This week, Inside Facebook asks people who have built businesses on the Facebook platform why they believe in the company. These are the people that are truly invested in Facebook, whether or not they bought stock.

For Part 4 of our series, we spoke with Rick Marini, founder and CEO of professional networking service BranchOut. The Facebook app lets users organize their professional connections, see which friends have worked at companies their interested in and search for jobs. The company has raised more than $49 million in venture capital since it launched in 2010.

Seeing the potential of Facebook

Marini realized the potential of Facebook when the social network moved in on the turf of his own company. In 2009, Marini created Superfan.com, a social entertainment site that allowed users to express themselves by becoming a fan of everything they love in life. It soon became clear that Superfan couldn’t compete with Facebook’s own fan pages product. When Facebook changed “become a fan” to “Like” in 2010, the number of Facebook users joining fan pages quickly accelerated.

“I realized the power of the network,” Marini says. Superfan began to incorporate sharing features so that users could “fave” things on the site and then post that activity to Facebook.

Around the same time, Marini and his team began to think about how Facebook could be applied to a number of different of industries.

“We realized there were all these verticals that should be social, that should be done on Facebook,” he says.

Developing a business idea

Marini says the most obvious industries that would be transformed by Facebook were those that were inherently social, like dating, ticketing or travel. These are things that bring people together offline, so they should be done that way online, too.

After working at job search company Monster for three years, Marini and his team still had ideas about the jobs and networking space.

“We realized no one had owned the professional side of Facebook,” he says. This seemed to have greater potential than Superfan did.

Marini and his team pivoted and became BranchOut in June 2010. They launched the app a month later.

Confidence in Facebook

Marini believes in Facebook because of its scale, the frequency with which people return to it, and the strength of connections people have there with friends and family.

“Facebook has combined [these] three big things that I don’t think anyone’s ever done,” Marini says. “That’s incredibly powerful and they still have a lot of runway.”

Then there’s BranchOut’s own quick rise. The app, which runs on the Facebook canvas and the mobile web, has more than 10 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Last month when BranchOut raised $20 million in a series C round, the company announced it had more than 25 million total registered users. Much of the app’s recent viral growth comes from Facebook’s Open Graph publishing and single sign-on for mobile.

Future of Facebook

Marini sees Facebook’s future not just in advertising but as a platform for developers.

“They want companies like BranchOut to disrupt multibillion dollar businesses,” Marini says.

In order to do that, Marini says he’d like Facebook to invest more resources in the platform so there are more engineers focused on developer relations and fixing bugs sooner.

“We want Facebook to be responsive and move as quickly as we can,” he says.

Though, Marini notes that in other areas Facebook already moves extremely fast and continues to innovate. He sees the company making big strides in mobile this year.

“I think it’s going to go from good to great,” he says. “I think they have a lot of focus to really make an enhanced experience there.”

Marini says the IPO gives Facebook the financial flexibility to attract top talent and do more deals like the Instagram acquisition so that it can stay on top of trends. As far as monetization, he says Facebook seems to be paying the most attention to advertising, though they’re looking at ways to monetize the platform better. For example, Facebook has said it might reduce the 30 percent fee it takes from developers using Credits for payments.

“For companies like BranchOut, that 30 percent doesn’t make sense,” Marini says. “Facebook gets this.”

Overall, Marini believes Facebook will continue to operate with a long vision of the future, not for short-term gain.

“They’ve made it clear they’re not going to manage the company quarter by quarter,” he says. “Mark [Zuckerberg] wants to focus on product innovation. Sheryl [Sandberg] will continue to focus on the business side.”

–

Read Part 1 with Clara Shih of Hearsay Social
Read Part 2 with John Corpus of Milyoni
Read Part 3 with Hussein Fazal of AdParlor 

Facebook, its underwriters and the Nasdaq exchange continue to face scrutiny over the company’s $16 billion initial public offering, as a number of investors have filed lawsuits and regulators have called for investigations.

Facebook’s stock closed at $32 today, up more than three percent since yesterday but still down from its $38 IPO price. Here we’ll recap the two main issues causing this onslaught of controversy and discuss what has happened so far as a result.

First were technical issues with the Nasdaq, which many claim led to botched trades on Friday when Facebook went public. The exchange had said it would set aside $13 million to cover compensation costs, but Nasdaq OMX Group was then sued on Tuesday by an investor claiming the exchange was negligent in handling orders for Facebook shares. Nasdaq representatives now say that if they had fully realized the extent of the technical problems they faced, they would have delayed the IPO. Facebook is reportedly getting pitches from the New York Stock Exchange to switch its listing.

The other controversy involves underwriters Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and others, as well as Facebook itself. Reports claim underwriters’ analysts reduced their earnings projections for the social network during the company’s roadshow, but did not make the change widely available to potential investors. According to Reuters, the banks are now forecasting 30.4 percent year-on-year 2012 revenue growth on average, instead of the 36.7 percent growth previously expected. In 2011, Facebook’s revenue grew 87.9 percent year-on-year to $3.71 billion. Another report says Facebook executives were involved in suggesting analysts revise their estimates.

As such, lawsuits have been filed in New York and California on behalf of investors who claim they had a legal right to know about the lower growth forecasts before the IPO. The underwriters, Facebook and its executives are listed as defendants in these suits.

According to Reuters, the U.S. House and Senate committees that oversee financial sector matters are planning to look into the allegations — as are the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth.

Morgan Stanley said in a statement Tuesday that it “followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs.” Facebook did not provide comment about the regulatory inquiries, but regarding the lawsuit, spokesperson Andrew Noyse said in a statement, “We believe the lawsuit is without merit and will defend ourselves vigorously.”

This week, Inside Facebook asks people who have built businesses on the Facebook platform why they believe in the company. These are the people that are truly invested in Facebook, whether or not they bought stock.

For Part 3 of our series we spoke to Hussein Fazal, co-founder and CEO of AdParlor, which provides Facebook ad services and software to optimize campaigns for clients including Groupon, Digitas and a number of social game companies.

Seeing the potential of Facebook

When Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers in 2007, Fazal was working as a software engineer at Bell Canada. In early 2008, he and a friend Kristaps Ronka decided to try building some Facebook applications in their spare time. Fazal didn’t know what would come of it, but he thought it would be fun.

Fazal built a file-sharing app called My Documents, and Ronka made a treasure hunt app. Even though the apps only had a few hundred users, the two started to look for ways to make money off what they had built. When they couldn’t find a good in-app ad network, they decided to build their own.

“As soon as we started working on the ad network, we realized there was real money to be made given the unfulfilled demand and the rapid growth of Facebook,” Fazal says.

Developing a business idea

Fazal and Ronka initially struggled to get advertisers and publishers on board with AdParlor. If they signed a new advertiser, they wouldn’t have enough publishers to give the advertiser the reach they wanted. If they signed more publishers, they didn’t have enough ad inventory to fill the spaces.

But after “a lot of hustling,” as Fazal says, the company became more established among game developers — including Zynga — and started bringing in six figures a month. When they saw the offer wall space begin to develop, they got into that business as well. The turning point for AdParlor came in early 2010 when an advertiser from China wanted to run a huge campaign to drive users to its app.

“They were looking to spend $1 million as fast as possible,” Fazal says.

AdParlor didn’t have enough banner or offer wall inventory to satisfy the advertiser, so Fazal says he turned to competing networks to serve the ad. It still wasn’t enough volume for the client, so Fazal tried using Facebook’s self-serve tool to run ads directly on the site, rather than within canvas apps. It worked.

“The advertiser called us and told us to shut down the banner network, shut down the offer wall,” Fazal says. “The volume and quality of the Facebook ads was better than everything else we were doing.”

Fazal ended up spending close to $1 million using the basic self-serve marketplace.

“We were like, ‘Holy crap, we should start doing this for everyone!’” Fazal says.

AdParlor began using the Bulk Uploader tool and eventually got access to the Ads API, which was in limited private beta at the time. Within two months, AdParlor built their own platform using the API and it has since focused exclusively on ads within the right hand column of Facebook rather than in apps.

Confidence in Facebook

Fazal believes Facebook is fundamentally different than most websites and services because its power is not just on Facebook.com or its mobile properties, but in the network of information it has on its users.

“I feel every once in a while there’s a big shift on the web,” Fazal says, discussing how Google redefined the space by making it possible for people to find information they couldn’t before. “I feel like Facebook is the same way. There really has been a shift in the Internet and what people do online.”

He says the scale of Facebook is what really proves its value.

“Just go into a Starbucks and look at the laptops,” Fazal says. “It’s is everywhere.”

Future of Facebook

Fazal sees a number of ways it could be integrated into products like social TV, car GPS systems, and recommendation services for music and movies. But as a developer in the advertising business, Fazal would really like to see Facebook launch a display ad network and build a better search engine.

“We’d love to have more inventory,” Fazal says of serving ads off-Facebook. “And we’d love to have intent-based search ads.”

Fazal acknowledges that these are big efforts, and Facebook search in particular could be a long ways off.

“Search is not an easy problem to solve,” Fazal says. “But if everyone already goes to Facebook.com, that’s a legitimate social competitor.”

–

Read Part 1 with Clara Shih of Hearsay Social
Read Part 2 with John Corpus of Milyoni

Regulators suggested today that they will review Facebook’s initial public offering following reports of the Nasdaq’s technical issues and possible violations by underwriters, according to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Chairman Rick Ketchum separately told the press that their agencies would be looking into allegations and concerns surrounding the much-scrutinized IPO. [Update 5/22/12 2:27 p.m. - Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth William Galvin has issued a subpoena to Morgan Stanley over it discussions with investors on Facebook prior to the IPO.]

Sources tell Reuters that Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs revised their earnings projections for Facebook during the company’s roadshow but did not make the change widely available to potential investors. Business Insider’s Henry Blodget explained that the underwriter analysts reduced their estimates after Facebook had filed an amendment to its IPO filing, which included a note that user growth continued to outpace revenue growth in the second quarter of 2012. He wonders whether Facebook had any direct involvement in the analysts adjusting their projections. [Update 5/22/12 3:02 p.m. - Blodget now says he has sources confirming that a Facebook executive told analysts to lower their estimates.]

Although companies do not release their own financial forecasts before an IPO, they generally provide guidance to underwriters whose analysts determine an estimate. Any information a company offers leading up to an IPO is required to be made available to all potential investors, however, bankers often favor their institutional clients and share information with them before disseminating it to retail investors.

As for issues with the Nasdaq, the exchange experienced a number of technical issues on Friday that could result in $13 million in compensation for bad trades. A number of investors were unable to verify whether their orders went through for several hours.

These problems seem to have led some investors to be more wary of Facebook’s stock, which has fallen to $31 today after initially listing at $38 and going as high as $45 on Friday morning. Shares are down 8.9 percent since Monday and down 18 percent from the offering price.

This week, Inside Facebook asks people who have built businesses on the Facebook platform why they believe in the company. These are the people that are truly invested in Facebook, whether or not they bought stock.

For Part 2 of our series, we spoke with Milyoni founder and CEO John Corpus. Milyoni is the Facebook commerce and social entertainment company best known for making films and live events available for streaming on the social network.

Seeing the potential of Facebook

Three years ago when Corpus was CIO of Mervyns department store, he saw the rapid growth of Facebook as an opportunity for commerce. At the time, the social network had about 150 million users. Although that is far less than the more than 900 million using the site now, it was a major milestone in 2009. Corpus says the growth was especially interesting when compared with trends showing that online display and search conversions were declining.

“The three rules of retail are location, location, location,” Corpus says. “Facebook was where people were spending more time.”

He says it was the amount of interaction and the speed of sharing happening on the site that stood out and led him to want to build a company on the platform.

Developing a business idea

When Corpus founded Milyoni (pronounced “million-eye”) in February 2009, the company was focused on helping businesses sell physical goods. Milyoni offered the “iFanStore,” an e-commerce platform for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. It was one of the few e-commerce apps that let users stay within Facebook during an entire transaction and then share their activity with friends.

The company gained a lot of entertainment-focused clients, including HBO, the NBA, UFC and The Onion. These companies were selling things like t-shirts and DVDs through the app. But Corpus says that a conversation with Warner Bros., at the end of 2010, led to a whole new market: digital goods.

Milyoni and Warner Bros. were discussing how video was incorporated in the app when an executive asked whether a full feature could be shared on Facebook. The companies decided to try it, and in March 2011, they made “The Dark Knight” available for streaming on Facebook with users paying for the rental using Facebook’s platform currency, Credits. The success of that test and others led Milyoni to develop what it calls “Social Cinema” for movies and “Social Live” for things like concerts and sporting events. The company is now primarily focused on these areas rather than selling physical goods through Facebook.

Confidence in Facebook

Corpus says Milyoni could expand to other platforms in the future, but for now it’s focused on Facebook.

“This is not a fly-by-night type of business,” Corpus says, pointing to Facebook’s latest user numbers and engagement statistics, which includes 300 million photo uploads and 3.2 billion Likes per day. “From a foundational standpoint, they’re here to stay.”

Milyoni’s own success on the platform is further proof for Corpus, who says Facebook users have watched more than 700,000 minutes of Milyoni content in the past three months. The company now offers more than 150 titles from 16 studios available on Facebook, and it plans to bring 700 more titles and 30 more live events to the platform this year.

Facebook’s future

To capitalize on the social network’s growth in users and engagement, Facebook now has to focus on growing its revenue streams through advertising, mobile and commerce, Corpus says. Social games were a good start, but he says there is a lot more opportunity around social entertainment where studios and other content providers can connect directly with their consumers.

Facebook’s payments revenue was $186 million in the first quarter of 2012, up 98 percent compared to the first quarter of 2011 when Credits were not mandatory for social games transactions. However, most of that revenue is still from sales of virtual goods, not digital goods or experiences. Milyoni is one of the few companies helping to pioneer the use of Credits outside the realm of games. Corpus says the social network needs to do more to get users to understand Credits so that they are more comfortable using the currency and spending money within apps. He sites PayPal as an example of another company that took a few years before it was widely considered secure. Corpus says that making it easier for users to see and manage their Credits accounts could help Facebook in this area.

“They have to let people know it’s not just Monopoly money,” Corpus says. “They have to provide people with a level of confidence and security to make it a more trustworthy place.”

Read Part 1 of our series, which profiles Clara Shih of social marketing software company Hearsay Social.

As many expected, Facebook’s stock fell below its offer price today, settling at $34.33 when the market closed.

Some pundits have rushed to call the social network’s initial public offering a flop, but it is important to distinguish between what a successful offering would be for Facebook versus what the media and some investors might have wanted to see. It is fairly common for stocks to fall below their offer price within the first six months after an IPO. The lower stock price does indicate that the market finds Facebook overvalued in the near term, though its future potential could be much higher.

As Fortune senior editor Dan Primack and Trinity Ventures partner Daniel Scholnick have written, Facebook’s was a highly successful IPO in that the social network likely maximized how much money it raised in the offering. Without a first day “pop,” Facebook can feel confident that $38 was the right IPO price. Had the stock gone way up, the company and investors who sold shares in the offering would have missed an opportunity to make more. Some aggressive investors might be disappointed that the stock didn’t pop on Friday and that it fell today, but that doesn’t change the outcome of the IPO for Facebook, which raised $16 billion in the offering.

Further, the IPO generated so much demand, the Nasdaq faced a number of technical issues that could result in $13 million in compensation for bad trades, according to the Wall Street Journal. On Friday, trading was delayed about 30 minutes and throughout the day investors faced issues that prevented them from confirming their trades of the social network’s stock. Nasdaq executives say the exchange will use $10 million of its own proceeds from the IPO in addition to a standing $3 million cap on payouts to customers who suffer losses as a result of failures in the exchange’s systems. It’s possible that those technical issues led some investors to sour on the stock.

Now, without underwriters to prop up the stock as they did on Friday, the market is determining an appropriate price for the social network. Business Insider editor and CEO Henry Blodget writes that the IPO price valued Facebook at about 65 times its 2013 estimated earnings per share. Apple, on the other hand, is trading at only 10 times its estimated earnings per share. Google is trading at 12 times its estimated EPS. That’s not to say Facebook isn’t likely to one day be worth much more than it is today, but it’s difficult for the market to uphold a $100 billion valuation for a company with $3.71 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit last year, especially when its margins seem to be declining.

As Facebook continues to grow, its operating costs are going to increase and its stock is likely to fluctuate, but Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley points to Amazon as an example Facebook might follow. The Internet company saw its stock linger below its $18 IPO price for almost two months before really picking up. Fifteen years later, the e-commerce company is trading around $218 per share.

This week, Inside Facebook asks people who have built businesses on the Facebook platform why they believe in the company. These are the people that are truly invested in Facebook, whether or not they bought stock.

First up is Clara Shih, co-founder and CEO of Hearsay Social, an enterprise platform that allows financial services, insurance, retail and other brands to manage their online presence — on the local and corporate levels — and maintain regulatory compliance as they engage on social media sites.

Seeing the potential of Facebook

“It was the first f8 on May 24, 2007,” Shih says. “I remember the date because it changed my life.”

Facebook announced its platform that day, enabling any developer to build applications on the site. The company also introduced the idea of the social graph. This stood out to Shih, who had been working at Salesforce at the time.

“It really got me thinking about what Facebook could become. I realized that your trusted online identity combined with News Feed could be transformative for businesses.”

Shih got to work on an app called Faceforce, which pulled Facebook profile information into a company’s Salesforce system to augment CRM data. Shih says that when Faceforce went viral, it was validation that her thoughts about Facebook were on the right track.

Developing a business idea

The success of Faceforce ultimately led to a book deal. Shih wrote “The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.” She says researching the book led her to want to start her own business focused on Facebook marketing.

“The more that I learned as I talked to brands and users, the more I became convinced Facebook would be the next Google,” says Shih, who previously worked in strategy and business operations at Google. “It became clear that social media is here to stay and it will be as big, if not bigger, than the Internet.”

When “The Facebook Era” made the New York Times bestseller list, it was further validation that Shih was onto something. She reached out to former Stanford classmate Steve Garrity, and the two decided to create Hearsay Social, which is a marketing platform that serves businesses with a corporate/local structure and addresses issues of compliance. The company launched publicly in February 2011, with Farmers Insurance, State Farm and 24 Hour Fitness as customers.

“Facebook has successfully changed consumer behavior,” Shih says. “It changes the way consumers find new information, content and recommendations. That’s transformational for marketers.”

Confidence in Facebook

Shih says Facebook’s growth rate combined with an opportunity to interact “the way we prefer to interact,” gives her confidence in the future of the platform.

“Facebook gets us back to basic human behaviors,” Shih says. “Facebook is all about people. We have innate human desires to connect, and Facebook is facilitating that.”

Shih says this works particularly well for “relationship sellers” — like the insurance companies and other businesses that use Hearsay Social. Facebook enables these companies to connect with individual consumers at scale.

Facebook and developers

Hearsay has had a good working relationship with Facebook since it began. Shih believes the social network has created “a win-win-win situation” with its platform.

First, developers have great revenue potential because of Facebook, Shih says. Facebook itself benefits because it can get into new industries without having to build its own products, for example instead of making a music feature, it can integrate Spotify, Vevo and others, which drive up the value and stickiness of the site. Finally, users benefit because they get access to all the innovation from third-party developers.

Facebook’s future

Looking forward, Shih believes Facebook will continue to transform industries and monetize in new ways. She says the company has only scratched the surface of its potential and suggests Facebook could get into social search, commerce, television or even out-of-home advertising that uses near-field technology to recognize who people are when they walk by.

“In the near term, they’re doing a great job innovating with new ads,” Shih says. “In the medium term, they’re in the best position to monetize mobile and internationally. And in the long term, the possibilities are endless.”

After intense build-up and a decent initial pop when the market opened, Facebook’s stock ended the day at $38.23.

Some analysts are calling the IPO a dud because the stock did not trade well above its offering price. Underwriters including Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had to prop up the stock to keep it above $38. However, the company and its early investors will be pleased that they did not miss out on an opportunity to sell shares at a higher price to begin with. Facebook raised $16 billion at more than $100 billion valuation.

Because of unprecedented demand, the Nasdaq delayed trading by about 30 minutes. Once the floodgates were opened, Facebook shares hit $42. The stock hovered around the $40 range most of the day before falling in the final hours of trading. Overall, the Nasdaq was down 1.24 percent today. The Dow and S&P also finished down, as they have all week. Other social media stocks, including LinkedIn, Yelp and Groupon, ended the day on a low note. Zynga fared especially poorly because of its deep connection with Facebook. The social gaming company hit all-time lows that triggered halts on trading this morning.

Despite what some might see as a weak performance, Facebook traded 566 million shares today, the most ever for a U.S. stock the day of its IPO. The social network displaces GM as the record holder since 2010. Coincidentally, GM was in the news this week questioning the effectiveness of Facebook advertising and suggesting it would cut its $10 million paid media budget for the site. The Wall Street Journal followed up today with a report that GM would also cut its Super Bowl spend, implying the company is struggling outside of social media as well. Many advertisers across industries say they are increasing their spends on Facebook, even if they aren’t always able to quantify the results. Facebook will need to continue to develop its ad model and provide advertisers with the assurance that their time and money is well-spent on the social network. However, the company has a number of options for future growth, including a fledging payments business, which could make the stock a better long-term investment than immediate boon.

Perhaps as part of a continuing effort to show that it is focused on its product not its stock performance, Facebook announced after trading hours ended that it had acquired mobile commerce and gifting company Karma. Critics often point to Facebook’s uncertain future in monetizing mobile use. Whether the acquisition gives some investors any new confidence in the company may be reflected in how the stock performs on Monday.

The official total of the IPO today was $16,006,877,370 with about $6.8 billion going to Facebook itself, $9.1 billion going to selling stockholders and $176 million going to the underwriters. Here is a breakdown of how many shares each underwriter was granted to sell today, according to Facebook’s latest regulatory filing:

Facebook is now officially a public company as it made its shares available for trading on the Nasdaq this morning priced at $38 a share. This gives the social network a potential market cap of $104 billion for the largest Internet IPO in history.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the opening bell from Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Employees spent all night on the company’s 57-acre campus for a hackathon event where they worked on new projects of their choosing. The hackathon seemed aimed at keeping companies focused on Facebook as a product rather than Facebook as a multibillion dollar company. To the right is one of the posters from the event.

Zuckerberg, who created Facebook in 2004, put off an IPO for years in favor of focusing on growing its user base and implementing sometimes controversial but largely transformative features. These include News Feed, Facebook Connect, Instant Personalization and the ill-fated Beacon, which has been ultimately re-imagined as Open Graph with far more success.

In 2010, Zuckerberg made his perspective clear in a response to a Facebook Question about when the company would go public:

“I tend to think that being private is better for us right now because of some of the big risks we want to take in developing new products. [...] The experience of managing the company through launching controversial services is tricky, but I can only imagine it would be even more difficult if we had a public stock price bouncing around. There are a lot more new things left to build [...] and I’d rather focus on building them than on going public right now.”

Among those features turned out to be an expanded Credits program, single sign-on for mobile devices, a mobile app platform, Sponsored Stories, asymmetrical relationships through Facebook Subscribe, a unified messaging system, new groups and list features for small-group sharing, location tagging for all posts, Timeline and Open Graph applications. With the launch of Open Graph actions in September last year, Facebook has put into place what seems to be a major building block for the social network to realize its goal of being a platform that gives developers the power to transform a range of industries. It is likely to have been a key change Zuckerberg wanted to make before beginning the IPO process.

Facebook reached the 500-shareholder limit last year, which would have forced the company to release its financial statements even if it didn’t make a public offering. As Google did when faced with a similar situation, Facebook decided to file for an IPO anyway in February. Despite the “quiet period” that follows an IPO filing, the company hasn’t shown any signs of slowing progress. It introduced a number of features for marketers and advertisers, including mobile Sponsored Stories, Timeline for pages and offers. It announced the App Center and a beta program for paid apps. Facebook also bought photo sharing app Instagram for $1 billion, and acquired a few smaller mobile startups. This was all in addition to the dozens of tests and redesigned features Facebook implements on a weekly, if not daily, basis.

Now will be the real test of whether or not the company can maintain focus while being on the public market. A dual-class stock structure introduced in 2009 gives existing shareholders 10 times the voting power of new shareholder so the board has more power over the long-term direction of the company without feeling short-term pressures from investors. Zuckerberg himself controls about 56 percent of the voting power.

Images below from Mark Zuckerberg’s Timeline and the Nasdaq live feed. Image above from Facebook.

Facebook began public trading today at $38 a share and a valuation of $104 billion. These are the top 25 apps on the social network the day of its initial public offering, as tracked by our AppData traffic monitoring service.

We’ll start with daily active users, which is a measure of the most engaged portion of an app’s audience. Note that of these apps, nine are Facebook canvas games. The others are mobile apps, web integrations, desktop apps or a combination. For example, Words With Friends is a canvas and mobile game, Spotify is a desktop and mobile app, and Socialcam has a mobile app, website and canvas presence. The top app, Microsoft, is a web utility that connects Windows Live to a user’s Facebook account.

1.	Microsoft	12,100,000
2.	Draw Something	9,100,000
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,100,000
4.	Words With Friends	7,100,000
5.	Bubble Witch Saga	6,400,000
6.	HTC Sense	5,900,000
7.	CityVille	5,600,000
8.	CastleVille	5,200,000
9.	Yahoo!	5,200,000
10.	Spotify	5,000,000
11.	Astrology	4,900,000
12.	Hidden Chronicles	4,700,000
13.	Yahoo! Social Bar	4,700,000
14.	schoolFeed	4,600,000
15.	FarmVille	4,500,000
16.	Diamond Dash	4,300,000
17.	Socialcam	4,200,000
18.	Zynga Slingo	4,200,000
19.	Bing	4,000,000
20.	Samsung Mobile	3,700,000
21.	DROID	3,500,000
22.	Tetris Battle	3,500,000
23.	Photo Love	3,300,000
24.	Bejeweled Blitz	3,200,000
25.	Daily Horoscope	3,100,000

Next, we present the top 25 Facebook applications in size by monthly active users. This is a measure of an app’s overall reach. By launching Open Graph integrations, many of these apps have rapidly climbed our rankings in the past months, and drawn excessive media attention whenever traffic plateaued or decreased. Of these apps, nine are Facebook canvas games — and they’re not all the same games that appeared in the top 25 DAU list above.

1.	Socialcam	51,500,000
2.	Yahoo! Social Bar	39,500,000
3.	CityVille	36,900,000
4.	Viddy	36,900,000
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	35,000,000
6.	Draw Something	30,600,000
7.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	29,700,000
8.	MyCalendar – Birthdays	29,000,000
9.	Bing	25,700,000
10.	Microsoft	22,800,000
11.	FarmVille	22,400,000
12.	Scribd	22,200,000
13.	CastleVille	22,100,000
14.	Hidden Chronicles	21,800,000
15.	Angry Birds	21,400,000
16.	Bubble Witch Saga	21,200,000
17.	Spotify	19,700,000
18.	TripAdvisor™	19,300,000
19.	Diamond Dash	18,900,000
20.	Samsung Mobile	18,700,000
21.	Static Iframe Tab	18,500,000
22.	Metacafe	17,900,000
23.	Words With Friends	17,600,000
24.	Instagram	16,700,000
25.	Tetris Battle	15,800,000

Be sure to catch up on Inside Facebook’s IPO coverage and stick with us to see how the app ecosystem evolves with the social network’s new status as a public company.