Could FarmVille at last be rousing from its gentle rest as Facebook’s reigning game? Since Christmas, we’ve been watching FarmVille as it periodically comes and goes from our AppData top 20 lists — especially this one, the Monday list of top gaining games by monthly active users (MAU).

Generally we point out that FarmVille, with its tens of millions of players, appears in the top lists sometimes simply from small fluctuations in its userbase. But that also means that it should disappear at times, something that hasn’t happened in a month. Find the game at number three below:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	49,135,859	+3,304,530	+6.73
2.	FarmVille	79,331,014	+2,653,765	+3.35
3.	Zoo World	19,499,210	+1,490,899	+7.65
4.	Facts about friends	913,983	+913,821	+99.98
5.	My City Life	1,633,798	+835,234	+51.12
6.	MindJolt Games	17,149,554	+695,479	+4.06
7.	PetVille	18,682,529	+548,893	+2.94
8.	Texas HoldEm Poker	25,833,621	+527,263	+2.04
9.	My Town	2,451,701	+489,908	+19.98
10.	Mafia Wars	25,082,042	+431,287	+1.72
11.	Hero World	6,526,636	+420,853	+6.45
12.	Gangster City	1,645,892	+412,563	+25.07
13.	UNO™	3,143,819	+405,026	+12.88
14.	Happy Island	11,518,626	+372,115	+3.23
15.	Ninja Saga	2,630,690	+369,346	+14.04
16.	SPP Ranch!	600,620	+334,766	+55.74
17.	Band of Heroes	1,485,862	+327,016	+22.01
18.	Bejeweled Blitz	9,707,422	+319,440	+3.29
19.	Happy Aquarium	26,664,020	+317,046	+1.19
20.	(Lil) Farm Life	5,459,483	+293,093	+5.37

More food for thought: in our month-ago MAU list, FarmVille had gained 495,488 players. Each successive week’s rise has been larger, until this week’s gain of 2,653,765 users. Entire gaming companies subsist off smaller numbers.

If it continues its growth, Farmville will be breaking through 100 million MAU within a couple months — a quarter of Facebook’s users.

But FarmVille may have broken out beyond Facebook. See the Compete chart below for an idea of how quickly the game’s new website,
FarmVille.com, is growing (note that you’re seeing monthly visits, not the 16 million unique visitors the site had in December), and the paired Google Trends graph for an idea of its spread as a cultural meme. Without Facebook, it’s unlikely FarmVille would have ever gotten its huge following, but at this point, it could be FarmVille that is bringing new users to Facebook. Especially, in this case, when you consider that FarmVille.com requires people to use Facebook Connect.

Birthday Cards and Zoo World are RockYou apps that have also been fixtures in the top five. However, it’s not clear how many users of one app are also be being counted as users of the other.

Number six, MindJolt Games, is a host app to several games created by MindJolt; like FarmVille (though on a smaller scale), it is a big game app that has begun growing fairly well again.

My City Life, at number five, is a city building game that has enjoyed blazing growth in its two short weeks of existence, while My Town is a similarly styled game that has been around a bit longer.