A Few Diamonds in the Rough On This Week's Up-and-Coming Apps List

We have some rather unimpressive Facebook apps in this week's up-and-coming list, with some very notable exceptions in the gaming category. At the top is one called Addict, a simple app that calculates how "addicted" you are to Facebook based on your recent activity, the completeness of your profile, networks you have joined, your number of connections (friends), and your number of groups, pages and events. Sounds sort of neat, right? Top Gainers This Week Name MAU Gain Gain, % 1. Addict 601,398 +601,360 +99.99 2. Snowball Fight! 454,237 +208,287 +45.85 3. WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE? 256,515 +206,430 +80.47 4. Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With? 910,660 +202,711 +22.26 5. Piou Piou contre les cactus 201,278 +201,233 +99.98 6. Farmville Gifts 191,197 +186,157 +97.36 7. The Hierarchy 188,685 +178,264 +94.48 8. Band of Heroes 268,629 +161,064 +59.96 9. Yakuza Lords 929,891 +154,539 +16.62 10. What kind of mask do you wear? 388,509 +153,351 +39.47 11. Snowball Fight 151,455 +148,475 +98.03 12. Acımasız Gerçekler 453,156 +113,470 +25.04 13. 商業大亨Web 348,112 +104,328 +29.97 14. Icy Tower 832,964 +97,581 +11.71 15. מגדת העתידות 121,452 +87,545 +72.08 16. COLLAPSE! 178,408 +83,418 +46.76 17. Huggles 237,396 +82,101 +34.58 18. SuperPocus 183,098 +77,729 +42.45 19. MixPod Playlist 698,581 +77,483 +11.09 20. What Type Of Girl Are you? 220,128 +76,101 +34.57 Unfortunately, the app generates a ranking of your friends without providing any transparency into how it arrived at that number. So, it could be making up any old percentage for each user. And in case you click around trying to figure out exactly what the app is telling you, you'll find that the "Continue" buttons you thought might take you to answers are actually quiz ads. Basically, this developer doesn't seem to be too serious about building a high-quality application, but does seem to be optimizing for some short-term revenue. Having gained almost all of its 601,000 users in the past week, this app might be pulling in a little money. Moving on... the list, as has often been the case in the past, also has a bunch of other simple apps -- mostly quiz apps, based around questions like "WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE IN LIFE?" and "Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?" These sorts of apps live and die pretty quickly. There's also a "Farmville Gifts" simple gifting app. As its page notes it's "[a]n application that sends FarmVille gifts! However, these gifts can't be sent to FarmVille." We expect Zynga will send the developer a take-down notice if it gets much bigger. However, there are some legitimately interesting apps, too. This list is based on filtering AppData to only see the apps that grew the most, that have between 100,000 and 1 million users -- the purpose is to find a few promising ones that are on track to become serious hits. The Hierarchy, a spy role-playing game from Serious Business, continues its climb. It has nearly doubled from when we noticed it at the beginning of the week, reaching 189,000 monthly actives today. Two other role-playing games are also growing fast, and although neither lists a developer, both appear to be made by LOLapps. While both have the same underlying interface components (more on that over on ISG), each one has surprisingly striking, unique-looking graphics. One, Asian mafia-themed Yakuza Lords, grew by 155,000 users to reach 930,000 monthly actives. It is on its way to graduating from this list. The other app, World War II RPG Band of Heroes, is smaller but growing relatively more quickly. It gained 161,000 to reach 269,000 monthly actives. Other notables on this week's list include Ice Climber-style game Icy Tower, which grew by 98,000 to total 833,000 monthly actives. It's a simple, arcade-style game. So is COLLAPSE!, which gained 83,00 to 178,000 monthly actives. So far, we haven't seen many casual games of this sort become big, with Popcap Game's Bejeweled Blitz being the one exception. Perhaps, though, these games show that the arcade style is in the process of becoming a lot more prominent on Facebook? And finally, and quite interestingly, Slide's new magical virtual world app SuperPocus is starting to catch some air. It grew by 77,000 to end up at 183,000 today.

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A Few Diamonds in the Rough On This Week's Up-and-Coming Apps List

Eric Eldon

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Eric Eldon