Inside Facebook

Something happened back on October 14th: three make-your-own-quiz applications started growing really fast, and they haven’t stopped. Meanwhile, on our list of the 20 Facebook apps that gained the most users this past week from AppData, we’re seeing the usual mix of games, simple gifting apps, and Facebook’s in-house iPhone app.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Make a Quiz!	11,722,723	+4,488,718	+38.29
2.	Quiz Monster	10,036,195	+4,320,448	+43.05
3.	Happy Aquarium	18,351,975	+3,878,861	+21.14
4.	Café World	23,814,664	+3,755,339	+15.77
5.	Quiz Creator	4,748,099	+2,413,570	+50.83
6.	Causes	34,373,044	+1,844,044	+5.36
7.	RockYou Live	8,128,028	+1,539,703	+18.94
8.	FarmVille	61,660,329	+1,337,570	+2.17
9.	Movies	14,340,182	+1,175,306	+8.20
10.	Horoscopes	7,158,456	+874,836	+12.22
11.	Bejeweled Blitz	9,387,901	+672,871	+7.17
12.	Music Challenge	3,274,445	+609,191	+18.60
13.	Who was i, in my past life ?	1,830,061	+469,299	+25.64
14.	Music	11,832,427	+437,692	+3.70
15.	Pet Society	20,714,196	+432,279	+2.09
16.	Restaurant City	17,454,448	+379,576	+2.17
17.	Halloween Haunting	1,017,893	+371,167	+36.46
18.	Friend Quiz	4,312,447	+340,285	+7.89
19.	(Lil) Farm Life	5,767,916	+323,588	+5.61
20.	Facebook for iPhone	16,237,123	+294,116	+1.81

Here’s more on the quiz mystery. Make A Quiz, made by Friendly Quizzes, grew from 2.30 million on the 14th to 11.7 million monthly actives by Sunday; it came in at number one on the list, growing by 4.49 million in the last week. At number two is another quiz app that started growing on the 14th, called Quiz Monster and made by a company of the same name. It started off at 911,000, at that point, and has since grown to 10.0 million, including 4.32 million in the last week. But wait, there’s another quiz app creator on the list. Quiz Creator is at number five, having grown from 322,000 on the 14th to 4.75 million now, including a gain of 2.41 million in the last week.

The timing of all this growth makes us wonder if somehow these apps are connected to each other. Or perhaps there is some sort of particularly aggressive tactic that made this growth possible? None of these apps say much of anything about who the companies are behind them.

And, meanwhile, these apps appear to be losing users quickly. We’ve just added a Daily Active Users feature to AppData, so we can see that all of these apps are starting to fall from the millions of DAUs they recently accumulated. It’s frankly not clear what the future holds for these three apps.

The future is much more clear for some of the other apps on today’s list, however. Virtual fish world Happy Aquarium, made by CrowdStar came in at number three, growing by 3.88 million monthly actives to reach 18.4 million monthly actives. Zynga’s Café World continues growing, as well, coming in at number four. It got another 3.76 million users to reach 23.8 million monthly actives, outpacing Zynga’s other big recent hit, Farmville. Other games on the list include Pet Society and Restaurant City from Playfish, Bejeweled Blitz from Popcap Games, and (lil) Farm Life from Green Patch Inc.

Non-games are also continuing to do well, including Causes, the app for organizing around causes, as well as Flixster’s Movies movie-fan app and iLike’s Music app. And finally, Facebook for iPhone continues to grow fast, gaining 294,000 this past week to reach 16.2 million monthly actives.