Facebook Application Development

This week’s list of emerging Facebook apps, measured as those still growing toward a million monthly active users, is led off for once by something other than a quiz app: Who thinks of you?, a sort of pen-pal finder for Facebook.

However, all of the new traffic to “Who thinks of you?”, some 712,312 new monthly active users, appears to have shown up in just the past day — which leads us to believe that Facebook may be going through another of its periodic updates or bug fixes, which sometimes end up drastically recalculating the traffic to some apps.

Take a look over the full AppData list; you may notice a few other incongruous apps:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Who thinks of you?	831,333	+712,312	+598%
2.	守衛家園	725,370	+708,996	+4,330%
3.	Market Street	547,474	+547,416	+943,821%
4.	Jewel Box	433,987	+423,273	+3,951%
5.	Office Wars	932,738	+415,127	+80%
6.	Birthday Alert	448,796	+382,358	+576%
7.	Cafe Life	676,692	+376,976	+126%
8.	Incontra gente	657,699	+273,247	+71%
9.	Crazy Taxi	635,996	+244,710	+63%
10.	Knighthood	373,002	+234,580	+169%
11.	Four in a Row	301,561	+232,625	+337%
12.	來問章魚哥保羅	246,536	+228,548	+1,271%
13.	Bingo Island 2	449,900	+226,752	+102%
14.	Tellywood	219,609	+218,679	+23,514%
15.	Platinum Life: Web Edition BETA	719,711	+215,754	+43%
16.	建立你的測驗	922,935	+215,068	+30%
17.	Ask Paul the Octopus !	201,077	+197,016	+4,851%
18.	על כל הקופה	194,200	+194,115	+228,371%
19.	FriendCameo Video Chat	628,653	+190,908	+44%
20.	WestWars	208,938	+186,656	+838%

Picking out a few, Jewel Box, Birthday Alert and Incontra gente all experienced similar one-day leaps. They’re all older apps that appeared to have plateaued or declining growth; now Facebook is reporting huge gains. We’ve seen these sorts of changes in the past, and it usually appears to be a fix intended to make the apps report the correct numbers; with that in mind, we at least now know that the aforementioned apps are of significant size, if not all blazing-fast growers.

Most of the other apps appear to be reporting normal growth. At number two and three, 守衛家園 and Market Street are both games; they are, respectively, a Chinese-language tower defense game and Playdom’s brand-new game, which we also just reviewed on Inside Social Games.

來問章魚哥保羅 is another Chinese-language app, but not a game. Instead, it’s a just-for-fun app that involves asking a psychic octopus the outcome of a question; you’ll notice that number 17, Ask Paul the Octopus !, is the same app in English. The apps are referencing a soccer World Cup meme, involving an octopus that correctly guessed the outcome of eight games.