Pretty Pages and iPhone Mania on This Week’s List of Top Gaining Facebook Apps by Daily Active Users
Unlike the gains shown on our sister site Inside Social Games today, the growth on this AppData list of Facebook apps picking up the most new daily average users is pretty spectacular. But it does come with a few caveats about why the apps are growing.
The first and best example is the top entry, Static FBML. You should disregard FBML as an app, but consider it closely as a trend. The app has been counting people who interact with customized Pages as new users for a few weeks; those four million new DAU certainly aren’t all developers using the app directly. But there are certainly a lot of people using the Pages those developers modified.
Also, Facebook removed notifications on Monday and this could be starting to affecting traffic — we’ll be tracking the impact.
Take a look at the rest before we go on:
| Name | DAU | Gain |
Gain, % | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. |  Static FBML |
5,878,938 | +4,049,935 | +68.89 |
| 2. |  Facebook for iPhone |
15,437,989 | +1,394,003 | +9.03 |
| 3. |  Friend Quiz |
2,468,705 | +1,212,463 | +49.11 |
| 4. |  Friend FAQ |
1,624,297 | +916,692 | +56.44 |
| 5. |  PetVille |
5,278,982 | +548,611 | +10.39 |
| 6. |  Zoo World |
2,646,777 | +528,548 | +19.97 |
| 7. |  Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones |
8,791,131 | +427,618 | +4.86 |
| 8. |  Graffiti |
578,290 | +396,905 | +68.63 |
| 9. |  Friends Exposed |
2,283,901 | +394,930 | +17.29 |
| 10. |  Translations |
372,125 | +371,976 | +99.96 |
| 11. |  Mafia Wars |
6,748,137 | +311,777 | +4.62 |
| 12. |  MindJolt Games |
3,305,651 | +287,834 | +8.71 |
| 13. |  Friend Quizzes – Dating! |
287,517 | +285,323 | +99.24 |
| 14. |  Petites questions entre amis |
390,027 | +276,144 | +70.80 |
| 15. |  Birthday Cards |
2,092,351 | +241,275 | +11.53 |
| 16. |  Friends Quizzes |
198,502 | +184,861 | +93.13 |
| 17. |  Birthday Calendar |
380,710 | +174,640 | +45.87 |
| 18. |  Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos] |
276,966 | +169,135 | +61.07 |
| 19. |  Give Hearts |
799,724 | +156,071 | +19.52 |
| 20. |  Bubble Island |
244,197 | +149,250 | +61.12 |
Number two, Facebook for iPhone, can for most purposes be paired with seven, Facebook for BlackBerry. But close watchers of these lists will notice that the iPhone app’s growth is much sharper than usual this week.
From the stats, it would appear that there has been a sudden increase in the number of existing iPhone users who return to Facebook daily, to 55 percent. Whether this is true, or just a Facebook reporting error, will become evident next week.
Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ round out the really fast gainers on this week’s list. Here, also, a caveat applies. It’s not that there is a technical issue affecting growth. Rather, it’s just that quiz apps rarely stay around for long, and there’s nothing particularly creative about these.
The question of how Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ are sucking in so many users is prettysimple easy to answer; they make it easy for users to click “Yes” or “No”, which immediately results in a public wall posting. The harder question is who the developer is behind the two apps (they’re actually identical). There’s no listing, and the apps load from two different anonymously-owned web addresses, Youbard.com and Epicmoo.com.
Down the list a bit is yet another friend quiz, Friends Exposed, but there’s no mystery here; Topzy is the developer. While the questions aren’t much better, at least this app lets you make up your own answer.
