According to a study last year from the University of Maryland, the Facebook app economy, which includes more than 8,000 companies in the U.S. alone, created 182,000 jobs in 2011. The total value of Facebook’s app economy, the study said, is more than $12 billion. And that figure doesn’t even include non-app companies in the Facebook ecosystem. In the run-up to Friday’s big IPO, startups that owe (at least part of) their success Facebook are likely giving an extra bit of thanks. Here are ten.

Adaptly
The New York-based startup, which gives brands a consolidated platform for buying ads across social media networks, announced earlier this month that it raised $10 million in funding, bring its total to $13.2. The company operates across multiple social networks but at this point is most closely connected with Facebook.

Branch Out
Riding Facebook’s momentum, this San Francisco-based startup is angling to take on LinkedIn. Since releasing its Facebook-integrated mobile Web app, the social professional network, founded in 2010, has grown from one million monthly active users to about 13.5 monthly active users. In April, it raised $25 million, bringing its total investment to $49 million.

Fab
Design and commerce are at the heart of Fab but social sharing – and Facebook, in particular – have helped it grow to 4 million members in less than a year. Since integrating with Facebook, Fab says referral traffic from Facebook has increased from 15-20 percent to 30 percent. This week, it announced a collection of new social features make its Facebook relationship even deeper.

Gogobot
Aiming to dominate the social travel market, Gogobot says it’s drawing much of its growth from Facebook, where 92 percent of its users connect to the service. This week, it crossed the 1 million mark for registered users and says it signs up a new member every 15 seconds.

Payvment
Earlier this year the social commerce platform exclusively on Facebook announced that it had reached its one millionth monthly active shopper. In December, Payvment, which has raised about $7.75 million, said the annual transaction volume of merchants in its network tripled during 2011.

RootMusic
MySpace may still mean something to musicians, but RootMusic is helping to migrate more artists to Facebook with its BandPages app. It’s raised $18 million in the past couple of years and counts about half a million artists among its users.

Spotify
Spotify was already an international hit before it moved stateside. But, as my colleague Janko points out, its Facebook integration has certainly helped its adoption. Music industry blogger and former Jupiter Research analyst Mark Mulligan estimates that the company has hit 20 million users, “turbo charged” by Facebook and its U.S. launch.

Viddy
One of the much-hyped “Instagrams for video,” Viddy is currently in fourth place on AppData’s leaderboard for Facebook Apps. Boosted by its Facebook-powered growth, it raised $30 million at a valuation upwards of $300 million.

Wildfire Interactive
One of several social media companies capitalizing on the need of brands to manage their presence on Facebook (including top rivals Buddy Media and Hearsay Social), San Francisco-based Wildfire was one of the first winners of Facebook’s fbFund program and has been taking off ever since. In the past year, its customer base doubled to more than 15,000 over the past year, while its workforce tripled to more than 330 people. They’ve raised $14.1 million to date.

Wooga
Launched in 2009, the Berlin-based company is the third-ranked game developer on Facebook, in terms of monthly active users, according to Facebook.  Its games, including Diamond Dash and Bubble Island, draw more than 40 million active players every month. It’s raised more than $30 million in venture funding.

Update: A previous version of this story mentioned King.com. While it has seen impressive growth since launching on Facebook, we realized it was likely too mature a company to include on a list of startups.

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According to Wooga, Diamond Dash has been downloaded more than 11 million times on iOS since it was first released for the platform just four months ago. The game also has more than 18 million monthly active users in its Facebook incarnation, helping Wooga into seventh place when it comes to Facebook app developers (that’s overall – not just for games).

The gem-clearing game, which is similar to the classic Bejeweled, is only available on iOS and Facebook, but the two versions links up to provide synchronised scores and a unified leaderboard. And of course you can compete with friends.

Wooga was one of the first games developers to release a specially-optimised version of its product for the new iPad upon the tablet’s release and, as the chart below shows, that device already accounts for a sizeable chunk of downloads.

Wooga’s stats suggest that the social element is working. The company said on Monday that 64 percent of players logged into Facebook to play with their friends. It also said those who logged into the social network were eight times more likely to shell out cash, and spend 50 percent more than non-logged-in players on average.

During March alone, there were 18.5 million instances of iOS users being directed to the app from a notification that popped up while they were browsing the social network from their mobile device, the developer added.

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A new app that launched this week called Frugalo aims to help people actually make sense of all this. Run by a two-person team — former Digg employees Michael Cieri and Scott Reynolds — and backed with seed funding from AngelPad, Frugalo wants to help separate the wheat from the chaff in the daily deal overload.

Frugalo connects with your Gmail account and assembles all your confirmed purchases from major deal sites — Groupon, Gilt Groupe, Bloomspot, Living Social, and others — in one place.  The app can also send you a weekly email summary to keep you abreast of when various deals are set to expire.

A big part of Frugalo that sets it apart from other daily deal aggregation apps such as Yipit is the social aspect. From the get-go, the app is linked to your Facebook account — anyone who is your Facebook friend is automatically your Frugao friend. This allows you to see the deals your friends are buying and collaborate on purchases with them. It also helps Frugalo learn about other deals that may be of interest to you in the future, by  monitoring the activity of your larger social circle.

“There’s still hunger for deep savings, but people are just overwhelmed with mediocre deals that don’t make sense to them,” Cieri said in an interview this week. “That’s why we want to help unearth relevant deals that do make sense to people, and use social as a signal to promote good offers.”

Daily deal fatigue is a very real thing, so I think Frugalo is on to something here. I like saving money as much as anyone, but I have recently unsubscribed from many daily deal and retailer mailing lists just because I got so tired of receiving 40 different coupon emails each day. But Frugalo just might convince me to get back on the daily deal bandwagon.

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Making travel tips super social

On Wednesday, Uptake made its first real public push with the debut of a Facebook app called Travel Q&A. Travel Q&A gathers information from your Facebook friends to help you find the best people from your existing friend circle to ask about certain travel destinations and activities.

Uptake app screenshot (click to enlarge)

The way the app works is pretty straightforward: Say I’m going to New Orleans. If I’m logged into Travel Q&A, I can search for New Orleans on the Uptake site, and the app will identify which of my friends are best positioned to give me travel recommendations. I can then choose to ask any or all of those people for their travel recommendations either through a public wall post or a private Facebook message.

According to Uptake, this is no easy feat. The company says Travel Q&A runs on its patent-pending “destination mining” technology that “analyzes both friends’ explicit location data, such as hometowns and check-ins, as well as friends’ less-obvious, implicit location data … in the form of photos, status updates and comments.”

Cutting through TripAdvisor’s clutter

Personally, I think Uptake’s Travel Q&A app could provide a nice alternative to scanning through the mountain of user-generated reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor. When I’m looking at those kinds of sites, I find myself spending lots of time sorting through entries and trying to determine if the people who wrote them are credible or relevant to my tastes. I already know and trust my Facebook friends, so going straight to them for advice makes sense — and Uptake’s targeting makes it so that I don’t end up spamming all my contacts or doing a “lazy web” post on my Facebook wall.

The problem, of course, is that the travel space is already quite crowded. But Uptake has been working on the problem for nearly five years — it took on its first round of funding back in early 2007, and has amassed a total of $12 million from VCs — and Lee, a Yahoo veteran who co-founded San Francisco Citysearch back in the mid-1990s, says he is well aware of the unique challenges the sector presents. In fact, that’s why it has been building itself up so quietly until now. He put it this way:

“Making money in travel is the easiest part. The hardest part is we knew that our go to market strategy wasn’t unique; it was about execution.”

There’s no doubt that Uptake is facing stiff competition, but the company seems as well-prepared as anyone to aim for the crown. Here are a couple more Uptake Travel Q&A screenshots (click to enlarge):

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The company has not nailed down a specific launch date, but we understand Words With Friends should be live on Facebook sometime within the next week or two.

Zynga acquired Words With Friends when it bought Texas-based mobile games developer Newtoy in December 2010. At that time, it seemed as if Zynga was keen to diversify beyond its established business of developing Facebook games. Words With Friends has been a major hit for Zynga as a standalone mobile app, but Monday’s news shows that Zynga is not looking to quit Facebook just yet.

It makes sense that Zynga would want to get as much value as possible out of Words With Friends — it was revealed in the company’s S-1 initial public offering filing last month that it paid a cool $53.3 million to acquire Newtoy, $44.3 million of which was in cash. And while mobile apps are key to Zynga’s future, Facebook is still a major part of its current revenue strategy: Zynga noted in its S-1 that it has “derived substantially all of our revenue and acquired substantially all of our players through Facebook.” Diversification is important, but now that Zynga is looking to go public the more revenue-generating irons it has in the fire, the better.

Overall, Words With Friends for Facebook looks pretty cool (a screenshot is embedded below.) Zynga says the Facebook version of the game will have all of the mobile app’s functionality with added social features such as the ability to “publicly call out your friend on their wall” after a particularly good move. Additionally, players on Android and iOS devices will be able to port their games seamlessly between their mobile devices and Facebook.

Words With Friends seems nearly ubiquitous as it is, but the move to Facebook could bring the game to a whole new level of viral popularity.

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Manifest Destiny depicted in the 1872 painting "American Progress"

Updated. With a healthy dose of fanfare, last week Facebook teamed up with Skype  to launch a new video-calling application, hosted at facebook.com/videocalling. But now a company called Samuday Web Technologies says it had that domain first — and Samuday’s CEO says that his company’s video chat app was unceremoniously kicked off Facebook in a modern-day case of Manifest Destiny, so that Facebook could clear the way for its own feature.

According to Nimit Kumar, his company’s uniRow video-calling application ran within Facebook at the facebook.com/videocalling URL starting in December of 2010. The app was moderately successful, although not hugely popular: Kumar says that it amassed 22,000 users, more than a third of whom were active, and the app managed to attract 4,500 likes and an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars.

But on April 7, Samuday’s video-calling app was deleted by Facebook without any warning whatsoever, Kumar says. The company immediately reached out to Facebook to try to understand why the action was taken, and received a vague form letter about how the app violated Facebook’s policies. Since the uniRow video-calling app for Facebook was the work of two developers, and Samuday has a host of other products, the company eventually decided against working on a relaunch.

But when Facebook launched its own video app at uniRow’s old URL last week, Kumar became suspicious about the reason his app was really kicked off of the platform. He wrote in a blog entry posted on July 8:

The question to ask is what happened around April 7th (exactly 3 months before the launch of Facebook-Skype Video Calling). It is clear that when the plan for rolling out their application was decided, Facebook wanted to use the phrase “Video Calling” and therefore wanted the URL. Instead of communicating this to the page (and application) owners, it went ahead and disabled the application. This is grossly undemocratic and probably illegal (we are looking into this aspect). We tried our best to get the application reinstated, but did not succeed.

In an email, Kumar told me that he is discussing the possibility of legal action with several lawyers: “They have been supportive thus far, but being a young (bootstrapped) startup, we are short of resources.” Samuday has not had any contact with Facebook since the Skype video-calling app launched, he said.

This is not the only time Facebook has gotten on a developer’s bad side. The company caught a lot of flack last month when it enacted a new spam-control policy that apparently cut a number of legitimate applications. But Facebook seems keen to make amends for its mistakes: The social networking company responded swiftly to the spam control outcry, and recently rolled out a softened policy reflecting that it had indeed heard the developer community’s complaints. But it’s difficult to see exactly how Facebook could make it up to Samuday, since the company’s former URL is taken up by Facebook’s own blockbuster app.

I’ve reached out to Facebook’s policy head Barry Schnitt for comment on Samuday’s claims, and he said in an email that his team is looking into the issue. I’ll update this post with any response we receive.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson emailed Wednesday morning with the following statement: “The app was disabled by an automated system for a policy violation that was not related to the URL of the app. The developer’s appeal was manually reviewed; the violation was confirmed, and the appeal was denied. Two months after the initial disabling of the app, Facebook acquired the URL.”

Image of John Gast’s depiction of Manifest Destiny from the 1872 painting “American Progress” courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Late last month, Facebook enacted a new spam control system to cut down on the rampant spam on the company’s application platform. But the company quickly came under fire when the new controls apparently cut out a number of legitimate applications. Disgruntled developers quickly took to Facebook’s message boards and the press to complain about the company’s lack of communication prior to the shut-downs.

It looks like Facebook heard those complaints loud and clear. On Thursday the company announced several changes to its application developer tools and its app spam control policy to give developers more insight into how their apps are being received by the larger community — before those complaints prompt spam control action. Facebook is now rolling out a “news feed” tab in its developer dashboard that shows the positive and negative feedback apps have received in an easy-to-read graph form.

In addition, Facebook said it has softened the way it responds to app complaints. Now, when Facebook receives excessive negative feedback on an app, it will first disable only the aspect of the app that is receiving the majority of complaints, rather than deleting the app entirely. For instance, Facebook engineer Mike Vernal wrote in a blog post announcing the changes: “If an app is generating a lot of negative feedback via chat messages, we will take action only on that app’s ability to publish to chat but otherwise leave the app intact.”

Facebook also says it will now disable, rather than delete, apps that receive negative feedback across multiple channels. Users will not be able to access an app in disabled mode, but developers will still be able to access, test, and edit it. Developers will be able to appeal when their apps are disabled entirely or in a granular fashion.

All in all, these are very smart moves for Facebook to make. The swift response to last month’s criticism shows that it is taking its developers seriously; as does Facebook’s willingness to be more transparent about how they are regulating the apps. After all, developer trust is key to any API strategy.

Here is a look at the new dashboard “news feed” feature:

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Facebook has come under fire most recently for implementing tighter regulations on its third-party applications. The new enforcement system enacted late last week was purportedly aimed at cutting the rampant application spam on Facebook’s platform. But in practice, it apparently cut out a number of legitimate applications as well. Developers, angry that their apps have been partially or entirely disabled without notice, have taken to Facebook’s message boards and the press to protest the actions.

Facebook has said that the new regulations were enacted as a response to a sharp uptick in user complaints about application spam on their walls and in their news feeds. The targeted apps were ones with “high negative user feedback,” the company said in statements released on Friday. Facebook also says that developers can appeal if they feel their app was wrongly disabled.

Meanwhile, some observers are suggesting that deeper motives than simply cleaning up spam are at play — namely, the ongoing and much-buzzed-about development of Facebook’s Project Spartan. With Project Spartan, Facebook is said to be building an HTML5-based platform that will allow the company to provide an app-like experience that runs entirely over the web within a mobile browser. An article published on Sunday by paidContent asked if Facebook’s app crackdown was a “Spartan prelude,” and on Monday mobile technology news site Mobiledia suggested a similar link.

Whether or not a Project Spartan connection exists, Facebook has recognized the need to clean up its apps before. Anyone who uses Facebook even occasionally can probably attest to the overabundance of spammy apps hosted on the platform. And in the wrong hands, a Facebook app can easily turn from being an annoyance into being a real danger. Last week the Los Angeles–based startup Unsubscribe rolled out a new Social Monitor feature that shows the various safety levels of the applications that users have installed on their social media profiles. In developing the feature, the team at Unsubscribe used several methods to test the security of Facebook apps — and they were pretty surprised at what they found.

“A lot of people have had apps for a long time, and they were built by developers who aren’t necessarily attached to them anymore. They’re kind of like ghost ships,” Unsubscribe CEO James Siminoff told me in an interview last week. As a security test, Unsubscribe’s team started calling app developers and asking if they could buy their apps — and along with them, access to their install base. “We were surprised at the number that said yes, for very low prices,” Siminoff said. “If someone wanted to, they could buy access to a couple hundred million email addresses, with complete social data attached to it.”

If Facebook’s application platform can clearly use a good scrubbing, why were so many people upset at the measures enacted last week? And why are some so quick to assume that there is a deeper, darker strategy than the company is letting on?

Like a lot of Facebook’s missteps, it seems that the backlash here is more related to the execution than the intent. Adding facial recognition technology to photo tagging is not inherently creepy, but the way that Facebook implemented it quietly as a default feature hit a sour note. Spam cleanup is generally well and good, but the company probably should have warned developers whose apps were being targeted by the new regulations before shutting them off entirely.

To be sure, Facebook is not the only company with such problems: Apple and Google have both been heartily criticized for rejecting or shutting down applications and APIs with little warning. In a way, all the hoopla Facebook encounters regularly is just part of its entry into the tech industy’s big leagues.

Indeed, Facebook’s challenge for the future is to provide enough transparency to its users and partners while still retaining the degree of strategic confidentiality needed to maintain a competitive edge. With some 750 million users, many of whom are highly engaged with the service, Facebook, like many other large companies, faces unique challenges on the corporate communications front. Though Facebook has clearly come a long way in its seven years, snafus like this are a reminder of how much more growing up it has yet to do.

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Last week, Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian told Om that the company is set to cross the 100,000-application threshold, an impressive feat given Heroku’s relatively small size compared with other cloud providers.  On Nov. 1, Heroku founder James Lindenbaum told me the company will exceed that mark “very shortly.” According to the Heroku website, its platform already hosts almost 98,000 apps, and Lindenbaum said the number coming on board per week has doubled over the past few months. In April, Heroku was hosting 60,000 applications. Lindenbaum estimates 25-30 percent of the apps fall under the umbrella of social media.

Of those roughly 25,000-30,000 applications, Facebook apps represent a large and growing percentage. With a little help, Facebook developers using Heroku have built applications that avoid the performance issues many other apps face. Many other apps can’t handle the complexities of interfacing with both the Facebook platform and the backend infrastructure — or even the amount of traffic. Lindenbaum points to Heroku customer Cardinal Blue, which maintains high performance for its social-gaming portfolio despite managing 12 million unique users.

With the Facebook App Package, Heroku customers have access to a best-practices guide and a starter kit of a 20GB dedicated database, 20 backend processes, 1GB of Membase Memcache, New Relic’s RPM Gold application-management service and a $200 credit for additional add-ons. With so many Facebook developers already choosing Heroku, Lindenbaum thinks the new program could drive significant growth. “We want to see what happens when we give people the core guidance.”

If successful, the Facebook App Package could spur an even broader social media push by Heroku. Lindenbaum says this is likely the first in a series of vertically focused packages, and there has been some thought given to a formal partnership with Facebook. He didn’t have details on how that partnership might look, but the idea of Heroku as the Official Application Platform of Facebook has a nice ring. Update: Heroku isn’t alone in targeting Facebook developers, though, as Joyent offers its own program hosted atop its SmartMachines IaaS platform. Update two: The Joyent program, which gives developers one virtual machine plus storage and bandwidth for a year, has been available since 2007 and, according to founder and chief scientist Jason Hoffman, maintains a steady– and capped — rate of about 15,000 VMs.

An interesting sidenote: However successful Heroku is with social apps (or in general), Amazon Web Services wins. Not only does Heroku run atop AWS, but some large social-software companies, such as Zynga, host their applications directly atop AWS.

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