Inside Facebook

It’s the middle of summer – a time when many tend to relax a little and spend more time on entertainment, both on and offline. Well then again, maybe not everyone. In the U.S., Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 25 (Facebook’s largest age group) have decreased by about 600,000 users this past month. Their parents and grandparents, by contrast, are finding their way to the site more and more: in the last 30 days, users in age groups 35-44, 45-54, and 55-65 increased by about 1.5 million each. Surprising?

So how are Facebook users entertaining themselves on the site? Today we take a look at the fastest growing Facebook applications in the Entertainment category, according to AppData.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Music	8,666,586	+728,892	+9.2	iLike, inc
2.		RockYou Live	14,975,851	+436,696	+3.0	RockYou!
3.		Mobile	7,157,658	+370,790	+5.5	Facebook
4.		Bumper Sticker	5,023,212	+160,403	+3.3	LinkedIn
5.		PageRage Super Profile	955,136	+76,228	+8.7	Yontoo Technology, Inc.
6.		My Band	660,563	+44,457	+7.2	ReverbNation
7.		Visual Bookshelf	581,803	+28,510	+5.2	LivingSocial
8.		iCast	167,024	+17,820	+11.9	iLike, inc
9.		MixPod Playlist	168,973	+14,938	+9.7	Mixpod.com
10.		My Flickr	241,111	+13,149	+5.8	Kaleb Fulgham
11.		Photo Album Strip	247,044	+12,354	+5.3	Arda Erol
12.		YouTube Video Box	935,555	+9,979	+1.1	Craig James Bovis
13.		Deezer	78,049	+9,168	+13.3	—
14.		YouTube Box	363,172	+7,956	+2.2	Tim Nilson
15.		Seegugio	29,409	+6,775	+29.9	Seegugio
16.		Xbox 360 Live Gamercard	133,647	+6,353	+5.0	Ben Caller
17.		Addicted to Gossip Girl	33,956	+5,939	+21.2	Watercooler
18.		Picnik	421,453	+5,556	+1.3	Bitnik, Inc
19.		Fan Posts	68,461	+5,016	+7.9	iLike, inc
20.		Music	122,606	+4,885	+4.2	Burst Development

In the #1 spot is iLike’s popular Music app, which among other things allows users to share music and find out about concerts nearby. At 8.7 million monthly active users (MAU), the app gained over 700,000 MAU in the past week.

RockYou Live by RockYou! (#2), Mobile by Facebook (#3), and verified app Bumper Sticker (#4) all saw weekly gains of over 3% – Facebook’s Mobile app saw a gain of 5.5 percent and currently has over 7 million users. And In the #5 spot is PageRage Super Profile by Yontoo Technology, an app we recently covered for its viral (and questionable) growth.

RockYou Live is growing again after seeing a decrease this spring.

Also in the Top 20 are LivingSocial’s Visual Bookshelf at #7, My Flickr at #10, and YouTube Video Box at #12. It’s definitely interesting to come back to this and other leaderboards in different seasons, even different economic times, when certain verticals – entertainment being one of them – see fluctuations in user activity.

For example, leaders in the virtual currency monetization space have repeatedly told us that they are bucking trends in this economic downturn because when times get rough, consumers can still afford to make small payments in exchange for entertainment – and they’re doing it increasingly inside Facebook applications.