[Update: Facebook is now starting to push the change out to all users. More, from the Facebook blog:

But now, for friends, you won’t just see their names and networks they’re in, you’ll also see the number of mutual friends you have with them, and the names of two of these people. This should help users more quickly identify who they might be searching for.

For applications, you’ll see the number of monthly active users each app has. Facebook has also been emphasizing games separately from other apps in its new Games Dashboard, and this classification is reflected in the new drop-down menu. Any app that self-identifies as a game in Facebook’s in classification schema will be listed as “Game.” Otherwise, it will be listed as “Application.”

Also, all results in the drop-down menu now have larger icons than before.

We say this is a “seemingly minor” change because Facebook has been busy making its search features more valuable lately. In the home page redesign it launched in early February, it moved the search box from the left-hand side of the site to the middle, and made it bigger. The company is also working with strategic investor Microsoft to deliver more relevant results based on social data.

And, due to redesigns or overall growth, Facebook is continuing to increase its share of the US search market. Web measurement firm comScore reported that Facebook had grown its on-site search volume by 13% for January and another 10% in February. Each of these little changes may seem small, but they help make search a generally more valuable component of the service — and for applications, these new details might lead users to engage with applications more often.

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Texas Hold’em Poker	14,188,471	+693,046	+5.14
2.	Mafia Wars	10,271,284	+380,157	+3.84
3.	Converse All Star	2,399,071	+315,468	+15.14
4.	Papa John’s Pizza	1,112,684	+293,107	+35.76
5.	Pirates of the Caribbean	896,438	+264,439	+41.84
6.	The Artifice	3,095,279	+194,782	+6.72
7.	National Guard	394,328	+154,992	+64.76
8.	Justin Bieber	2,174,128	+121,571	+5.92
9.	Macy’s	376,015	+120,437	+47.12
10.	Lady Gaga	5,684,096	+117,414	+2.11
11.	redbox	174,247	+116,984	+204.29
12.	FaceMoods	905,700	+111,018	+13.97
13.	Mozilla Firefox	971,520	+104,051	+11.99
14.	Facebook	7,678,773	+101,652	+1.34
15.	Selena Gomez	3,898,738	+101,222	+2.67
16.	Alice in Wonderland	1,152,339	+100,832	+9.59
17.	Starbucks	6,211,975	+86,425	+1.41
18.	REMEMBER ME	505,946	+85,595	+20.36
19.	Zoosk	642,666	+83,126	+14.86
20.	The Twilight Saga	5,266,537	+83,060	+1.60

Zynga’s Texas Hold’em Poker is at number 1 with 693,000 new fans and Mafia Wars in second place with 380,000. Interestingly, some cross-promoting has started to pop-up on Texas Hold’em Poker’s Page for Mafia Wars; both games saw steady growth over the past week and Poker has more than 14 million fans now. FaceMoods, a Page with emoticons, landed twelfth place partly due to a like page consolidation of 47,000 fans on Saturday.

Converse All Star’s Page was on the list again this week, in third place, with almost no daily growth except for surges of probable page consolidations of 142,500 on Wednesday and almost 154,000 on Thursday. The Page’s total growth for the week was 315,468 fans.

Fourth place takes us to the food, Papa John’s Pizza grew by 293,000 fans to its current 1.1 million fan base, in large part due to a surge of 53,000 on Tuesday and almost 206,000 on Saturday, both likely due to Page consolidations. Another food Page and Top 20 regular, Starbucks, took the number 17 spot this week with 6.2 million fans, 86,000 of whom joined this past week, 35,000 of them probably consolidated on Saturday.

Then there were the movies.

Pirates of the Caribbean took the number 5 spot, growing 264,000 fans to a total fan base of 896,438; considering that growth was mostly flat and this is an older movie, additions were probably consolidations of about 69,000 on Friday and 194,000 on Saturday. Redbox, the fan Page for the convenient automated video stores was eleventh in fan growth this week, growing by almost 117,000 fans (the bulk of it, 91,000, on Saturday) to bring the total to 174,000.

“Alice in Wonderland,” saw steady growth and was number 16, growing by 100,800 fans to 1.1 million, probably because it was the top movie at the box office this past weekend. “Remember Me” at 18 with 85,000 more fans for a total of about 506,000 also raked in the dough at the box office while The Twilight Saga’s Page grew by 83,000 to land at number 20 and currently has upwards of 5 million fans. Twilight may have grown due to the release of the next installment’s trailer and two of the stars have movies either in theaters now (see number 18) or soon to be released (“The Runaways”).

A few popular musicians made the list again this week. Teen idol Justin Bieber at number 8 with growth of 121,500 fans and now pushing 2.2 million fans probably grew because he’s touring, promoting his upcoming album and one of his songs was set to hit iTunes this week. Lady Gaga, who premiered her “Telephone” video to much fanfare this week, was at number 10 with an increase of 117,000 fans, bringing her total to almost 5.7 million.

And another teenager, Selena Gomez, added 101,000 fans this week and almost has 3.9 million fans; growth might be explained by the fact that she just ended the third season of her show, is starting a European tour later this month and just landed a lead in big movie project.

There were also a bunch of Pages that grew either for unknown reasons or apparently because of page consolidations.

The Artifice, a mysterious film/world/project, was at number 6, adding almost 195,000 fans with steady growth, bringing the total to 3 million. The National Guard’s Page took seventh place, with 143,000 of this week’s 155,000 fans added on Saturday, probably a page consolidation. Macy’s department store added 120,000 fans with 103,000 added on Thursday.

Mozilla Firefox’s Page added 104,000 fans this past week, mostly in two surges on Saturday and Monday; the rest might have been due to Mozilla’s efforts to spread the word about Europe’s upcoming web browser choices. Facebook’s Page added 101,000 this week and was fourteenth while dating site Zoosk’s Page added 83,000 fans to take the number 19 spot.

Interestingly, the most recent surge seems to have started shortly after Facebook introduced a new home page design in early February. Correlation is not causation, but it makes sense to us that the average user would find a News Feed that defaults to Top Stories more engaging than a real time stream. Here’s the graph below.

• Proxy email messaging wasn’t fixed until over a week after Notifications disappeared (see the bug) and some developers were caught off-guard that proxy emails have a restrictions on acceptable HTML and FBML tags
• The Games Dashboard and Counters have been extremely ineffective in driving traffic (one developer shared that of 150,000 referenced visits, 1202 were from the dashboard)

Illustrating the immediate impact of the changes, one developer posted this graphic of their application’s engagement metrics, highlighting the relative impact of Notifications versus the games dashboard in driving engagement:

In the two weeks since Notifications, Zynga’s titles are a mixed bag with PetVille and FishVille down 4-6%, Mafia Wars and Café World flat and YoVille and FarmVille up 3%. Zynga’s use of email is fairly sporadic and limited to a few titles…

> Continue reading at Inside Social Games

The company is certainly doing better than it was before FunSpace, along with its games, began its precipitous growth in mid-February. But the proportion of monthly users who return to FunSpace on a daily basis has shrunk from a modest average of five percent to about three percent. Even Slide’s games have remarkably low DAU as a percentage of MAU, coming in not much higher than FunSpace. However, media-sharing apps like this tend to have low DAU numbers simply because users don’t typically have something to share through the app every day.

Also, on the list below, FunSpace is topped by Static FBML, but you can disregard the latter, despite its just passing Birthday Cards to become Facebook’s second-largest app; it’s a Facebook-owned app that’s just showing how many users interact with customized HTML in Pages. Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Static FBML	44,735,124	+7,272,613	+16.26
2.	Graffiti	5,850,237	+5,850,237	+100.00
3.	Slide FunSpace	29,221,217	+5,788,967	+19.81
4.	Social City	4,903,377	+4,583,083	+93.47
5.	Birthday Album	2,143,411	+1,853,869	+86.49
6.	Dedica una cancion	3,380,631	+1,280,066	+37.86
7.	Tiki Resort	2,412,391	+1,063,186	+44.07
8.	Bubble Island	2,245,579	+1,038,735	+46.26
9.	MindJolt Games	20,921,341	+995,553	+4.76
10.	Dedica una canzone	4,143,870	+959,904	+23.16
11.	Jeux Gratuits	1,000,142	+757,906	+75.78
12.	Texas HoldEm Poker	28,026,262	+746,189	+2.66
13.	Facebook for iPhone	29,002,416	+671,119	+2.31
14.	Farmville exclusive	712,548	+666,947	+93.60
15.	Zoo Paradise	656,381	+544,053	+82.89
16.	Towner	981,779	+534,449	+54.44
17.	Cities I’ve Visited™	5,708,871	+476,231	+8.34
18.	Restaurant City	15,407,398	+467,571	+3.03
19.	Keyboard Mash!	774,759	+463,641	+59.84
20.	what tattoo best fits you?	1,044,376	+454,943	+43.56

It has been a while since Graffiti has registered as a top gainer, but the art app has risen to a new level of quality in the interim. There’s now more professional-looking art on the app, and more users are attracted by periodic competitions. Graffiti also now redirects users to its own site to buy custom art prints from its users, in partnership with Zazzle, so it could be generating good income.

Birthday Album is a 2pad app that creates a calendar of friends’ birthdays and sends out reminders; simple, but obviously effective, as the Album managed to pick up almost all of its two million MAU over the past week.

Most of the remaining top ten are games, which we’ll talk about over at Inside Social Games. But take note of Dedica una cancion and Dedica una canzone. These two are the latest examples of successful apps that have been cloned in multiple European languages, in this case Spanish and Italian. The apps are for sharing and listening to music, although it’s not clear whether they actually have licenses for their music.

As with its just-finalized office in Austin, Texas, the Hyderabad location will focus on providing online sales and operations services, the company says: “By having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones, we can provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support.” Unlike social game developer Zynga’s recent decision to open an office in Bangalore, Facebook doesn’t appear to be tapping into the company’s inexpensive and technically skilled work force.

Even though the Hyderabad staff will be serving Facebook’s more than 400 million monthly active users around the world, expect many more of those users to be in India.

While its growth exploded around Asia last year, India has been a late bloomer. Google’s Orkut established there there years ago, as have a variety of local social networks. India reached around 3.5 million Facebook users as of the middle of 2009. The service appears to have hit an inflection point recently, though — possibly due to Facebook’s recent mobile push. While most of the country lacks a computer-based internet connection, around half the population has a mobile device. Facebook has provided a variety of mobile web sites and applications, and worked with carriers to allow customizations like SMS; it’s also planning a new site, Zero, that will allow people to access the site with only a minimal mobile data connection. Between taking users from established rivals and making itself broadly accessible, look for lots of growth for the foreseeable future. Already, Facebook notes that India is up to more than 8 million users today.

And since the March Madness college basketball “March Madness” tournaments are starting now, that sport is currently receiving the most attention on the page. A “College” tab on it currently shows the fan pages for numerous colleges and their mascots. This way, Facebook can help funnel fans to Pages they may have wanted to join but hadn’t known about.

The new Page has already mentioned the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team’s big winning streak, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s big new video site for the tournament.

Facebook’s other official topics Pages includes one for celebrities, which has 2.54 million fans.

Monday, March 8th, 2010

• CrowdStar Learns Facebook Zoology with Zoo Paradise
• Mochi Media Announces Social API, $10 Million Fund for Flash and Social Games
• Fast Typing, Cities and Growth from MindJolt on This Week’s List of Fast Facebook Growers by Monthly Active Users
• Gravity Bear Weights In to Social Gaming on Facebook with Battle Punks

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

• Sony Online Entertainment Launches PoxNora on Facebook
• SiXiTs: A New Cross-Platform Startup Founded by Gaming and Visual Effects Veterans
• Super Rewards Brigns Offer Wall Service to Flash Games for the Web

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

• CyberAgent’s Ameba Pigg Virtual World Comes to Facebook as Ameba Pico
• Slides from Presentation at GDC on the State of the Social Gaming Industry
• Facebook Credits Now the First Payment Option in Zynga’s FarmVille Game
• City Building Games Make a Strong Showing in This Week’s List of Top Facebook Gainers by Daily Active Users
• MySpace Looks for More Social Game Developers with Big Platform Upgrades

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

• Feline Frenzy: Robot Wars is a New Facebook Game from Pakistani Developer White Rabbit
• Hi5 Launches Game Developer Program, Offers Special Access to Users and Monetization
• More Speakers, Venue Set for Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco
• Israeli Brewer Uses Facebook Gender Battle Parking App to Promote Beer

Friday, March 12th, 2010

• MyTribe Wants to Be a Complex, Engaging Facebook Game – And Mostly Succeeds
• Playdom’s Social City is the Latest Facebook City Building Game to Get Millions of Users
• Social Gaming Roundup: iPad, Frosmo, Statistics, & More
• Independent Developers Show Strongly on This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games

Facebook Partnering With EventBrite? – Does the screenshot below show an as-yet-unannounced way for people to tickets for events on Facebook via EventBrite? Or does it just show a way for people to buy tickets to Facebook’s developer conference in April, f8. TechCrunch raised the question earlier this week.

Here’s what it says: “Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing. Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell your and put some delightful cash in your pocket.”

Facebook tells us that “EventBrite is currently testing a Connect implementation.  We don’t have anything more to share at this time.” Up until now, Facebook has not offered a way for people with Facebook Events to charge users for tickets. It’s possible that EventBrite is going to be partnering with Facebook to enable ticket purchasing for events. And, of course, it’s possible (and probably more likely) that this is just a Connect integration and nothing further will come of it.

Classmates.com Sued for Privacy Policy – Classmates.com has been trying to make more of its user data public, like what Facebook has in some ways done recently — and it was sued this week for allegations that the company’s new privacy policy violates state and federal laws. The class action suit claims Classmates.com didn’t fully disclose that paying customers would have to opt-out of new Facebook and iPhone applications to keep their data private, violating federal and Washington state laws.

The suit comes in light of Classmates.com trying to compete with Facebook by moving its traditionally paying membership’s profiles to the public eye in January.

Facebook May Sue Over Erroneous UK Story – Facebook’s UK division has reportedly threatened to sue The Daily Mail newspaper over an article that editors published saying that Facebook was an easy way for sexual predators to prey on young girls. A former police detective did the work and said an anonymous social networking site was the medium for his experiment, but editors added the Facebook reference despite being told by the detective that it wasn’t accurate. The title of the piece was changed to, “I posed as a girl of 14 on Facebook. What followed will sicken you,” and chronicled the detective being approached by older men asking him to perform sexual acts. This is something that’s more difficult for people to do on Facebook, given the service’s privacy restrictions for minors, and emphasis on private, real-world connections.

MSNBC Breaks News on Facebook With Twitter – MSNBC is using an interesting method to engage viewers: breaking news on Facebook with their @BreakingNews Twitter account. An MSNBC spokesman said @BreakingNews is part of the company’s strategy to connect to social media users and become a source for news on social networks.

Interviews with Facebook’s DC Staff – AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher had an interview with Facebook’s Washington D.C. staff this week: Adam Conner, Tim Sparapani and Andrew Noyes. In the video the three discuss Sparapani, Facebook’s Policy Director, did a half-hour video interview about privacy with The Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang and C-Span’s Peter Slen this week.

Facebook Continues Domination of SecondMarket – Private company stock marketplace SecondMarket reported in February that Facebook continues to take the lion’s share of stock sold there. These transactions tripled in February, from $13 million to $43.8 million last month, TechCrunch reported this week, for a total of 48% of transactions. LinkedIn accounted for 18% of the transactions on SecondMarket, Twitter and Zynga 15% each and LifeLock 4%.

Facebook’s domination of SecondMarket, and just about everything else, comes in light of what we reported to be revenues that could exceed $1 billion this year. The company went from $280-$300 million in 2008 to about $600-$700 million in 2009, as sources told us.

Facebook, Google, Sued over Mobile Software – Winksite’s parent company, Wireless Ink Corp., sued Google and Facebook this week, claiming that both infringed on a patent they were issued in October. The patent dealt with the way online content is accessed by cell phones and the complaint was filed on March 9 in Manhattan’s federal court.

LivingSocial Raises $25 Million, Expands – LivingSocial announced a $5 million first round of funding in July of 2008, then announced an equal amount last December in a continuation of the round. Now it has raised $25 million more in a Series B round led by U.S. Venture partners. Money will go towards expansion of LivingSocial’s social group coupon product, Deals, in dozens of U.S. cities by this year’s end, including Chicago, Denver, Raleigh Durham and San Diego.

Get Satisfaction Goes to Facebook – Get Satisfaction, which has been helping companies collect user feedback for years, has turned its attentions to Facebook with its Support tab — a partnership with Facebook page management company Involver. As part of its Facebook Social Engagement Hub, Get Satisfaction created a tab that may be named for a specific brand on their Page, where customers may discuss products in four ways: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem or Give Praise. Once customers begin to post a question, Get Satisfaction suggests similar threads to give them instant answers; all information from Get Satisfaction is accessible by search engines and people may respond to any thread.

Finally, any of these questions or statements are automatically imported into the brand’s Get Satisfaction web interface.

You can pick them out below by the identical icon each uses: what tattoo best fits you?, How dirty are you ?, What age will you have your 1st baby ??? and I can guess your name. You can’t see it below, but on our full list, there are four more LOLapps quizzes at rankings 20 to 40.

Here are the top 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Jeux Gratuits	844,778	+721,188	+85.37
2.	Farmville exclusive	667,968	+651,588	+97.55
3.	Music Pets	498,952	+498,952	+100.00
4.	Zoo Paradise	477,274	+427,567	+89.59
5.	Keyboard Mash!	579,322	+346,258	+59.77
6.	what tattoo best fits you?	852,972	+313,179	+36.72
7.	Mahjongg Dimensions	881,454	+308,918	+35.05
8.	All About Me	285,629	+285,629	+100.00
9.	Towner	695,212	+285,410	+41.05
10.	How dirty are you ?	785,470	+249,078	+31.71
11.	Friend Poll!	858,511	+247,237	+28.80
12.	Ameba Pico	241,337	+241,272	+99.97
13.	أعرف صاحبك عايز يقولك ايه ؟	219,371	+219,233	+99.94
14.	What age will you have your 1st baby ???	645,992	+211,715	+32.77
15.	I can guess your name.	715,070	+208,047	+29.09
16.	Top Stalkers	433,212	+191,491	+44.20
17.	MMA Pro Fighter	710,431	+184,397	+25.96
18.	Dedica una cancion	343,213	+178,020	+51.87
19.	Jumping Dog	683,774	+167,712	+24.53
20.	Glamble	521,626	+160,859	+30.84

Our list doesn’t get much more original. The top app, Jeux Gratuits, we’ll cover over at Inside Social Games. It’s followed by Farmville exclusive, which is the most successful recent FarmVille parasite. Facebook hasn’t been prompt in shutting these down lately, but as of publishing this one has been blocked; the enforcement team may simply be concentrating on the fastest-growing parasites.

Following two more games, there’s Keyboard Mash!, by Ingenious Designs. No need for guesswork here: this app is all about mashing your keyboard as much as possible over 20 seconds. It’s following in the footsteps of How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT, which became a runaway success by asking users to type the ABCs. Oddly, another app by the dev, Mash the keyboard to save kittens!, was not successful.

All About Me, another quiz, appears to be on the list due to a data tracking accident; it’s actually shrinking. Finally, there’s Friend Poll! which is — wait for it — a quiz. It’s by FriendQuizzes, which has a couple other successful quizzes, as well.