The recently released version of Facebook’s Comments Box social plugin for third-party websites now accepts AOL accounts for login. Initially the plugin only allowed Facebook and Yahoo! for login, though we discovered there was live code for Twitter and Google logins present but inactive.

The additional login option will make the Comments Box accessible to a larger user base, but some might say that AOL’s willingness to be a login option is a signal that is has accepted its fate as a second-tier identity provider.

It appears that Facebook is reaching Comments Box login agreements with sites who have reciprocated by allowing Facebook as a login option on their sites or services. AOL allows users to sign in to it’s AIM instant messaging and some other service  with Facebook, and Yahoo! recently enabled Facebook as a login and account registration option across its properties.

The Comments Box has brought up a difficult question for the web’s largest services and social networks. By refusing to be a Comments Box login option, they force their users to employ another service provider’s credential in order to comment, but they in turn don’t have to permit Facebook as a login option. This allows them to own the registration information of anyone benefiting from their services.

On the other hand, by agreeing to Facebook’s terms and becoming a Comments Box login option, their users won’t have to choose another’s service credentials, but they usually must permit Facebook to colonize their site with its own login buttons.

Facebook is winning the identity game, and Yahoo! and AOL both now seem to have folded. The question remains whether Google or Twitter will concede to Facebook’s terms, work out a more evenhanded deal, or if they’ll continue to stay autonomous and try to themselves become the premier online ID.

[Thanks to David Sanger for the tip.]

Facebook is a testing a “Discover New Games” sidebar module that shows several of a user’s friends who play a specific game. This new, free discovery channel could make up for some of the lost virality that resulted from Facebook closing several viral channels this year. Therefore, it could potentially help to slightly reduce the reliance of developers on marketing spend to grow their games.

The module displays the names and faces of the viewer’s friends who play a game the viewer has yet to install. The name of the game, its thumbnail icon, and a “Play Now” link appear below the facepile. When users see this implicit social recommendation by friends, they assume their must be some entertainment value in the displayed game, and may choose to click and install it.

Modules have been displayed in Facebook’s right sidebar since as early as 2008, showing “People You May Know” to help users find new friends. Recently, the site began urging users to complete the demographic information in their profile with a “Which city do you live in?” module. Facebook has shown third-party content in the form of official Pages via the the “Recommended Pages” module, but now game developers can also benefit from the modules.

Developers have been requesting additional viral, communication, and discovery channels from Facebook since it has taken other steps to limit the organic viral growth of applications over the last year. Previously when a gamer published a story about an in-game occurence, such as winning a virtual good or leveling up, it could be seen by all their friends, generating fresh leads to the game. But in September Facebook changed the news feed to only show these stories to a user’s friends who already play that game, limiting their worth to re-engaging users, not scoring new ones.

Facebook has since began publishing “Discovery” news feed stories when a user first installs a game, and now offers featured placement in the Games Dashboard as an incentive to developers who use Facebook Credits as their exclusive payment platform. Discover New Games won’t fully restore organic growth rates, but will augment other viral and marketing efforts of developers. The module will also reveal to non-gamers that more of their friends are gamers than they might have thought, legitimizing game play.

Facebook bought ten companies last year, and told us to expect more this year — and today it is putting itself in a better position to execute on that plan, by hiring Google veteran Amid Zoufonoun.

Having been at Google since 2003, Zoufonoun has led major acquisitions including On2, Grandcentral (Google Voice), Metaweb, Widevine, Feedburner, and Simplify Media, according to his LinkedIn profile.

His title will continue to be director of corporate development once he starts at Facebook next week. He’ll report to Vaughan Smith, who oversees all of Facebook’s corporate development efforts, Facebook has confirmed with us, and will be overseeing all mergers and acquisitions, according to Reuters.

To date, Facebook has largely bought companies for the teams, moving people to other projects and either shuttering the existing products or putting them on life support (as was the case with FriendFeed). With its latest acquisition, mobile messaging service Beluga, last week, Facebook said it would also be using the technology.

Going forward, especially given the attractiveness of its equity and the amount of cash it has on hand, Facebook may choose to go after larger, more product-focused deals. For example, some reports have in recent months named Facebook as a possible acquirer of Twitter (a company which itself has hundreds of employees and is valued in the billions).

[Image via LinkedIn.]

Sweepstakes were an especially common feature in our roundup of Facebook campaigns this week, especially user-generated content sweepstakes. Kool-Aid is running a sweepstakes for consumer electronics, Ford’s electric vehicles division is asking people to identify with their green values, Jackson Hewitt wants people to talk about winning with their tax returns in video form and 5 Gum is using Facebook Connect to promote its new flavors and Coachella partnership.

We’ve excerpted two campaigns below. You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of dozens of other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Kool-Aid Win Back Family Night Sweepstakes

Goal: Page Growth, Network Exposure, Product Purchase, Email Marketing, Engagement

Core Mechanic: Ongoing daily sweepstakes to win electronics.

Method: Kool-Aid’s Win Back Family Night sweepstakes runs February 26 through June 17 and allows fans that Like the Kool-Aid Page to enter to win a series of prizes daily. After Liking the Page users are asked to enter an email, then address, to see if they’ve won; after doing so the sweepstakes apps automatically tells you if you’re a winner. Even if you don’t win one of the daily prizes of a Panasonic Blu-ray disc player, you are still entered to win a weekly grand prize of a Panasonic HDTV, Panasonic home theatre system or disc player. Finally, after entering the user may either share the contest to the stream or print out a 50 cent off coupon for Kool-Aid packets. Users may enter to win daily.

Impact: The Page has more than 734,500 Likes and seems to be popular; when the sweepstakes is mentioned on the Page there are hundreds of Likes and dozens of comments.

Jackson Hewitt’s The Big Check Contest

Goal: Network Exposure, Engagement, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: Jackson Hewitt income tax preparers are sponsoring a user-generated media contest, The Big Check, asking users to generate videos about how customers can win with the company. Then Facebook users vote on the top 20 videos and Jackson Hewitt selects the final winner on tax day, April 18.

Method: We’ve written previously about the drawbacks of user-generated video contests. The upshot is that these types of contests require a lot on the part of users, and the Jackson Hewitt contest is no exception. Essentially the contest runs from February 25 to April 15; at stake are two checks for $10,000, one for the winner and one for a friend the winner selects. Users generate videos that feature a “Win Win” Jackson Hewitt flyer that users print out via the app and then ask their network to vote for their video. The videos are short, 3-20 seconds.

Impact: The Big Check Page has about 6,800 fans, but Jackson Hewitt made this contest Page separate from its own Page, which only has about 5,300 Likes. So, Jackson Hewitt won’t be able to reap the benefits of these 6,800 fans once the contest is over on its own Page. Thus far there are only 10 entries.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of dozens of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

There were some interesting new viral features on some of the applications on our list this week. The top 20 growing Facebook apps by monthly active users this week included dating apps Badoo and Cupid, several horoscope apps, birthday cards, BandPage, IQ quizzes, profile banner apps and a few Asian language apps. Our list is compiled using AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook, and covers apps that grew the most in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Badoo	48,295,392	+5,537,846	+13%
2.	Daily Horoscope	3,538,151	+2,147,131	+154%
3.	Monopoly Millionaires	2,947,018	+1,184,888	+67%
4.	Profile Top Banner	1,354,855	+1,019,246	+304%
5.	Zuma Blitz	5,736,951	+819,988	+17%
6.	Games	7,489,455	+745,355	+11%
7.	Daily Horoscope	2,658,603	+637,451	+32%
8.	Birthday Cards	7,869,595	+578,752	+8%
9.	BandPage by RootMusic	19,266,766	+478,564	+3%
10.	Ravenwood Fair	11,696,620	+466,335	+4%
11.	การวิเคราะห์สมอง	486,287	+463,086	+1,996%
12.	Cupid	2,688,214	+451,957	+20%
13.	Gourmet Ranch	1,824,271	+407,061	+29%
14.	德州撲克(中文版)	4,009,186	+391,521	+11%
15.	Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game	601,744	+373,874	+164%
16.	Intelligent Elite	3,061,762	+371,135	+14%
17.	Diner Dash	2,237,996	+342,529	+18%
18.	Profilbanner auf Deutsch	3,331,623	+340,423	+11%
19.	My Friend Map	796,032	+291,811	+58%
20.	開心探寶	336,906	+280,239	+495%

Badoo continued the huge growth we’ve been seeing in the app since December this week by adding a whopping 5.5 million MAU, mostly from Mexico, France and Italy. Cupid, another Facebook dating app, is still far behind with only 452,000 MAU this week, but seems to be taking a cue from Badoo by incorporating the embarassing questions quizzes that Badoo has used to huge success. Basically, the app asks you strange questions about your Facebook friends, you click yes or no, and is actually quite engaging. You have the option with Cupid to publish your answer to a friend’s Wall.

Two apps on the list are called Daily Horoscope. One Daily Horoscope came in second place with 2.1 million MAU this week and growth in the U.S., Philippines and France. This app asks you upon delivering your horoscope if you would like to have it delivered daily to your Wall, exponentially increasing the viral potential. The other Daily Horscope was seventh and saw 637,500 MAU this week; it allows you to see your horoscope, share it to your Wall, and then suggests you send it to all your friends with the same sign.

Birthday Cards grew in the U.S., Indonesia and Canada to a total of 578,800 MAU this week; the app tells you which friends are currently having birthdays and you can send one card to dozens of people at one time. BandPage by RootMusic continued to grow, seeing 478,600 MAU this week, just after the company received an influx of cash.

There were two intelligence quizzes. The Thai การวิเคราะห์สมอง claims to analyze friends’ brains and added 463,100 MAU; the app posts photos to your stream and tags your friends after you use it. Then, Intelligent Elite which grew by 371,100 MAU, has an interesting viral feature we’ve written about. The app forces you to tag about 20 people before you finish it, posting a story to the stream every time.

Profile banners were also on the list, as they have been recently. Profile Top Banner saw more than 1 million MAU this week. Profilbanner auf Deutsch saw 340,400. Both do the same thing, publishing photo albums to your stream while displaying them as your profile banner. My Friend map, which saw 291,800 MAU this week, also publishes an album with a photo of a map of your Facebook friend network. Finally, two Asian language apps were on the list. Japanese 開心探寶 (treasure game) saw 280,200 MAU and 德州撲克(中文版) (Chinese Texas Hold’em poker) saw 391,500 MAU. The appearance of these apps hints at Asian growth which Facebook has been focusing on especially the past few months.

Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network.

Inside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms, and virtual goods.

Monday, March 7th, 2011

• Gameloft Will Cut Dungeon Hunter II’s Price Based on Facebook, Twitter Votes
• iOS Trading-Card Game Shadow Era Racks Up 200,000 Players

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

• Gameview’s Free-to-Play Pioneer Tap Fish Surpasses 10 Million Downloads
• How a Washing Machine Led to a Top Free iPad App — Chrome Gekko’s Bowmaster HD

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

• Puzzles Reach the Stars in Vishindo’s Collision Effect on iOS
• How Is VC Money Set to Change the Mobile Gaming Landscape?
• OpenFeint Partners With The9 to Bring Game Developers to China, Android

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

• With Angry Birds-Maker Rovio’s $42 Million Round, The Race Is On To Build a Durable Mobile Gaming Empire
• New Hires in Mobile: Big Fish Games, EA Mobile, Gameloft & More
• Z2Live’s TradeNations Surpasses 200 Million Game Sessions in Four Months
• Another Social Gaming Title Makes The Mobile Leap: CrowdStar’s It Girl Comes to iOS

Friday, March 11h, 2011

• Q&A: Accel’s Rich Wong on the Firms Big Bet With Angry Birds
• Developers Say Apple’s New In-App Purchases Rules Probably Won’t Hurt Them Too Much
• Mobile App Roundup: iPad 2, Scoreloop, Flash & More

Inside Social Games

Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, March 7th, 2011

• Nexon Enters Social Games Market With Classics MapleStory and KartRider
• EA Has a Monopoly on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• EA to Launch Dragon Age Legends Simultaneously on Facebook, HTML5 Mobile
• Playdom’s Deep Realms Brings Classic RPG Play to Facebook

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

• DDTank: A Worms-Style Facebook-Integrated MMOG
• The Red Ocean of Social Games
• Can Dragon Age Legends Hook Core Gamers With Console Tie-Ins?
• Interview: Majesco’s Jesse Sutton and Matt McEnerney on Parking Wars 2 and Facebook

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

• Monopoly, Mafias, and Sororities Lead This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• How Long Will the Greenfield Days of Mobile Apps Last?
• Following MySpace Traffic Falls, Some Top Developers Shut Down Games
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Jagex, NaturalMotion, Funcom, & More

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

• Facebook Ads — Analyzing English-Speaking User Acquisition for Game Developers
• New Hires in Social Gaming: Digital Chocolate, GSN, Kabam, & More
• Blast Away Opponents in Top-Down Shooter Twilight Wars on Facebook
• With GunShine, SuperCell Looks to Create a More Social MMOG Off the Facebook Canvas

Friday, March 11h, 2011

• Galaxy Online II Leads This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• IMVU Games Taking Advantage of Strong Growth
• Zynga Looks to Keep FarmVille Flying High With English Countryside Expansion
• Zynga Reveals FrontierVille Same-Ses Marriage Rate and the Value of Sexual Innuendo
• Social Gaming Roundup: Trademarks, Poker, Sega, & More
• Inside Network Speaking in Austin at SXSW Next Week

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

• A Reason Why Facebook Viral Channels Could Make a Comeback in 2011

Monday, March 7th, 2011

• Cupid, Badoo, IQ, Horoscope, Music and More on the Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Old Navy, Carrabba’s, Malaysia Airlines, Chobani Yogurt and Solmar Hotels and Resorts
• Facebook Comments Box Plugin Includes Live Code for Google and Twitter Logins
• Wildfire’s IFrames for Pages Facebook App Makes Creating Welcome Tabs Easy
• Platform Update: Breaking Migration to POST for Canvas, Beta Javascript SDK, Test Accounts

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

• Facemoods: A Growing Facebook Chat Client
• Facebook Helps Sell Digital Media with Credits: Challenge and Opportunities
• Facebook Adds Websites, Social Plugins, and Demographic Analytics to Insights
• Facebook Tests Replacing Keyword Ad Targeting With Broad Category Targeting

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

• Badoo, Video, Luck, Mobile and Connect on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• Insto.re Lets Local Businesses Offer Instant Rewards for Facebook Likes
• Facebook Videos Moved to the Profile’s Photo Tab
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: Digital Chocolate, Arkadium, Diversion, & More
• Reminder: Deprecation of FMBL Page Apps and POST for Canvas Deadlines Approach

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

• ReverbNation Adds Like-Gating to My Band Facebook App, Renames It Band Profile
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Credits, Advertising, Engineering, EMEA, Sales and More
• Facebook Careers Postings: Mobile, Singapore, Engineering and More
• Facebook’s New Social Safety Features Lets Users Confront Bullies, Ask Friends for Help
• Facebook’s Traffic, Advertising, and Trends by the Numbers — at Inside Facebook Gold, March 2011 Edition
• Facebook Adds Places Check-Ins and Deal Claims to Page Insights

Friday, March 11h, 2011

• Photo, iPad, Video, Mobile and Profile Banner in This Week’s Emerging Facebook Apps
• Worldwide Gains, Possible US Traffic Slowdown for Facebook in January 2011
• Facebook Expands @ Mention Tagging to Commentss
• Facebook Roundup: Skype, Al Jazeera, Video, Mobile, Fusion-io, Music, LinkedIn, Death and More
• Inside Network Speaking in Austin at SXSW Next Week

Two Inside Network staffers will be speaking at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas this coming week.

Josh Constine, lead writer on Inside Facebook, will be moderating a panel of Facebook platform developers discussing the value of Facebook fans. Kim-Mai Cutler, lead writer on Inside Mobile Apps, will be giving a presentation examining the tension between scale and authority in the media business today, with implications for how companies monetize (or fail to monetize). The presentation is based on an article that she wrote for The Quora Review last month.

Value of a Facebook Fan: Does it Matter?

A lot of buzz has been circulating around the value of Facebook fans. Different dollar values have been assigned, based on different research methods. Rather than debate which approach is more accurate, this panel will dig down to the root of this issue – why are brands so eager to assign a monetary value to fans? Will this become a measurement standard for marketers? What factors are really the most important in determining the value that businesses get from being on Facebook?

Josh Constine
Lead Writer
Inside Facebook

Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
VP Mktg
Involver

Melissa Parrish
Analyst
Forrester Research

Michael Scissons
Pres/CEO
Syncapse

Paul Ollinger
RVP
Facebook

Time
Monday March 14
11:00AM

Venue
Hyatt
TX Ballroom 1
208 Barton Springs Rd

Iterate or Die: How Media Businesses Must Adapt

In the past 15 years, the media and technology worlds have practically switched places. Tech companies have gone from needing to be 50,000+ employee behemoths to being teams of two guys that can ship products 1 million people love and that can change the world. All-powerful news organizations that used to support globe-trotting foreign correspondents reporting on human rights are now teams of 8-10 bloggers who must be glued to their computer screens at all times for a whiff or tweet of breaking news. Companies that leverage the content their users create like Facebook, Quora, Instagram and Twitter are getting better and better every year, while thinning profit margins are undermining the ability of paid media professionals to produce quality work. How should for-profit media companies evolve in an era when the audience has taken over the controls? What are the business models that media companies are using today and how are they changing? Which approach will you take?

Time
Tuesday March 15
3:30PM

Venue
Sheraton
Creekside
701 East 11th St

Facebook, Skype Rumored to be in Talks – There’s a rumor going around that Skype and Facebook are going to partner to allow users to make calls within Facebook.

Al Jazeera Show Will Script From Facebook – A new show on the Al Jazeera English network, “The Stream,” is set to take its content cues from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube streams, rather than its own script.

Justin.tv’s Socialcam Mobile App Shares Video – Justin.tv launched a mobile app called Socialcam to allow users to share videos from their iPhones and Android devices. Users will be able to log into Facebook and share videos via Facebook, as well as other social networks.

Fusion-io’s IPO Helped by Facebook – Fusion-io, a company that uses flash memory to speed up data storage has filed by an IPO, helped in part by the fact that Facebook is a big customer. According to AllThingsD, 80% of Facebook’s Prineville, Ore. data center hardware runs Fusion-io technology, the same will be true of the Rutherford facility in North Carolina.

RootMusic Raises $800K – RootMusic raised $800,000 this week, taking total funding to $3.1 million. Now the company is set to further develop its app to make RootMusic synonymous with music on the Facebook platform.

A Quarter of LinkedIn Friends are on Facebook – A study by MyWebCareer found that 23% of LinkedIn connections are also on Facebook, making it difficult to keep professional and personal lives separate.

BackType Raises $1M - BackType, which offers a free social media analytics dashboard, raises more than $1 million from True Ventures, K9 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Lowercase Capital, 500 Startups, Founder Collective, Raymond Tonsing and more, according to TechCrunch. The company previously raised $315,000.

Path Photo App Integrates Facebook – Path, an iPhone photo app, has integrated Facebook sharing, along with other features.

PunchTab Releases Mobile App, SolidPunch – PunchTab released an iPhone app, SolidPunch, which allows users to reward Facebook friends for the favors they do for you. The app uses Facebook Connect and allows users to “punch” a virtual ticket of sorts, once the friend does 6 favors, users may send friends a free PunchTab coupon. [Image via TechCrunch]

Context Optional, Websense Partner for Security – Context Optional and Websense have partnered to provide security services for Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite. Websense’s Defensio product can help guard against socially engineered attacks.

Vain Women Have Bigger Facebook Networks – A study by Michael A. Stefanone in the journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking found that women who base a lot of self-worth on their appearance share more photos online and have larger social networks. Facebook, then, becomes a platform for them to compete with other women for attention. There’s a video in which he explains.

Live On Facebook After You Die - An app from Israeli startup Willook, If I Die, allows users to create a video or text message to be published to your Wall after you die. The app works by asking users to select three friends from Facebook to confirm your death, if they all do, the message will publish.

Facebook users can now tag their friends, Pages, apps, Groups, and Events in comments to news feed stories and wall posts to create linked mentions. This will help users carry on conversations with other commenters and allow them to easily reference different entities on Facebook.

In September 2009, users gained the ability to mention friends and other Facebook pages in their status updates and wall posts by typing an “@” symbol followed by the first letters of a name and then selecting from a drop-down menu.

Later Facebook began showing tag suggestions whenever a user capitalized a letter in an update or post, but later removed the feature since it interrupted users who weren’t actually trying to tag anything.

Now users can type an “@” symbol to initiate the tag drop-down menu in comments. Until this release, some users had taken to manually typing @[first name] without it properly linking in order to create unofficial mentions in comments.

When a user is tagged, they’ll receive an notification stating that a friend “mentioned you in a comment.”

The new comment mentions also create new opportunity for Pages. Admins can “Use Facebook as Page” and publish comments that mention themselves on the posts of other Pages in order to attract people to their Page. Since Facebook’s spam filters sometimes hide comments that include URLs, the ability to mention Pages will make sure these types of links are seen.

The update should encourage users to have longer conversations inside the comments reels of posts. Since the comments generate notifications for everyone involved in the thread, not just those mentioned, longer conversations lead to more return visits and greater engagement.

Update 3/12/2011: We’ve noticed that users can not untag themselves when tagged in comments, whereas they can untag themselves from tagged news feed or wall posts. This means the @ mentions could be abused to associate a user with content they might object to.

[Thanks to Brandglue and Kobi Gamliel for the tip]