Are you looking for a way to monetize Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al? This company offers solutions that are geared both towards advertisers and publishers, and these include demographic targeting that takes into account location, gender and age. For its part, publishers are provided advertisements that are pre-filtered by way of ad tags. You can procure as many of these tags as you wish, and put them into practice right away. For the time being, only publishers will be able to use the site to the full, as some adjustments are still taking place regarding the advertising services on offer. If you are a publisher you can get started by furnishing some basic contact and profile information and submitting the URL of your newly-launched application. This solution is presented by Triana Global, and it has launched recently (that is why some features are not already fully implemented). If you would like further information, a contact form is included as part of the “About” page. You can also reach this Los Angeles-based team at media@shopit.com in order to dispel any doubts that you might have.

I spend a fair amount of time browsing through our Facebook application leaderboard to find what applications are growing on the platform. Every day it’s a different picture. Sometimes you find applications that are spamming the platform and other days you’ll find a really interesting application that you haven’t seen before. Regardless of type, there is still a huge potential to build successful applications on the Facebook platform.

While we’ve previously published buzz about the platform being dead, it’s currently far from it. The platform continues to thrive despite its occasional hiccups. Yes, there is controversy about honest versus dishonest developers but the fact remains that you can still build a popular application even with the new hurdles. Below are 13 strategies that you can use to immediately attract attention to your applications. Don’t be surprised if you use these strategies and your server gets overloaded with a massive onslaught of new users!

1. Copy Another Application

They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery. It’s also often times a really good business plan. In the world of Facebook applications, duplicating another Facebook application is frequently a fast track to success. I don’t recommend creating an exact duplicate though since at that point you could run into some legal issues. For those that are not very creative, duplicating applications is frequently the most efficient model for attracting a lot of users.

The highly viral applications, like snowball wars, tend to immediately attract numerous copycats which also often times attract tens if not hundreds of thousands of users. Even the top application developers use this strategy. For example, there is now an entire suite of Mob Wars applications created by Zynga and SGN which are essentially copycats of the original Mob Wars application.

I remember a saying in the movie hackers which was “Mess with the best, die like rest!!” If you modify that phrase a little you can come up with “Copy the best, soar beyond the rest.” Perhaps my derived version is a bit corny but you get the idea. Copy the top applications and there’s a good chance that you will attract a large number of users.

2. Put a New Twist On A Popular App

This is extremely similar to the first strategy that I outlined. If there is a popular application that appears to have an active user base but still doesn’t rank among the top 50 applications, you may want to explore ways to improve it. For example, Zynga’s version of Mob Wars is now one of the most popular applications on Facebook.

In this example Zynga simply provided more development and design resources to improve the application. I would guess that they also invested heavily in promotion in addition to thorough A/B testing. O.k., so perhaps that’s not the best example since Zynga clearly invested heavily in building out Mafia Wars. There are plenty of other applications that need improvements and you can be the one to do so.

This strategy clearly takes more investment then some of the other strategies I outline below. You can’t quickly duplicate larger applications since more development time went into creating them. If you are looking to build lasting value though, you are going to need to invest more significant development resources. So remember, if you can’t come up with an original idea, improve upon an existing one.

As Lupe Fiasco says in the song Superstar, “Did you improve on a design, did you do something new?” Improving upon existing applications can bring you great success.

3. Launch Holiday Oriented Applications

For the past two years, holiday applications have thrived on the Facebook platform. Every time another holiday comes around, I see a temporary spike in application traffic to those apps catering to the specific holiday. With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, love is spreading around Facebook through a number of applications.

One application, “Send Valentine Chocolate“, has attracted over 150,000 users in under two weeks. My guess is that they’ll be launching more holiday applications since they’ve called their company “Holiday Apps“.

There are numerous other applications growing due to Valentine’s day. Browse through our directory of the fastest growing Facebook applications and you’ll quickly find tons of applications for sending valentines, chocolate, love letters, and more. We’re almost two years into the Facebook application and there is still a market for holiday applications.

As always, niche holidays are always an easy grab but it appears that more popular applications are still ripe for the taking.

4. Niche Gifts

The most popular applications tend to have avid fan bases. For example, the YoVille virtual world application, created by Zynga, has an extremely active user base. There are also a number of fan pages that have popped up related to Yoville, a few of which have even become extremely popular. One application that is growing quickly is called “Pet Society Gifts“.

This application has taken advantage of the popularity of Playfish’s extremely popular Pet Society game and has made a gifting application targeted to it. Should you completely rip off another company’s brand? Definitely not. There are some great opportunities to build niche gift giving applications though.

Rochester Gifts is another application that picks an unfulfilled niche and provides them with a gift giving application. The application selects gifts that only locals would know about and then encourages them to donate the gift to friends. One problem with the application? It violates Facebook’s terms of service by unlocking more gifts as a user gives out more.

Regardless of their violation, the application clearly satisfies and unfulfilled niche and on Facebook there is still limitless niche possibilities.

5. Translate Existing Applications Into A Foreign Language

This is a huge opportunity for just about any developer. Take one of the more popular applications (not the most popular since the are probably translated already) and convert it into different languages. Also, a good strategy for choosing which language to translate into is to use our demographic statistics tool to find the fastest growing countries and then translate applications into each country’s native language.

There are now numerous fast growing applications written in Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Russian, and many other languages. The point is clear: create similar applications in other languages and you’re sure to experience similar success.

6. Post Outrageous News Feed Stories

Last week in my Facebook privacy guide, I highlighted how news feed items published by applications can often times be invasive if not offensive. Regardless of how aggressive some application developers are willing to go for new users, the bottom line is that such tactics are successful at acquiring new users. Personally, I’d avoid trying to launch a similar application but so far “Have Sex!” has proven to be extremely successful.

While I believe the developers in this example may have pushed the limits too far (in that they publish a news feed story every time you visit the application), the model is clearly effective. By publishing news feed stories regularly with outlandish statements you rapidly increase the likelihood of friends of your users clicking through and adding the application.

By itself, this strategy is not extremely useful, but combined with an engaging application, this strategy can attract a ton of new users.

7. Integrate a Way to Rate Friends

This strategy continues to be successful. Jugement, a French application which let’s you rate friends based on various characteristics has experienced tremendous growth over the past week. The application has also followed one of our previous suggestions, “Translate Existing Applications Into A Foreign Language”, by essentially translating the “Compare People” application into French.

Friends for Sale is probably the most classic example of integrate a rating system into their application. While Friends for Sale isn’t simply “rate your friends on these factors”, the bidding on friends creates a natural ranking system among friends, creating a highly competitive environment. I think there is a clear distinction between rating and ranking though, which is why I separated this strategy from the 11th strategy below.

The act of rating friends to determine who’s the most popular, who’s the most friendly, who is the best looking, and others, caters to our inner high school yearbook ranking system. Any time you can list out friends into ranked lists, you are guaranteed to attract the attention of users. Unfortunately though ranked lists only attract temporary attention which is why you need to come up with other creative models for engaging users once you have their attention.

Begin with a friend rating system and you are on the path to Facebook application success.

8. Turn A Popular Fan Page Into an Application

This is something that I think many developers have failed to act on. Fan pages are a great indicator for what’s popular among users of the Facebook platform. That’s why we released out Facebook page statistics tool. For example Kinder Surprise, a popular chocolate egg which comes with a toy inside (and has been banned from the United States), is one of the most popular pages on Facebook.

That’s why it’s not surprising that the Kinder Surprise application is one of the fastest growing Facebook applications. I would argue that this is probably the single most effective strategy for figuring out a good application to build. Whether it’s celebrities, products, politicians, or just general topics, fan pages provide developers with a countless number of good topics to focus on.

Watercooler Inc. is probably the best example of an application developer that has build a large network of applications based around popular topics. While they inspiration probably wasn’t Facebook pages since they didn’t exist when the company launched, the concept is similar: go find the most popular topics and brands and build applications around them.

9. Create the Online Version of a Television Game Show

Yesterday while browsing through our application directory, I noticed that the Deal or No Deal application was spiking in traffic. It’s not surprising considering that it’s still a popular television game show. Similar to the last strategy I mentioned, which is to take advantage of popular brands, this one takes that a little bit further and suggests duplicating television game shows.

There are clearly risks involved. For example, the Scrabulous application went through a number of lawsuits and was forced to rename their application after creating the first version of Scrabble for Facebook. While it’s not a game show, it still had trademarks and copyrights related to the game and the same thing goes for television applications.

One good model is to recreate a television game show but call it something else. For example, I have yet to find a Facebook version of the “Price is Right” but I’m sure tons of people would end up playing it. While you may want to call the application something besides the actual name of the game show, this strategy is pretty much guaranteed to work.

The only problem with this strategy? Well, it takes a bit more programming to recreate a television game show on Facebook. Aside from the hurdles though, this is still a great model.

10. Create Culturally Oriented Applications

Facebook is all about expression of self-identity and part of our self-identity is our affiliation groups. One affiliation group that people tend to be strongly attached to is their cultural groups. Whether it’s religion or geographically related cultural activities, targeting sub-groups of users is always a great way to achieve rapid adoption. Many of the culturally related applications are in other languages so it’s hard for me to come up with a lot of examples, but I would say that theShabbat Shalom application is one example.

There are a number of other applications that are culturally related but many of them have fairly uncreative application titles though. For example, the “Italian Stuff” application is growing quickly, yet it has a horrible name in my own opinion. There are a number of ways to brainstorm effective cultural applications.

The easiest way is to think of the most memorable places or activities when going on a vacation to any country. Applications based around native food dishes are also a great thing to consider. I’ll leave the brainstorming up to you though.

11. Create a Ranking System

I’ve already mentioned a rating system for friends, but ranking is much different. One of the better ranking systems I can think of is done through Grader.com. The site has a number of ranking systems including the Facebook grader which ranks the top Facebook users and top Facebook pages on the site. Many social gaming applications also have their own internal ranking systems.

These systems are great for incentivizing users to compete against their friends and other users on Facebook. The result is higher engagement and often times you see repeat usage as users try to work their way up the leaderboard. One interesting strategy to get users to return is to provide them with a higher ranking in the leaderboard. For example, users tend to rank higher among their friends then among all Facebook users.

By posting the leaderboard within their friends, it gives the impression that users aren’t really that far from the top spot. This indirectly encourages the user to return to try and gain the top spot.

12. Make People Feel Like They’re Part of an Inside Joke

This rule is a combination of making people feel like their part of an exclusive group as well as stroking their ego by emphasizing their intelligence. The Dunder Mifflin Nifty Gifties application is a good example of this. You can compare it to the “Watercooler effect”, which was when employees felt left out of the loop for not watching a certain television show the night before.

By catering to this sort of behavior, you can easily attract a large number of users by making them feel good for being in on the joke. Like many other strategies, this only generates temporary engagement. You will still need to create something which generates additional value for the user. Inside jokes alone don’t provide much lasting value.

The inside joke strategy will most definitely get you moving in the right direction for attracting a few new users.

13. Generate Creative Quizzes

I hate mentioning this one because there are already way too many quiz applications on Facebook. The funny thing is that this always works though. Browse through a Cosmopolitan magazine, and you’ll see it filled with tons of quizzes that are almost identical to ones they put in previous editions. Quizzes are as enticing as top 10 lists. They never fail to capture the user’s attention.

Encouraging the user to actually click the application is another story, but they’ll most definitely notice the quiz invitation. Quiz applications always rank among the fastest growing applications with our Facebook application leaderboard. Whether it’s “What character in Sex in the City are you?” or “What rock song best describes your life?”, people continuously add these applications.

Quiz applications have extremely short life spans for the most part though so you may want to quickly figure out somewhere to redirect users once they’ve completed the application. One way is aggregating all the quizzes into a single application. That’s what the developer ofQuizzes application did. They now have over 35,000 daily active users.

Quizzes are a great step for first attracting users, but as I said, make sure you quickly find out another way to engage the users once they’ve completed the quiz. Also, please do me a favor and don’t create junk applications. Try to come up with something a little more creative!

If you've ever tried to book a multi-destination airfare online or a round-the-world ticket, you know that it's not as easy as a basic point to point flight. In fact, travelers often tend to book more complicated airfares through a bricks and mortar travel agency or if they do attempt to book online, they proceed by purchasing individual sectors separately, possibly paying a lot more for one-way fares and forgoing frequent flyer points.

To ease the burden and encourage travelers to stay loyal to their global frequent flyer program, Oneworld -- which includes American Airlines, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Iberia, Japan Airlines, LAN, Malev, Qantas and Royal Jordanian -- has introduced a special section on its website (www.oneworld.com) to make a multi-stop trip on its ten member airlines a seamless booking experience. The round-the-world booking tool allows you to plan and/or book either a round-the-world trip or a multi-city itinerary through six continents with multiple segments and relatively few restrictions.

Before you get started, you will need to have Flash version 9 or higher installed on your computer (or be willing to download it through the link provided) and allow pop-ups/cookies (I learned the hard way. because if you don't allow pop-ups, you will lose all your research when you try to make the booking). Also if you don't think you can complete your itinerary in one session (or are browsing for a later booking date), make sure to save your itinerary, either to your computer or to the Oneworld website, if you want to access your work again later.

You can also choose to save your itinerary and send it directly to your favorite airline or travel agency if you would prefer to book directly through them. To start, choose whether you would like a round-the-world search, round-the-world search plus booking, or a multi-city itinerary. Then, the first screen that comes up is a world map with hundreds of destination dots (unfortunately the screen isn't large enough to show the entire world so you need to know your geography a bit and scroll across, up and down). You begin by choosing your departure city and then click on subsequent cities that you want to include.

A great feature that I particularly like is that you can actually identify whether you wish to fly between sectors or will travel by surface, for example you may want to fly from Boston to London, then to Prague but want to drive to Paris before flying to Spain and then home. You then choose your flights based on airline (if multiple airlines service that route) departure time and flight time. Check seat availability and type of aircraft you'll be flying -- even your terminal departure and arrival locations appear so you can be fully informed.

You search for flights by dates but if you'd like to change the date, you don't need to scroll back or enter all the information again -- just a simple click on the calendar and you can change your dates for any sector. You can click on the "Fare Estimate" tab at any time to gauge the cost of each sector of a multi-city itinerary or the total. Prices are obviously the same as those offered on the individual airline's websites, in fact when you click on "make a booking" at the end of your search, you will be taken to your local country's Oneworld alliance member's website (in our case, American Airlines) to complete the booking.

The multi-airline, round-the-world ticket, or Explorer as it is known, is Oneworld's most popular product. The Explorer generated the largest portion of the $725 million earned by the alliance last year. There are certain restrictions with this ticket, but the website walks you through the process with ease. Cities on the map that are valid appear as green dots, whereas cities that are invalid (not part of the fare regulations) appear as red diamonds. You will notice that once you have chosen a "green" city, it will turn red as you cannot visit the same city twice. If a direct flight is not available between two cities chosen, the website will route you through a central hub automatically.

The Explorer allows you 16 stops traveling to at least three Oneworld continents, or four from the Southern Hemisphere and Africa. Your route from one continent to another must move forward in a continuous westward or eastward direction, however, there are no backtracking restrictions so you are free to roam locally at will within a continent as long as you don't go back to your point of origin. I chose this (dream) sample itinerary and the entire process took me approximately ten minutes to complete: Los Angeles to Honolulu, Honolulu to Auckland, Auckland to Sydney, Sydney to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to New Delhi, New Delhi to Amman, Amman to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Rome, Rome to Madrid, Madrid to New York and then back to Los Angeles.

A four continent trip like this one in economy class is priced from $4, 400 plus taxes (this actual itinerary, traveling in April and May 2009 totaled $4,922 including taxes), a three continent itinerary is priced from $3,900 plus taxes, five will cost you $5,100 plus taxes and the big daddy of them all -- the six continent adventure will set you back around $6,000 plus taxes -- a bargain considering that it the ticket is valid for a year and you can fly in and out of 16 cities around the world. All up I found the research and booking process using the Onworld round-the-world- tool rather simple, once I played around with it for a while.

My only hiccup on the above itinerary is that I needed to forgo one of my desired destinations (Tahiti) as it was not covered on the route I was taking, and a few cities I chose within Europe required flying through London and I could only fly through London once so I had to remove them. Otherwise, the world was at my fingertips and within a reasonable budget. It seems that the "Oneworld" alliance is living up to its name, creating one website that gives you world access.

I stumbled upon a useful site earlier today that's worth sharing. Called SimilarWeb, this small Firefox (and soon Internet Explorer) add-on sits on the side of your browser and pulls up sites that are similar to the one you're currently on. It works remarkably well--at least with major sites. For example, visiting YouTube brings up a long list of other video hosts. The same went for social news sites like Digg, Reddit, and Delicious. You can scroll through these and open them up in new tabs, or pick from one of the tags SimilarWeb believes to be related to that page.

This will pull up an entirely new list of places it thinks you should visit. What makes the service shine is that users can re-arrange the lists and submit new sites that are not yet in SimilarWeb's index. There are thumbs up and down buttons which can raise or lower a site's standing on the list. Down-voting any site will actually remove it from the list. As a result, if users continue to vote the list gets more accurate. There is a notable downside to using this extension: your browsing performance will take a hit.

For some reason it needs to load its own results before it loads the actual page, which in my case meant waiting an extra few seconds when visiting a new site. That might be a deal killer for some, although it can easily be avoided by learning the keyboard shortcut that dismisses it from running in the sidebar.

You can also pull up the results from a drop down menu next to your browser's address bar. SimilarWeb would make a good companion for the now toolbar-free StumbleUpon, which actually learns from your browsing habits to give you pages it thinks you'll like. Combined with this you'd get another avenue of exploration.

Should you ever wish to keep fully posted on how the new Obama administration is remaking Washington D.C., a visit to this new online resource is more than likely to dispel any doubts you might have. Basically, this site acts as a directory that provides a comprehensive outlook on the personalities and players that make up the nation’s capital.

This directory can be browsed by choosing the pertinent profile from the provided drop down menu. This includes Administration Officials, Members of Congress and Barack Obama advisers. Of course, you can also carry out both regular and advanced searches in order to streamline proceedings. For its part, the site highlights the most viewed profiles on its main page. You don’t need to ask who is on first. In final place, a blog that goes by the name of “The Plum Line” is featured for you to learn about the latest developments and news as regards the country and the political path that is being blazed by the new administration. All in all, this site is a very interesting resource if only because it provides centralized and concrete information on personalities and matters that every American should stay abreast of. Consider paying it a visit to see how much you already know, and catch up to the latest news.

Should you ever wish to keep fully posted on how the new Obama administration is remaking Washington D.C., a visit to this new online resource is more than likely to dispel any doubts you might have. Basically, this site acts as a directory that provides a comprehensive outlook on the personalities and players that make up the nation’s capital.

This directory can be browsed by choosing the pertinent profile from the provided drop down menu. This includes Administration Officials, Members of Congress and Barack Obama advisers. Of course, you can also carry out both regular and advanced searches in order to streamline proceedings. For its part, the site highlights the most viewed profiles on its main page. You don’t need to ask who is on first. In final place, a blog that goes by the name of “The Plum Line” is featured for you to learn about the latest developments and news as regards the country and the political path that is being blazed by the new administration. All in all, this site is a very interesting resource if only because it provides centralized and concrete information on personalities and matters that every American should stay abreast of. Consider paying it a visit to see how much you already know, and catch up to the latest news.

Are you having a hard time keeping track of your finances If you are, then you have to check out Spendingdiary.com. Now more than ever, you’re going to have to keep track of your finances, and this site is what you need.

It’s simple to use, all you have to do is state how much cash you have coming in, what you spend it on, and how much you have left. It’s safe to say that if you’re already organized when it comes to your finances, then you won’t need this. Spendingdiary.com is for someone who is just beginning to try to organize their finances, and wants to an easy tool which will allow you to later use more complicated software.

In short, if keeping track of your finances on an Excel Spreadsheet is too much for you, then you have to use this. If all else fails, there’s always a bailout plan somewhere.