Inside Facebook

On the first official day of Q3 2009, which established apps are still growing the most quickly? Here are the numbers from AppData on today’s fastest growing applications on Facebook in the 1 million to 10 million MAU category.

Currently taking the #1 spot is FARKLE, an addictive dice game developed by Facebook app shop Viral, s.r.o. For each game, users roll dice 10 times and try to maximize their scores by following the game’s scoring rules. As you play, chips are earned along the way. They can also be earned by inviting your Facebook friends to play the game, sending your friends who are also users of the app a gift, and/or completing offers on the app’s offer wall.

		Name	MAU	Gain	%	Developer
1.		FARKLE	2,096,924	+197,165	+10.4	Viral, s.r.o.
2.		Barn Buddy	3,188,649	+167,087	+5.5	TheBroth, Inc.
3.		Waka-Waka	3,109,541	+120,994	+4.1	Metrogames
4.		Restaurant City	5,861,728	+106,605	+1.9	Playfish
5.		Biotronic	3,398,277	+101,750	+3.1	Metrogames
6.		UNO™ BETA	1,858,228	+100,639	+5.7	GameHouse
7.		Do you really know me?	1,865,635	+57,851	+3.2	How well do you know me
8.		Know-It-All Trivia	3,707,469	+57,736	+1.6	CrowdStar
9.		YoVille	7,857,944	+44,582	+0.6	Zynga
10.		Street Racing	2,904,532	+43,082	+1.5	Zynga
11.		Bejeweled Blitz	4,404,078	+35,434	+0.8	Popcap Games
12.		Fortune Products	3,504,943	+31,957	+0.9	QuoteMountain.com
13.		Daily Horoscope	4,152,067	+28,981	+0.7	6 waves
14.		Tattoodle	1,262,829	+25,777	+2.1	Make The Web Better
15.		Are YOU Interested?	2,640,198	+23,095	+0.9	SNAP Interactive (Ticker: STVI)
16.		Is Cool by cafe.com	2,221,961	+19,652	+0.9	Cafe.com
17.		Geo Challenge	3,695,910	+19,336	+0.5	Playfish
18.		All About Me	1,436,420	+18,857	+1.3	Lih Chen
19.		SuperPoke! Pets	1,348,700	+17,474	+1.3	Slide, Inc.
20.		Rock Legends!	1,061,607	+17,192	+1.7	Serious Business

FARKLE’s approach to incentivizing friends with the app pushes the boundaries of Facebook’s platform incentivization rules. About a year ago, the Facebook Platform team prohibited incentivized invites within apps - a policy designed to increase the quality of messages sent to users via apps.

Also in the Top 5 are Barn Buddy (TheBroth, Inc.), and verified apps Waka-Waka (Metrogames), Restaurant City (Playfish), and  Biotronic (Metrogames again). The top five spots are all taken by social games, and it’s notable that three out of the five apps are verified apps - one indication that apps in the Application Verification Program are enjoying the benefits of increased prominence.

Do you really know me? and All About Me have also earned places in the Top 20, consistent with numbers from last month showing that simple quizzing apps are continuing to see some pretty viral growth.

Although Facebook is publishing some of its own Facebook Connect widgets like the Live Stream widget and the Comments Box widget to help websites be more social, major widget platforms themselves are starting to integrate Facebook Connect in their own more specialized products.

Just a few days ago, widget platform Widgetbox soft launched Facebook Connect in a compelling integration that allows users to publish widgets to the News Feed. Widgetbox’s VP Marketing & Business Development Ryan Spoon says the company’s widgets reach 100 million uniques every month, but only 1% of those come through Facebook. With the recent release of Connect, the company is making efforts to change that.

Here’s an example of what the integration looks like:

1. You can sign in to Widgetbox.com using your Facebook account.

2. When you add a widget or rate and comment on a widget, you can publish these stories to your Wall and the News Feed.

3. If the widget you share is Flash-based, it should be functional within the Facebook News Feed. Most widgets come with a play button expands and plays the widget in-line in the stream. If the widget is written in Javascript, it appears in the Feed as a regular story. Widgetbox is trying to consolidate these types of stories - a challenge with the evolving Connect API’s.

The next step for Widgetbox is to enhance its Connect integration by bringing Facebook’s social graph to the site and make widget recommendations to its users based on what their friends have added. While the company is focusing its Connect efforts on the News Feed, the technology is also there to add Widgetbox widgets inside applications, especially in the context of games, Spoon explained.

Conclusion

Typically, widgets are added to sites like blogs that are more static, and so users can count on the widget being there the next time they need it. With Widgetbox’s Facebook integration, there seems to be a higher risk of users publishing content that flows off the first page of the stream in a matter of hours.

Nevertheless, widget makers are still trying to get distribution wherever they can inside Facebook since Facebook more or less booted widget-like profile boxes off user profile pages with the redesign last year (however, users can still add small application boxes and tabs to their profile). We’re looking forward to watching Widgetbox iterate on its Facebook Connect integration in the months ahead.

Earlier this month, Busch Entertainment announced a cross-platform social media campaign intended to create greater awareness of Busch Entertainment’s many theme parks, including SeaWorld and Busch Gardens. The campaign, called The Worlds of Discovery Photo Adventure, challenges people to see if they can find five differences between a series of two almost-identical photos featuring SeaWorld and Bush Gardens sights. Users can play the game via a Facebook application, the Facebook Connect enabled site MyPhotoAdventure.com, and soon, the iPhone.

In Busch’s Facebook application, after each game is over, the app shows you a 10 second or so video that promotes theme park attractions before asking you if you want to publish your score to your Facebook profile. It also shows you your score, rankings, and top rankings. With the tickets you earn, you can then enter drawings. The current prize, for example, is a pair of tickets to any Worlds of Discovery park. Other social features include inviting your friends to play the game and a column on the right-hand side that displays other theme parks that you can become fans of.

Entering tickets to win the current drawing:

Joe Couceiro, CMO for Busch, says, “The power of the social and mobile web applications allow us to connect with current and prospective fans in a fresh and engaging way, while providing a fun, interactive experience that begins before they ever enter one of our parks.” The campaign was developed with Buddy Media.

As we continue our in depth look at leaders the Facebook Platform payments ecosystem, today we turn our attention to Super Rewards, a virtual currency monetization platform for social apps and games. We did one of the first public profiles of the company last summer, when word was first getting out about Mob Wars revenues.

Most recently, the company announced the hiring of Julie Craft as VP of Marketing, who joins CEO Jason Bailey and President Adam Caplan on the Super Rewards exectuive team. Craft has recently worked as Vice President of Advertising and Publisher Sales at Simply Hired, followed by a business development role at rival monetization firm Offerpal Media.

We recently spoke with Bailey about the current state of the market and trends the company is seeing heading into the second half of 2009:

Inside Facebook: Jason, thanks for your time. Can you briefly describe the Super Rewards solution?

Jason Bailey: Super Rewards has been around since December 2007 and is a virtual currency monetization platform. We’re a simple cut-and-paste solution that allows game services to monetize their virtual currencies through a series of payment options via PayPal, credit card, cash, direct deposit, prepaid gamer cards, etc. At our core is an ad-based solution. We work with 3,000 different advertisers that give us money, for example, when users sign up for a service. This money then gets passed on to game publishers.

What’s the most important interaction in your value chain?

The interaction between end users and advertisers: If users want to sign up for Netflix, it’s important for them to find value in offers, so we work with advertisers to push high quality ads out. This increases the likelihood that users will return in the future. Advertisers want more users. A user who signs up for Netflix and unsubscribes doesn’t generate a lot of value to advertisers. In the middle are Super Rewards and game publishers. We facilitate the interaction between advertisers and developers. We make life easier for developers.

What are trends are you seeing so far this year, and what do you see ahead for the space over the next year or two?

Mobile payments are becoming more popular and commonly accepted. As carriers are providing services and costs are coming down, there will be more competition in the space. PayPal and credit card payments make up the largest portion of direct payments. In international markets, most people don’t have credit cards, so there are direct deposit options that take funds directly out of bank accounts. This hasn’t caught on in North America yet.

Overall, the space will continue to grow, and we’ll see a couple of major things happen: First, the bar will rise. The quality of games and applications has been getting higher and will continue to do so. The days of small developers who create apps in dorm rooms are kind of gone, but not completely. Second, we’ll see an aggregation in the space as far as who the key players are.

As we’ve all seen, Facebook’s payment service is now live in a few applications. What are your thoughts on Facebook’s payment system?

I really think it’s just another payment solution. I’m not too concerned about it and don’t think it’s Facebook’s gift to the world in terms of microtransactions. Facebook is late to game and not necessarily providing anything of additional value that can’t be gotten anywhere else. Social Gold and Spare Change have been offering the same solution for a long time. That said, there’s definitely the trust factor with Facebook.

It remains to see what margins Facebook will take. I’d say Facebook will capture a relatively small amount of third-party app revenue for 2009 unless it runs margins so slim that there’s no value for other companies or makes it so that everyone has to use Facebook’s payment method like Apple’s platform. With the former, the company would be at fraud risk; with the latter, there would literally be a riot.

Moving on to stats - how are your revenues currently breaking down across platform and geographies?

80% of our revenue comes from the four major English speaking countries. US, UK, Canada, and Australia.

Facebook and MySpace are fairly even in terms of total revenue. But MySpace does it on fewer users. This is because it is more heavily skewed to US users, whereas Facebook is more more international, but has more people playing more apps.

How do your ARPUs break down across countries?

ARPUs vary greatly. The top four being the best. However, often heavily overlooked are Norway, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, and Italy.

Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia, and Brazil should be avoided as their revenue is low on a per user basis. There are plenty of users, but the ARPU is low.

What are common mistakes developers make when it comes to setting conversion rates?

They are either giving away too many points or too little. In the first case, say the conversion rate is $10 dollars for 10 million coins: users have so many points that there’s no need to buy again. In the second case, say the conversion rate is too low - $10 dollars for five points: users would much rather go to other places in the game where they can click and earn.

How’s the acquisition of Frozen Bear going for Super Rewards?

Back in December we acquired Frozen Bear, a small company with only a few people mainly for its talent. The team at Frozen Bear has done a tremendous amount of work to bring Super Rewards to the next level with a robust, scalable product.

Thanks Jason. Finally, what unique value does Super Rewards bring to the monetization space?

The smaller players in the payment industry try to have you believe that offer inventory is the same, but I assure you there are offers in our platform that you absolutely will not find elsewhere. We work with a whole lot more networks than most of our competitors because of preexisting relationships with performance marketing companies. And it’s not just about the offers or volume, but which offers you present to users and which times. We serve 100 million unique eyeballs a month, and this breadth of demographic data allows us to see a new user, make an assumption, and present the right offer at the right time. As a result, we are the largest revenue generator for many advertisers and get slightly higher rates on most offers.

Now that school is out, what’s growing on the Facebook Platform?

Here’s a look at this week’s Top 20 fastest growing applications on Facebook from AppData amongst applications between 1 million and 10 million monthly active users.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Likeness	3,305,337	+1,154,621	+53.7	RockYou!
2.		My Polls	3,038,017	+776,361	+34.3	It’s complicated
3.		Farm Town	9,197,631	+715,502	+8.4	Slashkey
4.		Barn Buddy	1,948,971	+664,385	+51.7	TheBroth, Inc.
5.		Restaurant City	5,211,060	+626,901	+13.7	Playfish
6.		All About Me	1,222,298	+625,892	+104.9	Lih Chen
7.		When will you DIE?	1,398,828	+606,714	+76.6	Kyrah Abad
8.		MindJolt Games	7,652,207	+600,276	+8.5	MindJolt
9.		CourseFeed	5,284,093	+561,607	+11.9	ClassTop
10.		Do you really know me?	1,138,921	+507,349	+80.3	How well do you know me
11.		YoVille	8,081,702	+473,329	+6.2	Zynga
12.		Pillow Fight	2,242,228	+450,520	+25.1	Shikha
13.		Mobile	6,210,021	+448,974	+7.8	Facebook
14.		Bejeweled Blitz	4,120,033	+438,207	+11.9	Popcap Games
15.		Biotronic	2,831,529	+360,761	+14.6	Metrogames
16.		Mon Coeurs	1,198,052	+360,653	+43.1	Coeurs
17.		Cities I’ve Visited	1,917,483	+355,744	+22.8	TripAdvisor
18.		what are you born to do?	2,612,943	+346,967	+15.3	Born
19.		What is the theme song of ur life???	2,485,688	+341,637	+15.9	—
20.		Daily Horoscope	3,725,878	+328,981	+9.7	6 waves

Coming in #1 is Likeness, an app developed by RockYou! that allows users to compare themselves with friends and celebrities to see who they are most like. In the Top 5, three of the apps are new social games that center around building deep in-game engagement with your friends: Farm Town fom Slashkey at #3, Barn Buddy from TheBroth at #4, and Restaurant City from Playfish in #5.

Likeness, Barn Buddy, All About Me, When will you DIE?, and Do you really know me? have all grown by over 50% this week alone. All About Me’s weekly growth has been particularly noticeable - going from virtually no users to over 1.2 million monthly users in the last eight days. Developed by Lih Chen, the app is one of the many simple quiz apps that we’ve seen take off in recent weeks.

All About Me’s growth in the last month:

Other apps in this week’s Top 20 include those in education (CourseFeed), travel (Cities I’ve Visited), and virtual worlds (YoVille). With the first batch of 120 verified apps, it’s an exciting time for apps to observe how increased visibility could affect rankings on the audience leaderboards.

As we continue our discussions with this year’s 2009 fbFund REV winners, we now turn to Navify, an online collaborative encyclopedia that complements Wikipedia articles with images, videos, and comments. We recently spoke with Alan Rutledge, Founder of Navify, on his vision of creating an online encyclopedia that the world can illustrate together.

Inside Facebook: Alan, what’s the problem that Navify addresses?

Alan Rutledge: Wikipedia is a vibrant community. What would Wikipedia look like with complementary media forms? I was fed up with going to a movie article on Wikipedia and not being able to watch the trailer. I’m a very visual person, and so whenever I went on Wikipedia to read up on a topic, there would be no pictures; and I had no idea how to visualize the concept. Basically, we’re adding a rich multimedia layer on top of Wikipedia so you don’t have to go to YouTube, for example, in addition to Wikipedia to get related videos.

You seem to have a lot of entrepreneurial experiences under your belt already. What were you doing before Navify?

I was raised in an entrepreneurial environment. My dad used to run the engineering school at Caltech. I began working at startups in high school. At Idealab, I worked on projects related to alternative energy, sterling engines, getting rid of Internet cables, robots, etc. Before doing consulting at BCG, I worked at Microsoft and a mobile photo sharing startup that was bought out by iLike.

Who’s on the Navify team?

I work with two other buddies. We’re a very tiny overworked team right now.

So, what’s your relationship with Wikipedia?

You can use Wikipedia with attribution. Answers.com is a $30 million company that builds content around specific questions. For each answer, it pulls content from Wikipedia. Similarly, with Navify, our platform is possible with YouTube and Flickr’s APIs. At the same time, we’re not trying to substitute Wikipedia; in fact, we drive traffic back to Wikipedia.

How do users interact with Navify right now?

Navify is currently divided into two partitions. The first partition is human edited and is pretty empty right now because we launched only several days ago. The second partition is algorithmic and will always be populated with content. Users can move content, videos for example, back and forth between the human-edited and algorithmic partitions. There’s more noise with the algorithmic one, but with the human-edited one, users are picking and organizing content in meaningful ways.

Notice the Images and Videos tabs next to the Wikipedia article, as well as Comments to the right.

Richer media forms are a must in today’s Internet culture. Why hasn’t Wikipedia integrated them into its platform yet?

Wikipedia has a strict stance of neutrality. It’s hesitant to integrate with other sites because its community wants to remain neutral. But, in the last two years, most sites have opened their APIs, and the concept of the web as a platform has only begun to capture the public’s mind. Unlike Wikipedia, we plan to operate as a for-profit business. The key will be to find forms of monetization that are useful for end users – like how Google’s sponsored links are providing actual utility to users.

And, how are you leveraging the Facebook Platform on your own platform?

We already have Facebook Connect. In addition to images and videos, we’re building a vibrant reader community around topics of discussion by allowing Navify users to leave comments on articles (via Disqus), which Wikipedia doesn’t do. A Facebook integration comes in handy because your real identity is tied to your comments, which gives you incentive to leave higher quality comments; there are higher social costs to leaving meaningless comments. Contrast this to YouTube: its comment trail is like a bathroom wall. We also support OpenID and Twitter.

Now that you’re in public beta, what trends have you noticed in user behavior?

People like the Related Articles box. They sit and click on articles. It becomes addictive.

Are there any other players in your space?

The closest analogy to what we’re doing is FriendFeed, which provides a search and browse experience to let their users share more easily online. None of the content on FriendFeed is original, but users can build discussions around them.

What are your expectations for this summer’s fbFund REV incubator program?

I’m keeping my mind open.

Thanks Alan! Any final thoughts?

One thing I’ll leave you with is that we’re working on a collaborative encyclopedia for the world to illustrate and make more useful for each other. Navify isn’t just a product, it’s a belief. We’re illustrating the world’s knowledge.

Continuing our interview series of the 2009 fbFund winners, we now turn our attention to Funji, an avatar-based social networking platform for the iPhone that allows you (in the form of your avatar) to decorate your room and interact with other Funji users by visiting their rooms … and soon, hugging and kissing them too. Funji Home Version 1.1 is available in the iPhone App Store with Version 1.2 coming soon. We recently spoke with Shinyoung Park, CEO of Funji, about the company’s vision for bridging Facebook with mobile social networking.

Shinyoung, congratulations on winning the 2009 fbFund competition. What is Funji?

Funji is an avatar-based mobile social networking platform. We just launched our iPhone app about two weeks ago and are going to extend the app to other smart phones, including Blackberry and Android at the end of this year. In the game, you decorate your avatar in a room environment and visit other people to see how they decorate their rooms. The idea is to trigger friendship when you’re on the go.

How does the mobile aspect make avatar-based social networking unique?

Through mobile devices, people can have more personal, intimate interactions relative to traditional web environments. Ultimately, we want to be at a point where users can more easily explore each other’s rooms, especially among close friends. Soon users will be able to invite their Facebook friends and see which of them are Funji users via Facebook Connect.

What are current features of the app, and what features are coming soon?

Currently, there are two basic interactions: add a friend and leave a message. We’re seeing that the status bubble next to each avatar that lets users update their Facebook status is being used as a trigger to talk to other people (e.g., Movie this weekend? I’m bored.), and promote blogs. Back to the status bubble, Facebook Connect allows you to update your status through Funji. It’s like a visual tweet. Users can also upload photos, save them in their Funji home folders, and publish them to their Walls.

In the future, a point system and ranking will allow users to engage more deeply with the app and unlock items to decorate their rooms. There will also be different types of interactions such as teasing your friends by shaking your phone and kissing your friends by kissing the screen. Funji is about doing good for other people. These features will come as we make rooms more interactive: users will also be able to hug each other, dance with each other, and chat with each other through bubbles. Text and location-based features are also on our list.

What inspired Funji?

When I was working in Korea, I saw that the avatar market was growing like crazy and that every teenager was trying to get a mobile phone. A lot of entrepreneurs want to make people happy, so what could I do? I wanted to bring Funji users closer to their friends and family by providing a channel to talk more openly. The mobile phone is the most intimate device. People can bring it wherever they go. In the beginning, I wanted to build a hardware that people could personalize, but when the iPhone came out and had every component we would need, it became clear that we would build an iPhone app.

What were you working on before Funji, and how did you make the transition?

I had my first start up in 1999, a baby/childcare education portal, which was sold to an education company in Korea. From 2002 to 2006, I worked with mobile apps at SK Telecom, and then moved to New York to do a Masters at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications program. There, I developed Funji as my thesis. In July 2008, I moved to San Francisco and incorporated by company with some seed funding. Our team began building the first prototype, working remotely from Canada and Korea until I finally recruited them to our San Francisco office.

What geographic and demographic audience are you reaching?

We’re targeting the U.S. market, specifically teenagers and college students.

Now that Funji has been in the iTunes store, any surprises in terms of user behavior?

The Funji iPhone app in available in the iTunes store for free. We’re getting user feedback and working on making the app more stable. We were pleased to find that users were spending 10 minutes in the game, whereas most users spent one to two minutes in other apps. Users were spending more time decorating their spaces and visiting other people.Users have been publishing their rooms 1.6 times per session.

How will Funji leverage the virtual goods market?

The virtual goods business model is a good one. We plan to have in-app purchases and register all our virtual items in iTunes. We’ll be offering vacation, graduation, Christmas, etc. packages and feature limited and exclusive items, as well as allow users to generate their own items to sell. We may also introduce real-time virtual gifts and branded goods. With branded goods, users can choose to use their rooms as promotional tools. For example, Up could have a promotion in our app with its own characters and balloons.

As virtual goods take off, so is the payment industry. What are your thoughts around Apple’s payment strategy and future plans to integrate Facebook credits or mobile payments into your game?

In Korea, 30 percent is a lot. As the platform expands, Apple will cut less than 30 percent. As for Facebook credits, it’s possible. We want to allow as many payment systems as possible, and iTunes is the easiest for now. Eventually, mobile payments make sense too.

As we continue our conversations with this year’s 2009 fbFund winners, we turn from online dating with Frintro to online safety and security solutions with Life360. Life360 is an online platform that allows families to stay in better communication with each other, especially in the event of an emergency, through a collection of apps and widgets. Currently, popular widgets include Emergency Messenger, LifeID, and Lost & Found, with new widgets coming soon, including Collision Detector, Panic, and Curfew 2.0. We recently spoke with Chris Hulls, co-founder and CEO of Life360, about his company’s vision.

Inside Facebook: Chris, what is Life360 in a nutshell?

Chris Hulls: At Life360, we’re building the equivalent of OnStar, but for a family’s every day life. We manage safety and emergency preparedness. There are different products out there, ranging from lost-item to child-tracking services, but they are primarily offered as point services. We make these tools manageable on an iGoogle-style platform that reuses family information (so that users don’t have to register every time they add a service) and can add our safety and security widgets in a couple clicks. We’re building our own set of widgets in-house. There’s a long-term opportunity here to build applications around the family.

What motivated you to innovate in the family safety and security space, and what have been key milestones since then?

I was in the military/air force when I was 17 and liked it until 9/11 changed things for me. I went back to school to study business at Berkeley and came up with idea during Hurricane Katrina. I finished school, went into banking, and then decided to do my own thing after having a cancer scare. When you’re faced with mortality, it changes your outlook on life.

The idea behind Life360 quickly grew much bigger when we won Google’s Android contest and received our first seed funding. If you look at the industry, a lot of the companies acquire users by giving them the impression that if they don’t sign up something terrible will happen. As a site, we’re careful to encourage people to take risks and live life fully, but in responsible ways. This may not work in our interests financially, but it’s a way of life we strongly believe in.

How is Life360’s platform integrating with Facebook?

Facebook gives us better user data and an expanded messaging system. There’s potential to take the Facebook stream and process it in a number of ways. We could turn status updates into a messaging system using 411 or 911 as codes. Our system could then pick up on these status updates and email, call, or text the user’s list of contacts, which are stored in our system. Or, we could use the Facebook stream to create a family feed tool that brings status updates to Life360 without friending mom – via a widget or email digest. Most companies addressing what-if situations don’t have high user retention. We’re trying to change that because there’s a huge potential to make our service applicable for daily life, and Facebook can give us the presence to do that.

Who’s on your team?

I work with my co-founder Dilpreet Singh, who is Life360’s CTO. His background is in Computer Science, and he got his MBA from Berkeley. He’s been an engineer for five to six years now and used to serve as Director of Products at a CRM company. Together, we work with a dedicated group of developers.

What are your plans to stay financially sustainable?

We plan to operate on a subscription-based service and charge per family.

Who’s your target demographic?

Right now, moms with young kids. But there’s a huge demand for services with the aging baby boomers.

What’s Life360’s biggest challenge going forward?

Our biggest competitor is to do nothing. People don’t think of using the web/tech to manage everything to do with what keeps them up at night, the what-ifs. The biggest challenge by far is building awareness. That said, point-of-sale safety and security companies are competitors for now, but we hope to partner with them in the future.

A new Facebook gadget for iGoogle is available that lets you directly access the News Feed and update your status from your iGoogle home page. The stream is updated without having to refresh the page. However, you can’t comment or Like stories from the gadget just yet. (You can view a subset of comments for now.)

Here’s what the process of adding Facebook to iGoogle looks like:

1. Click here to add the Facebook Connect gadget to your iGoogle home page.

2. Once the gadget is added to iGoogle, you’ll be asked a series of requests for special permissions to allow iGoogle to a) update your status, b) remember you for constant reauthorization, and c) access the News Feed and Wall.

3. Now you can view live updates from your friends and the Pages you’re fans of, as well as update your status from iGoogle.

Notice that back on Facebook, my status has been updated via “iGoogle Gadget.”

This is not the first Facebook Connect widget that has taken advantage of Facebook’s “open stream” API. Desktop applications from Seesmic and TweetDeck allow users to monitor and update the stream from desktop applications. Now, gadgets like this one for iGoogle show that Facebook’s stream API is bringing more social context to portals as well - and driving more content sharing inside Facebook.

Update: A previous version of this story said that the gadget was developed by Facebook. It appears that this app was designed by Facebook but developed by Google, however. Thanks to Facebook and Michael Bauser for the correction.

Today Inside Facebook is launching an interview series with several of this year’s 2009 fbFund winners. Participating in the fbFund REV program this year will be 18 startups and 2 nonprofit organizations that are leveraging Facebook’s platform in fresh and innovative ways. This summer, winners will move into Facebook’s downtown Palo Alto offices to participate in the fbFund summer incubator program, where they will get the opportunity to work among each other under the mentorship of the Facebook Platform team and the fbFund Advisory Council. Once again, congratulations to all!

In today’s interview, CEO of Sofa Labs Brian Phillips shares the thinking behind Frintro, one of the first online dating sites to integrate Facebook Connect into the core user experience. Sofa Labs co-founders also include Katherine Woo and Skye Lee, both of whom are also former PayPal veterans. The team impressed me with their positive energy and passion for innovating in the online dating space.

Q&A with Brian Phillips: Part 1

“What’s totally fascinating about the second-degree social graph, which is where we’re focused, is it’s huge, and no one appreciates the size of it. For example, I have 175 friends right now who have been using Frintro … and with 175 friends, I have 60,000 friends of friends.”

Q&A with Brian Phillips: Part 2

“We’re all passionate about dating in general because we like to think, ‘Hey, what’s more important than helping friend’s find love?’ That’s  the mission we really get behind.”

“We have 500 active alpha testers … but we have very ambitious goals. In year 1, we’d love to see that grow from 500 people to 500,000 people. Once we get engagement and interactions right, we can really grow this business because we think we’re providing a really valuable service. We’d love to see some hypergrowth.”

Q&A with Brian Phillips: Part 3

“Frintro has facilitated several dates, and there’s a few budding relationships, which we’re really excited about. One of our key metrics over time will be number of marriages … At some point, I’d love to report back and tell you about our first Frintro marriage because I’m pretty confident it will happen.”

“We think there’s tons of opportunities in dating to innovate on … For example, I get asked a ton about mobile, and I do think mobile and dating is an interesting space, especially with Facebook mobile Connect becoming available, iPhone 3.0, and background applications, there’s tons of interesting stuff you can do there, so that’s not on short-term roadmap, but we certainly can’t ignore it long-term.”

A shot of Frintro’s user interface:

We’re excited to see how Frintro changes the online dating landscape. Stay tuned throughout the week for more featured 2009 fbFund REV winners.