Facebook Application Development

Say hello to Profile Box; you may be seeing a lot of it in coming weeks. The profile modification app hit the big time this week, reaching the top of our list of emerging Facebook apps still under a million monthly active users.

Profile Box is a little piece of MySpace right on Facebook. The app purports to allow its users to embed a small box on their profile with custom HTML or text, as close to a profile re-design as Facebook is likely to allow anytime soon. It may not work perfectly, but that didn’t prevent over half a million people from signing on, more than than any previous similar app has attracted — although Profile HTML, down at number four, is hot on its heels.

Of course, both apps are probably repeating the Static FBML phenomenon, in which everyone who uses a Page with modified content also gets signed up, so take the growth with a grain of salt. Here’s the AppData top 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Profile Box	763,433	+564,078	+282.95
2.	Name Analyzer	732,099	+537,645	+276.49
3.	Nightclub City	897,950	+535,969	+148.07
4.	Profile HTML	688,707	+498,185	+261.48
5.	Collect Roses	862,850	+485,347	+128.57
6.	Monster World	420,621	+330,820	+368.39
7.	天書奇談 2.0	931,920	+250,455	+36.75
8.	My Tribe	767,546	+236,515	+44.54
9.	My Casino	643,371	+197,776	+44.38
10.	Friend of the Day!	826,778	+193,133	+30.48
11.	Bike Mania 4 Micro Office	258,963	+182,666	+239.41
12.	Jungle Life	439,391	+175,120	+66.27
13.	FreeLuggageTags	196,634	+174,390	+783.99
14.	Ranch Town	279,555	+167,820	+150.19
15.	Pet Forest Online	592,382	+143,090	+31.85
16.	My Vineyard	639,721	+142,803	+28.74
17.	Funfari	444,897	+126,019	+39.52
18.	¿Cuál es tu leyenda de amor?	507,744	+120,873	+31.24
19.	Мисуиш ли?	118,179	+117,962	+54,360.37
20.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	408,105	+117,855	+40.60

Name Analyzer isn’t too impressive; it just provides you a graphical presentation of your own name. Oddly, this isn’t the same Name Analyzer as the one that hit the top of the list last week, although both theme and execution are similar (and similarly simple) between the two. Call it a mini-fad, if you like.

Collect Roses allows its users to accumulate a sort of virtual flower garden on their profile, assuming they’re willing to splay big photos of flowers across their feed. The app’s graph went into a hockey-stick last Saturday, as seen below — probably something to do with Mother’s Day.

Passing over a few games (which we cover at Inside Social Games) we come to Friend of the Day!, which randomly picks a friend to be… well, the name says it all. And the last app we’ll mention is FreeLuggageTags for which, once again, the name says everything: it’s an app through which the airline KLM is giving away luggage tags, which an astonishing number of people seem to need.