Inside Facebook

We’ve been chronicling the rise of Zynga’s Café World virtual restaurant game since it launched at the beginning of the month. By the looks of things, we’re going a lot more chronicling. After growing by more than 10 million users in its first week and a half, the app added nearly 8.5 million more this past week, according to AppData. It has been growing through a mix of promotions within other Zynga apps, ads on Facebook, and, well, being a higher-quality game than many you see on the platform.

It is now the 9th largest app total, and ahead of Playfish’s Restaurant City rival virtual restaurant game — although that app also made the list, growing by 607,000 to reach 16.8 million monthly active users this past week.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Café World	18,478,368	+8,379,784	+83.0	Zynga
2.		Roller Coaster Kingdom	9,970,808	+3,637,720	+57.4	Zynga
3.		FarmVille	59,655,966	+3,533,559	+6.3	Zynga
4.		Quiz Monster	4,167,117	+3,256,288	+357.5	Quiz Monster
5.		Make a Quiz!	5,574,893	+3,222,468	+137.0	Friendly Quizzes
6.		Quizzer	7,431,333	+1,172,867	+18.7	Quizzer
7.		Quiz Creator	1,500,922	+1,160,222	+340.5	QuizApps
8.		Who was i, in my past life ?	1,265,740	+1,049,625	+485.7	Nikolas Chalkidis A
9.		Horoscopes	5,996,528	+913,515	+18.0	RockYou!
10.		Causes	32,274,113	+866,080	+2.8	Causes
11.		Bejeweled Blitz	8,547,949	+859,612	+11.2	Popcap Games
12.		YoVille	19,565,632	+648,503	+3.4	Zynga
13.		(Lil) Farm Life	5,385,266	+647,573	+13.7	Greenpatch Inc
14.		How Well Do You Know Me?	10,694,699	+633,629	+6.3	How Well Do You Know Me?
15.		Restaurant City	16,807,632	+607,228	+3.8	Playfish
16.		We’re Related by FamilyLink	21,242,251	+531,186	+2.6	FamilyLink.com
17.		Pet Society	20,012,056	+499,821	+2.6	Playfish
18.		What will happen tomorrow with you?	2,102,756	+499,454	+31.2	—
19.		Facebook for iPhone	15,739,684	+481,037	+3.2	—
20.		Country Story	7,869,884	+444,105	+6.0	Playfish

Another Zynga title, virtual theme park Roller Coaster Kingdom, is also seeing a surge. It grew by 3.64 million to reach 9.97 million. And, of course, there is FarmVille, Zynga’s breakout hit virtual farming game. Although its growth was dwarfed by Café World, it is still got 3.53 million new users — and is by far the largest app on the platform, with 59.7 million monthly actives.

The other apps on the top 20 list this week are other games or simple quiz apps. An especially notable one is Bejeweled Blitz, from Popcap Games — the company is a decade old, and has historically been focused on casual games. But it has spent the last year focusing on social games, and raised its first round of funding ever only recently, to try to push that effort harder. Bejeweled, based on the company’s casual puzzle game of of the same name, grew 859,000 to reach 8.55 million monthly actives this past week. That’s is a good sign for the company.

There’s only one app on the list that’s neither some sort of game or quiz app: Facebook for iPhone, which has been showing itself on this list in past weeks, is on again, gaining 481,000 to arrive at 15.7 million monthly actives.