This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by DAU Reveals Three Banned Apps

Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard multiple anecdotal reports from developers that Facebook has tightened its enforcement of many non-game apps, banning some even if the developer meticulously follows the rules — or so they claim. Nobody has offered hard proof yet to back up these allegations, and Facebook has generally emphasized that it is enforcing the spirit of the law as well as the letter.

We do, in any case, have some examples on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users.

Three of the non-game apps below are now banned. Can you guess which?

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Birthday Calendar	3,188,663	+2,891,504	+973%
2.	Gifts to your friends	2,438,324	+2,392,669	+98%
3.	Friend FAQ	2,639,570	+1,916,469	+73%
4.	Animality	1,612,063	+1,612,063	+100%
5.	FrontierVille	7,399,800	+608,325	+9%
6.	Café World	5,301,141	+547,756	+12%
7.	Marketplace	647,735	+466,541	+257%
8.	Causes	1,424,687	+391,494	+38%
9.	Windows Live Messenger	5,452,119	+359,369	+7%
10.	德州撲克(中文版)	898,359	+353,973	+65%
11.	Give Hearts	1,300,900	+329,288	+34%
12.	開心水果(开心水果)	329,872	+326,533	+9,779%
13.	創世紀2012	391,814	+312,611	+395%
14.	守衛家園	427,388	+310,504	+266%
15.	Besarte	209,950	+207,150	+7,398%
16.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,395,806	+200,302	+3%
17.	MindJolt Games	2,189,690	+191,896	+10%
18.	Traveler IQ Challenge	183,341	+178,055	+3,368%
19.	Are YOU Interested?	735,961	+178,009	+32%
20.	Friend Facts™	420,915	+169,816	+68%

If you guessed the three were also the fastest-growing apps, you’d be almost right, with the exception of Birthday Calendar. That app, the top grower this week, is doing fine — although its gains are illusory, produced by spikes in the data.

Gifts to your friends, Friend FAQ and Animality are out for the count, though. All three now redirect to Facebook’s front page. They had significant differences; Gifts was, obviously, a gifting app, while Friend FAQ was a friend quiz, asking users questions with the answers posting to friends’ walls. Animality appears to have been a wall-posted prank app.

It’s business as usual on the rest of the list. Marketplace continues to pick up users in its latest growth spurt. Causes, too, is growing; its growth may be due to a special Facebook Like button test that the company has been running.

Notably, Friend Facts™ made it onto the list, at number 20. Like Friend FAQ, this is a friend quiz, but it’s growing much more slowly — and, importantly, is still active.