Inside Network’s AppData is a goldmine of information about third-party applications on Facebook. With it, you can see stats like: FarmVille has 63.9 million monthly active users — making it well over twice as large as the number two app on Facebook, Texas HoldEm Poker (also a Zynga game), which has 28.5 million monthly active users. But there was always something a little wonky about certain areas of AppData’s data. For example, they showed that Facebook for Android only had 67 monthly active users — yes, 67. But something happened this past week that seemed to correct the data, and it exposed one new massive Facebook app: Twitter.

As Inside Facebook (another site under InsideNetwork) noted yesterday, some change Facebook recently made appears to have corrected the stats for a number of apps. The aforementioned Facebook for Android shot up to 4.7 million MAU from its 67 — a 7 percent increase. The other big increase in the top 10 gainers? Twitter, which went from it’s previously reported number of just over 400,000 users, to nearly 7 million — a change of over 1,300 percent. And the app still appears to be growing pretty fast. The Twitter app’s own page on Facebook now confirms this new number.

Obviously, the app didn’t jump like that overnight, there was clearly an error before. Still, this information is interesting because it shows just how big an app made by Facebook rival Twitter is on Facebook itself. Its 6.7 million MAU makes it the 40th most popular app on Facebook, according to AppData’s numbers. That’s pretty significant.

Twitter’s app on Facebook has been the center of some controversy on the network for some time. A year ago, the app appeared to be badly broken (or exploited), and neither side appeared to be rushing to fix it. At the time, due to this underreporting, it looked like the app was relatively small (250,000 users, we reported at the time) — now it’s clear it was much, much bigger. Million of users were likely affected.

Earlier today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared some thoughts with Inside Facebook about Twitter. Notably, he admitted that he spent too much time thinking about the rival network over the past year and a half. But now he views it as a “very nice, simple service.” One that just happens to be one of the top apps on his platform.

Opera Software has struck a deal with Russia’s federal mobile operator OJSC MegaFon under which MegaFon’s special package “Unlimited Internet with Opera Mini” will be distributed to all Russian territories.

That may not sound like much at first glance, but you have to consider that MegaFon boasts over 53 million mobile subscribers, spanning all seven Federal Districts of Russia.

Furthermore, MegaFon serves some 39 percent of all mobile Web traffic in Russian territories, according to recent research (it was first in Russia to run a 3G network based on UMTS). The operator says internal statistics have shown that Opera Mini subscribers effectively generate twice the traffic than any other MegaFon user.

4INFO CEO Zaw Thet is trying to shed the title, “King of SMS.”

The mobile advertising company dominates the US SMS market, delivering some 400 million text messages each month (its monthly rate has roughly doubled from early 2010)— but Thet is tired of his crown, or rather, he’s eyeing a different one. 4INFO is trying to position itself as the largest mobile advertiser, SMS and beyond, and the company is ready to acquire other players to get it there.

“The way we look at it now is let’s be the best damn mobile company in the world,” Thet says. “[We want to] be the only mobile media platform that works with top tier publishers and advertisers to deliver the highest value per interaction…That means across every mobile channel (SMS, display, apps, etc.) and every type of mobile interaction.”

The first part of this (some might say overly ambitious) campaign is its acquisition of Butter, a company that specializes in creating customized mobile solutions and ad campaigns for the iPhone and Android platform. The all-stock deal, announced this Tuesday, is a modest takeover— a source believes Butter’s valuation didn’t break seven-figures— but it embodies 4INFO’s major shift in strategy.

Butter is not incredibly unique in its basic products, a few other companies are trying to create rich mobile ad experiences (like Medialets, Apple iAds) but Thet says he was drawn to their team, the roster of clients, which includes Coca-Cola, and especially their approach:

“The thing that we found very interesting about Butter was the fact that most of their advertising buys that they were getting weren’t coming from the mobile ad budgets. For viewers who are not familiar with the way that media works, there’s typically line items in each different advertising plan, for how they’re going to spend their money, x amount goes to TV, x amount goes to the web…what Butter had done is they had been able to break out of that bucket of just being an experimental, mobile ad budget line item… That meant to us that there’s something valuable there beyond just the technology, which was interesting, but the actual relationships and the network that they built in a very short amount of time.”

From Butter’s website:

As I noted above, this will be the first of many acquisitions for 4INFO, as the company tries to create a one-stop shop, mobile ad destination. Thet has a decent purse to work with, the company has raised approximately $40 million since 2005 and revenues are climbing at a feverish pace. According Thet, revenues will likely quintuple—possibly sextuple— this year. So they have the money, but will it work?

They’ve certainly proven themselves in the SMS category, the company boasts a network of roughly 3,000 publishers, with some of the biggest publishers paying as much as $75,000 per month to use the platform. For those unfamiliar with their B2B product, the main backbone of 4INFO is a publishing platform, “msgHaven,” which helps publishers manage their SMS content and delivery. The company also features an advertising platform, called “adHaven,” which includes an ad network for mobile ads. The company has expanded beyond SMS, notably moving into mobile display ads in 2009, but it definitely has a lot of ground to cover.

Of course that ground has also become more challenging. Now that Google and Apple have rushed onto to the scene with their recent acquisitions of AdMob and Quattro, their shadows loom over the market. Noah Elkin, a senior analyst at eMarketer, says 4INFO had a better chance of dominating the market 6 months ago (pre-Google/Apple takeovers), but he says their fundamental strategy of building a comprehensive mobile ad house is sound, as more companies look for rich ad experiences and one-stop shops: “SMS has had the greatest reach but it’s probably the most unsexy form of advertising there is— as more and more consumers buy smart phones you can see the tide shifting… It’s not too late for his peer group to get in the game.”

Thet discusses the value of Butter, his acquisition strategy, and potential suitors in the video above.

Bing’s iPhone app isn’t the only thing getting an upgrade today at Microsoft’s search engine. Bing is also starting to roll out close to 100 new features to its main search engine on the Web. The biggest change is a new major search category under Bing Entertainment, which will include better ways to search for music, movies, TV shows, and games. “We did travel, health, shopping and local last year,” explains senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “Now the Web has unlocked all of this entertainment, but for many people they are spending too much time looking for what they want to do instead of enjoying it. We are trying to remove all of those hurdles that block you from enjoying it. You should be able to watch a show, listen to online music, or play a game with a few clicks.”

Roughly 10 percent of all searches are entertainment related, according to Mehdi. And 90 percent of people do at least one entertainment search a month. Bing Entertainment is designed to provide a more in-depth and visual search experience for music, movies, TV shows, and games.

One of the most noticeable changes will come in music. Music searches will now come back with lyrics and playable streams for 5 million songs, which have already been licensed through Microsoft’s Zune service. A full stream of each song will be playable once per person, and then 30-second clips will be available in subsequent searches. (In this regard, Bing is catching up to Google, which launched a similar music search late last year). The idea is to make it easier for people to discover music and sample them. There will also be links to Amazon, iTunes, and Zune to buy full downloads.

When you search for an artist or a song, a special Answer Box (informally known as the Bing Box) will appear at the top of the search results page. It may be filled with pictures of the artist, a playlist of popular songs, upcoming events, their Tweets, and a link to the artist’s official site.

Movie searches will create an Answer Box with photo stills, a synopsis, local show times, and links to trailers. The results will be geared to help you plan a night out at the movies, complete with maps, parking, nearby restaurant suggestions and more. For TV shows, you will get TV listings in your area and sometimes playable streams from Hulu, Viacom, CBS and other partners through Bing Videos. Whenever available, trailers and TV shows will play within Bing.

Games searches will be geared toward both hardcore console gamers (teenagers) and casual Web gamers (Moms). For console games, results will be filtered to easily find walkthroughs, reviews, and cheats. Casual game searches sometimes take you to games you can play on Bing like Checkers and Bejeweled.

By bringing entertainment experiences it Bing, searchers might stick around longer. Search used to take you away to what you were looking for on the Web, but data (including music, video, and games) can move anywhere now, even to search engines. It might be time to retire that rule.

When Twitter bought Atebits, the company behind the excellent iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie, there was some concern it would slow down development of that app. Luckily, it doesn’t look like that has happened. As today, Twitter for iPhone version 3.0.1 has just launched, and with it comes suport for both iOS 4 and iPhone 4.

In fact, while other huge apps on the iPhone, such as Facebook, lag behind in supporting the newest iPhone functionality, Twitter is one of the first to implement some of the useful new features.

So what they are supporting with this update? The actual App Store page only vaguely says the app has updated “OAuth support” and has a “Stuck top tweets fix”. But having downloaded the app just now, I can confirm that it is enabled to “multitask” — meaning you can quickly switch into and out of the app and into other background enabled apps. The app also has been customized for the new iPhone 4 Retina display, developer Loren Brichter confirms.

You can find Twitter for iPhone here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

Whether you buy into the hype or not, it’s plain fact that 3D is everywhere these days. From movies and games to laptops and handhelds, pretty much every screen in the house is going to be 3D-capable in a year or so, even if you opt not to display any 3D content on it. Those of you who choose that path may stop reading now, and come back a little later when you change your mind. Because if you have kids or enjoy movies and games, there will be a point where you’re convinced, perhaps by a single standout piece of media, that 3D is worth it at least some of the time.

But 3D isn’t as easy to get used to as, say, getting a surround-sound system or moving from 4:3 to widescreen. Why is that? Well, it’s complicated, but worth taking the time to understand. Moreover, like any other new technology, 3D is not without its potential risks, and of course studies will have to be done to determine the long-term effects of usage, if any. For now, though, it must be sufficient to inform yourself of the principles behind it and make your own decision.

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There’s no question that Twitter’s web experience has been improving pretty rapidly over the past several months. However, one area that’s still lacking is a good way to view conversations. Clicking on the “in reply to” links is tedious for long conversations. Several third-party apps (including Twitter’s own native iPhone app — which they bought) are much better at doing this. One of those is an app called Twitoaster. And its creator just got hired by Twitter.

Twitoaster is the work of French developer Arnaud Meunier. As he tweeted and blogged today, he’s going to work for Twitter after getting to know some of the team following the Chirp conference in April. Of note, Twitoaster’s speciality was the threaded conversation view it gave to tweets.

So does that mean this is coming to Twitter? Not necessarily — Twitoaster eventually added a number of other features — such as analytics — that could point to how Twitter could use Meunier’s skills as well. But given the direction Twitter has been going with its web product, I would be surprised if some sort of better conversation view wasn’t added to the site relatively soon.

Another key focus of Twitoaster is tweet archiving. That’s another feature Twitter could definitely improve upon. Currently, thanks to Twitter’s search limitations, once a tweet is a couple of months old, it’s basically lost in the Twitter.com ether. If Twitter had a better archiving mechanism for old tweets, it could extend the life of them, and make them much more useful.

All of this, of course, is some fun late Friday afternoon speculation. But Twitter was clearly impressed with what Meunier built, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they use his skills in a similar fashion on their core product.

Meanwhile, Twitoaster will live on, but Meunier says not to expect any new features as he’ll be focused on his new job.

[thanks Richard]

Colorado startup Lijit is best known for providing websites with really good search. And it does search well – sites from Fred Wilson’s blog to ICanHasCheezburger use it.

But Lijit is really an advertising network. Publishers that use Lijit also get access to lots of stats about what’s going on with site searches. And they have an option to join the Lijit ad network to put display ads up on their sites – not just on search results – targeted via that data. So far, so good. Lijit doesn’t take inventory unless they can get the publisher a minimum $1 CPM, and 30% of their 700 million page views on publisher sites serve Lijit ads. They say that will grow to 1 billion page views by end of September this year.

Gross revenue, mostly from those display ads, is on target to hit $4 million – $5 million this year, CEO Todd Vernon told me earlier today. And most of their display ad publishers have joined Lijit in the last 90 days. Last year, revenue was near $0.

Vernon says that the company is able to get premium advertising rates for publishers by combining that search intent data with demographic and content targeting, and that they work very well with mid and long tail publishers who aren’t yet big enough to hire their own sales force.

All that growth and potential means Ligit gets a new round of funding. Existing investors Foundry Group, Boulder Ventures and High Country Venture have put another $6 million into the company, bringing the total to $18.3 million to date.

If revenue trajectories continue the company will get to profitability by the time they’ve spent this round, says Vernon.

One of the highlighted new features of the upcoming iPhone 4 is the gyroscope. With it, developers will be able to build all new kinds of games that take your body’s movement into account. Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed off a Jenga-like game at the WWDC keynote. And you can imagine augmented reality apps will love this as well. But what if you’re not going to get an iPhone 4? Well, there’s a developer out there who has built a software engine for the iPhone 3GS or iPad that does the same thing.

Developer Vishal Srivastava (who recently left a job at Microsoft after 5 years there) has built what he calls the “Perspectiverse Engine.” With it, you can use the iPhone 3GS or iPad in the same way the iPhone 4 with the gyroscope works. That is, you load up an app and move your body around to manipulate the action happening on the screen. You can see it in action right now in the app Magic 3G Easter Egg Painter, which is currently live in the App Store.

Even cooler is a game Srivastava is working on called Gyromaniac (formerly called “Colonoscapade”). In it, you move your body around to make your way through a colon and other interesting interiors. It’s both disgusting and awesome. Srivastava actually showed me a demo of the game well before the iPhone 4 was announced (and obviously before anyone knew about the gyroscope feature). It’s very impressive how well it works considering there is no gyroscope in this older hardware. Check out the videos below.

So how does it work? The engine “uses a combination of device sensors to constantly align the game world with the real world. No matter how you orient your phone, north in the game universe is the same as north in the real world, south is south, up is up, down is down, and so forth. This allows you to interact with that game universe as if you were in it,” Srivastava tells us.

The engine works in older devices too but it reverts to tilt-only controls, Srivastava says.

So now that the gyroscope is coming in iPhone 4, is Srivastava worried the engine he built engine will be obsolete? No — if anything he’s excited that it can make his games more accurate.

He’s calling his company Subversus Interactive. Gyromaniac will be coming out shortly, but you can find Magic 3D Easter Egg Painter live now in the App Store — for a limited time it’s only $0.99.

PogoPlug just released its upgraded Android app. The app allows you to browse media and music on connected drives, share files publicly from drives, and search for files. You can also manage the folders on your connected drives.

It is available in the app store now. As you recall, the Pogoplug is essentially a NAS adapter that plugs right into the wall and then pop in the Ethernet cable. Any USB drives connected to it are automatically shared on the Internet (password-protected, of course) and you can manage the entire drive from anywhere in the world. The device itself is available for $129.

Click through for full details.

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