Facebook has made several developer-focused announcements over the past few days, including that it has released more free tickets to its Mobile Hack event at Facebook headquarters this Friday. This will give more developers the opportunity to learn about building Facebook-integrated native native and HTML5 mobile apps.

Nine new international Facebook Credits payment methods have been added to make it easier for those abroad to buy Credits. Additionally, developers now have the capability to programmatically check if an app is installed on a Page and what privacy setting a user has selected for an app.

Facebook recently launched a blog specifically for HTML5 developers, and there announced it would hold an all-day Mobile Hack event at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto on October 28th. The event will cover iOS, Android, and HTML5 mobile web development for the new Facebook mobile app Platform. It will feature: “technical deep-dives, a Q&A, partner presentations, and an opportunity for you and your team to hack on site with Facebook developer team assistance. At the end of the day, awards will be given to the best mobile social apps.”

Developers can register to attend Mobile Hack for free on Eventbrite, though tickets are limited and will likely sell out the same way the mini-f8 Open Graph Technology Days Facebook held around the country did. They may then begin working on their hack project, as apps don’t need to be built from scratch at the event. The schedule for Mobile Hack is as follows:

10:00am – Registration Open
11:00am – Facebook Platform on Mobile
11:45am - New Features: Social Discovery on Mobile
12:30pm - Lunch
1:30pm –   Partner Presentations and Best Practices
2:30pm -  Native Distribution for Web Apps
3:00pm -  Break
3:15pm -  Open Graph and Mobile
4:00pm -  Q&A
5:00pm -  Dinner
5:00pm -  Hack
11:00pm – App Presentation & Awards
11:30pm – Event Close

There hasn’t quite been a blitz of mobile app development since the new Platform opened earlier this month. The launch partner apps show some promise, but traffic has been slow. Creating a healthy mobile app platform is key to Facebook growing mobile engagement and making money through mobile Credits. Facebook is hoping the new HTML5 resource center and Mobile Hack will give developers the understanding necessary to explore the mobile platform’s viral channels.

Alongside the announcement of initial test of Facebook Credits for Websites, Facebook listed that Credits can now be bought with several new international payment methods. The news benefits developers, as users are more likely to become paying customers if it’s easy for them to acquire Credits.

Many of the new payment methods are online payment solutions for Southeast Asia and South America, which have become important secondary markets for developers. Facebook now supports over 80 payment methods in 50 countries. They new methods include:

• Axeso5 (Brazil)
• Join Card (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand)
• Malaysia OBT (Malaysia)
• MEPS FPX (Malaysia)
• MEPSCASH (Malaysia)
• PayEasy (Philippines)
• PaysBuy (Thailand)
• SafetyPay (Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Spain, Austria, Brazil)
• WebCash (Malaysia)

The Graph API can now be used to determine if an app has been installed on a Page. An HTTP GET request to /PAGE_ID/tabs/APP_ID will return the IDs of any app installed on a Page when used with a Page admin access token, and whether a particular app is installed when used with that app’s access token. This will allow Page management apps to determine what tab apps have or haven’t been installed  on a Page they oversee.

The new app authentication flow allows users to set the widest possible audience for content shared through that app. Now developers can retrieve a user’s privacy selection via the privacy setting table. This way, when apps present users with subsequent privacy selectors, they can default to a user’s previously chosen privacy setting. This keeps users from thinking their existing privacy settings have been changed.

February 8 – 9, 2012 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps is coming back to San Francisco in 2012! We are proud to announce our third conference on the future of monetization on social and mobile platforms.

As of this week, we’re happy to present the following new speakers who will be joining our line-up at Inside Social Apps 2012:

	Daniel Terry Co-founder & CEO, Pocket Gems		Perry Tam CEO, Storm8
	Paul Bettner GM, Zynga With Friends		Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam
	Michael Lazerow CEO, Buddy Media		Simon Mansell CEO, TBG Digital
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Mike Sego CEO, Gaia Interactive
	Tim Chang Managing Director, Mayfield Fund		Micah Adler Founder & CEO, Fiksu
	Arjun Sethi CEO, 6waves Lolapps		Brenda Garno COO & Game Designer, Loot Drop
	Bill Jackson Creative Director, CastleVille, Zynga		Hussein Fazal CEO & Co-founder, AdParlor
	Mihir Shah President & CEO, TapJoy		Lisa Marino CEO, RockYou
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom, and Investor		Peter Farago VP Marketing, Flurry
	Atul Bagga Senior Analyst – Video Games & China Internet, Lazard Capital Markets

We’ll continue to announce additions to our 2012 speaker list in the weeks to come, including speakers from Facebook and more, so please stay tuned.

Registration

There is very limited $199 Early Registration pricing for the full 2-day conference pass for Inside Social Apps 2012, available until November 2 only.

Previous Inside Social Apps conferences have sold out in advance of event day, so we strongly encourage you to register now.

About Inside Social Apps

Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading social and mobile developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis.

Social applications first made their splash in the US in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms.

Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market.

Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early.

A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on Inside Social Apps for more information.

Registration

We have made available a limited number of tickets at special $199 Early Registration pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco!

GroSocial added a few board members and Shoutlet hired some sales staff this week in our Facebook platform hires digest. 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:

GroSocial

• JD Gardner, Curt Roberts and Chris Russell – board members.

Shoutlet:

• Michele Doyle, Director of Business Development & Channels – formerly Sales Director, Eastern Region at Lyris.
• M. Reynolds Morgan, Sales Director – formerly Vice President, Sales at Engage121
• Travis Nelson, Training Manager – formerly a Genius at Apple, Inc.
• Mason Kemp, Sales Executive – formerly Vice President, Partnerships at Songwhale.

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

Football and soccer-related were both popular on our list of Pages growing by the number of Likes this week. In addition to several games, popular musical acts like Adele and LMFAO, 50 Cent’s energy drink Street King, a religious Page, McDonald’s, Samsung Mobile and more.

We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.

	Name	Likes	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1.	David Villa Sánchez	3,130,174	+6,477	+1,081,402
2.	Modern Warfare 2	4,968,619	+2,637	+946,505
3.	Jamaicansmusic.com	1,217,533	+621	+700,651
4.	The Pittsburgh Steelers	3,576,123	+3,550	+581,938
5.	Jesus Daily	9,630,020	+65,818	+489,713
6.	The Walking Dead	3,575,779	+71,772	+477,680
7.	Adele	7,483,925	+69,938	+471,821
8.	LMFAO	7,071,256	+61,332	+426,972
9.	Texas Hold’em Poker	51,619,469	+63,409	+410,011
10.	Titanic	13,486,119	+57,296	+409,479
11.	Samsung Mobile	2,877,779	+73,738	+390,467
12.	Paranormal Activity	8,791,826	+35,258	+379,225
13.	Atlanta Falcons Football Club	582,201	+1,106	+372,883
14.	Pepe Reina Official	408,188	+305	+367,752
15.	Street King	400,487	+55,948	+363,881
16.	Titanic	8,936,161	+46,709	+356,202
17.	Facebook	54,501,044	+52,731	+352,653
18.	McDonald’s	11,302,681	+34,336	+349,160
19.	facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake!	445,351	0	+333,025
20.	Battlefield	2,171,640	+10,834	+328,790

The football and soccer Pages on our list seemed to make their appearance due to consolidations, as most of the jumps in Likes came from one-day leaps. Spanish FC Barcelona player David Villa Sánchez saw more than 1 million new Likes this week, topping our list, bringing his total to 3.1 million. The Pittsburgh Steelers grew by 582,000 to 3.5 million, the Atlanta Falcons Football Club grew by 372,900 to 582,200 Likes and Spanish Premier League goalie Pepe Reina saw his Page grow by 367,800 Likes to 408,200.

Games on the list included Modern Warfare 2 at number two with 946,500 Likes to grow to 4.9 million, though it seemed to be a Page consolidation. Then there was Texas Hold’em Poker, moving 410,000 Likes to 51.6 million. Battlefield grew by 328,800 Likes to 2. million after moving from its beta version to its final version this week.

Music-related Pages included Jamaicansmusic.com, which appeared to be a consolidation-related jump of 700,700 Likes taking the Page to 1.2 million. Then Adele’s Page grew by 471,800 Likes to 7.4 million and finally LMFAO grew by 427,000 to 7 million by promoting their performances and album.

Film and TV Pages included the popular TV show “The Walking Dead” growing by 477,700 Likes to 3.5 million. The popular film “Paranormal Activity” with 379,200 Likes to grow to 8.7 million and the two Pages frequently on our list as of late: “Titanic” with 409,500 Likes to grow to 13.4 million and “Titanic” with 356,200 Likes to grow to 8.9 million.

The rest of the Pages were a mixed bag. Jesus Daily grew by 489,700 to 9.6 million Likes. Samsung Mobile grew by 390,500 Likes to 2.8 million by promoting engagement and prizes. Street King is a really interesting case of a product-charity combo; rapper 50 Cent is promoting his energy drink by pairing it with a Page growth charity giveaway. If the Page gets to 1 million, he will double his donation to feed 1 million hungry children; the result is 363,900 Likes this week to bring the Page to 400,500. Facebook’s Page grew by 352,700 Likes to 54.5 million, McDonald’s with 349,200 Likes to 11.3 million and  facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake! 333,000 Likes to 445,400.

Musician profile website and publishing platform Bandcamp this week released a tab application that lets artists present their Bandcamp presence on their Facebook Page. While competing services like RootMusic built Page tab apps that now host hundreds of thousands of musicians, Bandcamp has focused on letting music be streamed or purchased from the news feed. Its new app makes it easier and cheaper for musicians to sell music than other popular Facebook apps.

Bandcamp criticizes the social network as a place for musicians, calling it “just another part of a good overall distribution strategy” in the launch materials for its app and saying Facebook Pages are cluttered with distracting content and ads. By waiting this long to build a Page tab app for Facebook, though, Bandcamp has given its competitors a big head start in terms of functionality and user base. It will need to close these gaps to remain attractive to artists who have much to gain from Facebook’s massive audience, and to increase its own revenues.

Bandcamp was founded in 2008, a few months after ReverbNation’s Facebook app launched and long before RootMusic’s growth took off. The service lets musicians create a homepage from which visitors can stream their music, view their upcoming tour dates, join their mailing list, download tracks, and buy their albums. The site acts as a publishing platform, as artists don’t necessarily need a record label if they can distribute their music for profit through Bandcamp.

At launch, the site’s simple design and reliability made it a refreshing alternative to Myspace. In the early days of music Page tab apps on Facebook, it offered arguably stronger, cheaper branding and distribution services than RootMusic’s BandPage and ReverbNation’s BandProfile. It also offered a wide range of sharing capabilities including powerful Facebook news feed sharing option that allowed users to stream music in-line from te feed or begin a purchase flow with a single click.

As Pages receive half as many impressions as their news feed posts, focusing on the feed rather than Pages seemed like a wise move. In the instructions for installing its new Page tab app, Bandcamp slams Facebook’s Pages product, which compete with its own core product, writing “The average Facebook page has between 50 and 60 things for your fans to click on other than your music. Why let an ad for Bonobos pants vie for your fans’ attention?”

With time, though, Bandcamp’s competitors replicated its rich news feed stories, branding, and distribution, and staying out of Facebook app development began looking like a misstep. Now, traffic measurement service Compete shows Bandcamp having roughly 800,000 monthly unique visitors and its new Page tab app has 90,000 monthly active users, while RootMusic’s BandPage hosts 300,000 artists, and has 1.3 million daily active users and 28 million MAU according to AppData.

Bandcamp users can visit the Facebook app or follow a prompt on their Bandcamp profile to access instructions for adding the Page tab app to their Facebook Page. Once installed, the app shows the same streaming, download, purchase, and sharing options as on artist’s Bandcamp page. If visitors go to download a track, they’re directed back to a Bandcamp download page. If they go to make a purchase, a payment flow is initially shown in-line before sending users to PayPal to complete the transaction.

The list of features missing from the app is long. To start with, there’s no way to automatically send updates when content is added, nor customize the app’s chrome, take in mailing list signups, display videos or photos, or require users to Like the Page, send a tweet, or sign up for email updates in order to access the app or specific content.

The one thing Bandcamp’s app handles very well is selling music. Musicians can easily upload music to Bandcamp and immediately begin selling it. Bandcamp takes a just 10% cut of sales with no upfront costs, and artist can require downloaders to join their mailing list. This beats RootMusic’s options of free downloads through Soundcloud or links to other music stores such as iTunes and Topspin. It’s also much cheaper than ReverbNation’s mp3 store which takes a large $3 cut per album. Bandcamp also lets artists cheaply give music away, as they can pay Bandcamp 2 cents a song to let fans download music for free.

Bandcamp’s Page tab app works well for artists that want to sell their music directly through Facebook. For smaller artists trying to scrape by, that might be the most important thing. However, its weak customization and lack of fan-gating options means that for now, artists thinking about the long-term, who are signed with labels, or that sell their music through iTunes and Amazon, may be better served by a more full-featured Facebook apps.

Last week Facebook announced the first test of “Facebook Credits for Websites”, its new program that could allow any site to sell virtual goods or digital media in exchange Facebook’s virtual currency. For businesses selling things online, a big hurdle to conversions is getting potential customers to enter their payment details, so this could be a big new way for them to make payments easier and monetize more users.

Facebook will need to make a choice regarding exclusivity and Credits for Websites. Requiring Credits to be the exclusive payment method for Facebook-logged in users would allow it to essentially charge websites for access to its identity platform. A rollout without exclusivity requirements could get more websites to adopt Credits.

Therefore, we believe that similar to how Credits were at first an option but then later required to be the sole payment method for Facebook.com games, Facebook may be best off initially allowing websites to use Credits alongside other options and later making them mandatory.

Credits Benefits and Costs

For background, Facebook launched Credits in the summer of 2010 to simultaneously make it easier for game developers to accept payment for virtual good and to give itself a 30% cut on virtual good transactions. Users buy Credits from Facebook with their credit card, PayPal account, mobile phone, gift cards, or offers. Rather than having to enter payment details in each different game or with each developer whose games they play, Facebook Credits allow them to enter payment details once with a single, theoretically more trusted vendor (Facebook) and then spend across different games and developers.

Initially game developers could provide the option to pay with Credits alongside their other payment methods. They would then redeem with the Credits spent by their users with Facebook for 70% of their value. In July 2011, Facebook began requiring all game developers to exclusively process payments through Credits, while utility app developers could (and still can) choose whether or not to use them. Then, Facebook began allowing mobile app developers to process payments with Credits earlier this month.

Offering Facebook Credits as a payment option is a trade-off for developers. Benefits include the ability to:

• Instantly process payments from those with a balance of Credits
• Monetize international users without having to accept their local currency
• Monetize those without credit cards such as teens that can acquire Facebook Credits by completing offers, buying Facebook Credits gift cards with cash at local convenience and grocery stores, or by depositing loose change at Coinstar/Rixty kiosks
• Avoid transaction and fraud costs
• Let users pay through a big-name company they may trust more
• Increase user spend because they’re paying indirectly through a virtual currency rather than directly with dollars they may be more careful with

Developers must also endure several drawbacks if they offering Credits as a payment option. Most importantly, they must pay Facebook a 30% tax. Additionally, developers lose flexibility in how they optimize virtual currency costs to maximize sales. Some people don’t trust Facebook and may be more likely to submit credit card information to a game developer than to the social network. Developers are also less likely to earn money off of breakage, where users buy their proprietary virtual currency but never end up spending it. Though there haven’t been many prolonged outages in the past, if the Facebook Credits system went down, those relying on it to process payments could miss out on sales until service was restored.

Finally, Facebook can impose its own exclusivity policies on how Credits can be used alongside other payment options. Facebook allowed the game developers to flourish using any payment method they wanted on the Facebook.com Platform before eventually requiring Credits to be their exclusive way of processing payments. In this way, the gaming industry invested in developing for the Facebook Platform rather than competitors such that it had little choice but to accept Facebook’s 30% tax when it became mandatory.

In many cases, developers would prefer Facebook not implement exclusivity policies, though they begrudgingly accepts them and the 30% as the cost of being able to do business on the Facebook Platform.

Facebook Credits for Websites and Exclusivity

In the first round of testing for the new Facebook Credits for Websites program, the social network is working with online gaming portal GameHouse. In two specific games, if users are logged in to GameHouse via their Facebook Credentials they’ll be prompted to pay for virtual goods with Credits and won’t see the credit card and PayPal options. In this way, Credits are the “exclusive payment method for users logging in through Facebook”.

If the tests go well, Facebook could roll out Credits for Websites to more beta partners and eventually to all websites. Here are some of the exclusivity structures it could use, how they would impact developers, and the likelihood that Facebook would choose each potential structure:

Exclusive for all users - Websites can only use Facebook Credits as a payment method if it’s the only option they give to users, even those without Facebook accounts. This would prevent developers from monetizing significant portions of their users who don’t have a Facebook account or don’t log in with it. Therefore it wouldn’t be worth it for developers to switch to Credits exclusively. It’s very unlikely that Facebook would choose this structure. It only works on Facebook.com because every user there must be logged in through Facebook.

No Exclusivity - Websites can offer Credits as a payment option as well as other options such as credit cards and PayPal. Though it would clutter their payment flows, developers could offer Credits as an additional option to lower the payment barrier for those who maintain a balance of the virtual currency. It would help with monetization of international and teen users without forcing developers to pay a 30% cut on all of their transactions.

At first, Facebook may choose to roll out Credits for Websites without exclusivity. This would lower the risk and cost for developers such that Facebook could to get the maximum number of developers to add Credits as a payment option. Getting a wide base at first would also help Facebook push more users to start carrying a balance of Credits because they’ll see them as more widely applicable.

Though it would complicate enforcement, Facebook could require Credits to be listed equally or at least alongside credit card and PayPal options so developers wouldn’t bury Credits behind additional clicks to dissuade users from paying through a taxed method.

Exclusive for Logged in Facebook Users – Websites that want to utilize Facebook as an identity provider to power their registration and login systems would have to exclusively use Credits as their payment method for Facebook-logged in users. This creates a value exchange where developers can’t piggyback on Facebook identity without paying for it. If developers want to monetize their users but not use Facebook Credits, Faceboo could deny them access to its identity platform.

Functionally, it works because only logged in Facebook users would see the option to pay with Credits, and those with an existing balance of Credits would be able to pay instantly. People using a third-party website without signing in through Facebook would only see more traditional payment options, or could also be given the option to log in through Facebook to pay through Credits.

If the test is any indication, Facebook may eventually want this to be the way Credits for Websites works. Third-party sites would be taxed for access its its identity platform the same way Facebook taxes developers on Facebook.com. At first it might allow Credits for Websites to be used without exclusivity, but eventually it might give sites warning that it would become the mandatory payment method for Facebook-logged in users.

Facebook has already carried out this strategy of luring developers with an untaxed Platform, then giving them the option and incentives to use its taxed universal currency, and then finally making Credits the exclusive payment method with games on Facebook.com, and canvas utility apps might be next. A similar long-term strategy for Facebook Credits for Websites could be the best path to monetizing transactions for games, media, subscriptions services, and more across the web.

Charity was a notable function of the Facebook campaigns on our list this week. A Fisher-Price campaign in Australia and New Zealand leveraged the brand’s products to inspire brand loyalty. 20th Century Fox created a website treasure hunt to promote a new film and Century 21 is incorporating Facebook into real estate purchases. Then Country Financial, Jeep and Publishers Clearing House used contests to engage fans this week while MassMutual used a campaign to sell fans on life insurance.

You can see all of this week’s featured campaigns in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.

Fisher-Price Australia and New Zealand’s Community Giving

Goal: Page Growth, Charity, Engagement, Network Exposure

Core Mechanic: A voting campaign that revolves around a charity component.

Method: Fisher Price basically has two things going on here. One is an app that allows users to look over the company’s toys from different eras and share their favorite one. The other component, the main one, is a Like-gated contest in which voters must recruit members of their community to vote for a prize pack for a particular school or child care facility. Users can either nominate a place or vote for one, which then publishes to the stream.

We spoke to Votigo’s co-CEO and founder Mike La Rotonda, who told us how his company’s technology powered the contest, and shared some insights about charity campaigns.

“In general, we’ve found that these types of promotions with a charity or community component tend to do very well,” he told us. “You really get that entire local community, everyone affiliated with a kindergarten for example, to come together. [So] you’re getting a larger pool than an individual entrant, [with] people reaching out to friends and family to vote.”

La Rotonda furter told us that charity campaigns usually also carry a greater viral impact than other campaigns. “In a normal campaign, we’ll see a 30% viral bump, in a charity or community-type of promotion, we see closer to the 50% range.”

Impact: The Page has 10,300 Likes and about 1,400 people are talking about the Page as of Monday morning. The campaign has about 742 submissions, more than 14,000 votes and the campaign which started in mid-September and runs until mid-December, took the Page from 550 Likes to 9,500 in a single month.

The National Audubon Society’s “The Big Year” Contest

Goal: Engagement, Page Growth, Branding, Network Exposure

Core Mechanic: A website treasure hunt directing users to more than 100 websites to collect dozens of virtual birds in preparation for the upcoming film “The Big Year” by 20th Century Fox in conjunction with the National Audubon Society.

Method: The campaign runs from October 11 through November 7 and the first 200 players to collect all of the birds win prizes, including a grand prize trip for two to the Galapagos Islands. “The Big Year” is a movie in which characters compete to see the most North American birds in one year, so the NAS integration is an imitation of the film online.

The Like-gated promotion on the NAS Page has users register for the app by inserting their email addresses, then users have a chance to either run into the birds online, trade with other users, find out more about the birds by visiting the NAS website, and join the organization.

Impact: The Page currently has about 30,000 Likes and PageData shows growth in recent days. This campaign has good engagement over time with the NAS, which is consistently driving traffic to its site or inviting users to join. The treasure hunt is both fun and pertains to the point of the campaign — birds.

Want to learn how top brands are designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Buddy Media has announced several new features to its social marketing suite, including ReachBuddy that lets brands embed on third-party websites the widgets they use as Facebook Page tab apps. ReachBuddy will help brands gain more exposure for the contests, discounts, sweepstakes and content apps the build for Facebook. This will in turn make BuddyMedia more of a cross-web publishing platform than a dedicated social media tool.

The Page management giant also launched C-Rank, a system for scoring and benchmarking Facebook and Twitter that will help brands track their performance. Additionally, clients can now create custom dashboards tailored for different team members such as marketers or community managers to improve the efficiency, compose content for other team members to publish in a way that facilitates corporate/local franchise hierarchies similar to Hearsay Social, and license custom packages of Buddy Media products to keep costs down for brands in specific verticals.

A core part of Buddy Media’s Facebook Page management business is the licensing of its suite of custom tab applications that brands can embed on their Pages. Brands can choose from templates to skin in order to easily offer promotions such as sweepstakes, discounts and user-generated content contests. They can also add content apps to let them distribute their Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr updates.

Most brands are working to build their Facebook fan bases, in some cases Like-gating their Page tab apps so users must become fans to use them. However, some still get much more traffic on their websites, or often create micro-sites for special initiatives. Now, rather than rebuilding widgets that duplicate the functionality of their tab apps, Buddy Media clients can use ReachBuddy to embed these apps on sites outside of Facebook.

ReachBuddy launch partner Pepsi used ReachBuddy to add video to a microsite promoting a partnership with television show The X-Factor. Rather than embedding a YouTube video, Pepsi was able to easily configure  a white-labeled video player for the site through the simple ReachBuddy interface.

Brands have an ever increasing number of ways to distribute their content, between websites, microsites, Tumblr, and now Google+ planning to launch brand pages that can host applications. Redundantly building rich functionality into each of these distribution channels is a waste of resources. By allowing brands to build first for Facebook, the biggest platform, and then replicate their apps across the web, ReachBuddy will make Buddy Media more valuable to clients trying to take advantage of the whole evolving social landscape.

A birthday calendar application topped our list of the fastest growing by monthly active users this week, but a half dozen were Page tab apps, three were apps for musicians to integrate with their Pages, then Spotify, Scribd and a Halloween costume app rounded out our list.

The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 400,000 and 2.3 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.	Zynga Game Bar	2,800,000	+2,370,000	+551%
2.	MyCalendar – Birthdays	19,200,000	+1,500,000	+8%
3.	Static Iframe Tab	15,100,000	+1,200,000	+9%
4.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	62,100,000	+1,000,000	+2%
5.	Scribd	10,400,000	+900,000	+9%
6.	Mafia Wars 2	8,000,000	+837,909	+40,072%
7.	PM Custom Welcome Tab	7,200,000	+800,000	+13%
8.	Wildfire’s iFrames for Pages	8,400,000	+600,000	+8%
9.	Welcome tab app for Pages	11,300,000	+600,000	+6%
10.	Bubble Witch Saga	4,500,000	+566,980	+20%
11.	開心水族箱	3,500,000	+500,000	+17%
12.	BandPage by RootMusic	28,000,000	+500,000	+2%
13.	The Guardian	1,200,000	+470,000	+64%
14.	Disfrázate	1,000,000	+450,000	+82%
15.	Ravenskye City	2,200,000	+442,220	+1,592%
16.	BandRx	4,900,000	+400,000	+9%
17.	Banner de perfil en espagnol	1,600,000	+400,000	+33%
18.	iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML	16,900,000	+400,000	+2%
19.	Spotify	7,300,000	+400,000	+6%
20.	Band Profile: Profile Pages for Musicians	12,700,000	+400,000	+3%

As previously mentioned, MyCalendar – Birthdays is an app that grew by 1.5 million MAU and asks users to first invite their friends to use it before being able to add their birthdays to a customized calendar.

Page tab apps on the list this week included one interesting highlight, which is Wildfire’s iFrames app. There was Static Iframe Tab with 1.2 million MAU, Static HTML: iframe tabs with 1 million MAU, PM Custom Welcome Tab with 800,000 MAU, Wildfire’s iFrames for Pages with 600,000 MAU, Welcome tab app for Pages with 600,000 MAU and then  iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML with 400,000 MAU.

Musician applications on our list this week included BandPage by RootMusic with 500,000 MAU, BandRx with 400,000 MAU and finally Band Profile: Profile Pages for Musicians, which can automatically synchronize with ReverbNation, with 400,000 MAU.

Rounding out the list was Scribd with 900,000 MAU; the Connect integration has added several social components, including allow a Facebook Connect login, a Share and a Like button attached to each document. The Guardian’s app continues to grow with 470,000 MAU. Halloween costume app Disfrázate, which allows users to “try on” costumes them publish photos of themselves dressed up to the stream, grew by 450,000 MAU. Banner de perfil en espagnol, which allows users to select from among different photos and then create an image across the top of their profile, grew by 400,000 MAU. Finally, there was music app Spotify, which grew by 400,000 MAU.

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.

A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you between October 17th and 22nd.

Inside Mobile Apps

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

Monday, October 17th:

• Mobile Gaming Funds Ramp Up: Gamevil Invests in RPG-Maker KNetP
• Emerging Top Paid iOS Apps: Scribblenauts, Oregon Trail, Animoog and Utilities
• Early Traffic Results for HTML5 Part of Facebook’s Mobile Platform Seem Tepid
• With iPhone 4S Sales Topping 4M Over The Weekend, User Acquisition Costs Temporarily Double
• Does Android Need Its Own Version of Game Center?

Tuesday, October 18th:

• Emerging Top Grossing Apps: Many Magazines, Zombies, Sky Gamblers and Scribblenauts
• Facebook Launches HTML5 Resources to Boost Newly-Launched Mobile Platform
• Apple Sells 17.07M iPhones, 11.12M iPads, 6.62M iPods
• Z2Live’s Major MetalStorm Update Brings Flight Combat Game Back Up The Charts
• Google Adds A Social Layer to Android With People App, Social API

Wednesday, October 19th:

• ‘Batman’ Animator Launches New Gaming Studio With an Over-The-Top Rock, Paper, Scissors Game
• Emerging Free iOS Apps: AddictingGames, Pearltrees and Unstoppable Robots
• Playforge’s Zombie Farm Sprouts a Sequel in Zombie Life for iOS
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: TinyCo, Natural Motion, CrowdStar and More
• Spacetime Studios Carves Out a Name For Itself in Hardcore Mobile MMOs

Thursday, October 20th:

• New Hires in Mobile: GameLoft, Rovio and Tapjoy
• Konami Turns Arcade Classic Frogger Into a Pinball Game for iOS
• Top Emerging Android Apps: Tap Fish, TeamLava, Sentinel 3: Homeworld and Lots of Sports
• CrowdStar Expands Globally and on Mobile as It Girl Goes to Asia
• Russia’s Game Insight Makes $300K in First Two Weeks From My Country iPad App

Friday, October 21st:

• Inside Network Is Hiring Writers to Cover Facebook and Mobile Apps — Apply Now
• Mobile App Roundup: RIM, Microsoft, Tapjoy and Persona 4
• Gamevil’s New iOS Action RPG Advena Clashes Swords on the App Store

Saturday, October 22nd:

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Natural Motion Games, Lolapps, TinyCo and More

Inside Social Games

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

Monday, October 17th:

• My Fishbowl Developer Happy Elements Nets $30M in Funding, Targets Mobile Market
• Ravenskye City Takes Flight on Facebook Before Ravenshire Castle is Built

Tuesday, October 18th:

• Spry Fox Targets Facebook, Google+ With Compelling Kindle Game
• Spa Life From FreshPlanet Pampers Players on Facebook
• New Facebook Game Invite Tool Streamlines Friend Requests Process

Wednesday, October 19th:

• Crowdpark Bets on Forecasting Algorithm for Facebook Game, Scores $6M Round for Mobile Development
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Lolapps, Sociable Labs, Games Cafe and More
• Trending Now: Simple Social Game Mechanics and Design Choices Gaining Ground

Thursday, October 20th:

• CrowdStar Announces Global Ambitions, It Girl Goes to Asia on NHN
• iWin Expands Its Facebook Game Show Tie-in Roster with $100,000 Pyramid
• New Hires in Social Gaming: Zynga, Kabam, and Playfish
• 6waves Lolapps Sews an Undead Farm Simulation on Facebook with Zombie Island

Friday, October 21st:

• Bingo Bash Powers Up a Classic Game of Chance on Facebook
• Crowdstar Enters Facebook Hardcore Strategy Genre With Wasteland Empires
• Social Gaming News Roundup: Google+, Rovio and Toyota

Saturday, October 22nd:

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Games Cafe, King.com, TinyCo and More

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, October 17th:

• Page Tabs, Mobile, Spotify, Scribd, Halloween and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
• The 25 Most Liked Pages on Facebook, Fall 2011
• Featured Facebook Campaigns: “Tower Heist,” Fair Trade, Toyota, Kodak, CVS, Discovery Channel, Philips Sonicare and More
• Facebook Page Insights 2011 Upgrade: The Complete Reference Guide
• Clickable’s $12M Series C Led by American Express Will Fund Facebook Ads API Development

Tuesday, October 18th:

• Movies, TV, Music, Books, Jesus, Angry Birds and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages
• New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Wikia, Shoutlet, Votigo, Vitrue and More
• Nominations Now Open for the Inaugural Facebook Studio Awards for Marketing Campaigns
• Facebook Encourages App Developers to Build In “Private Mode” to Mute Automatic Sharing
• How to Determine How Frequently to Post to Your Facebook Page

Wednesday, October 19th:

• Spotify, YouTube and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
• Facebook Condenses the Groups Interface, Leaving More Space for Ads
• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Acquinity Interactive, King.com, TinyCo and More
• Facebook Releases Messenger for BlackBerry, Now Shows Who’s Online With Top Friends First
• Facebook Launches HTML5 Resource Center, but Early Mobile App Platform Traffic Is Slow

Thursday, October 20th:

• Facebook Hires and Departures: Games, Recruiting, Engineering and More
• Facebook Careers Postings: Mobile, Engineering, Platform Ops and More
• Facebook and Labor Department Deliver Career Resources Through Social Jobs Partnership Page
• How to “Use Facebook as Page” to Raise Brand Awareness and Gain Fans

Friday, October 21st:

• Halloween, Grooveshark, “Twilight,” Page Tabs and More on This Week’s Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
• Inside Network Is Hiring Writers to Cover Facebook and Mobile Apps — Apply Now
• Facebook Pages Can Now Be Opened in Facebook’s iOS Apps Via fb://page URL Scheme Links
• Facebook Testing “Facebook Credits for Websites” That Helps Third-Party Sites Sell Virtual Goods
• Facebook Roundup: NATO Declaration, Irish Data, Privacy Adoption and More

Saturday, October 22nd:

• New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Storm8, TinyCo, Lolapps and More