Facebook made a change to the way that it counts active users for applications starting last Friday. Now, likes and comments on stream content published by the app are no longer counted. The results of the change are already very visible for many apps on AppData, but Facebook says the calculations are still in progress, so the numbers for all apps may not yet be updated.

This change affects all apps, Facebook says, but active user counts for mobile apps will be most significantly affected, because many of them generate user content that gets a lot of likes and comments. This explains some of the wild swings we’ve seen in the active user counts lately for Facebook’s own mobile apps as well, like Facebook for iPhone.

Conceptually, we think this change to the way Facebook calculates active users for applications makes a lot of sense. People who like or comment on stream content published by an app shouldn’t be counted as active users like canvas page viewers are.

Editor’s note: The following data is an excerpt from Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service covering Facebook’s platform and advertising ecosystem.

Nevermind China’s country-wide block on Facebook; the Chinese language is still the ninth-largest language on Facebook, thanks to Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Chinese is growing at a steady pace, and it’s beginning to draw the attention of some of Facebook’s biggest players.

Zynga is a case in point. Two weeks ago, the top social gaming company published a Chinese-language version of Zynga Poker, one of its flagship apps.

But rather than trying to reach China with the new game, where Zynga Beijing helped localize the app, the company settled for a release to Facebook’s 11.5 million Chinese-language users.

There were likely several motivations behind Zynga’s Facebook launch. The first is that China is not an easy market to push into, for a foreign company. The Chinese government requires that outside entrants be partially owned by a Chinese company — a hurdle that Zynga may not want to cross until it’s sure the project is worthwhile.

Luckily, Facebook can provide a great litmus test for entering the mainland. Hong Kong is an administrative region of China, while independent Taiwan is still culturally close (and often claimed by China as a province).

On Facebook, Zynga Poker will be competing for this cuturally Chinese audience, with actual Chinese game developers like Elex and Boyaa, which has its own successful poker game. The results should tell it how it might do in China.

There are other reasons to enter Facebook’s Chinese-language market beyond just testing for China itself, though.

The second is that the Chinese-language user group will likely contain more social game players, proportionately, than a similarly-sized group of English or Spanish speakers. Among the 11.5 million Chinese-language users, a large majority are visiting Facebook just to play games, judging both from what we’ve heard and seen in user behavior.

Additionally, these are users who not only play games, but spend freely on virtual goods within their games experience (as a side note, the virtual goods industry is estimated to surpass $5 billion this year). So, the East Asian user base is not only growing but also valuable. Here’s a rough estimate of how the Chinese-language market could continue to grow into next year:

The total population of Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan is around 35 million users, so there will obviously be some upper boundaries to growth; however, localizing existing games looks like a winning proposition from here.

As for the users themselves, our look at the performance of three apps in Taiwan earlier this month shows that there are more differences.

For instance, the average age of users playing the largest three games is around 27. In the United States or another Western country, the average age for a give group of apps would likely be a decade higher.

These youthful users, who have a strong propensity to put their disposable income into online activities, may also be cheaper to acquire than their counterparts in Western markets.

Here’s a look at cost-per-click ad rates across the three big Chinese-language markets:

For developers that do want to move their apps over, a Beijing office isn’t necessarily vital; some publishers in the region are offering localization services to Western developers, including Hong Kong-based 6waves, which we interviewed on the subject in July.

The full Facebook Global Language Report is available through a membership to Inside Facebook Gold, which also includes monthly data on total global audience growth and demographics. To learn more or join, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Today Facebook won a patent filed in 2004 for a search engine which ranks results or online ads based on the frequency of clicks by those connected to a user on a social network. Results would be accompanied by an image or text denoting how many people connected to the user clicked that link, similar to Facebook’s Like button/counter. The patent could, in theory, be used to create a search engine based on the clicks of one’s friends and friends of friends, or stifle a similar product of Google’s forthcoming social network Google Me.

The patent, filed for Facebook, Inc. on October 18th, 2004 lists Christopher Lunt, Nicholas Galbreath, and Jeffrey Winner as inventors.

It says a connection can be between “registered users who are related within two or more degrees of separation to the registered user within the online social network”. This leaves the degrees of separation up to Facebook, meaning results could be based on clicks by your friends, friends of friends, or every registered Facebook user. Searching for humorous content with results ranked by what your friends clicked could produce a more valuable experience than rankings based on clicks from across the web.

However, the patent doesn’t specify if results can be based on shared user characteristics, or connections to non-users, such as Pages. Facebook might not be able to use this patent to create a ranking system based on clicks of those within your network, country, or age group; or based on clicks by those who share a connection to an interest Page. If you were searching for political news, the power to see results ranked by clicks of those connected to the same political party could be useful, but it is not covered by this patent.

Facebook might not put the patent into use on its own products, though, as the site makes money from allowing Microsoft’s Bing to power its internal search. Instead, they might use the patent defensively. Social search could be a big part of Google Me’s differentiation from Facebook, but this patent could — again, in theory — restrict such features. Facebook owns or has applied for dozens of patents at this point, but it has not gone on the offense against rivals to date.

Facebook Page tab applications marketplace Appbistro today launched its Verified Developer Program, a distinction it awards to developers offering high quality, reliable apps and strong customer support.

Chosen developer will gain the advantage of having their apps display Appbistro’s Verified Developer badge and appear at the top of search results and app category indexes on the Appbistro marketplace.

The program acts as a third-party version of Facebook’s Preferred Developer Consultant Program, except that it is specifically for Page tab app developers and Appbistro earns a 30% affiliate fee on the sale of any app in its marketplace, verified or otherwise.

Currently upon submission to Appbistro, Page tab apps are given a one to five-star rating based on virality, content management, administrative experience, user experience, and scalability. The Verified Developer distinction is awarded independently of this rating. The launch partners, who will be the first to display the Verified Developer award, are Facebook e-commerce and storefront provider Payvment, job posting tab maker Work For Us, and welcome tab builder Pagemodo. They were chosen for having valuable apps, good customer support, and a high monthly active user count.

Director of Business Development Rhett Stonelake says Appbistro is now accepting inquiries regarding inclusion in the program, but that developers new to the marketplace will undergo a 30 to 40 day trial period to vet their long term customer support before being considered.

When a developer is admitted, all of their apps will receive the distinction and the associated advantages. A self-written blurb about the developer is also added to their app profiles. There is no specific cap on how many developers can be admitted, and developers will be warned if the quality or support of their apps drops such that they are in danger of being expelled.

Appbistro says they’re aiming to solve the Page tab app discoverability problem. Since some apps with high utility don’t have inherent virality, it can be hard for admins to find them, especially since Facebook removed links to the Application Directory. The Verified Developer Program does not discriminate based on size, making it accessible to small companies or even app hobbyists as long as they meet the requirements. While the launch of the program may also be designed to bring press and traffic to AppBistro, it does provide a distribution channel for any Page tab app developer which is committed to quality.

Today Palm released the latest version of its Facebook mobile app, Facebook for Palm webOS 1.3. The official release includes many features and improvements tested on its Facebook for Palm webOS beta clients, including landscape mode, revised photo tagging, selectable news feeds, and in-feed comments. Reviews of the app complement its speed but complain about the lack of Facebook Chat and Places.

Unlike some other Facebook mobile apps which only distribute official releases, Palm lets users download beta versions of Facebook for Palm webOS between official updates. This allows the company to experiment and gather feedback on new functionalities, ensuring official releases are stable and full of improvements. For instance, the ability to toggle on or off the display of comments in the news feed was tested in Facebook for Palm webOS Beta 1.2.30 before being included in today’s release.

Specific improvements to the release include:

1. Landscape viewing mode when the phone is tilted to the side
2. Photo tagging using suggested match once you start typing a name
3. Selectable news feeds including status updates, photos, links, networks, and friend lists
4. Fan page navigation
5. Simultaneous clearing of multiple notifications

Reviews of Facebook for Palm webOS 1.3 have generally been favorable, commending the speed and stability of the features now included. Criticism has focused on the lack of certain features long existing or recently added to other Facebook mobile apps. Like those with Blackberry and Android phones, Palm users still don’t have the Places functionality included on the iPhone. Palm’s Facebook Page and forums also included requests for Chat, the ability accept friend requests, and content deletion capabilities.

Palm is listening, though. Justin Reid, one of the application’s developers, has been personally responding to reviews of the app, pointing customers with issues towards support solutions. With this level of attention and the beta release system, we expect that Facebook for Palm webOS will continue to improve.

Retailer Urban Outfitters has made the Facebook Like button central to the way the company is marketing its products online. Visitors to the Urban Outfitters web site are now greeting by a large thumbs up asking them to “See our most Liked items.”

The company had installed the Like button by its products on the company web site and this new feature is essentially a grouping of the most Liked items into one place. These items — which include men’s and women’s clothing, as well as home items — are then grouped into a special section promoted on their web site.

So far more than 313,000 Like Urban Outfitters on Facebook, where the company does promote its company web site. Exclusive offers for Facebook fans are also offered and the company shares new merchandise with photos often with fans as well.

As previously mentioned, the fact that Urban Outfitters is using Facebook’s marketing tools to market its own products is inventive. It assumes that people visiting the company web site will still consider Facebook Likes as social recommendations when they’re shopping online. So the Like button is being used as a way to market products in its own right, instead of simply spreading the word about them.

For more about innovative uses of Facebook’s social plugins check out our premium service, Inside Facebook Gold.

Facebook launched an official company-run Page for universities and university-related entities Monday. The Page currently includes some shopping bargains relevant to school and also tips for how different campus organizations can use Facebook, like the recommendation that student newspapers add the Like button to their web sites.

The Universities Page is similar to other company-run reference Pages Facebook has created this year, including: Comedy Page, Congress Page, U.S. Politics Page and a Media Page. So far the Universities Page is nearing 3,000 Likes.

As part of the Page’s launch Facebook teamed up with several retailers to offer back-to-school specials on school supplies. Context Optional designed the Deals tab which includes offers such as Eddie Bauer discounts on clothing and backpacks and Newegg.com’s laptop deals.

Other info on the Page includes several separate tabs meant to help college organizations take full advantage of Facebook’s platform by providing a tip sheet. The Press tab offers tips for college newspapers, a Community tab for dorms or clubs, a Student Government Tab and a Sports tab with different suggestions on how to use Facebook for promotion. Some of the tips include cross-promoting content, spreading awareness, creating discussions, selling merchandise and promoting events.

It’s interesting to see Facebook take on the university scene, as several other companies have been trying to fill that void for some time. We’ve written about Inigral’s attempt to build a closed version of Facebook and CampusBuddy’s application adding onto Facebook with its most recent partnership with Cramster. Both companies have been attempting to help universities shine on Facebook, as currently higher education is one of the sectors that hasn’t had smashing success on the Facebook platform — aside from Facebook’s roots as a massive success with college students, of course.

Using data gathered from our PageData tool, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page each day, we can determine that music was very popular on Facebook during the past week.

More than half of the list, 11 to be exact, were music Pages, then there were some TV shows, a few brands, the Modern Warfare 2 video game Page, Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo and Megan Fox. It took between 732,900 down to 197,700 new fans in order to make the list.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Fans Gain Gain, % 1. Modern Warfare 2 1,998,909 +732,893 +57.89 2. Eminem 12,019,779 +413,705 +3.56 3. Justin Bieber 10,445,045 +331,546 +3.28 4. Lady Gaga 16,720,364 +328,546 +2.00 5. Facebook 17,414,796 +322,758 +1.89 6. Shakira 7,627,713 +276,250 +3.76 7. YouTube 12,074,847 +269,302 +2.28 8. South Park 11,723,393 +268,929 +2.35 9. Family Guy 16,228,502 +260,178 +1.63 10. The Simpsons 6,286,048 +256,176 +4.25 11. Linkin Park 11,318,818 +254,809 +2.30 12. Katy Perry 7,508,500 +253,647 +3.50 13. Lil Wayne 10,731,968 +253,510 +2.42 14. Cristiano Ronaldo 10,864,833 +242,894 +2.29 15. David Guetta 7,838,282 +238,000 +3.13 16. Rihanna 8,073,872 +232,794 +2.97 17. Megan Fox 12,546,602 +209,096 +1.69 18. Taylor Swift 9,545,600 +204,113 +2.19 19. Bob Marley 9,617,698 +201,870 +2.14 20. Kohl’s 2,438,265 +197,687 +8.82

As previously mentioned, Modern Warfare 2 was at the top of the list this week, but most of its 732,900 Likes were added in two huge jumps last Tuesday and Wednesday in spurts of 209,300 and 515,200, respectively. The Page hasn’t had activity since July and has just under 2 million total Likes.

Eminem kicked off the music portion of the list, coming in second place, adding 413,700 Likes during the past week, mostly probably because his single “Love the Way You Lie” is still popular and it was announced he’d be performing at the MTV Video Music Awards. His Page has a total of 12 million Likes now. Justin Bieber came in third, adding 331,500 Likes to grow his Page to 10.4 million; the singer has been touring and promoting his music in various ways.

Facebook queen Lady Gaga added 328,500 fans to her 16.7 million cache this week in fourth place. She’s been hawking merchandise on her Page, updating with personal information and photos. Another songstress, Shakira, was in sixth place, adding 276,250 Likes to grow the Page to 7.6 million Likes; she posted some tour dates and performance videos. At number 11 was Linkin Park, which has a really interesting integration highlighting both the audio and music video of the first single off their soon-to-be-released album that seeks social interaction. The band added 254,800 Likes and has grown to 11.3 million.

Katy Perry took twelfth place this week; she’s been promoting her new album/singles and has been appearing on television shows performing. She added 253,700 Likes to her 7.5 million base this week. Lil Wayne followed at 13, adding 253,500 Likes to grow his Page to 10.7 million. Although he’s still in prison he gained media attention for writing a letter to Sports Illustrated about his tennis predictions this week and promoted his music to his Wall this week.

DJ David Guetta was on the list at number 15, adding 238,000 Likes to his 7.8 million-strong Page; he’s been promoting his merchandise and articles about himself. At 16 was Rihanna, who added 232,800 Likes to her Page to pass 8 million, even though there wasn’t any activity on the Page since last week. She’s touring. Taylor Swift came in at 18, adding 204,100 Likes to get to 9.5 million; she’s been on TV promoting her new single and accompanying music video. Then there was Bob Marley’s Page, which is growing steadily adding 201,900 Likes to grow to 9.6 million this week. Because Marley is dead, most of the content is about his children (who are also musicians) or content generated by fans; his Page seems to be going the Michael Jackson route, where it grows due to the singer’s extreme popularity, rather than activity on Facebook.

In non-music related news, Facebook’s Page came in fifth place, adding 322,800 Likes to reach 17.4 million. YouTube was at number 7, adding 269,300 Likes to pass 12 million. Then Kohl’s department store came in 20, adding 197,700 Likes to grow to 2.4 million; the company is giving away half a million dollars to schools in a Facebook-promoted contest.

Television shows on the list this week included “South Park” at number 8, which added 269,000 Likes to reach 11.7 million. “Family Guy” followed in ninth place, adding 260,200 Likes to grow to 16.2 million. And, finally, “The Simpsons” were in tenth place, adding 256,200 Likes to a total of 6.2 million doing mostly promotion for the show’s fall premiere.

Super stars were on the list, too. Portuguese football player Cristiano Ronaldo was in fourteenth place, adding 242,900 Likes to get to 10.8 million total by mostly just updating fans about his current playing schedule. Finally, Megan Fox took the number 17 slot this week, adding 209,000 Likes, totaling 12.5 million, and not really updating her Page at all.

After having launched integrations with Twitter and other sites, MySpace has launched a new form of Facebook integration today. Now, it’s easy for MySpace users to syndicate their status updates on Facebook as well. The UI is available to users in a drop-down on MySpace’s status publisher, beneath the Twitter syndication feature that MySpace introduced last year.

As part of this, MySpace is also asking users for extended permissions for publishing to their walls — but is is also asking for access to their Photos and Videos on Facebook, and their Facebook data when they’re not using the application. In other words, MySpace is asking for permission to access lots of valuable social data from Facebook, but we don’t yet know how it might use that data in its products.

We should note that Facebook and MySpace have been talking about some sort of deal since last fall, as we and others were hearing. Then-chief executive Owen Van Natta told The Telegraph that MySpace saw value in Facebook for its content plans. “We are in talks with Facebook, and other sites, about how we could partner with them. Partnerships are going to be a big part of our strategy moving forward as a lot of value can be derived from them. Facebook is about core communications with your friendship network, whereas MySpace is about congregating around popular content with people who share your interests.”

The MySpace blog post on the matters has that same theme today: “Sync with Facebook allows users to keep their friends on Facebook up to date on everything, including: sharing songs, latest photos, fun game apps, and more.” Perhaps MySpace will attract some avid Facebook social gamers through news feed updates?

The integration could bring new usage scenarios to MySpace, but also reinforces the need for MySpace to provide a differentiated social service in order to lure users away. Van Natta is now at Zynga, the leading social gaming developer on Facebook and MySpace’s platforms; Mike Jones is now CEO at MySpace, apparently pushing the current integration forward – and MySpace still has considerable traffic.

Facebook Connect allows websites to know a lot about their users. However, sorting through this data and customizing a site to best fit each user can be difficult and a drain on engineering and design resources. Former gaming network Frosmo wants to help companies simplify this process and increase their revenues through their new product: Social Optimizer.

Frosmo’s CEO Mikael Gummerus founded the company in 2009 as a game network which could be integrated into portals like Yahoo! and China’s RenRen. Frosmo sold users virtual currency they could use to participate in tournaments, and its Facebook application FrosmoWorld peaked at approximately 750,000 monthly active users. But the company believed that the same customization of social games thanks to plentiful user data would happen to all websites.

To facilitate this shift to socialization, Frosmo built Social Optimizer. Clients can use it to analyze over 100 benchmarks simultaneously to quickly create real-time change to their site — without the need to burden IT departments or developers. Once installed on a site, Frosmo collects user identity, network, and behavior data from Facebook Connect. This data populates an analytics tool which helps companies segment their users and send them customized product offers, discounts, and messages through pop-ups overlaid on the client’s website. For example, Social Optimizer can help clients target users who’ve viewed a certain product page multiple times and send them a 20% discount offer to secure the sale.

Frosmo now has 30 employees between their Helsinki and China offices, with about 70% working on Social Optimizer. It is privately funded, and has raised $3.8 million from angel investors and a grant from the Finnish government. Clients come from media, sports, business-to-business service providers and include Yahoo!, MTV Media, APE Payment, and Asian social game developer 6waves. Frosmo costs a few hundred dollars per month depending on traffic, though a stripped-down version is available for free.

Frosmo Social Optimizer – Track, Target, Customize

After a client installs Frosmo and gives it some time to collect data, they can log in to the browser-based Frosmo Dashboard. There they can integrate Google Analytics data, view custom sales funnels, bring in data from their own APIs, and access Frosmo’s social analytics and Revenue Optimizer.

Frosmo’s analytics lets clients see graphs denoting which users viewed, published, or clicked a piece of content. By viewing these actions on a single graph, clients can tell whether they need to bring in more traffic as a whole, make sharing easier, or display more enticing and clickable content. The analytics system isn’t as sophisticated as some, but having a native analytics tools prevents clients from having the export to Excel to get a high level understanding of their data.

The core of Frosmo’s product is the Revenue Optimizer. Clients can use it to see how their revenue is dependent on different user attributes. Frosmo automatically calculates statistical significance, showing variables that strongly influence revenue in green and variables with no discernible impact in red. This powerful feature lets clients quickly hone in on which attributes to use to segment their user base. For example, if the language variable is shown in red, a client knows that language of the user doesn’t influence revenue, and language shouldn’t be used to create segments.

Revenue Optimizer’s graphs show how revenue and conversions fluctuate depending on a selected variable. A graph could show that while young adults have the highest conversion rates, revenue from this segment is low. Meanwhile, it could show that middle-aged adults convert less often but spend a lot when they do, leading to high revenue from this segment. From this graph, the client knows that getting middle-aged adults to convert is crucial to revenue, whereas it might be better to encourage young adults to share instead of buy to generate higher margin leads.

Clients can then use the User Messages tab of the Revenue Optimizer to send different messages to different segments. In our example, a client would send a “20% off” message to adults from ages 45 to 55 who have viewed a certain product’s page at least twice. The message would include a button pointing towards a discounted version of the product, and serve to push high-margin potential buyers who’ve been considering the product to finally make the purchase. The client could also set up a complementary message to be sent to those aged 18 to 28 with a “Share this product on Facebook” link instead of offering a discount to these low margin users.

Clients can then view the users targeted, impressions, clicks, and purchases initiated by their different messages. This list of messages can be used to perform A/B testing, such as tracking purchases rates depending on what wording a message uses.

While the back end of Frosmo’s Social Optimizer provides a lot of utility, the user-facing messages currently have poor design. The borders and font look cheap, and there are few aesthetic options other than including a company logo. Tracking and targeting users won’t help clients increase revenues if the customized messages are too ugly to click, but Gummerus says Frosmo is working on ways to make the messages look better with more images and Flash. The idea of employing Facebook user data to create a customized web browsing experience for customers is sound, and if given a little polish, Frosmo’s Social Optimizer could become an easy and effective method of socializing any website without any coding or design work.

The Future of Web Socialization

“Soon it will seem weird to people if they don’t get customized service” Frosmo’s CEO Mikael Gummerus says about the future of socialized web browsing. He thinks web designers need to stop thinking about their customers as numbers, and start thinking of them as people. This allows you to start grouping them by behavior and what they like, then tweak certain parts of the your service for specific subsets of users.

Gummerus thinks the web socialization space is quickly becoming crowded, but that Frosmo is different because they’ve learned from their game network experience the importance of creating a product which is easy to use. He says the quality of the Frosmo API, which reportedly doesn’t slow down client sites, will also help them stay ahead of their competition.

And, Frosmo is not tied to Facebook’s data or to optimizing only business-to-consumer sites. Social Optimizer can be used in conjunction with other social network platforms, such as LinkedIn, whose data could help optimize business-to-business commerce sites.

Frosmo requires clients to greet new visitors to their website with a request for them to log in to Facebook, which may cause some to shy away. However, Gummerus says clients should use Connect to benefit the user with features like one-click sharing, and that a small loss of users is worth the data gained. His advice to all websites right now? “Stop updating your website. Integrate Facebook Connect, encourage everyone to log in, and start to understand what drives your users to purchase and share. Then you can really start tweaking your website.”