Inside Social Games

A range of emerging games are in this week’s up-and-coming list. The list is based on sorting which applications with between 100,00 and 1 million users grew the most over the past week on AppData, that identify themselves in the “games” category of app on Facebook. A close look at this sometimes reveals promising new games that are getting traction, as is the case this week.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	JibJab	896,201	+190,506	+21.26
2.	what are you born to do?	913,576	+189,108	+20.70
3.	Which Zodiac Sign Are You Most Compatible With?	707,949	+153,073	+21.62
4.	Do you think…?	208,255	+98,426	+47.26
5.	Tarjetitas	958,169	+85,017	+8.87
6.	Word Island	207,995	+52,987	+25.48
7.	Moment Of Truth	299,248	+48,263	+16.13
8.	Halloween Pumpkins	253,923	+42,134	+16.59
9.	Fairyland	538,711	+39,807	+7.39
10.	Write In Pictures	632,279	+36,230	+5.73
11.	Name Analyzer	682,290	+34,008	+4.98
12.	Kamu cocoknya punya pasangan orang mana ?	169,586	+27,534	+16.24
13.	Status Cloud	288,300	+25,327	+8.78
14.	Çete Savaşları	770,856	+23,877	+3.10
15.	Ma Ferme	375,230	+22,639	+6.03
16.	Manda un Beso Sexy!! Besame!	249,158	+21,594	+8.67
17.	Gift Creator	450,421	+20,627	+4.58
18.	World Poker	966,448	+20,166	+2.09
19.	Hatching Eggs	279,968	+17,999	+6.43
20.	Benim Çiftliği	304,933	+17,700	+5.80

At the top is animated e-card creator JibJab, sort of. The app lets you create and share these cards with your Facebook friends — although the company has apparently taken the app offline, because when you try to add the app you’re taken to a landing page telling you to visit JibJab’s main site. JibJab has been big on using Facebook Connect, and apparently it decided its home site was a better venue for its business. We’re not sure how the app is continuing to post growth: It gained 190,000 new users to reach 896,000 monthly actives.

Other notables include Word Island from MetroGames, a Scrabble-style game that gained 53,000 users to reach 208,000 monthly actives this past week. The next two apps have appeared on the up-and-coming list in the past, and have continued to inch their way up. One, Fairyland, is a simple sort of virtual gardening game; it grew by 40,000 to total 539,000 monthly actives. Poker game World Poker grew by 20,000 to reach 967,000 monthly actives — it’s about to hit 1 million and graduate from this list.

There are a couple other games not on the list, apparently because the creators don’t identify the apps as “games” in Facebook’s app category directory (the directory that we use to index games in AppData). But we noted them over on Inside Facebook this morning. One, Icy Tower, an Ice Climbers-style game we covered recently, grew by 135,000 new users to total 735,000. Another game we recently reviewed, called Goobox – Free Games, is also seeing a solid surge. It grew by 85,000 to end the week at 526,000. The game is actually a collection of mini-games, with each one having a goo theme.

This week’s list saw the usual mix of simple quiz and gifting apps as well, that for some reason identify themselves as “games.” We’re ignoring them, especially as some look spammy and maybe scammy.