Inside Facebook

Seven of the 20 applications that gained the most monthly active users this past week have holiday themes, according to AppData. Meanwhile, top games and other applications appear to have been adding fewer users than last week.

Coming in first, RockYou’s Birthday Cards managed to beat Christmas Cards! this week by about 62,000 more users.  Christmas Cards is made using a LOLapps’ white-label app creator called Gift Creator that is used for many different gifting apps on Facebook. PetVille was the top game this month and third on the list. Zynga’s pet simulator added 26 percent, 3.4 million players, for a total of 12.9 million active users. And RockYou’s cross promotion of Zoo World, fourth, within its Birthday Cards app, couldn’t have hurt the game’s 23 percent increase in MAUs this week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	28,127,948	+3,979,319	+14.15
2.	Christmas Cards!	11,652,794	+3,916,852	+33.61
3.	PetVille	12,828,490	+3,357,145	+26.17
4.	Zoo World	7,450,131	+1,685,244	+22.62
5.	Santa Yourself	2,937,722	+1,639,897	+55.82
6.	Christmas Cheer	7,179,347	+1,440,974	+20.07
7.	Best Friends Forever	2,161,542	+1,381,472	+63.91
8.	Happy Pets	11,273,768	+1,287,201	+11.42
9.	Friend Quiz	10,573,173	+1,282,038	+12.13
10.	Mobile	13,724,133	+1,222,052	+8.90
11.	@Smiles	3,153,495	+1,216,874	+38.59
12.	Christmas Greetings	1,701,019	+1,189,658	+69.94
13.	Christmas goodies	4,311,779	+1,160,788	+26.92
14.	Snowball Fight	6,654,486	+1,021,075	+15.34
15.	Quiz Planet!	8,918,252	+864,657	+9.70
16.	Fun Cards – Christmas & More!	1,767,875	+831,180	+47.02
17.	Holiday Drinks	2,232,358	+805,555	+36.09
18.	Photos I Love!	2,370,508	+744,632	+31.41
19.	Country Life	4,910,244	+682,468	+13.90
20.	iSmile	7,874,255	+681,589	+8.66

Meanwhile, Santa Yourself, a photo manipulation tool, continues to climb the chart, etching out a 56 percent increase in players last week, or about 1.6 million. And, Christmas Cheer follows behind with a 20 percent increase and a user base of 7.2 million, versus Santa Yourself’s 2.94 million monthly actives.

Other games only incrementally improved last week, but stayed in the top 20 overall. The week saw five games in the top 20 compared to Christmas’ seven apps. Happy Pets was missing last week due to a statistical bug, but returns this week at eighth, adding a healthy 12 percent to reach 11 million monthly active users. Only two other games appeared on the Top 20 this week, Snowball Fight and Country Life. Both games added users incrementally last week.  Snowball by 15 percent and Country Life by 14 percent.

Finally, the app with the highest MAU overall was Birthday Cards with 28.1 million. And the app with the highest increase in relation to its size was Christmas Greetings adding 70 percent or 1.2 million users for 1.7 million monthly active users overall.

Next week should be the culmination in Christmas and other holiday–related apps on the top 20 as we head into 2010.