Inside Facebook

The latest dating app is on the rise on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users. Social Connect leads it off with over 600,000 new MAU:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Social Connect	901,832	+603,092	+202%
2.	Profile Banner	816,826	+479,775	+142%
3.	Draw My Thing	505,457	+386,896	+326%
4.	Birthdays Reminder	441,461	+329,912	+296%
5.	鋤大地(大老二)	695,147	+297,347	+75%
6.	Dog Show Friends	312,317	+249,135	+394%
7.	Facebook Live	953,690	+195,963	+26%
8.	Pizza World	370,107	+191,100	+107%
9.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	526,701	+171,481	+48%
10.	朋友大配對	576,508	+171,213	+42%
11.	Contests	984,551	+169,903	+21%
12.	Bandsintown	547,866	+166,652	+44%
13.	Günlük Burç Yorumları	439,903	+166,179	+61%
14.	Cooking Mama	452,941	+157,103	+53%
15.	We’re Related	775,427	+148,878	+24%
16.	PicBadges	905,036	+140,806	+18%
17.	Photo Sticker	631,824	+134,574	+27%
18.	Social Empires	297,575	+130,854	+78%
19.	SpeedDate	717,402	+128,633	+22%
20.	Funmoods	492,704	+124,953	+34%

Made by VisionSync, Social Connect is a little different from the big dating app that has been tearing through the rankings lately, Badoo. Instead of using the popular Hot-or-Not style ranking screen, Social Connect tries to be more like a full-featured dating site with search, chat, full profiles and messaging.

Profile Banner is by MiniMax, a non-game app developer that has been doing quite well of late. Having a banner isn’t an intentional feature for Facebook, but it’s possible with some careful photo album manipulation, a trick that Profile Banner exploits quite well.

And the third big gainer on the list is Draw My Thing, an OMGPOP mini-game that the developer pulled over from its destination site with a few interesting adds, like the ability to make a wall post of your Pictionary-style attempts to sketch out words.

Some huge gains by key Facebook canvas and Connect apps are evident on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing apps by daily active users. Yahoo! comes in at the top with more than three million new DAU:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Yahoo!	5,431,459	+3,032,195	+126%
2.	Badoo	3,730,736	+2,459,056	+193%
3.	FarmVille	15,373,366	+445,902	+3%
4.	Social Statistics	492,000	+437,805	+808%
5.	CityVille	19,649,245	+400,098	+2%
6.	Windows Live Messenger	12,638,402	+321,685	+3%
7.	Paradise Life	362,988	+228,505	+170%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,307,136	+204,282	+3%
9.	Ravenwood Fair	865,528	+153,877	+22%
10.	BandPage by RootMusic	813,919	+134,458	+20%
11.	Big Business	203,452	+113,879	+127%
12.	Make Your Jersey	186,706	+106,779	+134%
13.	Your statistics	167,241	+100,075	+149%
14.	Monster Galaxy	470,063	+98,837	+27%
15.	Profile Banner	118,749	+98,726	+493%
16.	It Girl	1,143,992	+98,496	+9%
17.	Social Connect	99,493	+96,079	+2,814%
18.	Friendly for iPad	553,174	+93,464	+20%
19.	HTC Sense	4,076,776	+90,218	+2%
20.	FarmVille 中文版	447,588	+90,053	+25%

As usual when the DAU numbers are so large, they’re caused by a new influx of users. In Yahoo’s case this could be connected to the site’s recent decision to open its entire third-party network to authentication via Facebook (and Google OpenIDs).

But a good number of the big gainers seem to have started picking up new monthly active users simultaneously last Friday, which of course cause simultaneous DAU rises. The app uses a friend quiz that asks users to post to their friend’s walls — which while aggressive, appears to be within the Facebook platform policies. Here’s Badoo’s MAU chart:

Number three on the list is FarmVille, and Zynga follows it up with CityVille and Texas HoldEm Poker. All the recent growth going to Zynga has helped push its MAU to record numbers, although its DAU is still down a bit over 7 percent from its peak last year, as we recently pointed out in a larger platform analysis.

In our fourth panel of the day, Matthaus Krzykowski is moderating a panel on the growth and monetization of mobile platforms.

The panelists:

Martin Essl, Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
Anil Dharni, Co-Founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8
Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
Asokan Thiyagarajan, Dir. of Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
Matthaeus Krzykowski, Founder, Xyologic

The live transcript (paraphrased in parts and edited for brevity)

JO: The platforms are just in different stages of evolution. If there are a hundred million devices, there’s definitely a smaller footprint. We’re making a bet, long-term, that we’re at a special point in time. Unlimited data plans may be coming, localization, and the capability and usability of these devices being where we can build what we want to. Those things combining we think will create an unbelievable growth period for mobile.

AD: The more you spend, the costlier it gets. The flipside of this on the mobile side, what we noticed is, there’s so much inventory coming in, and so many free to play games coming in, that the cost of user acquisition is not scaling up, and you can have a business model to support that. Today, if I had to have a model of what it looks like on Facebook for the next six months, it’s hard to estimate that. The window on mobile is predictable right now, but it might change in the next six months to a year. I think the time right now is pretty good.

MK: Tell me about 2010. How does your job change this year?

AT: We announced two big things last year. One was social hubs. Today, you take an app-based approach. If you want to call a friend from an app, you have to go back to your contacts. What we did is, you can link in your contacts to various other apps. If a friend calls in and he posted something on Facebook about being in Dallas, it can show that. So you bring in a seamless, integrated experience. The second thing we did was bring in the media hub, where we allow users to download full-length movies on Samsung handsets. The idea is to move them across devices.

MK: That was 2010, right? How big will all this be this year, what are you working on?

AT: Last year a lot of work was done on things done from the handset, getting data in. We’re trying to see how we can best optimize data usage on the handset. Moving to a model where we’re pushing data in a very optimized way. Because of this model, let’s say you’re getting data from five networks at once. So we’re working to get 80 to 90 percent optimization of the data coming into the handset. This is good for both operators and users. For the user, it’s the battery. Last year I carried two or three batteries with me.

MK: Martin, the App Store came along and your job became obsolete, right?

ME: I don’t think obsolete, and I think the device manufacturers are underestimated in many ways. At Sony Ericsson, we’re looking at what else we can do for developers — tutorials, SDKs, we provide additional hardware features that may allow new usage features. We can promote you in different channels.. we’re not so much interested in pre-loading anymore, by the time we have a phone in the market, the apps could be obsolete.

MK: Can you elaborate on deep integration:

ME: Deep integration is something you’d see much more going forward. That doesn’t mean you’re replicating what Facebook does, but that you’re utilizing Facebook’s social graph. We want to surface features much better for the user. Another thing is that we’re doing a lot of marketing, for Foursquare for example, and integrating that..

MK: How do you feel about Android?

JO: We’re very excited about Android. We see it as a big growth opportunity — we’re happy with the devices, with the distribution, and how the content looks on the devices. There’s no doubt that you need good acquisition channels.

MK: Why do you need to connect Facebook to Android?

AD: There’s a short term take and a long term. DeNA and Ngmoco are long-term, and that makes sense. But if you’re acquiring a lot of users on Android, they may not be paying much. You may need backers. The real winners will be those that time it right, and there’s still room for new winners to come into the market. In terms of social, we actually haven’t seen much success with people who have apps on the iOS and try to force users to connect with Facebook. You can look at any of the apps that have Facebook integration and look at their reviews — people are just bitching about being connected to Facebook. People on the iPhone hate when that’s the only option. I’d say, if you’re thinking about it, fine, but it doesn’t have to be in version one of your apps.

JO: You have to enable users to source relationships and contacts from where they want to do that. There are certain games and apps that lend themselves to it. In other games, it’s much more about meeting someone for the first time in the context of the game. It’s a question of good product design.

MK: I think there’s a consensus that the most important thing Facebook has done is single sign-on. You have companies like Loopt where Facebook is giving a userbase and you innovate on top of that. How big is Facebook single sign-on for you?

AT: My take on it is that it’s still in its infancy. We don’t see mobile as just Facebook. We see it in other segments as well. There could be other social networking taking place in other parts of the world — in Korea there are other things going on. We don’t see Facebook as the single conduit for single sign-on. But we are following trends in the market pretty closely, and will make some decisions in time.

JO: Facebook has done a good job of providing the platform in a more granular way. Facebook may be a good source of contact information, and free-to-play game is an ongoing relationship with the user and having the ability to contact them is important. In some cases it may make sense to use Facebook as that channel.

AD: All I’d add is the game perspective. For games, I think the analogy is very similar to why real-time interactions on Facebook don’t work, they’re not online at the same time and probably don’t want to play the same games you do. I’ve got a million people available, but how many have an iPhone and Facebook at the same time? Suddenly the userbase shrinks. It’s just an add-on.

ME: We understand that Facebook isn’t strong in every market, but we do see in Sony Ericsson’s markets that Facebook is usually the primary network. To me, it’s not a question of who is the social network, Facebook is the social layer that’s on top of everything. For our devices, they’ll all come with Facebook single-sign on pre-loaded. In the next couple months you’ll see it coming.

MK: Let’s talk about why that’s relevant.

ME: We encourage developers by promoting Facebook single sign on so when a user authorizes it, they don’t have to enter a username and password anymore.

MK: [What about the Playstation phone?]

ME: I can’t comment on that.

MK: Give me some examples of what you’re working on and the coolest use-cases you see.

AT: There are multiple touch-points in a connected home, so we’re looking at use cases. Let’s assume you’re driving your kids and they’re watching a movie. You reach home, turn off the movie, and turn on your TV to watch it there. You bring your tablet with you, and say, here you go — it’s streaming from the tablet to the TV. Getting a bit more social, let’s say you’re landing in an airport and want to tell your wife you’re coming home. So you can say you want to share your location for the next hour, and she can turn on the TV and see exactly where you are. (Audience laughter.) I know there are a lot of discussions around privacy, but these are the use cases. Let’s say you’re watching TV and the washer finishes its cycle, it could tell the TV. And social dating applications, based on your profile, where you are and what you’re doing, location-based dating is possible. What we’ve been trying to see is to make sure this integration becomes seamless.

Audience question: You see a lot of companies going from Facebook to mobile — when do the mobile companies take their apps to Facebook?

JO: All of the new game tech we’re building is on the idea that you build a single codebase for multiple distributions. We’re ready for that today.

Audience question: We’ll have all these access points — what are the opportunities or risks based on designing your game for a particular access point? Not just that it’s a bigger screen, as with a computer or iPad over the mobile device.

AT: The first thing is, I deal with a lot of developers on a day to day basis. Data has become very big in 2010 in the US. If you’re building a data-intensive app and take it to the Asian market, it’s not going to work. You need to be careful to make sure you’re targeting the right audience. If you don’t do that, you might make a good solution without any takers.

ME: Basically you need to understand the market you’re going into — demographics, context and the device you’re targeting.

Audience question: Do the lack of in-app payments in Android account for its lack of success?

JO: Yes, it does…

MK: I think that 98.4 percent of all downloads on Android are free now, so everyone is waiting for in-app purchases.

Audience question: You said it seemed like common sense that user acquisition would run into a barrier in six months, what will make that happen?

AD: I think as more and more advertisers come into the space, there’s only so much of a pool on these devices. There will be a place where Android will start slowing. It’s exactly what has happened on Google Ads and Facebook — when that happens, the economics will change, and I think that’s six months to a year away.

Audience question: I don’t think Flash will work on mobile, so what path should Facebook developers take to mobile devices?

JO: We’ve addressed that by focusing entirely on Javascript as a development environment. We were unsatisfied with where HTML5 is today, it’s not comparable to the experience in native UIs, so we’ve built a framework that plugs into the native UI.

AD: Don’t let that slow you down. There are enough genres that you can succeed with just HTML and Javascript, and there are companies that have been successful with that. You can look at with the space and figure out where you need to go native, and where you can do HTML / Javascript.

Audience question: Have you seen any example of a title that has crossed over between mobile and Facebook?

AD: I don’t think anyone has proved that it works. They’ll be successful on just one platform. The audience is different, the play style is different and usage patterns, the genres that succeed on Facebook might not on mobile and vice versa. That’s why we started Funzio, to prove that it can work.

Audience question: What kind of technology can you recommend for mobile to make a social experience less intrusive?

JO: I think it just depends on asking for the right amount of information that’s in context of what the user’s expectation is. Facebook, for example, gives you a lot of flexibility in how you use their platform. A lot of people don’t think about that as much as they could, and optimize for it. A lot of it is about compulsion loops and the user understanding why you want them to do things.

Audience question: Will the Facebook app itself be pre-loaded on Sony Ericsson devices?

ME: Yes, that’s what it means, and we’ll incentivize users to sign in with things you’ll see coming later this year.

Audience question: How many devices have you sold?

ME: I think we sold nine million Android devices last year. Sony Ericsson isn’t that big in the US yet, so it’s something we’ll have to fight for.

Facebook, and social gaming, appears to be a vastly different place for game developers today versus just a year ago. While social gaming visibly grew at astounding rates through 2009 and into early 2010, producing massive successes like Zynga, growth seemed to suddenly stop in the spring of 2010 as Facebook began limiting the viral channels that made big gains possible.

Since then, Facebook itself has repeatedly changed the rules that app developers play by, and has increasingly forced usage of Credits, a virtual currency that skims 30 percent of in-game sales when used, leading some developers to conclude that Facebook is now too difficult to work on.

Growing a game on Facebook is certainly more difficult today than it was in 2009. However, the view that succeeding is too difficult, and that growth has ended on Facebook, is belied by the experience of savvy developers, and hard data about Facebook apps from our AppData tracking service.

Our own view of the Facebook market considers each facet of the market separately. Here’s what we’ll cover below, in brief:

1. Overall audience size for large developers has declined on average, but this is not necessarily cause for concern
2. Small and medium-sized developers are steadily growing
3. Good game design is increasingly important and effective
4. Monetization is improving in several ways

Large Developers

Before we can look at the performance of games across all Facebook developers, we should split out data for what were considered the “top 5” developers on Facebook in early 2010: Zynga, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts), CrowdStar, Playdom (now part of Disney) and RockYou. This is because views that Facebook’s heyday has already ended are largely based on the performance of this handful of companies.

The trouble for these developers began last March, when Facebook made the first of several viral channel changes that would end their fast-paced growth:

The above table is not an entirely straightforward measurement of how any of the five developers listed is doing, since MAU / DAU measurements alone don’t directly predict revenue; CrowdStar and RockYou also lost significant amounts of traffic from non-game quiz and gifting apps. Even so, only Zynga is arguably doing about as well as it was in early 2010, and only with the massive success of its brand-new game CityVille. Its four competitors lost 30 percent or more of their DAU, which is the best publicly-visible predictor for success.

If Zynga, with over $500 million in venture capital, can’t continue growing on Facebook, what chance do smaller players have? This question has clearly resonated with the wider community; many Facebook developers are now shifting their attention to smartphone games, and investors have by and large ended their investment in pure-play web-based social gaming.

In our view, however, the market still offers healthy opportunities. Expectations were distorted by the outsized success, over just a year or two, of Zynga and its peers. Before the social gaming boom, it typically took several years to build successful companies; now that the “boom” is over, this reality has resumed. The fact that more players of Zynga’s size have not popped up in less than a year of Facebook’s matured social gaming market is neither remarkable or distressing.

This view proceeds from real market data, which we dive into in the following two sections.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Facebook’s perennially active feed of life at its headquarters, Facebook Live, heads up this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, or those still under a million monthly active users, with over 400,000 MAU. At least that many people showed up to watch pop star Katy Perry meet Mark Zuckerberg, as well as demo some social networking tech.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Facebook Live	757,727	+412,928	+120%
2.	Что твои друзья думают о тебе?	795,481	+314,454	+65%
3.	購物天堂	483,697	+311,378	+181%
4.	TheFacepad	800,323	+221,369	+38%
5.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	355,220	+204,706	+136%
6.	朋友大配對	405,295	+202,583	+100%
7.	Günlük Burç Yorumları	273,724	+198,060	+262%
8.	Miscrits: World of Adventure	835,830	+179,122	+27%
9.	Pizza World	179,007	+178,960	+380,766%
10.	樂業超市	312,793	+172,425	+123%
11.	Bingo Island	807,621	+166,183	+26%
12.	CineGratisYa	469,778	+150,218	+47%
13.	Paradise Life	918,154	+142,777	+18%
14.	How old do you look?	476,159	+137,506	+41%
15.	Cooking Mama	295,838	+135,611	+85%
16.	SpeedDate	588,769	+132,562	+29%
17.	Tavla	650,090	+125,970	+24%
18.	Kamera Şovları	210,665	+125,301	+147%
19.	พืชVSมนุษย์หุ่นฟาง	152,537	+124,055	+436%
20.	Gambino Poker	537,681	+123,584	+30%

Although it may rise, Facebook Live usually falls back down again after whatever event it’s covering is over. It’s followed up by Что твои друзья думают о тебе?, which we first spotted a week ago; in Russian, it’s a simple friend quiz, which posts to users’ walls.

Absent an official iPad app from Facebook, TheFacepad continues to grow (along with rival Friendly for iPad). But its continuing weakness at retaining users suggests that when Facebook does release its own app, it won’t have much trouble taking over the market.

The trend this week in games is board and card titles, but there are a few interesting examples, like Miscrits: World of Adventure, which puts a new spin on the well-known Pokemon-style monster collection genre. We cover the games in a bit more depth this morning over at Inside Social Games.

This week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users is a fairly typical mix of games and utilities that nevertheless has a few interesting points to it. Take a look:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Windows Live Messenger	12,276,230	+293,482	+2%
2.	CityVille	18,985,046	+287,118	+2%
3.	Kingdoms of Camelot	900,104	+255,010	+40%
4.	My Photos	483,770	+204,787	+73%
5.	Ravenwood Fair	695,519	+142,613	+26%
6.	Epic Fighters	204,912	+125,768	+159%
7.	購物天堂	147,982	+117,522	+386%
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	7,175,754	+116,218	+2%
9.	Horoscopes	3,399,443	+98,506	+3%
10.	LivingSocial	221,502	+96,564	+77%
11.	FrontierVille	5,789,842	+94,631	+2%
12.	HTC Sense	3,967,713	+86,500	+2%
13.	Facebook Live	118,799	+82,110	+224%
14.	World War	181,418	+76,766	+73%
15.	Bubble Island	959,079	+73,912	+8%
16.	樂業超市	93,299	+64,660	+226%
17.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	94,547	+63,334	+203%
18.	Farmandia	223,795	+56,645	+34%
19.	Günlük Burç Yorumları	91,428	+55,714	+156%
20.	Monster Galaxy	414,411	+54,745	+15%

After six weeks of leading all our DAU gain lists, CityVille has finally been dethroned, by the ever-growing Windows Live Messenger Connect app. CityVille is still growing, but Zynga appears to have cut back on marketing for the game.

Several other large (but not that large) games did relatively well. Kingdoms of Camelot and Ravenwood Fair both picked up significantly, perhaps as a result of increased promotion; both are published by 6waves, which currently has a half-dozen older but growing apps in its fold.

My Photos is the first utility, a daily app that automatically creates wall posts for photos. Despite very low reviews, the app continues to do well — which is fairly typical for apps that focus on wall posting. Horoscopes is similar, but gets much higher reviews and has an enviably high stickiness, or percentage of monthly actives who return on a daily basis.

LivingSocial rounds out the top ten. This app long ago evolved from a basic list of your favorite things to a major group shopping site; but oddly, the app appears to be non-functional at time of writing.

Three apps pulled in huge numbers of new users on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users: CityVille, Badoo and Marketplace. Growth was also significant for a range of other apps and games.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	100,256,070	+3,678,154	+4%
2.	Badoo	19,138,845	+2,212,809	+13%
3.	Marketplace	16,190,490	+2,112,495	+15%
4.	Causes	25,219,707	+900,009	+4%
5.	FarmVille 中文版	2,832,729	+823,326	+41%
6.	BandPage by RootMusic	13,597,130	+726,436	+6%
7.	Prosperous New Year To All My Friends	15,372,155	+615,990	+4%
8.	Farmandia	1,776,561	+567,823	+47%
9.	Monster Galaxy	5,503,284	+540,745	+11%
10.	Las personas que mas revisan tu perfil	411,075	+410,958	+351,246%
11.	GodsWar Online	848,335	+388,094	+84%
12.	Komşu Çiftlik	1,909,885	+384,072	+25%
13.	It Girl	7,671,328	+362,992	+5%
14.	Windows Live Messenger	14,716,742	+353,504	+2%
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,337,038	+332,647	+0.92%
16.	Friends photomontage	446,737	+328,937	+279%
17.	Что твои друзья думают о тебе?	578,964	+310,354	+116%
18.	寵物戰爭	657,795	+300,872	+84%
19.	TheFacepad	638,458	+270,708	+74%
20.	Likes Likes	1,038,785	+270,148	+35%

Zynga once again gets top billing with CityVille, but the new game’s growth has slowed from over two million new MAU per day to around two hundred thousand. However, Zynga also makes the list with its Chinese-language localization, FarmVille 中文版. Interestingly there are two strong farming games on the list including Farmandia; we look at both a bit more closely this morning at Inside Social Games.

Badoo is the real story, at least among non-game apps. The Hot-or-Not style dating app has taken the title as Facebook’s largest in the category, and the seventh-largest app overall by MAU. The interesting detail is that competitor SNAP Interactive, which has 14 million MAU with Are YOU Interested?, just raised $8.5 million in a venture funding. Watch for the single user acquisition wars to begin.

Marketplace is the third app to grow significantly. The Facebook-sanctioned auction app is now at an all-time MAU high. The flipside of this is that its stickiness is at an all-time low, with just one percent of users returning as daily actives, so its MAU should fall in fairly short order.

Most of the remaining apps are returning. The one most worth pointing out is BandPage by RootMusic, which has picked up again; at this point, the app is Facebook’s clear leader for music pages. That’s a trend that should continue as the company adds features, something it just took on $2.3 million in new funding to do.

This week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users but growing fast, includes an unusually wide variety of apps, a trend that seems to be driven by the many foreign-language offerings.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	GodsWar Online	748,651	+366,237	+96%
2.	寵物戰爭	646,130	+362,838	+128%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★	729,028	+333,434	+84%
4.	Likes Likes	980,796	+330,777	+51%
5.	TheFacepad	578,954	+311,505	+116%
6.	Что твои друзья думают о тебе?	481,027	+304,054	+172%
7.	Friends photomontage	408,053	+297,017	+267%
8.	My Friends in 2010	860,451	+271,115	+46%
9.	Newspaper Clips	337,141	+247,485	+276%
10.	CineGratisYa	319,560	+231,851	+264%
11.	Photo Sticker	411,790	+212,818	+107%
12.	朋友大配對	202,712	+189,406	+1,423%
13.	Dragons of Atlantis	844,590	+170,897	+25%
14.	Miscrits: World of Adventure	656,708	+165,891	+34%
15.	All My Friends	291,185	+163,914	+129%
16.	Bingo Island	641,438	+162,517	+34%
17.	SpeedDate	456,207	+155,634	+52%
18.	Puzzled Hearts	575,943	+154,205	+37%
19.	Age of Champions	549,200	+140,180	+34%
20.	Tagged	777,608	+135,021	+21%

The top three apps, GodsWar Online, 寵物戰爭 and Texas HoldEm Poker – Deluxe ★★★★★★ are all games by Chinese developers — respectively a massively multiplayer game, a pet fighting game, and a card game. We’ve seen Chinese-language games do quite well in the past, but there’s a newer trend of English-language games by Chinese companies doing well with a broader international audience.

Likes Likes is the first non-game app, and one that we’ve seen before under various names; it gives users a list of clever sayings that they can “like” on their profile. It’s followed by TheFacepad, an iPad Connect app that, as we’ve also noted before, is getting traction but doesn’t seem to be keeping its users around. Its stickiness, or percent of MAU that returns as daily actives, has dropped to 11 percent.

There’s a problem with AppData’s language display on number six, which is properly called Что твои друзья думают о тебе? The reason for the bad display is simple — Russian-language apps are extremely rare, with only a few million Russian-speaking users, so we hadn’t had a chance to see the problem before. The app, a simple friend quiz, seems to be doing quite well anyway.

Friends photomontage and My Friends in 2010 are fairly self-explanatory. Far more interesting is Newspaper Clips, which allows users to create their own fake newspaper clip using a friend’s profile. The result, which actually looks pretty good, is saved to your photo gallery, with the option of tagging your friend in the image.

Small social network Tagged appears for the first time on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users. The app is the latest example of a Connect integration, which we’ve also seen larger players like MySpace do.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	18,591,715	+1,620,113	+10%
2.	Marketplace	996,978	+428,876	+75%
3.	Causes	1,250,533	+328,041	+36%
4.	Windows Live Messenger	12,032,329	+293,998	+3%
5.	Millionaire City	2,678,013	+198,868	+8%
6.	寵物戰爭	235,763	+161,834	+219%
7.	Tagged	195,691	+136,798	+232%
8.	Formspring	1,029,000	+133,563	+15%
9.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,981,466	+132,997	+2%
10.	Café World	3,428,097	+132,895	+4%
11.	แฮปปี้คนเลี้ยงหม	689,945	+123,055	+22%
12.	HTC Sense	3,905,124	+103,385	+3%
13.	Horoscopes	3,344,276	+96,998	+3%
14.	Country Life	808,712	+95,114	+13%
15.	Phrases	1,599,421	+93,010	+6%
16.	Spotify	964,627	+89,524	+10%
17.	Auto Club	90,553	+86,669	+2,231%
18.	It Girl	1,000,207	+86,215	+9%
19.	Friends photomontage	90,005	+84,234	+1,460%
20.	Status Shuffle	938,234	+80,328	+9%

CityVille once again leads the list, with 1.6 million new DAU. Last week, we suggested that the game might have finished its DAU growth, but it has bounced back for once more week. However, its gains in both MAU and DAU have slowed down significantly at this point.

Marketplace has also done well in the past couple weeks. The Facebook classified ad service has seen its ups and downs over the past year, but definitely more of the latter of late; its DAU is currently higher than it was for almost all of 2010.

Coming to Tagged again, the social network is not the only example of Connect integration on the list. Windows Live Messenger, of course, is the biggest, but Formspring, which just took a large $11.5 million funding round, also uses Connect alongside its platform app. And HTC Sense is a Connect app for both Android and Windows-based smartphones by HTC.

There’s just one more app we haven’t seen before on this week’s list: Auto Club, at number 17. The auto-fan app is just a gallery of cars, with a “Vote” button and pre-ticked “Post to my wall” button; users can vote once every ten minutes.

CityVille is once again the leader of our weekly AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users but several other apps also made significant gains:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	CityVille	97,827,688	+13,604,922	+16%
2.	Badoo	17,300,811	+2,586,965	+18%
3.	Marketplace	14,686,913	+2,551,007	+21%
4.	Prosperous New Year To All My Friends	14,876,537	+1,497,176	+11%
5.	Monster Galaxy	5,077,595	+1,095,648	+28%
6.	Causes	24,508,717	+934,132	+4%
7.	德州撲克(中文版)	6,297,224	+858,066	+16%
8.	My Top Followers	2,431,791	+771,638	+46%
9.	FarmVille 中文版	2,125,457	+737,794	+53%
10.	My Top Friends (new)	2,560,488	+725,808	+40%
11.	Zuma Blitz	7,676,969	+695,487	+10%
12.	How Common is your Name	2,937,688	+677,898	+30%
13.	BandPage by RootMusic	12,955,264	+632,869	+5%
14.	Give Hearts	16,210,504	+579,029	+4%
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,109,648	+563,993	+2%
16.	Tarjetitas	5,872,320	+527,644	+10%
17.	Zoosk	6,574,145	+469,971	+8%
18.	Likelicious	3,773,740	+463,736	+14%
19.	Zoo World	8,960,956	+461,149	+5%
20.	Komşu Çiftlik	1,568,908	+455,911	+41%

Although CityVille averaged almost three million MAU per day for several weeks, it is now under two, with gains of just over a million MAU on the most recent days. This could mean that it will peak sometime in January, though only well after passing 100 million MAU.

Dating app Badoo is doing better than ever with 2.6 million new MAU. The Hot-or-Not style app has been battling with Are YOU Interested? for the top spot in its genre, but at this point, it appears to be breaking away.

At number three, Marketplace is enjoying an all-time high, which followed a sudden jump in both MAU and DAU in late December. It’s not entirely clear why, but readers are welcome to chime in if they know.