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Growing between 40,000 and 95,000 fans a day over the past week, Toys”R”Us has become the fastest growing brand on Facebook. The company, which recently released its “Big Book” catalog of toys on its Facebook Page, has been experiencing tremendous growth in the past few days. While we don’t know the exact reason for the growth (we’d assume it’s the result of an ad campaign), there are a number of features within the company’s Facebook Page which drives new fans.

With Black Friday impending, Toys”R”Us has developed a custom Black Friday Preview application which lets Facebook fans find out what deals are available. Also, in order to drive new fans, the company is limiting the visibility of some Facebook Page tabs to only fans. On the development side, rather than using the fb:visible-to-connection FBML tag to limit visibility to fans only, ContextOptional, who helped develop the page, has appeared to use a simple custom application to verify whether a user is a fan and if not, force them to become one.



While we have no way to verify whether or not this method has been effective, it’s clear that the company has effectively grown its fan base. By the end of today, there’s a good chance Toys”R”Us will surpass 400,000 fans, which is no easy feat, unless of course you use the “pay per fan” model that appears to be increasingly popular among large brands looking to build their Facebook presence.

While the volume of new fans each day appears to be slowing, Toys”R”Us is now among the some of the top brands across Facebook. Do you think most of this growth is a result of the company buying fans or do you think the company naturally jumped by almost 90,000 fans in a day ?

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Prior to the recent homepage change, many developers were loving a massive unfiltered distribution channel of application updates: the Facebook stream. Since the redesign that has all changed, and today Facebook is making one other change to the stream. Previously, feed stories from applications could display multiple images. As of today, multiple images can still be displayed, however the default display will only show one image and require the user to click “See More” to see the full feed story.

It’s a subtle interface change but many developers know that this could have a significant impact on feed dependent applications. In addition to smaller images, developers will also need to keep all action links in feed stories to less than 25 characters. It’s a change which makes the stream look much cleaner however it will also definitely impact some applications.

Most developers have already been forced to adjust to the stream changes as the default news feed is no longer unfiltered, which means today’s impact probably won’t be as significant as the recent homepage changes. Other things which developers should note about today’s changes is the deprecation of a number of methods, primarily those that dealt with the old “feed” object.

Developers should only interact with stream methods for publishing stories. That includes the option of using Stream Attachments which are essentially JSON-encoded key-value pairs. Enough technical speak though! If you are a developer and want to know more about today’s changes you can view Facebook’s blog post from last month.