Snarky comments have won the day on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as titles that still have less than a million monthly active users.  In the lead is Like It Too, which is mainly composed of sarcastic and funny quips that people can “Like” in order to have it appear on their wall.

The full list contains a wider variety of apps than usual:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Like It Too	700,703	+460,224	+191%
2.	#1 Song On My Birthday	539,525	+450,825	+508%
3.	Farm Bonuses	573,688	+445,790	+349%
4.	PicBadges	871,816	+340,389	+64%
5.	Pool Master 2	438,424	+297,022	+210%
6.	Starbucks Card	650,975	+287,179	+79%
7.	OyunPark	684,354	+229,018	+50%
8.	Twitter for Pages	922,051	+227,621	+33%
9.	PM Welcome Tab	784,997	+220,591	+39%
10.	MyGame	811,696	+196,326	+32%
11.	Sweepstakes	951,237	+192,911	+25%
12.	SuperPoke! Pets	612,935	+191,944	+46%
13.	Die Herausforderung der Städte	194,833	+191,389	+5,557%
14.	Entrevista Social	602,557	+182,375	+43%
15.	iLike this Artist	854,147	+180,788	+27%
16.	Fantasy Kingdoms	719,757	+172,681	+32%
17.	iCast	737,015	+171,557	+30%
18.	Downhill Snowboard	202,186	+169,864	+526%
19.	Puzzle Saga	623,302	+169,328	+37%
20.	Crazy Cabbie	198,446	+165,953	+511%

At number two, #1 Song On My Birthday is just the latest version of a time-honored web app. After finding out your birthday, it tells you what the top charting song was on the day you were born.

Farm Bonuses is similar to one that we’ve seen before called Frontier Bonuses; both scrape the walls of your friends in search of shared virtual goods from Zynga games. While thousands of apps purporting to help play social games have appeared and subsequently been banned on Facebook, 101 Apps‘ titles take a different tack, and seem to be surviving because of it.

PicBadges modifies your profile picture to show support for a cause, or just a mindset, by placing a logo over the photo. It’s followed by Pool Master 2, a new casual game.

Starbucks Card is worth a look; it provides a place both to manage your existing card by adding to the balance or setting up auto-reload, or to buy a new card. With the gifting season coming up, the latter use is probably what’s driving growth.

Finally, Twitter for Pages and PM Welcome Tab are both page management tools. The first is actually built by a significant brand, Involver; it’s used to manage a Twitter stream on a Page, but it also appears to be temporarily closed to new accounts. PM Welcome Tab, by Pagemodo, is a simple management tool for smaller brands.

Facebook has announced it will hold its first annual multi-round programming competition called Hacker Cup. Entrants will have their answers to “algorithmic-based problem statements” scored on accuracy and speed. 25 finalists will be flown to Facebook headquarters to compete for a $5,000 grand prize and the Hacker Cup trophy. Facebook has been using its Hackathons to engage the development community, promote its status as a technology company, and recruit top talent.

The Hacker Cup’s cash prizes are relatively small compared to the $2 billion in revenue some speculate Facebook will bring in during 2010. However, winners could receive something of greater value — a job or internship at Facebook. The Sharabash brothers who won Facebook’s Camp Hackathon for university students were offered a summer internship for their ambitious augmented reality drawing application. Even if Facebook doesn’t offer any unofficial prizes, the notoriety gained could position finalists for recruitment by other technology companies.

Unlike previous competitions which have been subjectively judged by Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Hacker Cup will be a more objective competition based on skill instead of presentation.

Here are the details of the Hacker Cup rounds:

Qualification Round

Time Limit: 72 hours

Date: 4pm PST, January 7, 2011 to January 10

To Advance: Solve at least one of the three problems.

Online Round 1

Time Limit: 3 sub-rounds of 3 hours each

Date: Different times from 7am PST, January 15 to 4pm PST, January 15

To Advance: Score amongst the top 1,000 competitors in any of the three sub-rounds.

Online Round 2

Time Limit: 3 hours

Date: 7am PST, January 22 to 10am PST, January 22

To Advance: Score amongst the top 25 competitors to be flown to Facebook headquarters and receive accommodations in Palo Alto, CA for the finals. Those scoring amongst the top 300 competitors will receive an official Hacker Cup t-shirt.

Finals

Date: March 11

First Place: $5,000, the title of world champion, and the winner’s name on the Hacker Cup trophy

Second Place: $2,000

Third Place: $1,000

Fourth through Twenty-Fifth Place: $100

Facebook is conducting a short term test showing application requests in the notifications channel. It will analyze the effects of the change before concluding whether to further roll out application request notifications.

By showing these requests in a persistently visible, frequently checked channel alongside notifications about system actions such as a user being mentioned in a post or tagged in a photo, Facebook may be able to assist developers with app discovery and user retention.

Applications could previously send messages directly to users as notifications, but lost access to the notifications channel in February. Facebook made major changes to the Platform in September, removing stories about in-game content from the feeds of non-gamers, leaving only app discovery stories about friends starting to use an app. Facebook also moved app invites and requests from the Requests panel to the Application and Game Dashboards. Many developers complained that these changes significantly hurt discovery and retention, leading Facebook to bring app invites and requests back to the Requests panel.

Facebook has sought to improve relations with developers of all sizes through improved outreach, documentation, and reliability as part of “Operation Developer Love.” But its access to communication and viral channels which are the biggest concern for most developers. Removing these channels makes it especially difficult for smaller developers to compete with larger ones which can pay for massive advertising campaigns and cross-promote to kickstart new apps.

The introduction of application requests and invites to the notifications channel could be some of the change developers have been waiting for. Facebook improved the visibility of this channel earlier this year by showing alerts of notifications on browser tabs opened to Facebook. The red counters on the notifications icon are difficult to ignore, so these notifications could lead users to more frequently visit the dashboards where they can respond to requests and invites.

Facebook must try to assist developers without detracting from the user experience. Some might be frustrated about notifications which distract them from their browsing but don’t link to more intimate social activity such as a friend Liking their status update or writing on their wall. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “one of the biggest drivers of negative experiences has been games”, and these notifications could remind users of the days when their home page and news feed were flooded by app spam. However, these notifications can only be generated by explicit actions of a user’s friends, which could set the right balance between annoyance and obscurity for applications.

Facebook has released a new version of its Platform Dialogs — interfaces which allow users to take actions through Facebook apps, websites, and mobile apps without giving special permissions. The updated versions automatically render in a format optimized for whatever device a user is on. The update ensures dialogs always look right without application developers having to deduce the appropriate display parameter to include.

The update currently only supports the Feed Dialog for publishing stories, Friend Dialog for adding friends, and the OAuth Dialog for authorizing users, but other dialogs will be updated in the future.

The new dialogs will make it easier for developers to create mobile apps that display well on the touch screens on newer devices as well as WAP browsers of older phones. It will aid international growth of mobile apps, as users from the developing world predominantly access Facebook through WAP browsers.

Facebook has been improving its mobile platform in other ways as well. Last month it introduced new location APIs, and single sign on, which allows Facebook-integrated mobile apps to borrow the authentication token from a device’s native Facebook app, relieving users from having to enter their Facebook credentials for each app they use.

New Platform Dialog Implementation

To invoke the dialog, applications send an HTTP request or use the JavaScript, iOS, or Android SDK.

For example, a dialog invoked through the JavaScript SDK would look as a follows:

<html>
<body>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js"></script>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>
// assume we are already logged in
FB.init({appId: '123050457758183', xfbml: true, cookie: true});

FB.ui({
method: 'feed',
name: 'Facebook Dialogs',
link: 'http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/',
picture: 'http://fbrell.com/f8.jpg'
});
</script>
</body>
</html>

This would load the URL below as an frame:

http://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?
app_id=123050457758183&
name=Facebook%20Dialogs&
link=http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/&
picture=http://fbrell.com/f8.jpg&
redirect_uri=http://www.example.com/response/

A user on the iPhone mobile browser would see the following dialog for posting to their wall through the app:

Facebook announced its intention to grow its staff in its Dublin, Ireland office by about 100, and open a new location in Washington, D.C., part of its ongoing worldwide expansion.

Here’s our weekly look at changes on the Facebook Careers Page, including more details on who Facebook is looking for in the new offices.

In Ireland, Facebook is set to expand its staff by 85 in the next year, adding to its current staff of about 200, according to The Guardian. The Dublin office serves as the Europe, the Middle East and Africa headquarters for Facebook and focuses primarily on advertising, sales in all types of languages, account management, finance and human resources while less than 20 work on engineering and platform operations.

These priorities are already reflected in Facebook’s Career Page postings where the following Dublin positions were posted: Partner Engineer (Mobile) – Dublin, Account Manager – Swedish (Dublin), Analyst, Online Sales Operations – Dutch (Dublin), Analyst, Online Sales Operations – Swedish (Dublin), Account Manager – Dutch (Dublin), Law Enforcement Response Analyst, French (Dublin) – Contract, Law Enforcement Response Analyst, Spanish (Dublin) – Contract, Physical Security Manager (Dublin), Customer Marketing Associate – EMEA (Dublin), Customer Marketing Manager – EMEA (Dublin) and Marketing Communications Manager – EMEA (Dublin).

As far as Facebook’s plans in Washington, D.C., The Washington Post reported that the company signed a lease in late November for offices on F Street, downtown. The new space is 8,600 square feet, enough for about 30 or 40 people, according to the Post; in the article, Facebook said that it planned to grow long-term and make the physical move in April.

This announcement made for some interesting timing, considering that two D.C.-based positions were no longer listed on the Careers Page: Associate Manager, Policy Communications and Manager, Public Policy. As the company has gotten more attention from Congress over privacy issues, it has been building its local presence to get its message across.

Other positions that are no longer listed include several Dublin-based security positions, the Lead Recruiter position in Singapore, a Marketing Campaign Manager, several Strategic Partner Development positions, a Network Engineer – Voice, the Benelux Head of Sales position, and Business Development Manager – Mobile.

A bunch of new sales positions were also posted this week to work across Europe, from Hamburg to Milan to Paris to Sweden, but also Singapore. Partner Engineering positions, as well as about a dozen U.S.-based Strategist – Market Solutions positions were also listed.

Two positions also of note that Facebook added to its Page this week were Litigation Counsel and Senior Commercial Transactions Counsel.

For more jobs in the industry, be sure to check out our Inside Network Job Board.

January 25th | San Francisco

As we announced recently, Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is happening January 25th in San Francisco.

Today we are excited to announce that Facebook CTO Bret Taylor will be joining us for a fireside chat on the Facebook Platform 2011 roadmap at Inside Social Apps. There’s no shortage of big questions facing the future of the Facebook Platform, and following up with our in-depth discussion with him in the middle of the year, we’re happy to have him joining us to talk about the way Facebook is approaching the key issues for the year ahead.

We’ll address crucial topics for developers about Facebook’s Platform-level priorities around engagement, distribution, monetization, and the balance between on- and off-Facebook.com services. We’ll also look at larger questions affecting the way the Platform will expand in 2011 following the launch of the Open Graph this year, including publisher services such as Instant Personalization, the Like button, and other plugins. Finally, we’ll also discuss the growing importance of Facebook’s mobile partnerships and mobile platform services, and what that means for mobile app developers in 2011.

Who’s Speaking?

At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, executives and experts from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will be discussing the future of social platforms and virtual goods monetization in social games and apps.

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
	Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal		Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
	Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity		Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network

Key topics for the day will include:

• Growth and User Aquisition on the Facebook Platform
• New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?
• Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
• M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers
• Monetization on Facebook in a Credits World

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Register Now

A limited set of “Early Admission” tickets is available through Friday, December 17 at a special price of $299. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!

Facebook is testing a new type of one-line story on the recent activity feed of the wall which shows the full text of a comment. This story type would make the recent activity feed more interesting but slower to read, and could entice users to click through to view the original post.

In the example above, the standard comment story on Sanders’ recent activity feed shows his first name, and that he commented on Trevor Bryant’s link. However, in the tested full text comment story, the author of the comment’s first name is not shown, and instead the text of the comment is shown in its entirety. Only the green comment icon denotes what kind of action the story represents.

The recent activity feed was changed to be more interactive in early November after months of relative stability. Facebook added the option to instantly Like an Open Graph object from the activity feed story generated when a friend Liked that object. Previously, users had to click off-site to the object to Like it. To balance this, users were also given the option Unlike a Page or Open Graph object when removing the story about a Like from their own feed.

The full text comment story brings a user’s unique content into the recent activity feed. Otherwise, this feed is only populated by stories indicating connections and actions, such as a user Liking a Page, editing an open field of their profile, or writing on a friend’s wall. The stories wouldn’t show what they added to the Quotations section of their profile, or what they wrote on that friend’s wall, though.

Showing the full text might make readers curious enough to click through and see what the original post was about. However, we’re no longer seeing this test, meaning Facebook may have decided that unique content is better left on the wall.

Facebook is adding privacy controls for applications and websites to the m.facebook.com mobile interface. Users will be able to access the recently launched Applications, Games, and Websites Privacy Dashboard to view which parties have access to their profile, rescind permissions, control what info is shared with the apps of friends, and restrict who can see their app and game activity.  The mobile controls, which are being rolled out over the next few weeks, will allow users to quickly respond to privacy concerns while away from their computers.

Mobile privacy controls have been a focus of updates to many of Facebook’s mobile sites and apps over the past six months. Access to controls over content sharing, communication, and basic directory information were added to m.facebook.com in August. iPhone users gained the ability to restrict status updates to certain people on a post by post basis, and in November received quick links to Account and Privacy settings on the full site. The changes shows that Facebook recognizes how access to privacy controls is crucial to keeping its 200 million users sharing through their mobile devices.

Last month, Facebook launched single-sign on for mobile applications, allowing apps to piggyback on the a user’s login to Facebook through their native Facebook app such as Facebook for iPhone. Since apps no longer have to explicitly require users to enter their credentials to let them access their data, mobile application privacy controls became necessary to control that access. The turnaround time of just over a month for implementing these controls is admirable.

Once access to the controls has been rolled out to a user, they can navigate to them by visiting m.facebook.com/privacy or by clicking “Settings” at the bottom of their mobile page, then “Privacy Settings (change)”. There users will see an Applications and Websites section they can click through to make changes.

First, users see the Applications You Use section, where they can view a list of allowed apps listed in order of which was the last to access their data. Clicking through to an app reveals options to remove the app, rescind optional permissions, and what data was last accessed. These controls make it easy to tell if a user has given an app access or not, and stop apps which are abusing this access, such as those posting to a user’s wall or sending emails too frequently.

Info Accessible lets users allow or deny access to each category of their profile data and content to apps their friends are using. Many users don’t realize that even if they don’t use any third-party apps or websites, these parties may be accessing their data through friends who are less cautious. The addition of these controls to the mobile interface could increase awareness.

Lastly, the Game and Application Activity section lets users select who can see that they’ve installed an app or made a request for friends to join or help them in a game. As more Facebook Platform social games move onto mobile devices, the ability to switch to playing privately through the same interface will become more important.

The mobile optimized privacy controls make it quicker and easier to make changes that using a mobile browser to visit the slow-loading full site. It’s worth noting that Facebook consistently uses images of Apple’s iPhone when blogging about updates to the m.facebook.com interface — which is available on all mobile handset browsers. The lack of images depicting Android handsets lends a little more weight to the idea that Facebook may be purposefully pushing the iPhone over Google-powered phones. This could be to suppress the search giant’s mobile presence as Google plans the launch of a competing social product which may be deeply integrated with the Android platform.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Playdom, Kabam, Playfish, Storm8, and Ubisoft.

• Social Game Design Lead (San Francisco, CA)
• Art Director (Mountain View, CA)
  
• Senior Game Designer (Mountain View, CA)

• Senior Product Manager, Payments & Monetization (Redwood City, CA)
• Business Intelligence Quantitative Analyst (Redwood City, CA)

• Head of Acquisition Marketing (Redwood City, CA)

• Users Relations Associate (Redwood City, CA)

• Lead Artist (San Francisco, CA)
• Producer (San Francisco, CA)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users is mostly a listing of larger apps that enjoyed rebounds, but not real growth, in their DAU over the seven-day period, along with a few showing new spikes that may not last. But as usual, there are also a few newer names that are deserving of some attention.

Here’s the full list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Phrases	6,076,562	+1,684,209	+38%
2.	My Year In Status	1,035,811	+1,035,103	+146,201%
3.	FarmVille	17,200,603	+842,502	+5%
4.	Frases Diarias	1,572,254	+554,836	+55%
5.	BandPage by RootMusic	507,871	+505,206	+18,957%
6.	Windows Live Messenger	10,503,808	+451,037	+4%
7.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,588,421	+425,384	+7%
8.	MindJolt Games	2,089,241	+412,851	+25%
9.	Yahoo!	2,549,153	+377,062	+17%
10.	Birthday Calendar	347,781	+347,744	+939,849%
11.	FrontierVille	7,114,716	+297,941	+4%
12.	德州撲克(中文版)	1,212,817	+250,921	+26%
13.	Horoscopes	2,858,230	+231,169	+9%
14.	Badoo	618,051	+213,682	+53%
15.	Status Shuffle	1,003,146	+207,263	+26%
16.	Family Feud	1,159,021	+200,759	+21%
17.	Games	1,457,841	+200,683	+16%
18.	My Top Fans Pro	194,417	+186,087	+2,234%
19.	Die Herausforderung der Städte	185,624	+185,139	+38,173%
20.	My Band: Profile Pages for Bands and Musicians	195,933	+180,218	+1,147%

Phrases, Frases Diarias and a handful of others are showing significant, unexplained spikes in DAU. With larger apps of their sort, it’s usually best to wait a few days before judging whether the gains are permanent.

My Year In Status is an older app that, almost exactly a year ago, briefly enjoyed a high of 7.3 million monthly actives and almost a million DAU. It has since crawled along at just a few thousand users. It can thus be considered something of a holiday app, attracting users only toward the end of the year.

Skipping down past some less notable apps, Birthday Calendar comes in at number 11; this is an app that we made note of earlier this week; it works by generating calendars with embedded photos of friends, who are then tagged.

Finally, My Top Fans Pro is enjoying fast growth, using the same mechanic as Birthday Calendar; after generating a picture of your top fans, it asks you to publish the photo, which will notify all of those friends simultaneously.