Today, Facebook officially launched “Facebook for Every Phone”, a downloadable native mobile app compatible with 2500 different feature phones. The app is a rebranding and improvement on the “Facebook for Feature Phones” app Facebook built with Snaptu before it acquired that company in March. The app brings a smartphone-like experience to less advanced handsets, and includes the ability to upload photos and pull a phone’s contacts into the Facebook Friend Finder.

The app will help users of older phone models, including many in the developing world, gain access to more Facebook features. To make sure users get hooked on this deeper experience, Facebook has collaborated with 20 international carriers to offer 90 days of free data access to the app.

We’ve been tracking Snaptu’s Facebook feature phone app since June 2009, and have watched it climb to 1.76 million daily active users, just down from its peak of 1.89 million DAU last month. In an effort to improve its offering for feature phones, Facebook partnered with Israeli Snaptu in January 2011 and offered 90 days of free access to Facebook for Feature Phones from several East Asian and Central European carriers.

Seeing international mobile usage as key to continued growth, Facebook acquired Snaptu in March. Some estimated the purchase price between $40 and $70 million, which may have made it Facebook’s largest acquisition to date.

Now Facebook has renamed the app Facebook for Every Phone, added new features, and made deals for temporary free access from 20 more carriers including several from countries with fast-growing Facebook populations such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The app was specially designed to require less data transfer than mobile sites or Java apps, so low costs should encourage users to pay for access after the free trial expires.

Users can download the app by visiting m.facebook.com, scrolling all the way to the bottom of the news feed, and following the download link. Facebook for Every Phone is also available in popular feature phone app stores such as GetJar, Appia, and Mobile Weaver. Users can also download it directly from d.facebook.com/install. Even before the formal launch, users were already actively downloading it, with Facebook for Every Phone already hosting 744,000 DAU as of yesterday.

Some features that appear to be new include the ability to upload photos from one’s hand set. This will drive use of the Photos product in developing countries where users may not have separate digital cameras or web connection to upload photos from. With more photos from friends available for browsing, usage of Facebook in these areas should also increase.

Facebook will also be able boost user growth and interconnection thanks to Facebook for Every Phone’s ability to import a user’s phone’s contacts into its Friend Finder. This will allow Facebook to suggest friends for users, and get them to send site invites to their contacts that don’t have accounts yet. When users except these invites, Facebook can provide them with recommendations of people to friend. This guides these users get over the initial on-boarding hump and fills their news feed with compelling content that helps Facebook retain them.

Along with Facebook’s permanently free mobile site 0.facebook.com, Facebook for Every Phone will bring the social network closer to ubiquity on mobile devices. Though Facebook doesn’t currently monetize its mobile users directly, they create content that drive time-on-site and therefore ad impressions on the web interface. By getting users outside the first-world invested in the site by helping them upload photos and find friends, Facebook can convert to them to monetizable web users once computers and web access become more widely available and affordable.

The 2011 Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey released today showed that 55.3% of companies now use Facebook for recruiting, up just 0.7% since 2010. This indicates that the recent proliferation of social recruiting tools has not changed perceptions of the purpose of Facebook or led to a significant increase in recruiting there — or, at least not yet. 86.6% of businesses now say they recruit on LinkedIn, up 8.3 points, while 46.6% use Twitter, up only 1.8% since 2010.

The June survey of over 800 US-based human resources and recruitment professionals suggests that interest in recruitment on general interest social networks has been lagging the growth of the networks themselves. It’s not exactly clear how these professionals were chosen though, so there could be some bias.

The data contradicts the swell in social recruiting products that were launched or enhanced this year. Professional networking Facebook app BranchOut began to gain traction, spiking to 250,000 daily active users. The app will launch a premium enterprise recruiting solution on August 1st. Job referral networking app Pursuit launched, and its founder were promptly hired away by Facebook. Identified has begun work acquiring users to build a recruiter searchable database, and Monster.com launched a professional networking app where recruiters can post job openings.

Jobvite itself has continued refining its social distribution system for job listings. It also offers a tab app that companies can host on their Pages to solicit applications, similar to the Work For Us app from Work4 Labs.

Despite all these options, interest in recruiting on Facebook has been unable to surpass 59% that Jobvite’s survey showed in 2009. That peak came after a massive 23% jump up from 36% in 2008, which may have been caused by Facebook’s own massive growth that year leading companies to overestimate it’s effectiveness. However, given time to build a user base and become more attractive to recruiters, professional networking Facebook apps could boost interest in Facebook recruiting over the next year.

Only 55% of companies plan to increase their spending on social recruiting this year, though that’s much higher than the just 16% that plan on increasing spending on job boards. Increased interest in LinkedIn pushed the percentage of companies that have hired from social network recruiting up 6 points to 64% this year. LinkedIn also helped grow the total percentage of companies surveyed that plan on using social media for recruitment this year to 88.9%.

Some other key stats from Jobvite’s survey include:

• 64% of surveyed companies use at least two networks in their recruiting efforts, and 40% use three or more.
• Over the last six months 73% of all social hires came from LinkedIn, 20% from Facebook and 7% from Twitter
• Over the last six month, LinkedIn users received 52% of all social job referrals, while Facebook and Twitter each received 24%.
• Among companies anticipating increased hiring this year, 95% currently use or plan to use social recruiting.

The social recruiting applications we’ve profiled this year have great potential to increase recruiting efficiency and help companies find qualified and passionate employees. Jobvite Source makes it easy for recruiters to distribute trackable job opening links to the networks of their employees. Work For Us converts a Facebook Page’s fan into potential hires by showing them opening that match their profession and location. These companies have value to provide, so they may need to step up their marketing efforts to court the huge percentage of companies that aren’t recruiting on Facebook yet.

Companies on our list of hires this week brought on project and community managers, sales associates, interns and engineers. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into next week’s post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Buddy Media

• Paul Miller, Project Manager - previously a Marketing Manager at Recyclebank.

Context Optional (part of Efficient Frontier)

• Rebecca Moring, Community Geniuses Manager – formerly a Social Media Consultant at The Medicine Chest.

Efficient Frontier

• Richard Garrod, Associate Business Analyst – previously an Associate Account Manager at Efficient Frontier.
• Sara Nasser, Account Management Intern.

Syncapse

• David Capilla, PHP Software Engineer - formerly did similar work at unit9.

TBG Digital

• Jamie Thompson, Middleweight Designer - previously a designer at glue Isobar.

Wildfire

• Eamonn MacConville, Sales Associate – formerly a Manager at Brimm’s Catering.
• Stefanie Sutton, Project Coordinator – previously an Intern at Ambata Capital Partners.
• Zack Moy, Sales Associate – formerly a supervisor at the Northwestern Office of Alumni Relations.

Vitrue

• Danielle Grau, Product Manager - previously a Mechanical Engineer II at BAE Systems.

Katango is a simple mobile group messaging app built on technology with huge potential. The first Kleiner Perkins sFund investment, Katango’s debut is an eponymous iPhone app that lets users send email, private Facebook wall posts and in-app messages to lists of friend that it automatically that it automatically assembles. It’s this last part that’s so important.

Based on data about a user’s interconnectedness with their friends, Katango instantly and accurately builds what Facebook calls friend lists and Google+ calls Circles. When the company showed me a prototype web interface in early June, it allowed users to export these groups as Facebook friend lists.

Without the ability to send SMS to message recipients that haven’t download the app, it will be hard to compete in mobile messaging with GroupMe and Beluga. However, the algorithm that automatically create friend lists could be be a deciding factor in the battle between Facebook, Google and others for social network supremacy.

Kleiner Perkins invested $5 million of its $250 million social fund into Katango when it was still called Cafebots. The team includes two Stanford PhD graudates who studied artificial intelligence, a Stanford computer science professor, and Yee Lee, who worked on product for PayPal and Slide. After more than six months of work, the team produced the friend sorting algorithm, and is now releasing its first product.

When users first open the app, they’re required to login with Facebook. The app then takes a little time crunching their friendship data before revealing their freshly minted friend groups that cluster together sets of friends such as closest friends, graduating high school class, family, and coworkers. I was amazed by how accurate it was. It picked out 18 of my different friend groups including a set from my time studying a different college, and the people met on a recent trip abroad. The groups rarely had more than a few omissions or wrongful admissions.

Each group displays a facepile of its members, and is titled with the first names of members. Unfortunately the app doesn’t show groups of people you frequently interact with at the top, or move those you actually message to the top either.

Users can go into a group and name it whatever they want and refine it by adding additional friends from Facebook or their phone’s contacts and removing any that were mistakenly included. They can then send messages and photos which friends will receive via email, in-app message, or Facebook wall post that is only visible to those in the conversation.

The app would only really be useful if you spent a lot of time wall posting and emailing content to multiple friends from your mobile device, which few do. Luckily, the company tells me it is planning to build a platform for integrating its technology into third-party products. The question is whether that includes Facebook and Google. If users of those networks could use Katango’s algorithm to build then export their friend groups, they wouldn’t necessarily need to come back.

Katango holds the key to Google+’s big problem of getting its users to categorize their friends into Circle before being able to share with them. With its new competitor focusing on selective sharing, friend lists are becoming a much bigger issue for Facebook as well. Right now only 5% of users create friend lists, and the rest of Facebook 712 million users could certainly benefit from having them. If Facebook could create friend lists accurately and automatically, it could get users to share more frequently, and control their privacy settings more easily.

Facebook should be looking to release an improvement to friend lists before Google+ shows its potential. If it had technology like Katango’s now, it might be able to stop Google+ in its tracks. Build, partner, or acquire — Facebook will need to do one because while Katango is just a mobile group messaging app today, automated friend list creation is vital to the social network’s future.

After a botched first attempt at social that caused some users to become logged into the wrong accounts, Hulu has relaunched its Facebook integration. It allows users to post timed comments and syndicate them to Facebook, and see what friends are watching and commenting on while browsing programs or a special Hulu news feed.

Hulu is betting the social content will lead to more usage, so it’s giving users a free month of Hulu Plus, normally $7.99, for signing in with Facebook. However, it will need to make privacy settings more accessible to provide both a better user experience, avoid spamming Facebook, and protect itself from backlash.

The initial Facebook integration that Hulu pushed on July 1st had to be disabled because an error caused users trying to merge their new Facebook Hulu account with their pre-existing Hulu account to become logged into the accounts of other users. Hulu claimed responsibility for the issue, absolving Facebook, and said that no sensitive user data was leaked. Still it error may have made some users weary of signing in with Facebook, making the incentive it also offered alongside the initial integration even more important.

Social Features, Privacy Issues

Now, Hulu has relaunched the Facebook integration. When users visit the home page, they’ll see a roadblock popup about “Hulu. Now With Friends.” Those who choose to login with Facebook Connect are emailed info about redeeming their one month of Hulu Plus. If users don’t already have a Hulu account, they can quickly set up the remaining details not available through Connect and select their privacy setting for who can see what they’ve watched.

However, if users have a pre-existing account and merge it with their new account, they’re not prompted to reset their privacy setting. This could raise privacy concerns because selecting to share what one watches with friends meant something very different when that only included your specific Hulu friends, of which users probably had few, compared to now when that info could be exposed to hundreds of Facebook friends.

Once set up, users will see content from Facebook friends on their home page’s friend activity feed. This shows what friends are watching and commenting on, and allows them to add their own replies to these activity stories. Hulu could have gone a step further and converted a user’s Facebook Likes into favorites, which would feed more data into its recommendation engine and relieve users from having the select favorites manually.

While watching shows, users can see which of their friends have watched that show too. Similar to Soundcloud, users can leave timed comments about specific moments of a show, so a user’s friends can tell what they were referencing.

By default, all comments and a video clip of the scene they’re left on, as well as ratings, reviews, favorites, and forum posts are published to Facebook. Users can’t opt out of syndicating to Facebook on a post-by-post basis, and instead must opt out through their Hulu privacy settings.

This opt out system may lead to more posts to Facebook and therefore more referral traffic it also creates an aggravating user experience where one can’t easily switch between publishing to Facebook or just to Hulu while watching. If someone wants to post multiple comments about a single scene and Facebook publishing is enabled, they’ll have to redundantly publish multiples video of the same scene to Facebook, which their friends might see as overkill.

Facebook believes TV watching is an inherently social experience that can be made better with friends, since it extended its Instant Personalization to online TV listings guide Clicker in December. Hulu’s Facebook integration provides a lot of value to users, even more so because of the Hulu Plus incentive. Still, TV watching can at times be a private experience, so more transparency and flexibility in its privacy settings might reassure users that they are in control and won’t spam friends.

Documents detailing an upcoming change to Facebook Pages and Places have been found by our German sister site, AllFacebook.de . We’ve now confirmed with Facebook that this week it will launch a limited private test of tools permitting a new parent-child management structure for Places that will allow corporations to administrate all the Places pages of the local instances of their business. On corporate parent Pages, an in-house “Locations” app will automatically display nearby branches and allow users to search for local branches by zip code, and child Places will feature a link back to their corporate Page.

Giants from foodservice, retail, insurance and other industries are already setting up Places for each of their branches to facilitiate local marketing and encourage checkins using the clumsier old system. Facebook’s new parent-child structure will make this process simpler and more systematized, which could lead more corporations to buy Facebook ads for their local branches.

Facebook tells us “We’re testing new ways for businesses with more than one location to develop a localized presence on Facebook. The tools launching this week…make it easier for businesses to begin to localize their voice at scale.”

The way Facebook’s location-based service originally worked made it difficult for corporations that needed to set up multiple Places, whether in the dozens or the thousands. Places, separate from Pages, had to be set up or claimed and then clumsily merged with Pages. Facebook has since streamlined this process, giving checkin functionality to any Page that lists a street address.

A corporation’s Page and all its local branch Places still couldn’t be connected on the backend of Facebook’s admin system, though. This meant that if a corporation wanted to push a branding or slogan change to all its Pages, or manage regulatory compliance, a single corporate representative had to be individually granted admin privileges to every Place.  Even then, changes had to be pushed one Page at a time.

Third-party Page management products such as Hearsay Social launched to specifically handle the corporate-local problem. This seemed like a lucrative business as corporations such as State Farm and 24 Hour Fitness were spending a lot on Facebook marketing, and the solution seemed more complicated than something Facebook would design a native product for. However, close relationships that Facebook has forged with corporations through its inside ad sales teams have now led it to address the corporate-local Page management issue.

Parent-Child Admin System and Pages API Changes

Facebook will offer a parent-child Page set up tool to a limited set of businesses that have a corporate-local structure.  Once the connections between parent and child Pages are arranged, parent Pages will include a Locations tab in their Edit Page admin interface navigation menu.

The Locations admin interface will display a list of all children Places, including the store ID, address, Like count, and checkin count of each. This will make it simple for a corporation to monitor the performance of its child Places. Admins will be able to search for a specific child Place by store ID, and make the Locations Page tab application visible to users or hide it.

When using Facebook as the parent Page, admins will have full admin control over the children Places, meaning they can go in and edit a Place page’s info, post or moderate content, change settings, and install tab applications. This means corporations will be able to swiftly address threats to their branding by deleting the posts of local branch admins or fans, as well as coordinate marketing campaigns such as the installation of a new sweepstakes app. Child Place admins won’t be able to remove admin privileges from parent admins.

It appears that Facebook will also support the parent-child structure in the Pages API. Settings, apps, and content moderation will be able to be controlled programmatically, enabling corporations to push changes to many Pages at once. For example, McDonalds could use the parent-child Page API to install an application and publish an update promoting it on all of its local Places simultaneously. Corporations will also be able to use a Checkin Deals API to offer rewards to users for visiting any of their local branches in person.

The corporate-local Pages API could encourage more developers to build apps designed for tighter integration between different levels of a company. For instance, developers could build contest apps that include local run-offs on child Places leading to worldwide finals that are held on a parent Page.

With time, Facebook may build more corporate-local moderation and publishing features into the graphic user interface so corporations can easily change the wall settings, ban certain words, or post content across all their Pages without the use of any code. This could commodify some third-party Page management services, forcing companies offering these services to look for other ways to provide value to their clients.

Locations In-House Page Tab Application

Facebook users visiting a parent Page will see a Locations tab app in the Page’s navigation menu. Parent pages will display a store locator that automatically shows a store nearby the user and can be used to search for branches by zip code. A map and list will show users nearby branches of a business along with thumbnail pictures of friends who’ve checked in there, and allow them to visit the corresponding children Places. These features will help users discover the local branches of their favorite corporations. This will in turn help drive foot traffic, and engagement with location-based Checkin Deals.

Children Places will display a link to their parent Page just below their name, allowing corporations to gain Likes from supporters of their local branches. Checkin counts from child Pages will be summed on the Parent page to give a more accurate impression of the global popularity of the business.

Overall, the parent-child structure and Locations app seem like a strong start to accommodating businesses and organizations with a corporate-local structure. These include some of the world’s biggest brands who are also the world’s biggest spending advertisers. If Facebook can get more corporations with local branches onto the Platform and using the parent-child Page system, it could lead to the launch of a huge number of new, well-funded local Places that it could offer its advertising services to.

Update 7/12/11 10:15am PST: Facebook has confirmed with us that the parent-child Page management set up tool will launch in limited private test this week.

Strategies for using Facebook Places to market your business can found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

Brands on our post this week used livestreaming, social commerce and photo contests to attract users and customers during the slow summer months. We’ve excerpted two of the 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.

Toys “R” Us Christmas in July Contest

Goal: Engagement, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure, Page Growth

Core Mechanic: The Like-gated contest asks users to submit a photo or video of their best Christmas moment on the Page to compete to win a store gift card.

Method: By submitting a photo or video about their best Christmas moment, users enter the contest to receive Toys “R” Us gift cards. Submissions are then are voted on by their peers. Since the photos are of compelling moments, users are likely to direct their friends to view them on the Toys “R” Us Page, increasing virality. This should offset the higher barrier to participation that comes with photo submission contests.

Impact: As Toys “R” Us is a well-established brand, this contest looks to increase sales in the slow summer months and secure Likes that will help the retail chain’s marketing efforts in the high traffic pre-holiday months. The Page now has over 1.5 million Likes. The contest, which runs until July 24, has just under 60 entries only a few days after launching. More virality can be expected when voting begins, which will also happen on the Facebook platform.

Finally, the company is pairing the contest with special “Christmas in July” discounts on merchandise.

Craftsman American Treasures Photo Contest

Goal: Network Exposure, Page Growth, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: A photo contest in which users submit photos related to Craftsman merchandise.

Method: The Like-gated contest asks users to submit photos of vintage Craftsman tools, or related items like lawn/garden equipment and historic items in order to win a $100 Craftsman gift card or the chance to have your antique evaluated by a famous antiquer. The submission automatically signs users up for the Craftsman email list and generates a feed story upon entry.

Impact: The Page currently has 426,100 Likes, not bad for a tool company, and there have been 276 entries. For the amount of money the company invested in this gift card giveaway, the return should be well worth it.

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.

Photos, Page tabs and videos made a big splash on our list of the fastest growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week. But there were also dating, mobile and horoscope apps. The apps on our list gained the most MAU of any apps, growing from between 462,800 and 3.6 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	60photos	31,158,314	+3,636,727	+13%
2.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	32,058,537	+3,166,077	+11%
3.	Empires & Allies	51,099,704	+2,670,437	+6%
4.	VEVO for Artists	12,784,798	+1,659,487	+15%
5.	Facebook for Every Phone	3,674,668	+1,376,043	+60%
6.	Global Warfare	3,651,969	+1,355,005	+59%
7.	Zoosk	22,994,653	+948,477	+4%
8.	It Girl	7,426,364	+912,624	+14%
9.	Video Yeri	1,959,630	+879,157	+81%
10.	Daily Horoscope	14,613,414	+795,304	+6%
11.	inFAMOUS Anarchy	2,166,304	+783,884	+57%
12.	Static Iframe Tab	5,161,844	+702,162	+16%
13.	Yahoo!	16,446,426	+670,183	+4%
14.	Video Galerisi	945,659	+594,616	+169%
15.	Gardens of Time	14,723,939	+567,791	+4%
16.	Socialbox	1,218,614	+563,036	+86%
17.	Zoo World	4,294,109	+558,259	+15%
18.	Kingdoms of Camelot	1,871,131	+540,713	+41%
19.	Welcome tab app for Pages	7,280,624	+520,341	+8%
20.	Pool Master	1,858,518	+462,818	+33%

60photos topped our list by far with 3.6 million new MAU; the app asks users to rate friends’ Facebook photos either “nice” or “pass” and generates a Wall post when you rate the photo “nice.” Since there are so many photos on Facebook, and users generally enjoy this part of the service, the result seems to be good news for this app. It’s not clear if Facebook itself might consider the app to be too spammy, though.

Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 3.1 million MAU this week, Static Iframe Tab by 702,200 MAU and Welcome tab app for Pages by 520,300 MAU mostly in the Philippines. These Page tab apps were very popular this week and help users create customized Page tabs for their Pages.

Video apps also made our list. VEVO for Artists grew by 1.6 million MAU; this app brings together an artist’s VEVO videos on a tab for their Page. Turkish video apps also made the list. Video Yeri grew by 879,200 MAU and Video Galerisi by 594,600 MAU. Basically these two allow users to view, share and Like videos.

Everything else was varied.

Facebook for Every Phone is Snaptu’s Facebook mobile app, and grew by 1.3 million MAU. Zoosk the dating app grew by 948,500 MAU mostly in the U.S. Daily Horoscope, which allows users to receive daily horoscope Wall posts, grew by 795,300 MAU. Yahoo!’s app grew by 670,200 MAU. Finally, Socialbox grew by 563,000 MAU and is a downloadable desktop chat app.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Here are all the latest headlines from around Inside Network this past week.

Inside Mobile Apps

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

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

• Emerging Top-Grossing iOS Apps: New Releases, News, & Sports Show Growth
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon Rolls Out on iOS
• Tapjoy Raises $30 Million from JPMorgan to Fuel Push on Android
• Emerging Paid iOS Apps: Electronic Arts & GameloftDominate the Charts with Independence Day Sales

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

• Tracking Service App Annie Raises Series A Investment From IDG Capital Partners
• Emerging Top Free Apps on iOS: ICEEs, Business Sims & Oprah Rise This Week
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Pontiflex, Dynamic Signal, PopCap and More
• Wednesday Mobile Roundup: New Mobile OS, RIM User Decline, Data Plans & More
• Game Review: Zynga Trims Down CityVille for iOS

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

• eBay’s $240 Million Acquisition of Zong Will Increase PayPal’s Virtual Currency Capabilities
• New Hires in Mobile: Beeline Interactive, Flurry, Gameloft & More
• Freemium Revenue Surpasses Paid App Revenue Among Top 100 Grossing Games, Flurry Says
• OpenFeint Actively Recruiting Social Game DevsLooking to Go Cross-Platform, Experimenting With Monetization Product
• MyPad Adds Twitter Integration, Refines Game Portal Ahead of Facebook’s Forthcoming iPad App

Friday, July 8th, 2011

• Game Insight Gets Players to Stay in Vegas in New iPad App
• Zynga Mobile Makes Another Acquisition: Toronto’s Five Mobile
• W3i Bets on Free App Promotion as Developers Look Beyond Incentivized Installs
• EA’s Playfish to Bring Pet Society, Restaurant City Brands to iOS
• Friday Mobile Roundup: Origin, Game Launches, Angry Birds, & More

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, July 4th, 2011

• Empires & Allies, inFamous Anarchy & Zoo World 2 Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by MAU
• WildTangent Brings It Girl, Other Social Games From Facebook to WildTangent.com
• Cafe Life Opens Up Shop in Crowded Restaurant Game Market

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

• Slotomania Sees Traffic Resurgence on Facebook Following Playtika Acquisition
• Tapjoy Raises $30 Million from JPMorgan to Fuel Push on Android
• Zynga Doubled ARPU From Last Year Even as Facebook Platform Changes Slowed Growth
• Pac-Man S Powers Up an Arcade Favorite, Lags Behind Other Pac-Man IP on Facebook

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

• Perfect Getaway Sails on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Games on Facebook by DAU
• Shadow Fight Gives Nekki an Edge Across Multiple Social Networks, Sparks New Game Developments
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: PopCap, Tagged, King.Com and More
• Namco Bandai Uses Pac-Man Franchise to Test Facebook Waters, Looks to More Established IPs

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

• New Hires in Social Gaming: 6waves, CrowdStar, Happy Elements, & More
• Zynga Launches PrivacyVille, a Gamified Version of Its Privacy Policies
• eBay’s $240 Million Acquisition of Zong Will Increase PayPal’s Virtual Currency Capabilities
• OpenFeint Actively Recruiting Social Game DevsLooking to Go Cross-Platform, Experimenting With Monetization Product
• EA Playfish Bringing Risk: Factions to Facebook, Pet Society & Restaurant City to iOS

Friday, July 8th, 2011

• Perfect Getaway, My Country, Pet Tales Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• Weeds Social Club Joins Both Budding Marijuana Genre And Saturated Farming Sim Genre on Facebook
• Mike Sego on Monster Galaxy’s Monsterous Facebook Growth
• Zynga Mobile Makes Another Acquisition: Toronto’s Five Mobile
• Social Gaming Roundup: EA’s Origin Platform, CivWorld, Google+, & More
• A Closer Look at Restaurant City and Pet Society on iOS

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011

• Zynga’s IPO Means More Visible Feedback for Facebook’s Platform Product and Policy Teams

Monday, July 4th, 2011

• Zoosk, Page Tabs, BranchOut, Phrases and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: Buca di Beppo, Bissell, Bank of the West and the NBA

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Deal United, Votigo, Efficient Frontier and More
• Facebook and LinkedIn Block Apps TOS-Violation Browser Extension and Apps
• Platform Update: JavaScript SDK with OAuth, Place Like Box, Removed Bookmarks Insights
• Zynga Doubled ARPU From Last Year Even as Facebook Platform Changes Slowed Growth
• The Facebook Marketing Bible July 2011 Edition Is Now Available

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

• Birthdays, Spotify, Friends, Mobile, Horoscopes and More on This Week’s List of Top Gaining Apps by DAU
• Live-Blogging a Facebook Chat Product Launch at the Start of “Launching Season 2011″
• Zuckerberg Confirms That Facebook Has Reached 750 Million Monthly Actives
• Facebook Launching Ad Hoc Group Chat, New Chat Design, Skype Video Calling
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: SponsorPay, Zen Entertainment, Tagged, Dynamic Signal and More
• How to Grow Your Page With Like Count Milestone Campaigns

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

• Facebook Careers Postings: Engineering, Management, Recruiting and More
• Facebook Hires and Departures: Interns, Recruiting, Software Engineering and More
• Jobvite Source Lets Recruiters Post Trackable Job Links to Facebook Accounts of Employees
• MyPad Launches Twitter Integration to Differentiate From Facebook’s Forthcoming iPad App
• Facebook Apologizes For Disabling Apps, Launches New Feedback Metrics, Granular Enforcement, Disabled Mode

Friday, July 8th, 2011

• MySpace, Photos, Chat, Video and Badges on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Facebook Pages Can No Longer Tag Users in Posts
• Spotify Ad Pitches Reveal More Details About Its Forthcoming US Facebook Integration
• Facebook Roundup: BranchOut, China, Zuckerberg, Seattle, Google+ and More

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Zen Entertainment, SponsorPay, Pontiflex, Dynamic Signal, King.com, Tagged and PopCap Games.

• Social Media Director
• Social Media Director
• Internet Marketing Director
• Product Marketing Director

• Director Publisher Relations Europe (m/f)

• Mobile Development Associate
• Senior Systems Engineer
• Senior Systems Enginer – SF
• Linux Systems Engineer

• Front-End Engineer
• Front-End Engineer
• Product Management

• Game Developer
• Product Manager , Social & Mobile Games
• Business Analyst
• Business Intelligence Developer

• Art Director – Social Games
• 2D Graphic Artist
• Game Designer
• Creative Director – Social Games
• Product Manager – Monetization

• Web/Graphic Designer
• Producer
• Game Developer
• Artist

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps 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.