportunities and issues by segment

Get The Annual Membership

Get Annual Membership (Includes Report + 3 Additional Quarterly Issues): $2,495 $1,995 USD*

OR Buy Single Report: $995 $695 USD*

* Pre-order discount ends June 21, 2010. All pre-ordered reports will be delivered on June 22, 2010.

Although the report will not be released until next Tuesday, June 22, we are offering a special pre-order discount for those who purchase now. A one year subscription is $1,995 until June 22, at which point the price will go to US $2,495. The one year subscription includes three quarterly updates on key developments in the space, including future editions of our annual reports, Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009-2010 and Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010.

Or, you can download just this report. The pre-order price is $695 until June 22, at which point the price will go to US $995.