As acquisitions and IPOs abound in the industry, virtual goods and social gaming have proven to be a key part of monetizing social media.

This fall, we invite you to join the conversation with Inside Network’s Justin Smith and Eric Eldon as they lead discussions on the economics of virtual goods and social games at this year’s Socialize West, happening October 20 – 21 in San Francisco.

About the Sessions

Measuring the Health of Your Virtual Economy

Eric Eldon, Editor at Inside Network

Managing a growing virtual economy is not easy. What should you track? What are the key indicators of a healthy virtual economy? Our panel of metrics and economy experts will share their thoughts on this important subject.

Social Games 2015: Where to now?

Justin Smith, Founder at Inside Network

Over the last two years social gaming has quickly established itself as highly profitable business model in the interactive entertainment industry. But now that the word is out, where do we go from here? Or, more formally, how does one build a long-term sustainable business in social gaming? This panel will briefly cover the history of social gaming and provide an assessment of the current landscape, but will predominantly focus on how social gaming will move forward in the next few years. Key topics covered include: consolidation, licensing and venture capital.

About Socialize West

Socialize gathers professionals from all aspects of the social media spectrum: social gaming, virtual goods, startups, mobile and media: business owners/leaders, business development, strategy/operations, and marketing.

Learn more about Socialize here.

Facebook looks to have hired account managers, analysts, engineers, recruiters, operations, policy, communications, and other staff from posts on its LinkedIn feed and jobs that disappeared from the company’s Careers Page.

New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:

• Stefan Cataldo, Account Manager CEEMEA – formerly an Account Manager at Google.
• Leila Summa, Client Partner – formerly worked as the Head of Digital Marketing and SOcial Media Director for Migros-Genossenschafts-Bund.
• Yi Wang, Software Engineer Intern – formerly a Research Assistant at the University of California, Riverside.
• Michael Fox, Director, Global Vertical Marketing – had previously worked as the Head of U.S. Market Solutions at Facebook.
• Thach Nguyen, Software Engineer – formerly a Software Engineering Intern at Google.
• Nasser Alsherif, Analyst – previously worked as a Research Assistant at the American University in Cairo.

Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:

• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (Palo Alto)
• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (New York)
• Analyst, Pricing and Yield (New York)
• Audience Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Partner Engineer
• Manager, Site Operations Engineering
• Site Operations Engineer
• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (Palo Alto)
• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (New York)
• Audience Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Director of Policy (Spain)
• Pan-Euro Communications Manager
• Network Operations Engineer
• DSO Account Manager, Japanese (Hong Kong)
• Manager, Online Sales Account Management (Austin)
• Sales Manager (Palo Alto)
• Product Specialist, User Operations (Release)
• Employee Relations Specialist (Contract)
• University Recruiting and Sourcing Specialist – Dublin
• University Recruiting and Sourcing Specialist – Contract (Dublin)
• Product Specialist, User Operations (Release)
• Law Enforcement Response Analyst

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook is on the prowl for more engineers, as usual, according to posts on the company’s Careers Page and its LinkedIn feed. The company is also looking for an EMEA Policy Manager, a mobile engineer, data center, ads ops, account management staff and more.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Engineering Program Coordinator
• Mobile Ops Engineer
• EMEA Policy Manager
• Product Marketing Manager, Brand Advertising
• Software Engineer 1109B (Seattle)
• Software Engineer, Developer Tools (Seattle)
• Partner Engineer (New York)
• Partner Engineer (Singapore)
• Partner Engineer – Marketing Solutions (Singapore)
• Software Engineer, Data Center Tools
• Software Engineering Manager, Data Center Tools
• HR Business Partner (New York)
• HR Business Partner (Sao Paulo)
• Offer Letter Coordinator (Contract)
• Sales Training Consultant (Singapore)
• Intern Program Coordinator (Contract)
• Recruiting Manager (Sao Paulo)
• IT Product Manager, Data
• Manager, Measurement Solutions (New York)
• Data Center Business Operations Manager
• Administrative Assistant
• DSO Account Manager (Sao Paulo)
• Manager, Account Management, Global Marketing Solutions (Austin)
• Associate, Ad Operations – Finnish (Dublin)
• Associate, Ad Operations – German (Dublin)
• Strategic Partner Development, Media (New York)
• Global Business Manager (London)
• Account Manager – Danish (Dublin)
• SMB Marketing Associate (Dublin)

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• EMEA Policy Manager, Facebook
• Account Manager – Danish (Dublin), Facebook
• SMB Marketing Associate (Dublin), Facebook
• Senior Strategist, Global Customer Marketing (Hamburg), Facebook
• Project Manager EMEA – Sales and Business Development, Facebook
• Business Operations Associate (London), Facebook
• HR Business Partner (New York), Facebook

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

The applications that grew the most on our emerging list by monthly active users this week included some love quizzes, the German Phrases app, a few Page tab apps, video, greeting cards and more. The apps on our list grew from between 147,600 and 613,900 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define “emerging” applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Your Funny Apps !	704,086	+613,928	+681%
2.	Bubble Atlantis	983,431	+419,420	+123%
3.	Deine Phrases	420,804	+359,573	+587%
4.	Dirty Dancing	322,605	+294,636	+1,053%
5.	Sayfanıza Hoş Geldiniz Sekmesi Ekleyin	894,061	+244,019	+44%
6.	VidyoBlue	391,105	+243,145	+164%
7.	fantacalcioville	371,569	+205,027	+155%
8.	Trendkız	529,984	+196,360	+66%
9.	Angry Birds	471,344	+194,212	+70%
10.	21個問題	758,165	+189,876	+33%
11.	Greeting Cards	364,943	+174,474	+140%
12.	Are You In Love?	626,665	+168,824	+38%
13.	Jungle Jewels Flash	573,476	+167,301	+49%
14.	True Love Quiz	569,779	+162,522	+41%
15.	Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?	649,377	+159,017	+32%
16.	Intel – Welcome	446,787	+158,618	+55%
17.	Hike FREE Tab Builder for Pages: New Static FBML	873,191	+157,766	+22%
18.	Airport City	341,398	+157,420	+211%
19.	Adventure Slots	718,350	+153,076	+27%
20.	Slot City – Slot Machines	896,625	+147,551	+20%

Your Funny Apps ! is an app that grew by 613,900 MAU that offers users a choice of three different apps — Find Your Previous Life, Your Future House, Your Life Graph — and publishes the results of either quiz to the stream as a photo in its own photo album with a link to the app. Other, similar apps on our list included Are You In Love? with 168,800 MAU and True Love Quiz with 162,500 MAU. Both apps run in the same circle of asking you questions, then asking you to invite friends to the app for the answer, then  clicking for the results, then asking you to invite friends to use the app.

There was the German app, Deine Phrases, not available in the United States that grew by 359,600 MAU. Then two Page tab apps, the Turkish Sayfanıza Hoş Geldiniz Sekmesi Ekleyin by 224,000 MAU and Hike FREE Tab Builder for Pages: New Static FBML by 157,800 MAU, were on the list.

VidyoBlue grew by 243,100 MAU and is a Turkish video app that allows users to view, share, Like and comment on the videos. 21個問題 is an app that grew by 189,900 MAU and it allows users to answer questions about their friends, then posts answers to the stream. Greeting Cards is an app that provides a selection of greeting cards to be sent to a user’s friends, generating a feed story, growing by 174,500 MAU. Intel – Welcome grew by 158,600 MAU.

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

Facebook said 350 million of its 800 million monthly active users access the service through mobile devices today in an update today to its statistics page. The last time it spoke about this number was back in March, when it said it had 250 million monthly active mobile users.

Our app tracking service AppData does record actives for Facebook’s different smartphone apps. Since Facebook is likely one of the most, if not the most, popular smartphone app in the world excluding China, its growth can be used as a proxy for developers interested in the market size of each platform.

We went through our service AppData to compile the following figures. The iPhone app is adding about 250,000 users per week to reach nearly 90.1 million monthly active users. Growth has slowed in recent weeks in likely anticipation of the iPhone 5, which may make its debut in October.

Facebook for Android is showing five times as high a growth rate as iOS with nearly 1.5 million users becoming monthly active users every single week.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

Building off the now-common Like button that it launched last year, Facebook is introducing a new social plugin today called the Recommendations Bar. It’s designed to deliver additional recommended articles to readers right as they finish each article.

While Facebook’s recommendations box plugin has already driven this behavior, there has not been a slick interface to help readers move to a new recommended story once they finish the first recommended one. In most implementations to date, the user has to click back to find more stories in the recommendations box.

The new plugin, at least as it was presented at f8 (it’s not live), resides at the lower right corner of each browser window of a page that has the plugin installed. It floats down as users scroll, basically like how other toolbars work. When a user first loads a page — say, an article on CNN — the bar is collapsed and only shows the option to Like the page. But as the user spends more time reading the article and scrolling down, the plugin will expand and show additional articles to read on the site based on the criteria below.

The expanded view also shows an “Add to Timeline” button. If the user clicks on it, the story will be shared back to Facebook and placed within the (new) Timeline profile. Although it might not be obvious to the user at the time, they are also enabling the plugin to share a “read” action back to Facebook every time in the future that the plugin is activated on that particular site.

That seems like it could upset users who don’t realize or remember enabling auto-sharing. But they can either turn off the feature by clicking again on the “Add to Timeline” button on the bar, or by adjusting their privacy settings on their home site, Faceboook product manager Austin Haugen said during a presentation at f8 on the feature.

As the Facebook documentation outlines below, developers have the following options for defining exactly when the plugin bar will expand:

• onvisible - the plugin is expanded when a user scrolls past the exact point where the <fb:recommendations-bar /> tag is placed on the page. This is the simplest option and will work best if you place the tag right at the end of your article’s main content. This is the default.
• X% - where X is any positive integer less than or equal to 100. This specifies the percent of the page the user must scroll down before the plugin is expanded. For example: 100% would indicate that a user needs to scroll all the way to the end of the page before the plugin expands. 50% would be to the mid point of the page.
• manual - use this option to manually trigger the read action. When you want to trigger the action callFB.XFBML.RecommendationsBar.markRead(href); in JavaScript. The href parameter is optional and will default to the current page if not set. If provided, it must match the href parameter on the XFBML tag. The manual trigger is useful when you have more a multi-page article. For example on a three page article, you would addtrigger="manual" on pages one and two and never call the ‘markRead’ JavaScript function on those pages.

In addition, a read_time parameter will tell the plugin to wait a customizable number of seconds before it expands. It’s set to 30 seconds by default.

Facebook will then take all “read” stories data and figure out how to display them in users’ Timelines and in their friends’ news feeds.

Overall, the bar should help each user find more interesting stories from their friends while reading news stories on a site. For example, a user might get to the end of an article about government budget issues, and see a recommendation from a friend about a related opinion piece on the topic. The result is that the user stays on the site longer than they otherwise might, finding more useful information while bringing the site more engagement. The plugin also could generate additional traffic through the sharing back to Facebook. However, the opt-in-once aspect of the feature might surprise some users — there could be privacy issues around this, just like there was with the now-shuttered Beacon years ago.

Advertisers will gain an important new way to target Facebook users thanks to changes launched earlier today at f8, we’ve learned after talking with two Facebook Ads and marketing executives. Facebook announced a new class of Open Graph applications that let users share what they listen to, watch, and read with friends. These news feed and Ticker stories will feature new “Listened”, “Watched”, and “Read” button. Advertisers on Facebook’s Ads API or who work with the Direct Sales team will soon have the option to target users who’ve shared through these apps or clicked these buttons, letting them reach consumers of their content that might not have Liked a related Page.

For example, rather than just targeting users who Like the band Coldplay’s Page, advertisers will be able to target any user who shared a Coldplay song through Spotify or another Open Graph application, and any of their friends who clicked “Listened” on a shared story about Coldplay. Granular targeting will allow advertisers to choose if they want to reach users who listened to a specific Coldplay song, any Coldplay song, or anyone who used the Spotify app. Advertisers will also be able to turn media sharing and usage of these feedback buttons into Sponsored Stories that turn what would have been news feed or Ticker stories into sidebar ads.

An added bonus of users sharing more about themselves and their behavior is that Facebook gain more data to power ad targeting. Facebook’s profile redesign last year made biographical data and interests more prominent, encouraging users to provide more information about who they are and what types of media and companies they care about.

Many users have interacted with more brands, artists, and pieces of media than they’re willing to list in their profile. However, they might be comfortable stating that they watched a movie their friend posts about. With the new feedback buttons, Facebook is turning these behaviors and activities into targetable information for advertisers.

At first, only music, video, and readable content will feature these new feedback buttons, but Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions David Fischer tell us the site is considering releasing more, including a “Want” button for products. Soon developers will be also be able to create their own feedback buttons. This could bring these new ad targeting opportunities to more industries such as ecommerce, consumer packaged good brands, and games.

Here are some more examples of how the new ad targeting capabilities could be used:

• A concert venue could target all users who said they listened to band to sell tickets for that band’s upcoming concert.
• A band could target all users who listened to one of the songs off their soon to be released album about that album going on sale on iTunes
• A big box retailer could target all users who shared or said they watched any movie starring Johnny Depp to sell a new DVD box set of the actor’s films
• A film studio could target any user who said they watched a trailer of a new film that a friend shared after watching it on IMDB.
• A tech conference could target any user who said they read an article on any of the major technology blogs
• A baby clothing retailer could target any user who said they read on article about how to buy clothes for infants on a blog for mothers.

A wide variety of media partners and news publishers have partnered with Facebook to allow uses to publish content to the site that can be immediately consumed by friends.

When users listen to a song on Spotify, watch a film on Netflix, read an article on News Corp’s The Daily, or use products by any other partners, that activity will be automatically published to the news feed Ticker and profile Timeline. Users can then click on the Ticker story to load the corresponding app and hear the song, watch the film, etc.

Previously, users had both grant an app initial permissions upon install and fill out a sharing prompt every time they wanted to publish something to Facebook. Now, users will grant a new type of permission that allows an app the ability to instantly publish activity without showing a prompt.

There are some privacy implications of this new app sharing scheme. While users might be comfortable sharing most of their Spotify listening habits, they might occasionally want to listen privately. Facebook could potentially introduce some sort of “incognito mode” to allow this, but there’s no indication of such a feature yet. Users might also grant persistent permission to an app without understanding what it means, or forget they’ve done so, and get angry when they see their activity published.

In addition to publishing posts to the Ticker, activity will be published to special content tabs on the profile TImeline. When users interact with music, video, and text content, they’ll have the ability to use new feedback options: Listened, Watched, and Read. More specific than simply Liking a friend’s update, these buttons will let users share how they’ve also consumed the content.

This will create big new opportunities for marketers and advertisers. Those using the Facebook Ads API or that work with Facebook’s Direct Sales ad team will be able to target users according to their interaction with content. Previously advertisers could only target user that formally Liked a Page, and had no way to target users based on their Likes of news feed content.

Media apps will launch today, and other lifestyle apps and games that depend on the Timeline will be rolled out alongside the redesigned profile over the next few weeks.

Facebook introduces platform changes today that will help it diversify beyond social gaming and add new user acquisition points for developers. Here are four key changes happening now:

1) Facebook is making a serious effort to diversify the platform beyond gaming and marketing by expanding the kinds of structured behavior users can share.

Facebook has long had a conflicted relationship with the fact that the most mature verticals on the platform have been social gaming and marketing. The platform has spawned companies like Zynga, which was founded just four years ago and went on to earn $279 million in revenue in the second quarter of this year.

But the platform has yet to produce a third-party business of similar size in another industry even though Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has repeated in multiple events that he believes that social networking will revolutionize every industry from the ground up.

Today, the company is expanding the range of structured actions users can take on the platform. Users can now “Watch,” “Listen,” “Cook,” or “Run,” among numerous other types of behavior. It adds more granularity to the “Like,” button, and will ideally fuel the growth of many types of apps beyond gaming. The company showed off a number of examples apps like “Social Cooking” and the Spotify integration, where users can catalogue what they’ve cooked or what music they’ve listened to.

The question is whether adding a social layer and stronger viral distribution on Facebook will help make these long-troubled industries like music and media more financially viable. Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek did say on-stage today at the developer conference that Facebook-integrated users were more likely to pay for the service, but didn’t specify by how much.

2) Graph Rank adds interests to the social graph, matching users with the types of news feed stories like music, cooking or movie-themed ones that are most likely to engage them.

Facebook is adding another layer of sophistication to the Open Graph today that will match news feed stories with users based on their interests. So users who are likely to click on music-themed stories, will probably see more music-related activity in their news feed. It appears to build on platform changes the company introduced within the last year that matched gaming activity with users who play games.

3) Facebook will make it easier for developers to get users to continuously share their activity on the network.

Since the company’s botched launch of Beacon four years ago, Facebook has struggled with how to boost sharing activity in a way that respects the privacy of users. As the company has matured and attracted more mainstream users, it’s had to learn how and when to push online social mores without damaging its brand too much.

Today, the company is doing a careful pendulum swing back toward more continuous sharing by letting users give third-party apps the ability to constantly stream their activity. Users maintain control because they can toggle on or off the ability of third-party apps to share their behavior. The news feed is also far more sophisticated now and can filter out activity that’s uninteresting so users don’t have to worry about bombarding their friends. But there is still potential for abuse.

4) Developers can focus on three user acquisition points on the platform: timeline, news feed and the ticker.   

With timeline and ticker, Facebook introduces two new user acquisition points for developers this week. One is the ticker, which shares activity on the network with more emphasis on how recently it was published. The second is the news feed which appears to be relatively unchanged from before in that developers need to get their users to share updates that can easily attract likes and comments for higher rank.

The third — the Timeline — is probably the most difficult to break into. A third-party app would have to produce a news feed story that attracts enough engagement that it might count as the best update from a given month or year of a user’s life.

Ticker: Low barriers to access, but likely a lower clickthrough rate. Ticker was introduced last week and shows a live feed of user activity from across the web. Facebook vice president Mike Schroepfer said during a press question-and-answer session at the developer conference today that the company will continually to tweak the ticker for more engaging activity. So there is some filtering for engagement, but less than what would be seen on the news feed.

News Feed: Similar to before. High barriers to access. An item would need to have high EdgeRank (e.g. a user would see an item if the update itself attracted many likes or comments or if it was from a friend they often interact with on Facebook).

Timeline: High barriers to access. Timeline is a new profile view that lets people see a visual history of a user’s life. To see something in Timeline, the news feed story would have to be the most engaging from a given month or year in a user’s life or they’d have to intentionally curate it into their Timeline.

Or a user could add an application to their timeline, akin to what “Boxes” used to do in letting users feature applications on their profile page until it was removed last year.

The Facebook Platform application permissions framework and UI has undergone many changes throughout the last few years. In the beginning, before there were many constraints on developers publishing content into the News Feed, developers took advantage of the opportunity to publish more content than many users wanted. As a result, most recently, Facebook has adopted a stricter stance on permissions, requiring users to manually post content into the stream through the Share dialog.

Today, Facebook announced a new permissions dialog along with the launch of the new profile timeline that once again allows users to authorize developers one time to post content to their profile on an going basis. However, in this version of the permissions model, the up-front authorization only applies to posting activity to the timeline — i.e. these stories will not appear in a user’s friends’ News Feeds. We’ll have more details on the way this applies to existing app permissions soon.