American Dreams is an educational social game created by developer Nihaoareyou that not only allows users to play in an online university world, but also have access to real life educational lectures from anywhere around the world.

Nihaoareyou, a company that develops educational social games, created the game to foster understanding between the U.S. and China, where American Dreams recently launched in Beta. The Beta version is available in 12 countries total, including Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil and India on Facebook and a Chinese rival to Facebook, Renren. While users play the game, which simulates the American university experience, they can stop and jump into a live video stream of an actual American university class.

Nihaoareyou currently partners with Abilene Christian University and offers courses in English, with plans to expand its curriculum. A YouTube video of a game demo also says that lectures from Harvard, Stanford and Yale are to be offered in the game as well. The game promises not only the live lectures, but video lessons, PowerPoints, a white board, online lessons and flash cards to help the user better her education.

The basic premise is that the user is going to study abroad in the U.S., so, players start out receiving their visa in the airport and immediately arriving to a college town.

On Level 1 of the game, users pick their avatar and where they live — including how much they’ll pay for it from their stock of “money” — and get to decorate their new home. An introduction then explains how the live classes on American Dreams work. Then a user passes to Level 2, finding a job and going to the mall to furnish their new home or buy new clothes are among the activities in which users may participate.

We’ve written previously about how companies like CampusBuddy and Inigral are hoping to take the power of Facebook’s social graph and apply it to the university setting, but no one seems to have gotten the formula just right. Perhaps this combination of social gaming and education will yield new results.

As part of our ongoing series on companies offering Facebook’s Ads API tools and services, today we profile Brighter Option’s Social Ads Manager. It allows clients with relatively small budgets to create, target, and bid on ads at a large scale through a self-service tool. SAM’s strengths are in post-click conversion tracking and a robust set of native data visualizations, but it doesn’t have automated bid optimization like some other Ads API tools.

For those less familiar, Facebook’s performance advertising system offers powerful targeting, but the user interface is not designed for running big campaigns or conducting sophisticated A/B testing. Last fall, Facebook gave a limited number of developers access to an ads API to allow more powerful tools for designing, targeting, and managing ads to be built.

Company Profile

Brighter Option is an off-shoot of European social advertising agency Socially Bright, that was looking for a scalable way to run Facebook ads to drive social game installs for its clients. Socially Bright wanted to be able to prove the ROI of running Facebook ads, so Brighter Option designed SAM to focus on conversion tracking and reporting.

The twelve employee team is based in South London, and is self-funded by CEO and founder Peter Goodman. The SAM browser-based software is currently being licensed by roughly twenty clients ranging from social games to small agencies. Unlike many ads API tools which require clients to spend at least $10,000 to $50,000, Brighter Option does not have a a minimum spend. Clients are charged a fee for each click driven through SAM, allowing companies with limited budgets to try out the tool without making a commitment. Fees are capped for larger campaigns to encourage clients to increase their spend.

“We believe once you start using SAM, your spend will increase,” Goodman explains. “People need to be offered a chance to use it at an early stage to prove that Facebook can deliver good results.” Clients need to understand how to use the tool in order to increase their spend, so Brighter Option offers training to help managers.

In the six weeks since SAM launched, Brighter Option has seen a wide spectrum of client spend, though it doesn’t have volume specifics to share yet. The tool provider differentiates itself by “trying to take care of the smaller players as well as the larger ones.”

Social Ads Manager

Upon logging into SAM, users see a dashboard showing their most active campaigns and clients which can be sorted by spend or other metrics, as well as recent daily spend history, ad approvals by Facebook, and connected Facebook accounts.

The New Campaign tab allows user to title, schedule, and bid on a campaign, add images from the ad’s destination site or a library of previously used images, and define targeting. By choosing to expand targets, all the included ages in an age range, selected countries, or languages are applied as variables to create every possible permutation of the ad.

SAM doesn’t provide a vivid way of seing different variants as they’re created, or the approximate audience of all the variants, making it slightly more difficult for a user to understand what ads they’re running. SAM also lacks suggestions for similar interests, or a typeahead for selecting common Likes to target.

The Clients tab presents a performance overview graph which can show metrics including spend, impressions, clicks, Likes, CTR, CPC, CPM, and cost per Like over a variety of time periods. Any of these metrics can be clicked to instantly show that performance graph without the page needing to reload. Users can also see the performance of different campaigns for single products, such as different service plans for a satellite TV package. User can select exactly which columns of data they want to see about these campaigns, such as average bid, total conversions, or how often different conversion levels were reached.

The Engagement section of a product allows users to set up conversion tracking pixels for different post-click actions or conversions, copy the code, and insert it into the web page denoting the action or conversion. Up to eight conversion pixels can be configured for each ad.

The Campaigns tab provides data on exactly who is clicking the ads. Pie charts and bar graphs show a campaign’s clickers broken down by gender, age, location, creative clicked, and more.

Users can view charts of the bids and performance of individual ads within a campaign. Bids to multiple ads can be changed simultaneously, either by setting a new bid, increasing all the bids by a monetary value, or increasing all the bids by a percentage. This last option is useful for when a certain campaign of ads with different bids is leading to higher conversions than other campaigns, and a user wants to increase all the bids of the successful campaign accordingly.

Bid management is Brighter Option’s biggest weakness at this time. Users must manually adjust bids to reflect insights from the analytics, but this is impossible for large scale campaigns. Constantly changing bids by tiny increments to optimize for how different demographics monetize at different times requires an automatic, algorithm-based system that the early-stage company has yet to develop.

The Details view allows users to see bar graphs of the performance of different ads stacked on top of each other for multiple campaigns. This makes it easy to visually compare the campaigns while retaining perpective on how each ad influenced each campaign’s performance.

Clicking the analytics button presents report options where users can select a chart type, date range, interval, values within the chart type, and the statistic to chart. Users can view the report on the site reducing the need for the advertiser or agency to have an in-house data visualization specialist. Reports can also be exported as Excel files or PDFs. Analytics are pulled from Facebook every five minutes, or the Sync button can be click to instantly pull the latest data. Insights like at which step of the monetization flow clickers drop out, such as entering credit card data for those over 50 years of age, can be used to refine both bid management and site design.

To help small agencies and advertisers who don’t always have a manager in the office to pause campaigns in the event of a problem, Brighter Option has developed a special WAP site. It allows managers to pause or active campaigns from their mobile device.

Conclusion

Goodman says the fast-growing ads API industry is exciting, and that Brighter Option has focused on getting feedback from clients to define their roadmap. He says Facebook has helped the company pick up the steep learning curve by providing ample warning about API changes. Next, Brighter Option is working on developing bid optimization algorithms.

Overall, SAM is a huge improvement over running Facebook ads through the native user interface. Offering training, conversion tracking, and native analytics without a minimum spend means any business can get data on the ROI of Facebook ads. However, if advertisers or agencies can afford an ads API tool with auto-optimization of bids, they’ll achieve a lower cost per acquisition than is possible with Brighter Option’s Social Ads Manager.

Involver is announcing a new WordPress and Facebook integration for its Audience Management Platform today. Users can draft WordPress blog posts, compose updates for Facebook and Twitter which promote the blog post, then publish the post and updates from within AMP. Updates for the social channels can be automatically populated with a headline and shortened URL, saved as drafts for publishing later, and feedback can be tracked across posts through a tagging system. The addition shifts promotion on social media from an ad hoc, untracked secondary action to a central, measurable part of content production.

Involver, a social marketing platform listed as a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, launched its moderation and engagement tracking software Audience Management Platform in July. AMP provides frequently updated growth and engagement analytics, and clients are charged by the number of Pages or accounts managed or by audience size. Since, the 60+ employee company has raised $8 million in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners to encompass additional channels and content platforms such as those integrated in this build. Involver has powered promotions and designed custom applications for the FIFA World Cup, top musicians such as Alicia Keys, and even Facebook itself.

The latest build of Audience Management Platform allows users to add WordPress blogs as outlets in the Publish tab. Users can compose, save drafts, and publish to WordPress within AMP. After publishing a blog entry, most content producers would either let an application automatically post updates to Twitter and Facebook linking to the blog, or manually compose these updates. Automated systems can produce robotic-sounding posts which don’t attract readers, while manual composition for each channel is inefficient.

Involver has developed a solution by bringing promotion of a blog post on Facebook and Twitter within the same window as composition on WordPress. Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts can be selected as outlets to publish to, and by clicking “Promote to all”, drafts of updates to these outlets are populated with the blog post’s headline and a http://inv.lv shortened link to the post. Content producers can then add additional channel-specific context such as photos or text descriptions. Like the blog post, these social updates can be saved as drafts, published simultaneously with the post, or scheduled for future publishing.

To allow producers to track the success of the social updates, they can be internally tagged with the channel they’re published to, a category of content, or the name or subject of the post they link to. Producers can then monitor the Likes, clicks, @replies, or other metrics across all updates sharing a tag. For instance, if a content producer tagged and published ten different updates to their Facebook Page linking to three blog posts on the same topic over a period of six months, they could see the aggregated feedback for all of those updates, or drill down to update-specific metrics. This tagging system can produce insights, such as updates about a certain topic drive more traffic when published in the evening, that couldn’t be deduced through other publishing methods or on Facebook’s native Page analytics.

Combining a tagging system with human-assisted social media publishing represents a significant improvement over existing automatic cross-channel publishing systems. Involver’s VP of Marketing Jascha Kaykas-Wolff explains that the improvement to AMP “accurately represents the way we publish content – to the richest channels first, then to Facebook and Twitter as promotional channels.”  The interface for the improvements runs smoothly and intuitively, making social promotion a natural extension of the blogging process. Content producers who find themselves constantly juggling these different publishing outlets have much to gain from the analytics and efficiency offered by Audience Management Platform’s WordPress integration.

The December 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Comprehensive Guide to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of marketers, social application developers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to navigate and get the most out of the increasingly sophisticated marketing opportunities on Facebook.

The web edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible is comprised of detailed resource pages, comprehensive how-to guides, and case studies analyzing today’s most successful marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook.

In addition, Inside Network is pleased to announce that through December 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms).

Now that Facebook has crossed the 500 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience through marketing on Facebook.

The December 2010 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Offline promotion for your Facebook Page, Place or campaign through the company’s recently launched Like Button stickers and QR codes.
• Facebook Places and Deals, the company’s evolving location-based feature that presents new marketing opportunities for businesses both on and offline.
• Facebook Groups, a new way for users to connect and collaborate with others who share their interests and affiliations, and new ideas for marketing with Groups on Facebook.
• Facebook Questions, and how these new user-facing feature can offer a new ‘no-cost’ marketing channel for brands, advertisers, and developers.
• Facebook’s Open Graph and Social Plugins, the features and code that brings “instant personalization” to your website off Facebook.
• Facebook’s latest advertising guidelines updates and what they mean for advertisers throughout the ecosystem.
• Audience growth and engagement, including best practices for holding on to fans, keeping marketing channels open, and re-engaging your audience on Facebook.
• Plus, comprehensive walk-throughs of Facebook’s tools for advertisers, web content publishers, and Page administrators.

Learn more about the December 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com.

Table of Contents excerpted from the full December 2010 Edition

Building Your Brand through Facebook Pages

• The Profile Page – A Walk-Through
• Facebook Pages and Public Profiles
• Strategy: 4 Reasons Why Marketers Should Choose Pages Over Groups
• Strategy: How to Promote Your Page in 6 Steps
• 10 Key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know
• Vanity URLs for Facebook Pages
• SMS Subscription Service for Pages
• Adding Custom Modules to Your Page

Growing your Facebook Page Audience

• The Basics of Status Updates for Pages
• Increase Engagement and Insight through Status Tagging
• How to Grow Your Page’s Audience through Page Invitations
• How to Grow Your Page’s Audience through Fan Badges
• Demographic Targeting for Status Updates
• Updating Facebook Page Status Via Text
• Receive Page Status Updates Via Text
• How to Export Your Facebook Page Updates to Twitter
• Facebook Learning from Twitter, Pages Getting Better
• Branded Virtual Gifts on Facebook Pages for Viral Advertising

Designing Your Facebook Page

• The Wall Tab for Making Pages Dynamic and Viral
• How to Choose a Landing ‘Tab’ for your Facebook Page

Advanced Strategies for Facebook Pages

• How to Avoid Having Your Page, Open Graph Object, or Application Unliked, Removed, Muted, or Blacklisted
• 8 Best Practices for Retailers on Facebook
• Marketers Actively Bidding for Generic Facebook Pages
• How Page Owners Can Restrict Content for Underage Users

Tools and Analytics for Pages

• Facebook “Insights” Metrics Dashboard for Page Managers
• Using Third Party Tools to Manage Your Facebook Page

Facebook Groups

• Strategy: What About Spamming Existing Groups?
• Quick Note on Groups and SEO
• Facebook Groups for Brand Marketing

Facebook Events

• Facebook Events – A Walk-Through
• Facebook’s Events API
• Quick Note on Events and SEO
• Events from the Home Page

Facebook Questions and Places

• Facebook Deals – How to Create a Deal
• Promoting Your Facebook Page in Real Life with Stickers and QR Codes
• Facebook Questions – A Walk-Through
• How Marketers Can Get The Most Out Of Facebook Questions
• How Marketers Can Use Facebook’s New Location Features
• Facebook Places – A Walk-Through
• Facebook Places for Advertisers
• Facebook Places for Brand Marketers
• Facebook Places for Developers

Performance Advertising Fundamentals

• Facebook Ads: Read Before You Get Started
• Facebook Ads – A Walk-Through
• The Facebook Ads Manager
• Facebook Self-Serve Ad Types: Page Ads
• Facebook Self-Serve Ad Types: Event Ads

Ads Targeting on Facebook

• 10 Powerful Targeting Methods Facebook Ads Every Performance Advertiser Should Know
• Friends of Connections Targeting
• Facebook Ads: Language Targeting
• 4 Connection Targeting Tests Every Advertiser Should Run
• From Keyword Targeting to People Targeting: Understanding Performance Advertising with Facebook’s Tim Kendall
• Time Scheduling

The Facebook Open Graph, and APIs for Web Publishers

• Publishing to Those Who Have Clicked a Like Button on Your Open Graph Website or Application
• Implementation Options: Like Button
• Facebook CTO Bret Taylor Discusses the Open Graph
• Facebook for Websites or Facebook “Connect”

Policies, Privacy, and Guidelines to Watch

• Promotional/Sweepstakes Policies for Facebook Pages
• The Future of Sharing on Facebook: A Hybrid Public/Private Model
• Facebook’s Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook

The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

An interesting mix of technology and beverage companies, TV shows, musicians and movies on our Top 20 list of growing Facebook Pages. We gather our information from our PageData tool, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page each day.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Harry Potter	10,611,841	+930,293	+9.61
2.	Google Chrome	4,044,085	+807,080	+24.93
3.	Red Bull	13,337,852	+730,281	+5.79
4.	Rihanna	17,608,697	+646,321	+3.81
5.	Facebook	28,966,889	+597,765	+2.11
6.	YouTube	23,590,161	+597,443	+2.60
7.	Texas Hold’em Poker	28,849,531	+586,313	+2.07
8.	Shakira	15,487,016	+578,667	+3.88
9.	Eminem	22,603,891	+565,629	+2.57
10.	Disney	13,904,473	+530,896	+3.97
11.	The Simpsons	15,504,034	+527,080	+3.52
12.	Shinedown	651,531	+505,301	+345.55
13.	SpongeBob SquarePants	13,706,187	+493,779	+3.74
14.	Star Trek	591,822	+481,062	+434.33
15.	Coca-Cola	19,780,621	+475,545	+2.46
16.	MTV	11,362,253	+460,369	+4.22
17.	Bob Marley	16,469,006	+450,474	+2.81
18.	AKON	12,794,890	+432,751	+3.50
19.	Katy Perry	14,412,004	+428,470	+3.06
20.	Linkin Park	18,154,410	+426,908	+2.41

The first Page on the list this week was the Harry Potter Page, which given the smash success of the most recent film, makes sense. The movie reached worldwide release in the past week, adding 930,300 Likes in the process to grow to 10.6 million total. Another film, “Tangled,” from Disney pushed that Page to number 10 on the list with 530,900 new Likes and more than 13.9 million all told.

Then there were two beverages on the list, Red Bull and Coca-Cola. Red Bull took third place after adding 730,300 new Likes to reach 13.3 million; the Page has been mostly promoting Red Bull and related events and merchandise. At number 15 was Coca-Cola with 475,600 new Likes and a total of 19.7 million.

Tech companies on the list included Google (Chrome and YouTube), Facebook and Zynga.

In second place was the Google Chrome Facebook Page which showed some huge spikes after adding 807,100 Likes to pass 4 million. Facebook’s own Page added 597,800 Likes to come in just under 29 million. YouTube’s Page added 597,400 Likes to jump to 23.5 million. Finally, Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker Page added 586,300 Likes to get to 28.8 million with all types of promotions on the Page.

There were a bunch of TV-related Pages on the list, too.

At number 11 was “The Simpsons” with 527,100 new Likes and 15.5 million total; the Page has been promoting the show. “SpongeBob SquarePants” was number 13 with 493,800 new Likes and 13.7 million total; the SpongeBob float in the Thanksgiving Macy’s Day Parade seems to have garnered some attention on the Page. “Star Trek” was next at 14 with 481,000 new Likes, the bulk of the 591,800 Likes to the Page — it seems like perhaps a Page consolidation took place. Finally, MTV’s Page added 460,400 new Likes to reach 11.3 million although it mostly promoted old content.

The remaining eight Pages on the list belonged to musicians.

Rihanna came in fourth with 646,300 new Likes and a total of 17.6 million; she recently appeared on an awards show and is running a promotional sweepstakes for fans. At number 8 was Shakira, who added 578,700 new Likes to her 15.4 million; she recently won a music award. Eminem was next at 9 with 565,600 new Likes to pass 22 million and he hasn’t even updated the Page.

The group Shinedown was at number 12 after adding 505,300 new Likes to grow the Page to 651,500. The band is selling iTunes downloads of its songs on Facebook, like several other bands on our list.

Bob Marley’s Page took the number 17 spot with 450,500 new Likes, coming in just under 16.5 million at the end of the week, and selling merch and promoting covers. Akon’s Page took number 18 with 432,800 new Likes and almost 13 million total fans, selling iTunes downloads and set to perform in the Victoria’s Secret show this week.

Also performing at the Victoria’s Secret show is Katy Perry, whose page is up 428,500 Likes this week with a total of 14.4 million; she’s also selling iTunes downloads. Finally, Linkin Park came in at number 20. The band added 426,900 Likes, passed 18.1 million and is touring, as well as selling tickets to its North American tour on Facebook.

A key gripe among Facebook Page owners — at least those who don’t do a lot of ad spending — has been the spending restriction Facebook put in place on promotions last year. If you hadn’t bought at least $10,000 in Facebook ads, the company wouldn’t give you the written prior permission it required to run a promotion, whether it was a “sweepstakes, contest, competition or other similar offering.”

It is dropping the spending requirement and approval process, we’ve confirmed with the company, following an email it reportedly sent about the changes to some Page owners earlier today.

Until now, disobeying the promotions guidelines could cause Facebook to do things like block your Page.

Promotions can be done for minimal cost, just the worth of the prize if nothing else, so they’re a natural type of marketing plan for smaller businesses. Facebook first instituted the restrictions last November, and told us more recently that its guidelines weren’t about making money. It didn’t have enough staff to be able to preview everything quickly, and if it didn’t have some sort of full review process in place, it could still be found legally responsible for material posted by Page owners.

But the company has been busy hiring for sales operations and related roles over the past year, and apparently it feels comfortable enough with its current processes that it has dropped the restrictions. Note that the guidelines terms haven’t been updated to reflect these changes, although we assume that will happen shortly.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

As part of Facebook’s continuing deprecation of the its old groups product in the wake of the launch of new Groups, the home page left sidebar navigation bookmark to old groups has been removed. Users could previously click this bookmark to reveal links to their old groups, but now must visit the Groups page to see the new Groups and old groups they are a member of. Since posts to old groups do not appear in the news feed, the removal of this bookmark could lead users to forget about their old groups all together.

Facebook has also updated the Groups page to include a “Recently Updated” section showing counters next to a user’s new Groups which have posts they haven’t read. Old groups do not appear in the section when posted to.

At the new Groups launch event, Facebook announced that old groups would not gain new functionality, could not be converted into new Groups, and users would no longer be able to create them. Earlier this year, Facebook removed the list of groups a user was a member of from the profile info page, preventing old groups from growing in this way.

Now when users view their navigation bookmarks in the bottom section of the home page’s left sidebar above “Friends on Chat”, they won’t see a bookmark for old groups amongst those for third-party apps and other in-house apps like Photos, Notes, and Links. The only way users can access their old groups is through search, activity links on their wall, or through the Groups page.

Users can navigate to the Groups page by clicking “See All” at the bottom of the Groups bookmarks section in the middle of the home page’s left sidebar, beneath “Friends” and above the third-party and secondary in-house apps bookmarks section. Users must then look for the group links without profile pictures at the bottom of the My Groups section, sometimes hidden beneath the “Show Older” fold. Clicking these links leads to a user’s old groups, where they can post to the wall, but do little else.

The “Recently Updated” section borrows the counter design from the new Application and Game Requests bookmark system. Users can get the same information about new posts from the counters on the Groups bookmarks on the home page, so this new section is more convenient than essential. The Groups page also shows invitations to old groups.

With the implementation of community Pages and the new Groups product, old groups have little place on Facebook anymore. Therefore its sensible to remove navigation links to them. However, even if Facebook removes all the links, expect users to paste saved URLs of groups into their browsers until Facebook actually deletes those protest and world record groups.

Users whose names don’t meet Facebook’s guidelines are being temporarily denied access to their accounts. Upon logging in, these users are warned to change to a full first and last name without special characters or punctuation. If they provide an invalid name, they’re prevented from viewing their news feed, communicating with other users, or even deactivating their account for a number of hours. This aggressive move should eradicate irregular names on Facebook, promoting authentic identity but potentially angering or driving some users away from the site.

A month ago, Facebook began asking users to use their real name in only one language with a full first and last name and without special characters such as ♥, ☮, or Ⓥ. Facebook explained that this was to “reduce spam and increase authenticity”, but many affected users felt it was unfair to force them to strip away symbols used to denote affiliation with causes or ideologies, such as  Ⓥ for veganism or voluntaryism.

In Facebook’s view, when users are tied to their real name and identity, they’re less likely to practice abusive or disruptive behavior. By only having real names on the site, Facebook could power future online identity systems which could become a lucrative business. However, Facebook has allowed irregular names until now, meaning some have become accustomed to this form of expression and are reluctant to change.

Now when users without valid names log in to Facebook, they’re brought to the URL http://www.Facebook.com/Checkpoint. Under the header “Please Update Your Name on Facebook” they see a warning stating “If you enter an invalid name your account will be inaccessible for [#] hours before your next opportunity to update your name.” The number of hours number reportedly increases from one to two hours to four hours, and possibly longer if the user repeatedly refuses to comply.

Users are shown first, middle(optional), and last names entry fields which they can use to update their name. If the user enters a valid name, they’re given normal access to their account. If they enter the same invalid name they’ve been using or another name that fails to meet the guidelines, they’re shown an “Account Inaccessible for [#] Hours” page explaining “Your account is temporarily unavailable because of repeated attempts to enter an invalid name.” They’re told to enter a valid name when they regain access.

Users with unusual legal names, such as those which umlauts or other special characters, could be erroneously prompted to change their names. The move could also stamp out some emergent behavior, such as users changing their name on Facebook while searching for a job to keep hirers from finding their profile, or users putting special characters in front of their names so they appear at the top of search results.

Facebook could merely be trying to clean up the site. However, the stern approach may be to speed preparations for an upcoming feature or integration which requires authentic identity.

[Thanks to Jill B for the tip]

Following an initial integration with Facebook at the end of August, where MySpace let users share status updates and other information to Facebook but not the other way around, it introduced a way to share Facebook profile data back to the site in order to build out users’ interests.

That effort is starting to pay off at least a little bit, as our AppData measurement service shows MySpace gaining more Facebook users.

The app had been coasting down to under 500,000 monthly active users by the middle of the month. Then, it started rising when MySpace began apparently testing the new product with users, and started going up more steeply when the feature went live on the 28th — today it’s up to 761,000. That’s not much compared to big new social games on Facebook, but it’s a good sign for MySpace and its “social entertainment” strategy, considering that most third party web measurement show the company continuing to lose users.

And for those wondering about the relatively flat daily active user numbers, the news isn’t necessarily bad for MySpace there, either. DAU counts were down to around 65,000 at the middle of the month, and have since risen up to slightly above 80,000. This likely shows that Facebook status update integration has a small but reliable user group — and a steady line of new people doing the new one-off sync with Facebook to port their data over.

With the new integration, the results wouldn’t show up as Facebook traffic. The News Corp. company is using the Facebook data to friend profiles of celebrities and other figures who a user has already Liked on Facebook. Then it is using that information to share a constant stream of updates from those people into users’ news feeds. This in turn could get more users coming back to MySpace to engage with the musicians, actors, and the demi-celebrities who helped make the site a hit with users over the past decade.

While the traffic numbers are still low, growth is in the right direction. The real test will be how MySpace is able to use the new relationships in order to increase engagement. If third parties start showing the site going back to gaining users, Facebook could be one reason why.

Other social networks, and anyone looking to boost their own social integrations, should be watching to see what they can learn from MySpace’s efforts.

Just a few days after surpassing FarmVille as Facebook’s largest app by monthly active users, Phrases has fallen back below the farming game — exactly as we predicted it would. But developer Takeoff Monkey appears to have a new plan. The developer has never spoken out that we know of, but it does have a new version of Phrases that is ramming its way up the rankings:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Phrases (new)	14,164,363	+3,788,546	+37%
2.	Tag Friends	4,263,425	+2,419,721	+131%
3.	Social Fun	5,713,423	+915,841	+19%
4.	Vegas City	2,746,935	+877,045	+47%
5.	phrases 4 fun	1,928,386	+741,652	+62%
6.	FrontierVille	29,271,413	+603,957	+2%
7.	JibJab	2,228,025	+541,238	+32%
8.	Birthday Greeting Cards	624,743	+534,018	+589%
9.	Island God	1,515,461	+419,956	+38%
10.	Hollywood City	3,107,475	+414,168	+15%
11.	Social Statistics	3,585,676	+404,123	+13%
12.	Frontier Bonuses	396,762	+395,938	+48,051%
13.	Epic Fighters	721,374	+381,723	+112%
14.	Game of Truth	1,289,812	+371,011	+40%
15.	ABC.com	775,989	+359,779	+86%
16.	xo Hearts xo	1,473,180	+348,795	+31%
17.	Quizazz	3,315,133	+332,750	+11%
18.	Crime City	6,256,827	+327,563	+6%
19.	Entrevista Amigos	1,358,411	+326,113	+32%
20.	Bar World	635,811	+310,334	+95%

In total between the two versions of Phrases, Takeoff Monkey now has access to about 67 million MAU, which by that measure places it well ahead of any developer except for Zynga.

Quite a few apps besides Phrases are doing well on this week’s list — in fact, the usually dominating game category only holds six of the 20 total entries, starting with Vegas City at number four. Ahead of that game we have Tag Friends and Social Fun, which both use variations of the quiz and wall post mechanic that makes Phrases successful. Phrases 4 fun, after Vegas, does as well.

JibJab has lurked in the lower-growth sections of the list for several weeks. Like several apps that we’ve pointed out recently, it is not, in fact, an app at all; what you’re seeing is a count of how many Facebook users log into JibJab.com using their social network credentials. JibJab shut down its dedicated Facebook app several months ago, but the decision doesn’t seem to have hurt it. We’ve covered the company’s successful use of Connect over the years, see its guest post from last November for more.