The downside to being one of the most popular mobile apps in the world is that you must be universally accessible to all devices from the lowliest feature phone to the latest Android device.

Facebook said today that it’s overhauling its offerings for more than 2,500 models of feature phones through a partnership with Snaptu. It has launched a new Facebook for Feature Phones app that works on Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG and other manufacturers.

The company says the new app has an easier-to-navigate home screen, syncs contacts and supports fast scrolling of photos and friend updates. More full-featured apps tend to see more usage, so Facebook for Feature Phones could fuel signficant increases in Facebook mobile’s DAU, especially in the developing world.

Facebook is also extending some of the partnerships it initiated last year through Facebook ’0′, a free, low-bandwidth version of the site meant to fuel the company’s growth in developing countries. Fourteen mobile operators from Tunisia to the Ukraine will give their customers free access to Facebook. Carriers typically use these deals to entice new mobile subscribers to upgrade to paid data plans and they usually carry a one-year term.

Snaptu, which specializes in supporting smartphone-like experiences on feature phones, has been growing aggressively on Facebook and boasts 3.4 million monthly active users, according to AppData.

> Originally posted on Inside Mobile Apps.

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 MdotM, Speeddate, King of the Web, Meteor Games, and NaturalMotion.

• Account Manager / Account Executive (Burlingame, CA)
  

• Lead Product Manager/ Director of Product (Millbrea, CA)
  

• Ruby on Rails Software Developer (Seattle, WA)
  

• Game Designer (Beverly Hills, CA)
  

• Digital Marketing Analyst (Oxford, UK)
  

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. 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.

Chatroulette-style Facebook video chat application vChatter has just raised $350,000 from angel investor Dave Kennedy, who co-founded a dating site that would eventually turn into Match.com. The funding will be used to make hires for the app’s development team with the goal of more rapid deployment of new features and efficient scaling, the company tells us.

The funding comes at an interesting time, as despite vChatter’s quick growth over the summer to a MAU peak of over 2.56 million in September, it has since slipped to 1.12 million, according to AppData Pro, our premium application metrics and trends monitor.

The world became enamored with the concept of video chatting with strangers last year, particularly around Chatroulette, but soon grew tired of the shallow interactions and high volume of unsolicited nudity. The eighteen year old founder of that company, which received valuations as high as $40 million at the peak of its popularity, says the massive fluctuation in traffic “was like a movie: Everybody watched it, and then everybody else. Well, now that they’ve all watched it, they’re less interested.”

Though vChatter has integrated features for chatting with specific friends — getting around Chatroulette’s initial interface problems — it is still experiencing a similar decline. Its DAU is now roughly a quarter of its peak in September. The app may be establishing a sustainable user count following the fad, leaving the future uncertain.

Facebook video chat could be a shaky industry, as Facebook could simply integrate video into its popular existing Chat feature, eliminating the need for a third-party app. vChatter will need to distinguish itself with innovative features that can reestablish growth or monetize existing users.

[Image credit: Fast Company]

This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users is a fairly typical mix of games and utilities that nevertheless has a few interesting points to it. Take a look:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Windows Live Messenger	12,276,230	+293,482	+2%
2.	CityVille	18,985,046	+287,118	+2%
3.	Kingdoms of Camelot	900,104	+255,010	+40%
4.	My Photos	483,770	+204,787	+73%
5.	Ravenwood Fair	695,519	+142,613	+26%
6.	Epic Fighters	204,912	+125,768	+159%
7.	購物天堂	147,982	+117,522	+386%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,175,754	+116,218	+2%
9.	Horoscopes	3,399,443	+98,506	+3%
10.	LivingSocial	221,502	+96,564	+77%
11.	FrontierVille	5,789,842	+94,631	+2%
12.	HTC Sense	3,967,713	+86,500	+2%
13.	Facebook Live	118,799	+82,110	+224%
14.	World War	181,418	+76,766	+73%
15.	Bubble Island	959,079	+73,912	+8%
16.	樂業超市	93,299	+64,660	+226%
17.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	94,547	+63,334	+203%
18.	Farmandia	223,795	+56,645	+34%
19.	Günlük Burç Yorumları	91,428	+55,714	+156%
20.	Monster Galaxy	414,411	+54,745	+15%

After six weeks of leading all our DAU gain lists, CityVille has finally been dethroned, by the ever-growing Windows Live Messenger Connect app. CityVille is still growing, but Zynga appears to have cut back on marketing for the game.

Several other large (but not that large) games did relatively well. Kingdoms of Camelot and Ravenwood Fair both picked up significantly, perhaps as a result of increased promotion; both are published by 6waves, which currently has a half-dozen older but growing apps in its fold.

My Photos is the first utility, a daily app that automatically creates wall posts for photos. Despite very low reviews, the app continues to do well — which is fairly typical for apps that focus on wall posting. Horoscopes is similar, but gets much higher reviews and has an enviably high stickiness, or percentage of monthly actives who return on a daily basis.

LivingSocial rounds out the top ten. This app long ago evolved from a basic list of your favorite things to a major group shopping site; but oddly, the app appears to be non-functional at time of writing.

Yahoo! has announced that it will open its network of sites to third-party authentication through Facebook and Google OpenIDs. Users will be able to login or create accounts on the web versions of Flickr, Yahoo! News, and other services with their Facebook or Google account. By becoming an OpenID relying party, Yahoo! has conceded the race to become the premier online identity provider, and settled into its role as a content portal.

The third-party authentication system will ease the new user onboarding process, which could help Yahoo! sites retain visitors sent that way from links shared through Facebook or Gmail. Creating a dedicated Yahoo! account is a lengthy process, requiring users to set up a new email address, add demographic data, establish security questions, and complete a Captcha.

These new speedier alternatives improve the Yahoo! user experience and should increase sign-up rates. Users will still have to use their Yahoo! credentials to interact with desktop clients or mobile versions of Yahoo!’s properties.

When users without an existing account want to comment on a Yahoo! News article, for instance, they’ll be prompted to choose from using Yahoo!, Facebook, or Google to register. Selecting Facebook brings up a Facebook login prompt if they aren’t already signed in. They’re then shown a Request for Permission dialog asking for their basic information, email address, and birthday, followed by a seemingly redundant pre-populated Yahoo! dialog asking them to confirm their name and birthday before being deposited back on the original site. The Google flow is slightly longer, requiring users to manually enter their birthdate.

While Yahoo! remains an OpenID provider, its status as a relying party for registration places it on a second tier of web services beneath Facebook and Google, both of which don’t allow users to create accounts based on third-party credentials. Similar to MySpace’s recent retreat from social networking to entertainment content channel, Yahoo! is refocusing on what it does well by smoothing access to its deep content management features.

This leaves Facebook and Google to compete for the role of defacto internet identity provider. Despite Gmail’s supremacy and the wealth of Google services that integrate identity, it’s Facebook that owns the social graph. The widespread adoption of Facebook Connect and its social plugins, and the importance of their social recommendations to ecommerce and content engagement position Facebook to better control identity on the internet.

[Editor's note: Hussein Fazal is CEO of AdParlor, an ad management company for Facebook campaigns with social gaming clients including Ubisoft, PlayFirst and Five Minutes.]

One of the most frequent questions we are asked is ‘How much will it cost to acquire users for my Facebook game?’ The answer to this question depends on many factors.

A brand new casual game targeting both genders and all ages in Indonesia can pick up tens of thousands of users very quickly, for pennies per user. On the flip side, a poker application with a large existing user base and a laundry-list of permissions, targeting 40-year old American males, can pay several dollars per user. Important background information on the many factors that affect pricing is discussed in our longer white paper – this post instead examines an interesting sub-topic around user acquisition. We dig deep into the rising cost of user acquisition over the length of a campaign, and why this occurs.

On average, for every 100,000 users you attract to your application via Facebook Ads, you can expect your cost of user acquisition to increase by 10%. Before examining why this happens, we’ll first take a closer look at click-through rates (CTR) and how Facebook makes money on a cost-per-click ad campaign.

CTR and its value to Facebook

If you were to bid and be charged $1 per click with a CTR of 0.01%, you then have an effective cost per thousand users, or CPM, of $0.10 to Facebook. For every 1,000 times Facebook shows your ad, they are only making 10 cents.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is just one week away!

Tickets are close to sold out, and we do not expect any to be available at the door. Make sure you get a spot and register today.

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms. This one-day summit features industry leaders from every corner of the social app and game ecosystem. Executives and leaders from Facebook, Google, leading social networks, mobile platforms, social game and app developers, media companies, virtual goods and payment services, and investors will all be there to tackle the most pressing issues facing the industry in 2011.

Register now to join top developers of today and tomorrow at Inside Social Apps.

Who’s Speaking?

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
	Kristian Segerstrale Co-founder and CEO, Playfish (now part of EA)		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	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		Paul Bettner GM, Zynga with Friends
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Dennis Ryan EVP Worldwide Publishing, PopCap Games
	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		Martin Essl Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network		Kim-Mai Cutler Lead Writer, Mobile & Social Applications, Inside Network
	Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network

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 of casual networking.

Register Now

The countdown has begun and Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is just one week away! We’re expecting a full house for the event; to make sure your spot is reserved, please register now.

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

Pages related to games and football appeared on our list of Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages again this week. Our list is compiled by our PageData tool, which counts the number of Likes added to a Page each day. Additionally there were music, TV and movie Pages, as well as the Chuck Worldwide Page, which is the fan Page for Chupa Chups lollipops. Pages needed between 330,600 and 777,700 Likes to make the list this week.

Top Gainers This Week

First on the list was the Chuck Worldwide Page, which as mentioned, is a Page for Chupa Chups lollipops. It appears the Page’s presence on the list this week is mostly due to an official Page consolidation, as on Tuesday there was a spike of more than 770,000 Likes and the Page’s 777,700 Likes added last week pushed the Page past 1 million total fans.

Games’ Pages were also popular on the list this week. Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker made number two on the list with 707,500 new Likes in its 33.2 million arsenal of fans by promoting the game with specials. Number 5 on the list was the Call of Duty: Black Ops Facebook Page, which added 582,100 Likes to pass 4.1 million. This Page has been doing all sorts of promotion, including a landing Page urging visitors to Like the Page, view a video or receive exclusive information by following the game on Facebook. The game is even offering a 20% discount coupon on Facebook and made an event out of the release of additional game-related items.

As mentioned, football (soccer) was also on our list again this week. Real Madrid C.F.’s Page made fourth place after adding 584,400 Likes to its 7.5 million total; although the Page experienced a huge potential Page consolidation on Wednesday, adding 553,600 Likes in one day. The team’s star football player Cristiano Ronaldo also made the list at number 14 with 369,000 new Likes to pass 18 million. Ronaldo’s Page has become increasingly good at fan engagement, for example this week he asked fans to share photos and videos of his most recent game.

Most of the rest of the list consisted of musicians.

The Black Eyed Peas were in third place after gaining 602,000 new fans to pass 10 million; the Page promoted recent award nominations. Rihanna’s Page took sixth place with 530,800 new Likes and a 21.5 million total; she appeared in Vanity Fair magazine this week and was nominated for several awards. Shakira’s Page was number 8 on the list with 472,200 new Likes to total 18.6 million; she’s touring and has been nominated for music awards as well.

Eminem’s Page took tenth place after adding 433,300 new Likes to add to 25.8 million. Linkin Park added 401,500 to take eleventh place and come in just under 21 million total fans. The band has been doing interesting promotions for its new tour, including a landing page advertising free downloads, tour tickets and their latest single. Michael Jackson’s Page was next at 12 with 371,800 new Likes to move past 27 million fans. Akon’s Page was at number 15 after the addition of 362,400 new Likes; the Page now sports 15.1 million Likes after he launched an iPhone app and a Lamborghini giveaway.

Pop star Justin Bieber’s Page was at number 16 after adding 358,100 Likes to bring his new total to 18.5 million; he was in Vanity Fair magazine recently and is always good about engaging fans on Facebook to promote his music. Lady Gaga was eighteenth with 345,600 new Likes and 26.5 million total; she announced a new line of products with Polaroid, was nominated for awards and has been promoting her upcoming album. Finally, Katy Perry was nineteenth with 331,600 Likes to get to just about 17 million fans; she’s been nominated for awards and just wrapped a video fan contest, announcing the winner on Facebook.

Movies and TV otherwise occupied the list.

The “Harry Potter” Page took seventh place with 489,000 new Likes, 15.4 million total and a promotion for its merchandise. The “Shrek” Page took ninth place with 470,300 new Likes, 6.8 million total and a $5 coupon promotion for fans for the latest film release to celebrate the 6 millionth fan mark. “The Simpsons” took thirteenth place after adding 369,800 Likes to get to 18.6 million by promoting its guest stars and upcoming episodes. The “Avatar” Page made number 17 with 348,000 new Likes to reach 5.8 million. Finally, MTV’s Page made it to 20 with 330,600 Likes added, taking the Page to 14.1 million total. MTV usually promotes its own content, this week the network’s new show, “Skins,” is especially prominent.

Following intense backlash from the press, Facebook has temporarily disabled the newly added ability for users to share their mobile phone number and address with applications and third-party websites. We praised Facebook for boldly facilitating innovation but we also advised that users be more clearly warned when permitting access to such sensitive information — through a separate prompt in the interface, for example. Now Facebook is doing the right thing, saying it will reenable the feature in a few weeks once it can make “changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so.”

In the announcement posted to the Facebook Developers Blog, Douglas Purdy, Director of Developer Relations, cited some of the same potential uses for the new permissions as we did, namely accelerating e-commerce checkout and powering apps which provide real-time updates about deals. Users will greatly benefit from these functionalities, but they could also be made victims by apps that quietly request their contact data only to spam them or sell their personal information.

Facebook didn’t provide details on how it will change the sharing process to reduce the risk of abuse. We suspect it will add a separate step to the permissions flow for especially sensitive data. Two others options would be to make these permissions more prominent by moving them to the top the list in the requests dialogue in colored or bolded text (mocked up below), or to add a roadblock such as a time delay or checkbox. It will take clever design to effectively slow down and inform users without so encumbering them that they might as well input the data by hand.

Facebook appears ready to challenge the notion that it is unresponsive and careless about  the well being of its users. Instead of waiting a month to issue a response to well-founded criticism, as it did during its first PR crisis over Beacon in 2007, Facebook only took three days. It has done the same recently with rapid responses to feedback on API migrations that could break apps and home page changes that hurt user retention for social games. If it can solve the problem of educating users on when to share contact info and with who, a new generation of apps and integrations will flourish thanks to this data.

Facebook is using a new “Which city do you live in?” sidebar module to prompt users to list more personal information in their profile. The module suggests a city based on a user’s other data and connections, and allows them to add that city to their profile with a single click. Current city is one of the most valuable pieces of data to advertisers because permits location-specific ad targeting. Since Facebook sell access to this data in an anonymized form, pushing users to list their current city assists Facebook’s monetization efforts.

The current city ad targeting parameter is Facebook’s biggest money maker. It’s crucial to ads run extensively by restaurants, contractors, and group deals providers like Groupon that make up a significant portion the performance ad revenues that fund the company. The more data points and the higher the accuracy of this information, the more advertisers who will shift spend to Facebook in order to target these users and the more Facebook can charge them.

Users who haven’t listed their curent city in their profile may see the right sidebar module while browsing areas of the site such as Events. The module suggests a possible city and shows a link and picture of its community Page, as well as either a friend who lives there or the number of people who Like that Page. The suggestions appear to be inferred from the cities of a user’s friends, and the location of their school, work place, and home town if they’ve provided that information.

Users can click “I live here” to instantly add the suggested city to their profile without leaving the currently viewed page, or click “Choose another city” to go to the profile editor and select manually. If a user clicks the ‘x’ button, the module disappears.

The December profile redesign also goaded users to list additional personal information, but in a more natural way. Providing this information improves the Facebook experience for users because potential friends can find them more easily, and the ads they see will be more relevant. Still, the direct appeal is clearly in the interest of Facebook’s bottom line. Users may be less inclined to add information if they realize the motive behind the request, and Facebook might therefore want to be more subtle.

[Thanks to Brittany Darwell for the tip.]