Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Badoo	48,295,392	+5,537,846	+13%
2.	Daily Horoscope	3,538,151	+2,147,131	+154%
3.	Monopoly Millionaires	2,947,018	+1,184,888	+67%
4.	Profile Top Banner	1,354,855	+1,019,246	+304%
5.	Zuma Blitz	5,736,951	+819,988	+17%
6.	Games	7,489,455	+745,355	+11%
7.	Daily Horoscope	2,658,603	+637,451	+32%
8.	Birthday Cards	7,869,595	+578,752	+8%
9.	BandPage by RootMusic	19,266,766	+478,564	+3%
10.	Ravenwood Fair	11,696,620	+466,335	+4%
11.	การวิเคราะห์สมอง	486,287	+463,086	+1,996%
12.	Cupid	2,688,214	+451,957	+20%
13.	Gourmet Ranch	1,824,271	+407,061	+29%
14.	德州撲克(中文版)	4,009,186	+391,521	+11%
15.	Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game	601,744	+373,874	+164%
16.	Intelligent Elite	3,061,762	+371,135	+14%
17.	Diner Dash	2,237,996	+342,529	+18%
18.	Profilbanner auf Deutsch	3,331,623	+340,423	+11%
19.	My Friend Map	796,032	+291,811	+58%
20.	開心探寶	336,906	+280,239	+495%

Badoo continued the huge growth we’ve been seeing in the app since December this week by adding a whopping 5.5 million MAU, mostly from Mexico, France and Italy. Cupid, another Facebook dating app, is still far behind with only 452,000 MAU this week, but seems to be taking a cue from Badoo by incorporating the embarassing questions quizzes that Badoo has used to huge success. Basically, the app asks you strange questions about your Facebook friends, you click yes or no, and is actually quite engaging. You have the option with Cupid to publish your answer to a friend’s Wall.

Two apps on the list are called Daily Horoscope. One Daily Horoscope came in second place with 2.1 million MAU this week and growth in the U.S., Philippines and France. This app asks you upon delivering your horoscope if you would like to have it delivered daily to your Wall, exponentially increasing the viral potential. The other Daily Horscope was seventh and saw 637,500 MAU this week; it allows you to see your horoscope, share it to your Wall, and then suggests you send it to all your friends with the same sign.

Birthday Cards grew in the U.S., Indonesia and Canada to a total of 578,800 MAU this week; the app tells you which friends are currently having birthdays and you can send one card to dozens of people at one time. BandPage by RootMusic continued to grow, seeing 478,600 MAU this week, just after the company received an influx of cash.

There were two intelligence quizzes. The Thai การวิเคราะห์สมอง claims to analyze friends’ brains and added 463,100 MAU; the app posts photos to your stream and tags your friends after you use it. Then, Intelligent Elite which grew by 371,100 MAU, has an interesting viral feature we’ve written about. The app forces you to tag about 20 people before you finish it, posting a story to the stream every time.

Profile banners were also on the list, as they have been recently. Profile Top Banner saw more than 1 million MAU this week. Profilbanner auf Deutsch saw 340,400. Both do the same thing, publishing photo albums to your stream while displaying them as your profile banner. My Friend map, which saw 291,800 MAU this week, also publishes an album with a photo of a map of your Facebook friend network. Finally, two Asian language apps were on the list. Japanese 開心探寶 (treasure game) saw 280,200 MAU and 德州撲克(中文版) (Chinese Texas Hold’em poker) saw 391,500 MAU. The appearance of these apps hints at Asian growth which Facebook has been focusing on especially the past few months.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Badoo	48,295,392	+5,537,846	+13%
2.	Daily Horoscope	3,538,151	+2,147,131	+154%
3.	Monopoly Millionaires	2,947,018	+1,184,888	+67%
4.	Profile Top Banner	1,354,855	+1,019,246	+304%
5.	Zuma Blitz	5,736,951	+819,988	+17%
6.	Games	7,489,455	+745,355	+11%
7.	Daily Horoscope	2,658,603	+637,451	+32%
8.	Birthday Cards	7,869,595	+578,752	+8%
9.	BandPage by RootMusic	19,266,766	+478,564	+3%
10.	Ravenwood Fair	11,696,620	+466,335	+4%
11.	การวิเคราะห์สมอง	486,287	+463,086	+1,996%
12.	Cupid	2,688,214	+451,957	+20%
13.	Gourmet Ranch	1,824,271	+407,061	+29%
14.	德州撲克(中文版)	4,009,186	+391,521	+11%
15.	Galaxy Online II – Most Competitive Strategy Game	601,744	+373,874	+164%
16.	Intelligent Elite	3,061,762	+371,135	+14%
17.	Diner Dash	2,237,996	+342,529	+18%
18.	Profilbanner auf Deutsch	3,331,623	+340,423	+11%
19.	My Friend Map	796,032	+291,811	+58%
20.	開心探寶	336,906	+280,239	+495%

Badoo continued the huge growth we’ve been seeing in the app since December this week by adding a whopping 5.5 million MAU, mostly from Mexico, France and Italy. Cupid, another Facebook dating app, is still far behind with only 452,000 MAU this week, but seems to be taking a cue from Badoo by incorporating the embarassing questions quizzes that Badoo has used to huge success. Basically, the app asks you strange questions about your Facebook friends, you click yes or no, and is actually quite engaging. You have the option with Cupid to publish your answer to a friend’s Wall.

Two apps on the list are called Daily Horoscope. One Daily Horoscope came in second place with 2.1 million MAU this week and growth in the U.S., Philippines and France. This app asks you upon delivering your horoscope if you would like to have it delivered daily to your Wall, exponentially increasing the viral potential. The other Daily Horscope was seventh and saw 637,500 MAU this week; it allows you to see your horoscope, share it to your Wall, and then suggests you send it to all your friends with the same sign.

Birthday Cards grew in the U.S., Indonesia and Canada to a total of 578,800 MAU this week; the app tells you which friends are currently having birthdays and you can send one card to dozens of people at one time. BandPage by RootMusic continued to grow, seeing 478,600 MAU this week, just after the company received an influx of cash.

There were two intelligence quizzes. The Thai การวิเคราะห์สมอง claims to analyze friends’ brains and added 463,100 MAU; the app posts photos to your stream and tags your friends after you use it. Then, Intelligent Elite which grew by 371,100 MAU, has an interesting viral feature we’ve written about. The app forces you to tag about 20 people before you finish it, posting a story to the stream every time.

Profile banners were also on the list, as they have been recently. Profile Top Banner saw more than 1 million MAU this week. Profilbanner auf Deutsch saw 340,400. Both do the same thing, publishing photo albums to your stream while displaying them as your profile banner. My Friend map, which saw 291,800 MAU this week, also publishes an album with a photo of a map of your Facebook friend network. Finally, two Asian language apps were on the list. Japanese 開心探寶 (treasure game) saw 280,200 MAU and 德州撲克(中文版) (Chinese Texas Hold’em poker) saw 391,500 MAU. The appearance of these apps hints at Asian growth which Facebook has been focusing on especially the past few months.

Facebook originally implemented the requests limit because they were being abused by developers and users were getting so many that they were ignoring them.

Facebook recently began testing use of the top navigation bar notifications channel for showing app requests, but the Developers Blog post says, “In some cases of requests that Facebook predicts to be very relevant based on the recipients usage and relationship to the sender, the recipient may be made aware using a notification jewel.”

This means Facebook may be scaling back the use of the notifications channel, which should come as good news to some gamers who say their social notifications about things like wall posts and photo tags have been drowned out by app requests. Receiving masses of invites and requests can turn-off gamers and non-gamers alike, so Facebook will need to be vigilant to prevent a return to the wild west days of rampant application spam, regardless of the channel they appear in.

The blog post implies that there is no limit, but the documentation says that if a developer doesn’t specify a ‘to' field, then users can only send 50 requests. It is unclear if this limit is per request flow or per day.

Developers can visit the new Requests Dialog documentation page for instructions on how to implement it. Facebook engineer Derek Brandao explains that “the dialog was designed to work for IFrame apps, and no longer requires server-side FBML”, making it easier to add to apps than the previous version.

Judging from preliminary tests and image from the documentation, it appears that the new Requests Dialog is already active in Zynga’s CityVille.

//

Our Inside Social Apps 2011 conference yesterday featured intense industry discussions around key issues like developer growth on Facebook, the expansion of Credits, the evolution of mobile social applications, and the roadmap for Android in 2011.

Be sure to check out the coverage from the press in attendance, below.

If you want to see what attendees were saying during the event, see the #isa2011 Twitter hashtag.

The Future of Social Gaming: Key Questions for 2011 & The Emerging Media Landscape

Inside Facebook: ISA 2011: Live Blogging The Future of Social Gaming Panel
Silicon Alley Insider: Playdom Founder Says Facebook Is “Addicted” To Games

Fireside Chat: The 2011 Facebook Platform Roadmap

Inside Facebook: ISA 2011: Fireside Chat with Facebook CTO Bret Taylor
Inside Facebook: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor: “Mobile is the primary focus for our platform this year.”
TechCrunch: Bret Taylor: Facebook Cut Spam By 95% Last Year
TechCrunch: Facebook CTO Bret Taylor: “Mobile Devices Are Inherently Social”
TechCrunch: Facebook’s Focus In 2011: Better Cross-Platform Unification Led By HTML5
VentureBeat: Facebook CTO: 2011 is all about mobile and HTML5
Forbes: Facebook: Our Focus In 2011 Is On Mobile, HTML5
All Things Digital: Facebook Sets Mobile Sights on HTML5
Wall Street Journal: Facebook CTO: Mobile Is 2011 Priority
Silicon Alley Insider: Mobile Is Facebook’s Top Priority In 2011
Silicon Alley Insider: What Facebook Learned From Microsoft
Mashable: Facebook Cut Platform Spam By 95% in 2010
Mashable: Facebook CTO: We’re Focused on Mobile in 2011
All Facebook: For The Facebook Platform, 2011 Will Be About Mobile Expansion

Bonus: TechCrunch recently published a follow-up, looking at Facebook’s plans for tablets.

See Techmeme for more discussion on the spam and HTML5 topics.

New and Alternative Social Platforms: Where Do Opportunities Lie?

Inside Facebook: ISA 2011: Live-Blogging New and Alternative Social Platforms Panel

Monetization & Customer Acquisition on the Facebook Platform in 2011

Inside Facebook: ISA 2011: Facebook Announces Buy With Friends and Frictionless Micropayments
Inside Social Games: ISA 2011: Live-Blogging Monetization & Customer Acquisition on the Facebook Platform
TechCrunch: Facebook Commerce Head Deb Liu Addresses Concerns About Mandatory Facebook Credits
VentureBeat: Did Facebook just hint at its answer to Groupon?
Forbes: Facebook To Launch Social Group-Buying Feature
All Things Digital: Facebook Testing Social Commerce Feature “Buy With Friends”
Silicon Alley Insider: Facebook Developers Not Happy About New Payment System
All Facebook: Facebook Takes Heat Over New Credits Policy

See Techmeme for more discussion on the new Credits features.

Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms

Inside Mobile Apps: ISA 2011: Live-Blogging Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms
Inside Mobile Apps: ISA 2011: Sony Ericsson to Preload its Android Devices with Facebook Login at Startup
TechCrunch: Sony Ericsson Announces Integration Of Facebook’s ‘Single Sign On’ Across All Android Phones
All Facebook: Sony Ericsson Announces Single Sign-On Support For Facebook

See Techmeme for more discussion of the new Sony Ericsson Facebook integration.

Fireside Chat: Android’s 2011 Social Roadmap

Inside Mobile Apps: ISA 2011: Fireside Chat with Google Android Group Manager Eric Chu
TechCrunch: Android In-App Payments Coming Soon — Were Delayed Because Developers Were Busy
VentureBeat: Google’s Eric Chu explains Android Marketplace rejections, in-app purchases
Forbes: Unhappy With Slow Growth Of Android App Purchases, Google Talks 2011 Roadmap
All Things Digital: Android Market to Finally Get In-App Payments, Improved Discovery. When? “Soon.”
Silicon Alley Insider: Google “Not Happy” With Number Of Android App Purchases

See Techmeme for a large and wide-ranging discussion of the in-app purchase issues and the 2011 roadmap.

M&A Landscape for Small & Midsize Developers

Inside Social Games: ISA 2011: Small Developers Don’t Need to Sell Out Yet
Inside Social Games: ISA 2011: Live-Blogging the Mergers and Acquisitions Landscape for Small and Mid-Size Developers
TechCrunch: Why ‘Angry Birds’ Wouldn’t Make Sense On Facebook

And don’t miss Silicon Alley Insider’s retrospective on the event.

The Call feature could be a build out of Facebook’s partnership with Skype that brought the ability to browse the social network to the the Skype 5.0 for Windows VoIP app. However, no Skype branding appeared in test, so Facebook might be working on voice chat independently.

Facebook recently removed a job posting for a Network Engineer – Voice, meaning it has likely hired someone for the position. This employee could be helping develop the feature, or could simply be managing an internal phone system for Facebook offices.

Native web voice chat could pull business away from mobile operators, as users wouldn’t need to reach for their phones to call friends. The feature could also position Facebook to offer its own mobile handset that makes VoIP calls. COO Sheryl Sandberg has previously said “we want to make Facebook available everywhere on every device. That’s actually complicated in a world of so many cell phones, so many mobile operators.” If voice chat can be perfected on the web interface, it could eventually allow a Facebook phone to bypass the tangle of mobile operators.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Facebook and Meteor Games.

• Contract Technical Writer (Palo Alto, CA)

• 2d Artist w/ Flash Experience (Beverly Hills, CA)

• Ruby on Rails Software Developer (Seattle, WA)

• Digital Marketing Analyst (Oxford, UK)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

The features will help keep users in control of their personal information and should increase trust in Facebook, though early tests of Social Authentication have occasionally locked legitimate owners out of their accounts.

This year, Facebook has been accused of putting users at risk of spam and malware despite implementing many new security features including security questions, one-time use passwords, and remote log-out. It responded to a flurry of criticism about how already public User IDs were being shared with third-party applications by implementing the Iframe Post Proposal that encrypts the IDs. Today’s announcement should help Facebook combat the exaggerated perception of insecurity that the media has propagated.

Secure Browsing (https)

Over the next few weeks, Facebook will roll out Secure Browsing (https) as an opt-in option users can enable from within Account->Account Settings->Account Security. When enabled, users will see a green bar or lock icon on their browser’s address bar, and all of a user’s communication with the site will be encrypted. Note that Facebook already encrypts logins, but Secure Browsing will keep data like Messages private

The feature is designed to keep user information safe while they’re browsing over a public network. Facebook recommends “enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools.” It will also protect users from software and browser extensions like Firesheep that let others on the same Wi-Fi network spy on and identify another user’s cookies.

Developers who wish to serve their canvas iFame applications over a secure connection can specify a Secure Canvas URL in the Facebook Integration tab of the Developer app. If a user with Secure Browsing enabled visits an app without a Secure Canvas URL, they’ll be shown a warning that they’ll be switched from HTTPS to HTTP. Developers should therefore provide this URL as not to scare away users concerned about security.

Social Authentication

If Facebook detects a suspicious login attempt, such as one coming from Australia when the user had logged in from the U.S. just hours ago, it will trigger Social Authentication. The person trying to gain access to the user’s account will be shown a set of pictures of one that user’s friends. They’ll have to identify the friend by choosing between six names, try refreshing to a different set of photos, or skip the question. Five correct answers are required to regain access to the account, though its unclear how many wrong answers or skipped questions are permitted.

Facebook has been testing this alternative to CAPTCHA since at least July with mixed results. As users are always identifiable from their photos, many legitimate owners were locked out of their accounts because they couldn’t identify childhood or costumed Halloween photos of friends. Some users have many friends who they hardly know, such as people they’ve friended through social games. Some users found it impossible to identify these people, and were prevented from accessing Facebook for months.

Some of these issues appear to have been addressed in this official version of Social Authentication. The photos appear to hone in on the friend’s face, similar to Facebook’s facial recognition photo tagging feature, meaning likely won’t be asked to identify photos that don’t show the friend’s face at all. Users can also refresh to a different set of photos if the initial set aren’t adequate. To solve the social gaming friends issue, hopefully Facebook only requires users to identify the close friends who they most frequently interact with.

Improved Security with Less False Positives

Facebook explains that, “hackers halfway across the world might know your password, but they don’t know who your friends are.” If this latest set of security efforts can both improve security and dispel the perception that Facebook isn’t protecting users, it will be able to refocus attention on its innovations.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Yahoo!	5,431,459	+3,032,195	+126%
2.	Badoo	3,730,736	+2,459,056	+193%
3.	FarmVille	15,373,366	+445,902	+3%
4.	Social Statistics	492,000	+437,805	+808%
5.	CityVille	19,649,245	+400,098	+2%
6.	Windows Live Messenger	12,638,402	+321,685	+3%
7.	Paradise Life	362,988	+228,505	+170%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,307,136	+204,282	+3%
9.	Ravenwood Fair	865,528	+153,877	+22%
10.	BandPage by RootMusic	813,919	+134,458	+20%
11.	Big Business	203,452	+113,879	+127%
12.	Make Your Jersey	186,706	+106,779	+134%
13.	Your statistics	167,241	+100,075	+149%
14.	Monster Galaxy	470,063	+98,837	+27%
15.	Profile Banner	118,749	+98,726	+493%
16.	It Girl	1,143,992	+98,496	+9%
17.	Social Connect	99,493	+96,079	+2,814%
18.	Friendly for iPad	553,174	+93,464	+20%
19.	HTC Sense	4,076,776	+90,218	+2%
20.	FarmVille 中文版	447,588	+90,053	+25%

As usual when the DAU numbers are so large, they’re caused by a new influx of users. In Yahoo’s case this could be connected to the site’s recent decision to open its entire third-party network to authentication via Facebook (and Google OpenIDs).

But a good number of the big gainers seem to have started picking up new monthly active users simultaneously last Friday, which of course cause simultaneous DAU rises. The app uses a friend quiz that asks users to post to their friend’s walls — which while aggressive, appears to be within the Facebook platform policies. Here’s Badoo’s MAU chart:

Number three on the list is FarmVille, and Zynga follows it up with CityVille and Texas HoldEm Poker. All the recent growth going to Zynga has helped push its MAU to record numbers, although its DAU is still down a bit over 7 percent from its peak last year, as we recently pointed out in a larger platform analysis.

This is an industry first for a device maker, and will encourage Android developers to use Facebook for social features because users won’t have to type in their email and password to try new social apps.

When users unbox their new Sony Ericsson Android device, they’ll be asked to log in to Facebook as part of the set up process. Then, once users download third-party Facebook-integrated applications, they won’t need to login, but just authorize thanks to single sign-on. “Facebook is the primary social network provider” said Essl.

Facebook introduced single-sign on in December to reduce the friction in trying Facebook-integrated mobile apps. The system allows apps to borrow the Facebook login authentication token from the device’s primary Facebook app, like Facebook for Android. The system encourages application experimentation amongst users.

Essl acknowledges that “Facebook isn’t strong in every market, but we do see in Sony Ericsson’s markets that Facebook is usually the primary network.” Preloading devices with Facebook will ease user acquisition for third-party Facebook-integrated apps, making Sony Ericsson, Android, and Facebook more attractive to developers.

Sony Ericsson will also utilize the social graph to power native functions of its devices. Users can already pre-populate their phone book with contact information of their Facebook friends. These additional integrations will be revealed in the near future.

The preloading of its app is a win for Facebook as well. Sony Ericsson sold nine million Android devices last year. Similar or better numbers in 2011 will help Facebook boost its mobile user count well above the currently listed 200 million.

The panelists:

Martin Essl, Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
Anil Dharni, Co-Founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8
Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
Asokan Thiyagarajan, Dir. of Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
Matthaeus Krzykowski, Founder, Xyologic

The live transcript (paraphrased in parts and edited for brevity)

JO: The platforms are just in different stages of evolution. If there are a hundred million devices, there’s definitely a smaller footprint. We’re making a bet, long-term, that we’re at a special point in time. Unlimited data plans may be coming, localization, and the capability and usability of these devices being where we can build what we want to. Those things combining we think will create an unbelievable growth period for mobile.

AD: The more you spend, the costlier it gets. The flipside of this on the mobile side, what we noticed is, there’s so much inventory coming in, and so many free to play games coming in, that the cost of user acquisition is not scaling up, and you can have a business model to support that. Today, if I had to have a model of what it looks like on Facebook for the next six months, it’s hard to estimate that. The window on mobile is predictable right now, but it might change in the next six months to a year. I think the time right now is pretty good.

MK: Tell me about 2010. How does your job change this year?

AT: We announced two big things last year. One was social hubs. Today, you take an app-based approach. If you want to call a friend from an app, you have to go back to your contacts. What we did is, you can link in your contacts to various other apps. If a friend calls in and he posted something on Facebook about being in Dallas, it can show that. So you bring in a seamless, integrated experience. The second thing we did was bring in the media hub, where we allow users to download full-length movies on Samsung handsets. The idea is to move them across devices.

MK: That was 2010, right? How big will all this be this year, what are you working on?

AT: Last year a lot of work was done on things done from the handset, getting data in. We’re trying to see how we can best optimize data usage on the handset. Moving to a model where we’re pushing data in a very optimized way. Because of this model, let’s say you’re getting data from five networks at once. So we’re working to get 80 to 90 percent optimization of the data coming into the handset. This is good for both operators and users. For the user, it’s the battery. Last year I carried two or three batteries with me.

MK: Martin, the App Store came along and your job became obsolete, right?

ME: I don’t think obsolete, and I think the device manufacturers are underestimated in many ways. At Sony Ericsson, we’re looking at what else we can do for developers — tutorials, SDKs, we provide additional hardware features that may allow new usage features. We can promote you in different channels.. we’re not so much interested in pre-loading anymore, by the time we have a phone in the market, the apps could be obsolete.

MK: Can you elaborate on deep integration:

ME: Deep integration is something you’d see much more going forward. That doesn’t mean you’re replicating what Facebook does, but that you’re utilizing Facebook’s social graph. We want to surface features much better for the user. Another thing is that we’re doing a lot of marketing, for Foursquare for example, and integrating that..

MK: How do you feel about Android?

JO: We’re very excited about Android. We see it as a big growth opportunity — we’re happy with the devices, with the distribution, and how the content looks on the devices. There’s no doubt that you need good acquisition channels.

MK: Why do you need to connect Facebook to Android?

AD: There’s a short term take and a long term. DeNA and Ngmoco are long-term, and that makes sense. But if you’re acquiring a lot of users on Android, they may not be paying much. You may need backers. The real winners will be those that time it right, and there’s still room for new winners to come into the market. In terms of social, we actually haven’t seen much success with people who have apps on the iOS and try to force users to connect with Facebook. You can look at any of the apps that have Facebook integration and look at their reviews — people are just bitching about being connected to Facebook. People on the iPhone hate when that’s the only option. I’d say, if you’re thinking about it, fine, but it doesn’t have to be in version one of your apps.

JO: You have to enable users to source relationships and contacts from where they want to do that. There are certain games and apps that lend themselves to it. In other games, it’s much more about meeting someone for the first time in the context of the game. It’s a question of good product design.

MK: I think there’s a consensus that the most important thing Facebook has done is single sign-on. You have companies like Loopt where Facebook is giving a userbase and you innovate on top of that. How big is Facebook single sign-on for you?

AT: My take on it is that it’s still in its infancy. We don’t see mobile as just Facebook. We see it in other segments as well. There could be other social networking taking place in other parts of the world — in Korea there are other things going on. We don’t see Facebook as the single conduit for single sign-on. But we are following trends in the market pretty closely, and will make some decisions in time.

JO: Facebook has done a good job of providing the platform in a more granular way. Facebook may be a good source of contact information, and free-to-play game is an ongoing relationship with the user and having the ability to contact them is important. In some cases it may make sense to use Facebook as that channel.

AD: All I’d add is the game perspective. For games, I think the analogy is very similar to why real-time interactions on Facebook don’t work, they’re not online at the same time and probably don’t want to play the same games you do. I’ve got a million people available, but how many have an iPhone and Facebook at the same time? Suddenly the userbase shrinks. It’s just an add-on.

ME: We understand that Facebook isn’t strong in every market, but we do see in Sony Ericsson’s markets that Facebook is usually the primary network. To me, it’s not a question of who is the social network, Facebook is the social layer that’s on top of everything. For our devices, they’ll all come with Facebook single-sign on pre-loaded. In the next couple months you’ll see it coming.

MK: Let’s talk about why that’s relevant.

ME: We encourage developers by promoting Facebook single sign on so when a user authorizes it, they don’t have to enter a username and password anymore.

MK: [What about the Playstation phone?]

ME: I can’t comment on that.

MK: Give me some examples of what you’re working on and the coolest use-cases you see.

AT: There are multiple touch-points in a connected home, so we’re looking at use cases. Let’s assume you’re driving your kids and they’re watching a movie. You reach home, turn off the movie, and turn on your TV to watch it there. You bring your tablet with you, and say, here you go — it’s streaming from the tablet to the TV. Getting a bit more social, let’s say you’re landing in an airport and want to tell your wife you’re coming home. So you can say you want to share your location for the next hour, and she can turn on the TV and see exactly where you are. (Audience laughter.) I know there are a lot of discussions around privacy, but these are the use cases. Let’s say you’re watching TV and the washer finishes its cycle, it could tell the TV. And social dating applications, based on your profile, where you are and what you’re doing, location-based dating is possible. What we’ve been trying to see is to make sure this integration becomes seamless.

Audience question: You see a lot of companies going from Facebook to mobile — when do the mobile companies take their apps to Facebook?

JO: All of the new game tech we’re building is on the idea that you build a single codebase for multiple distributions. We’re ready for that today.

Audience question: We’ll have all these access points — what are the opportunities or risks based on designing your game for a particular access point? Not just that it’s a bigger screen, as with a computer or iPad over the mobile device.

AT: The first thing is, I deal with a lot of developers on a day to day basis. Data has become very big in 2010 in the US. If you’re building a data-intensive app and take it to the Asian market, it’s not going to work. You need to be careful to make sure you’re targeting the right audience. If you don’t do that, you might make a good solution without any takers.

ME: Basically you need to understand the market you’re going into — demographics, context and the device you’re targeting.

Audience question: Do the lack of in-app payments in Android account for its lack of success?

JO: Yes, it does…

MK: I think that 98.4 percent of all downloads on Android are free now, so everyone is waiting for in-app purchases.

Audience question: You said it seemed like common sense that user acquisition would run into a barrier in six months, what will make that happen?

AD: I think as more and more advertisers come into the space, there’s only so much of a pool on these devices. There will be a place where Android will start slowing. It’s exactly what has happened on Google Ads and Facebook — when that happens, the economics will change, and I think that’s six months to a year away.

Audience question: I don’t think Flash will work on mobile, so what path should Facebook developers take to mobile devices?

JO: We’ve addressed that by focusing entirely on Javascript as a development environment. We were unsatisfied with where HTML5 is today, it’s not comparable to the experience in native UIs, so we’ve built a framework that plugs into the native UI.

AD: Don’t let that slow you down. There are enough genres that you can succeed with just HTML and Javascript, and there are companies that have been successful with that. You can look at with the space and figure out where you need to go native, and where you can do HTML / Javascript.

Audience question: Have you seen any example of a title that has crossed over between mobile and Facebook?

AD: I don’t think anyone has proved that it works. They’ll be successful on just one platform. The audience is different, the play style is different and usage patterns, the genres that succeed on Facebook might not on mobile and vice versa. That’s why we started Funzio, to prove that it can work.

Audience question: What kind of technology can you recommend for mobile to make a social experience less intrusive?

JO: I think it just depends on asking for the right amount of information that’s in context of what the user’s expectation is. Facebook, for example, gives you a lot of flexibility in how you use their platform. A lot of people don’t think about that as much as they could, and optimize for it. A lot of it is about compulsion loops and the user understanding why you want them to do things.

Audience question: Will the Facebook app itself be pre-loaded on Sony Ericsson devices?

ME: Yes, that’s what it means, and we’ll incentivize users to sign in with things you’ll see coming later this year.

Audience question: How many devices have you sold?

ME: I think we sold nine million Android devices last year. Sony Ericsson isn’t that big in the US yet, so it’s something we’ll have to fight for.