Inside Facebook

It’s been almost two weeks now since Facebook launched the new “stream” home page. At the time, we published our guide for application developers interested in optimizing their apps for the new design. Which ones are succeeding?

According to AppData, the answer is clear: quizzes and brackets.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		IQ test	2,827,492	+1,686,785	+147.9	Christopher Smit
2.		Movies	13,752,039	+1,576,292	+13.0	Flixster
3.		Super Wall	16,498,978	+1,320,196	+8.7	RockYou!
4.		2009 Bracket Challenge	1,675,763	+1,064,190	+174.0	Watercooler
5.		How good are you in bed?	1,388,003	+866,813	+166.3	www.singlescave.com
6.		The True Age Test	1,499,387	+736,559	+96.6	Quiz Monster
7.		What is Your Actual Age?	1,238,525	+724,981	+141.2	Quiz Monster
8.		what alcoholic drink are you?	944,947	+652,670	+223.3	Adam Linn
9.		Which Mr Men Character are you?	696,007	+642,553	+1,202.1	—
10.		Make a Quiz!	1,242,042	+582,778	+88.4	—
11.		Who Were You In A Past Life?	1,164,956	+495,643	+74.1	—
12.		Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	604,821	+471,580	+353.9	Mishkaat Abid
13.		What Pokemon Are You?	473,138	+455,002	+2,508.8	Joshua Taylor
14.		What color are you?	367,198	+352,294	+2,363.8	—
15.		Mafia Wars	8,962,449	+328,173	+3.8	Zynga
16.		2009 Bracket Challenge	621,293	+321,342	+107.1	Citizen Sports
17.		Pet Society	9,098,787	+314,564	+3.6	Playfish
18.		Astrology	659,997	+305,357	+86.1	Astrolis.com
19.		Are You an Angel or a Devil?	546,782	+274,206	+100.6	—
20.		CBSSports.com	492,366	+273,431	+124.9	CBSSports.com

March Madness Inside Facebook

On the NCAA hoops front, Watercooler’s 2009 Bracket Challenge is the most popular bracket game on Facebook by a wide margin, with over 1.67 million players. It grew by about a million users in the last week (note: I am an advisor at Watercooler). Citizen Sports’ 2009 Bracket Challenge also doubled in size this week to over 600k users, and CBSSports.com’s bracket app more than doubled to nearly 500k users.

In total, nearly 3 million people are playing bracket games with their friends on Facebook this year. Unlike last year, none of the apps received special promotion that we are aware of.

The Resurgence of Quiz Apps

However, the broader story right now is the preponderance of quiz applications that are growing like wildfire (and annoying many users due to their prevalence in the home page stream). Each follows roughly the same premise: take a quiz, post the results on your profile, and invite friends to compare, and many do an effective job with prepopulating the new Feed Forms.

70% of this week’s top 20 fastest growing apps are quiz applications, including the fastest growing app on the platform, IQ Test. Many apps have doubled or tripled in size and some have gone from nothing to nearly a million users in the span of just over a week.

It’s somewhat reminescent of earlier chapters on the Facebook Platform when there were far less rules around virality. Now, these quiz apps are growing largely through explicit sharing by Facebook users via Feed Forms. It will be interesting to see if Facebook responds if these personality quizzes continue to hang around.