MySpace social game rankings don’t usually change much, but they did this past month. BitRhymes and RockYou managed to climb up the charts.

Meanwhile, Zynga and Playdom continue to hold many of the top spots within the space. Their role-playing games continue to slide up and down the charts, as users find themselves preferring new game features being constantly introduced by the companies.

Here are the highlights from this past month:

• Playdom’s Mobsters continues its reign at #1 with nearly 14 million installs as of this past month, but it’s followed closely by Zynga’s Mafia Wars, with approximately 12.5 million.
• With nearly 400,000 more installs this time around, YoVille holds on at #8 with an impressive 5,026,949 installs.
• BitRyhmes beats out the Playdom powerhouse for the #14 spot with Tag Me (BitRhymes’ other title, Cheers!! comes in at #12 with over 3 million installs), thereby knocking the game, Sorority Life, down to #15. Of course, the Playdom title still garners over 3 million installs, growing by nearly 200,000 since last month.
• Speed Racing, from RockYou, shows an impressive leap, jumping from #20 to #17 with just over 2 million game installations.
• Also, Zynga’s Dragon Wars takes over the #19 spot with 1,966,774 installs (15,588 more than last month) as Playdom’s Heroes loses a little over 12,000 on its monthly install rate, tallying in at 1,952,049.
• Fashion also turns out to be more popular than going green as Fashion Wars and Green Spot appear at numbers 21 and 22 respectively with about a 200,000 install difference.

On another note, it’s surprising to see farming games not take hold on the site, even though they’re popular across the world. On Facebook, Zynga’s FarmVille has boomed to 33.4 million monthly active users in just three months. The difference may be related to the fact that no farming games are currently offered on by top farm game-makers on Facebook, neither Zynga, nor Slashkey, nor Playfish. Smaller apps might have an opportunity here, or perhaps larger companies will move in — or maybe MySpace’s many music and celebrity-loving users want glitzier games than virtual agriculture.

As always, if ever you feel there are some games or apps that should be included on this list, by all means, let us know, and we will be sure to take a look.

Well, it’s been quite the month for Facebook as we continued to see the astounding growth of games centered around the simple concept of farming! While it was last month that Zynga reached the #1 spot with its brand new title, FarmVille, this month proves to be no different. However, while the standings are the same, the numbers behind those standings are quite astonishing.

Zynga continues with an impressive five titles within the Top 25 and two within the Top 5. Playfish also continues to hold strong with six titles in the top 25, showing the value of highly polished and creative designs. Nonetheless, this past month also played host to a number of new faces as well.

Here are the highlights from the past month:

• Easily the top story of the month is FarmVille. Having only been around since July, this Zynga title has become one of the single, fastest growing games on Facebook, effectively doubling its monthly active users over the course of August to reach 33 million people.
• Mafia Wars regained its #2 spot with about 19 million monthly uniques as Slashkey‘s Farm Town moved back up in the rankings to #3 with over 18 million.
• Playfish’s classic title, Pet Society gains over 1.5 million users to overtake, long time favorite, Texas HoldEm, coming in at #5.
• A popular MySpace game from Playdom made its first appearance in the Top 25 with almost 5.5 million monthly actives at #11 - Sorority Life – and Playfish’s own rendition of simple living, Country Story also makes its debut at #14
• The German social developer wooga also gets its new game up in the charts at #16 with the quiz game, Brain Buddies, which, surprisingly, beat out the classic Playfish app, Who Has The Biggest Brain?, which fell behind at #17.
• Lastly, another developer, Offbeat Creation, gets its first appearance at #23 with a drinking challenge game, Chug It!

Certainly, August has been an eventful month, and the momentum isn’t slowing down any time soon. With new games and apps appearing constantly, it is impossible to predict who will climb in popularity next. To that end, if ever you feel something ought to be included on this list that we missed, let us know.

Mobile payments are an increasingly popular way for people to pay for things like virtual goods, because it lets them bill items to their mobile phone accounts instead of paying through credit cards or other services. Today, mobile payment provider BOKU is announcing a range of large and small new partners in social and web games, as well as some new statistics on its growth.

Social gaming companies using BOKU include larger developers like Playfish and Slide, as well as small ones, like HitGrab (MouseHunt), Hive7 (Knighthood), Icebreaker, PageFad (Premier Football) and TheBroth (BarnBuddy). It is is also getting reach across web-based gaming portals and virtual worlds, including Aeria Games, Games-Master (Cabal Online), IGG, K2Networks/GamersFirst, Meez, Three Rings and WeeWorld.

While Facebook is currently testing out payments with rival Zong, BOKU counts Hi5 and Badoo as social networking partners. Finally, BOKU announced it has partnered with payment aggregators fatfoogoo, Gambit, Jambool, Offerpal, Sometrics, Super Rewards, and TrialPay.

In the world of mobile payments, there is often trouble with the phone service providers charging steep overhead fees for transactions, but from the consumer’s standpoint, the costs seem to be worthwhile. Why? The service is actually quite simple: Users go to make a purchase, select the “Pay By Mobile” option, put in their phone number, respond to the immediate text message with “Y,” and voila, the transaction has been made.

So far, BOKU says it has 1,000 merchants using the service and is doing one million transactions a month, with a ten percent monthly growth rate. It now serves users in 56 different countries, with Finland, Indonesia, Slovenia, and Taiwan new to the list, the company is also announcing today.

A demonstration of the BOKU service can be viewed here.