Inside Facebook

Last week, Inside Facebook took a look at many of the fastest growing applications on the Facebook Platform since the redesigned home page launched. The results? Many of the top 20 were a variety of now-familiar personality quizzes. While those applications are likely to become more subdued once the latest version of Facebook reaches a new equilibrium, there is another application that has skyrocketed in usage since the redesigned home page launched that may have more staying power.

LivingSocial, the flagship application from the Grotech-funded application developer by the same name, has seen its number of monthly active users increase by nearly 5x since this time last week from about 2 million users to nearly 10 million users, according to AppData.

AppData for LivingSocial

How? Basically, LivingSocial has been making extensive and compelling use of Facebook’s new sharing features which enable applications to gain more visibility in the home page stream when users share content from the app. For example, here’s a recently shared feed story that was created through LivingSocial:

While the company has been building apps on Facebook for a long time, LivingSocial has reoptimized its product around list building and sharing since the new home page launched. Now, when users go to the application, they are simply prompted with a menu of lists to build, and then given the chance to build the list. After building the list, users are prompted to post it to their profile via a Feed Form, so that it will also show up in their friends’ streams. The stories also make good use of action links.

As we wrote last week, the prevalence of quiz apps in the new Facebook “is 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.”

While quiz apps will likely become less visible as more users hide them from the stream through Facebook’s stream customization controls, apps like LivingSocial that enable more intentional sharing of more meaningful content should better stand the test of time.