Inside Facebook

A promising range of new applications has shown up in this week’s up-and-comers list, including some less familiar game genres, seasonal apps and more.

For those who haven’t been following recently, this list is derived by looking at the apps on AppData with between 100,000 and 1 million users, that grew by the most monthly active users in the last week. Inevitably, some apps seen here are simple quizzes or gift-giving types, that have short and uninteresting life-spans. However, this list also provides an early look at high-quality apps that go on to become major hits — like LOLapps’ string of role-playing games released in recent weeks, including Champions Online Diva Life, Yakuza Lords, and more.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Ultimate Slot Machines	484,198	+484,148	+99.99
2.	Medical Mayhem	444,487	+444,186	+99.93
3.	建立你的測驗	600,679	+364,648	+60.71
4.	Happy Thanksgiving!	381,779	+352,993	+92.46
5.	Sexy Santa Helpers	501,685	+349,697	+69.70
6.	Photo Books	498,639	+259,372	+52.02
7.	Snowball Fight!	943,027	+239,335	+25.38
8.	What Type Of Girl Are you?	674,078	+231,229	+34.30
9.	Band of Heroes	881,360	+191,253	+21.70
10.	The Hierarchy	550,764	+187,483	+34.04
11.	Piou Piou contre les cactus	540,930	+179,711	+33.22
12.	Christmas Kisses	176,205	+173,697	+98.58
13.	Ask a Friend	522,568	+171,577	+32.83
14.	Myphotostats	379,006	+150,620	+39.74
15.	BigPrize Giveaways	455,009	+150,102	+32.99
16.	Daily Sex Chance	583,330	+138,475	+23.74
17.	A Special Bouquet Greeting!	774,619	+133,976	+17.30
18.	Бира	134,017	+123,620	+92.24
19.	@Smiles	160,481	+114,702	+71.47
20.	New Moon	282,420	+111,086	+39.33

So today, at number one on the list, we have Ultimate Slot Machines, a game made by Hong Kong-based 6 Waves. In it, you can choose from all sorts of slot machine games like what you’d see in a casino, except you can’t win real money. The game has gone from 0 to 484,000 within the last week, probably partially due to developer cross-promoting it across its dozens of other apps.

In second place, we have Medical Mayhem, made by a little-known developer called Vojo World. Interestingly, the game is being cross-promoted by 6 Waves within the toolbar it runs on various apps. And, similar to Ultimate Slot Machines, this app has grown nearly all of it 444,000 monthly active users within the past week. We’re also interested to see how the medical genre does on Facebook — especially, for American audiences, as Congress debates a major overhaul of the real-life health care system. This game makes you the boss of a hospital (we presume a private hospital, not a government-run one), and tasks you with organizing doctors and nurses to take care of patients as quickly and effectively as possible.

Below these two games, we have 建立你的測驗 (or, “to build your tests,” according to Google Translate). It’s a Chinese-language quiz-creation app that has made this list for the second week in a row, gaining 364,000 new users to reach 601,000 monthly actives. Another non-English app that made our list this week is Бира, or “beer” in Bulgarian. This is the first app from that language to make any of our lists, as far as we know; and yes, it allows you to give your friends the gift of virtual beer.

And, ’tis the season the season for simple holiday gifting apps, including Happy Thanksgiving!, Sexy Santa Helpers, Snowball Fight!, Christmas Kisses and A Special Bouquet Greeting!. Hopefully, these apps have a very happy holiday season; we’re guessing they have a snowball’s chance… of making our rankings once January comes around.

Another notable set of (non-game) apps this week are ones that allow you to print your photo albums, including Photo Books and Myphotostats. The latter is especially interesting because it provides stats on how many people have been tagged in Facebook photo albums with you, and includes the top 3 friends you’ve been tagged with most often.

Finally, we should note that LOLapps has one RPG still on this list, that is close to graduation — Band of Heroes, with 191,000 new users and 881,000 total monthly actives. We expect it to have moved up into the big leagues of apps with more than 1 million users by this time next week.