Smaller games are prominent on this week’s list of Facebook games gaining the most daily active users (DAU), from AppData. Starting with number three, 開心寶貝, fully 13 of the entries have under half a million total DAU.

Among those same games, there are also several repeat visitors to the list, suggesting that they won’t remain small for long. Here are all 20:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Bejeweled Blitz	3,038,124	+231,139	+7.61
2.	Zoo World	2,167,734	+159,973	+7.38
3.	開心寶貝	476,028	+150,155	+31.54
4.	My Town	486,796	+100,763	+20.70
5.	Happy Island	2,919,892	+96,184	+3.29
6.	Mafia Wars	6,712,908	+81,514	+1.21
7.	Wild Ones	326,413	+77,235	+23.66
8.	(Lil) Farm Life	998,748	+72,478	+7.26
9.	Jewel Puzzle II	67,640	+67,621	+99.97
10.	Gangster City	220,909	+62,673	+28.37
11.	MindJolt Games	2,513,204	+55,954	+2.23
12.	Go to Hell	55,153	+54,564	+98.93
13.	Little Warrior	238,319	+47,320	+19.86
14.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	68,271	+41,914	+61.39
15.	Texas HoldEm Poker	5,665,925	+31,742	+0.56
16.	Little Rock Pool	93,399	+27,278	+29.21
17.	Medical Mayhem	216,179	+22,932	+10.61
18.	SuperPocus	37,100	+19,610	+52.86
19.	Kingdoms of Camelot	142,402	+19,532	+13.72
20.	Fashion City	19,308	+18,313	+94.85

The board’s leader, Bejeweled Blitz by Popcap, has actually lost over half a million monthly users in the past month. But the game’s stickiness has risen slightly; about four percent more of the game’s users visit on a daily basis now. Number two, RockYou’s Zoo World, has been on a sharp upward trajectory for the month, though not as much as its sister app Birthday Cards, which it is partially integrated into.

The Chinese-language game 開心寶貝 (Happy Baby) is notable for more than its steady week-over-week growth. Quite a few of the game’s monthly users are also daily users (see below) — more so than most English-language games, whose DAU tends to hover at or below 30 percent of MAU.

My Town continues to do quite well, also. In its early days, this game appeared on our top 20 lists with Ninja Warz, the other significantly-sized game from developer Broken Bulb Studios. But Ninja Warz has fallen away, while My Town, a sim-town game, appears to have gotten a firm foothold among players.

Continuing down, there’s Mafia Wars and a bit further, Texas HoldEm Poker; these two huge Zynga games never seem to gain much at once, but both have gained pretty steadily since the holidays. And below Mafia Wars, you’ll notice Gangster City, a similar challenger from Playfish with strong prospects. But it looks like the game may be having trouble hanging onto players; we’ll have a better idea of that next week.

[Editor's note: This article was co-authored by Eric Eldon.]

When Facebook began enforcing new policy changes in mid December, it was called a “philosophical approach to platform governance.” As we covered on Inside Facebook, “instead of trying to spell out all the rules in detail, it is laying out more general principles and reserving the right to make policy enforcements when its policy team deems doing so to be necessary.”

Looking at what has and hasn’t been enforced since the changes were implemented helps provide some insight into the policy team’s thinking thus far.

When is Gifting Okay?

The policy: “You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application.”

Just about every game launched prior to the changes in December had gifts — where users send gifts to friends, in most cases to users not already playing the game — first and foremost in their viral marketing strategy. This is still still evident by the number of games where the first menu tab is “Free Gifts” or “Send Gifts.” In reviewing 98 game applications with over 100,000 daily active users (DAU), only about 20% of them did NOT have a gifts component at the start of the game (the largest was Popcap’s Bejeweled Blitz with 2.8 million DAU).

We’ve been tracking this story over the past week. When we first looked, only four games with more than 100,000 DAU four appeared to be directing users to gift prior to playing the game: Happy Farm (940,000 DAU), Farkle, (840,000 DAU), Garden World (260,000 DAU) and Las Vegas Slots (210,000 DAU).

Facebook tells us that the policy “is not at all meant to stop gifting or virality — it’s meant to prevent users from being prompted to use Facebook communication channels before engaging with the application.” The company wants “users to initiate communications and not be asked to send them right after authorization or every time the user returns to the application.”

“Our expectation is that developers are required to comply with our Principles and Policies,” it says, “and if we come across violations, developers are going to be held accountable.” As many developers have been discovering lately, Facebook won’t punish apps by blocking them completely but rather shutting down some communication channels into fixes are implemented.

Out of the four games mentioned above, three have updated their interfaces to not require gifting, and are in compliance. Garden World still directs users to gift first, but we’re not sure for how long.

Let’s look at some more examples. Titles from Playdom, like Sorority Life and Mobsters 2, are taking users to a gifts screen when you click the Jobs and Missions tabs respectively. So while not the first thing users see when they come to the application, users still must skip the gifts screen (or send items to their friends) before they can actually engage in the game. This interface is okay, Facebook says, because the gift page isn’t what users see first when they add or return to the apps.

While gifts have often been considered social spam (with some developers specifically not including gifts because they feel they are too spammy), the feature has become a very powerful way to get users to interact around a game. Still, one can imagine a gifting mechanism that is a more natural extension of the game’s social aspects.

Café World by Zynga has a Free Gifts tab positioned first among menu items and was one of the first to add a “present” icon as an overlay to the playing screen; the app recently added a “Gift of the Day” section to your friends leaderboard across the bottom — you can send gifts to earn points. This interface is not just okay but a best practice, Facebook says.

It still by default prompts you to send this gift to all of your friends (versus just your Café World friends), but by positioning your promo near the friends leader board, it underscores the behavior that users are more likely to send gifts to their friends actually playing the game.

Pet Society by Playfish has taken the other extreme, only providing gifting of items from a user’s inventory to one of their friends actually playing the game. While this most accurately reflects the typical user’s desire to send something to a friend, it wouldn’t appear to be a top-of-mind functionality that would drive retention or viral growth as it is buried within the inventory “Chest” section of the game.

Eventually, we think most developers will create a gifts functionality that lies somewhere in between the “spam everybody” and “gift to a single friend” philosophies. One way for games like Café World to begin this transition would to change the default from sending to all your friends to just the users playing the game. Then take it one step further, allowing users to filter it to go to only their “active” Café World friends (say those that have played in the last week and thus are more likely to find value in the gift messaging).

Ideally, gifting can be a jumping point for users to have more conversations in and around the game, moving it from a viral marketing tactic to a game experience enhancing transaction that boosts customer retention.

Applications Continue to Gate Content Based on Number of Users

While gifting spam has been reined in a bit thanks to policy changes implemented by Facebook back in December, the company does not yet appear to be enforcing one of the other recent policy changes.

The policy: “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

Two of the biggest games on Facebooks, Zynga’s FarmVille and Café World, continue to use the practice, leaving developers trying to figure out how to interpret this specific policy. Below, you can see the Café World restaurant expansion requires 12 neighbors and just under 1 million coins (or a user can spend 35 Café World cash – the equivalent of $7 – to unlock the feature).

FarmVille recently introduced its long-awaited 24×24 expansion, and it requires a hefty 30 neighbors (or 60 FarmVille cash – about $12) to unlock. The desirability for this expansion by some players has resulted in long pleas to friends or strangers to “add them” so they can unlock it:

Besides the written responses, we’ve anecdotally heard of friends who have had long-ago forgotten colleagues contact them by phone to request them to friend them on a game to unlock something. That’s powerful stuff.

There is a long history of game design where users can either grind through to earn rewards or pay cash to unlock the items faster – a classic tradeoff between time and money that has helped fund a great number of games.

With Facebook, the ability to virally spread is equally valuable, as a portion of new users will end up spending real cash or bringing in other users. Thus developers like Zynga prize a user who can bring 30 friends to the game initially, then continue to influence (and retain) them through posts about the game. If, as a developer, you can’t remind users with notifications – those are being phased out in a month, you might want an army of users who will post on their walls handle viral communication for you.

While there is definite economic value being exchanged here by both to a developer and the user, it creates some presumably unwanted behaviors:

It induces users to go beyond their social graph of “known” friends. If a user “adds” a stranger, it potentially exposes more personal information than a user realizes they are sharing – basically, their whole profile unless the user actively goes through multiple steps to limit access.

Users are also creating secondary accounts just to play games, distorting DAU and MAU data as well as creating potential cheating issues. Comments on developer fan page posts end up being a litany of “add me” notes, drowning out any true conversation around the content being posted

While the Facebook policy as stated would appear to be squarely focused at eliminating these undesirable behaviors, the lack of enforcement begins to make one wonder if this is as important an issue to Facebook policy team now compared to when the roadmap of changes were initially announced. Clearly some of the latest changes to user information sharing – like privacy settings — were designed to get users to open up more and expand beyond the “known” friends to “Everyone”, so maybe Facebook’s platform team is less worried about users inviting people they don’t know into their personal network.

While the gifting policy has largely been enforced, Facebook says to expect more news on gating:”Our intent is to protect the integrity of the social graph and the authenticity of relationships on the site,” the company tells us, “but we recognize that this is a complex and important topic. We plan to provide more context on this policy soon.”

In the meantime, check out Facebook’s platform policy examples and explanations page for more detail.

About mid-year, last year, German developer wooga (world of gaming) created an entertaining quiz-like game by the name of Brain Buddies. Since then, the game has done fairly well, currently earning around 3.2 million monthly active users. However, the European company has also been hard at work on a new Facebook game, Bubble Island.

The game is a remake of a classic arcade type of game where the player shoots multicolored bubbles toward a collection of other bubbles hanging from a ceiling. The object is to match three or more of the same color to remove them. However, every couple of shots, the ceiling lowers, and should any of these soapy orbs cross the red line located near the bottom of the screen, the game is over. Of course, if you remove them all, you win.

Like the arcade rendition – and the myriad of casual Flash versions – of this game, bubbles can be bounced off of walls, and in the case of Bubble Island, the ceiling. Furthermore, all bubbles hanging from the ceiling must be connected to the ones above them to avoid falling, so the player is capable of shooting connecting ones to remove all those below.

Like with wooga’s last title, the presentation value for Bubble Island is fantastic. Players play as a backpacking raccoon and move about a tropical island setting. Each section of the island is a new level that has three to four stages that must be cleared in order to move forward. Furthermore, each one has a very nice visual display and music that, for the most part (there are a few stages where the music skips), fits perfectly.

Beyond aesthetics, each level changes the board slightly too. Some boards seem to be taller, others wider, thus adding a nice change in game play pace. Frankly, even more dynamic and oddly shaped levels might be prudent in adding a little new flavor to such an old game concept.

Nevertheless, what Bubble Island does bring to the table — that is very new — is its social elements. Yes, it has the basics of inviting friends and competing for high scores on each level, via leaderboards. But there’s more. Players have lives in Bubble Island. Should they fail to remove all the bubbles before they reach the bottom, they lose one. However, the more they play, and the more their Facebook friends play, the more lives they earn.

Beyond the above, this app also has other social standards such using the social graph through feed postings and earnable trophies (achievements). To the untrained eye, it may not seem like terribly much, but for many players the earning of achievements is narcotic, and adds a great deal of longevity to even the simplest of games.

The only real complaints to be had are minor, at best. It feels like the bubbles shoot a bit too fast. They literally are in place in less than half a second, and there was always something gratifying about watching them bounce into place. Ironically, the second issue is the reverse. When one completes a level, it often takes a exorbitant amount of time to load the scoring screen, leading one to the assumption that the game might have crashed.

It is also worth mentioning that, yes, a more original game concept would be much better, but, this type of game is still very entertaining, and new iteratoins on old ideas are loved by many social game players.

Currently, wooga’s Bubble Island is still in beta, and it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of users yet. Our AppData is tracking around 19,300 monthly active users. However, unlike most Facebook games that say “beta” (Pet Society still has a beta tag, and that came out ages ago) wooga’s seems more like a real one. It prompts users to input an email and wait a bit for access. That in mind, this app isn’t exactly doing too bad. We look forward to seeing how it does when fully released.

Internet voice services provider Vivox has been around since 2005, but it’s been focusing on building partnerships with game developers lately. Now, the Natick, Mass. company has just closed a $6.8 million third round of funding to “accelerate its growth;” IDG Ventures led and Benchmark Capital, Canaan Partners and GrandBanks Capital participated.

Today, it says it has 20 million total users in 180 countries, with clients from Second Life creator Linden Labs to Electronic Arts (full list of companies and games, here). Its services let developers integrate voice features in a variety of environments, from directional sounds that let players hear things like footsteps behind them to virtual goods where users can buy upgrades to get new kinds of voices like a monster or an elf. It also offers audio ads. It makes money from licensing or revenue share deals from these features.

Voice is an inherently social service. Although it hasn’t been a key part of big social games, Vivox may help change that.

The company has raised $21 million total to date.

The Flash web portal, OMGPOP.com, formerly known as iminlikewithyou.com, has always been a quasi-social site. It has long had features such as friends, messaging, and virtual goods but it was never as robust as a true, blue social network. Of course, why build a new one when you have Facebook Connect? That’s just what the OMGPOP guys did, as users, new and old, can link their OMGPOP and Facebook accounts together.

With the integration, users are able to post various accomplishments to their Facebook feed as well as import their profile photos. Generally, all standard stuff when it comes to Facebook Connect integration, but what is different is that doing so earns the user a hefty amount of the site’s virtual currency, Coins.

Coins are used to purchase various items and power-ups to help players in the myriad of OMGPOP games, as well as buy virtual goods to improve your profile. It can be earned through normal play, but also through direct purchase methods and offer completions. Currently, however, an extra method of garnering some income now comes via linking your account with Facebook Connect.

Just by logging in with Connect, players earn 3000 Coins. Furthermore, should the players link up their AIM accounts, as well, they can earn another 1000. As if that were not enough, users can also become a fan of OMGPOP’s Facebook fan page to earn, yet another, 1000 Coins.

Evidently, the Facebook Connect addition is not only prudent for users socially, but in a digital sense, fiscally as well.

Startup thebizmo recently launched a new Facebook role-playing game called Hit or Not: It’s designed to give users the experience of running their own record label. The developers are hoping to match the widespread success of other Facebook apps like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, but in order to help real-life musicians.

The artists in the game are genuine, and your efforts to help them in the game could lead to online sales and more recognition among Facebook users. For the sake of all those starving musicians out there — and because of the music industry’s financial troubles — we’re especially interested to see this sort of experimentation.

Hit or Not gives Facebook users a chance to play music mogul by allowing players to rank songs in a Showcase based on how they think other players like or dislike them. The closer they get to hitting the average ranking — a sliding scale between 0 and 100 — the higher their Hit Spotter Rating climbs. The ultimate goal is to reach a rating of 90% or higher, which is fairly difficult as the score will rise and fall with each ranking.

As players listen to the songs, they can also decide to sign the artists if they feel the song will rise in popularity. This is one of the quickest ways to build your bank roll, measured in Hit or Not dollars (HN$). As songs become more popular, their value increases; players can then trade their songs or sell them, kind of like a virtual stock market for music.

For the artists, Hit or Not is a way to have their music heard. You aren’t going to have any big name bands or songs on the Top 40 come through your Showcase for a ranking; the bands and artists currently on Hit or Not don’t have contracts with major labels or songs in heavy rotation on your local radio station. But there is the potential of songs in the game giving these budding artists much-needed exposure. Players are given the option of purchasing MP3′s of tracks that they like and want to put in their permanent collection. Actually purchasing songs also translates into added clout in the game — as developers put it, money speaks louder than words.

The music Showcase runs on a “battery” that only allows players to listen to a limited number of songs before having to wait a few hours to let the meter recharge. Players can spend real dollars to add to their battery capacity, thus giving them more of an opportunity to rank songs, sign artists and move up the ranks. If players want to add to their virtual dollars quickly to sign high-profile artists to their label or buy more popular songs, they can also turn real dollars into the HN$ currency to get a leg up on the competition.

Thebizmo is still adding layers to the game, it’s aiming to mirror the world of the notoriously cut-throat music industry — actions like bribes and shady contracts. The attention to such detail can be attributed to the fact that the startup is run by a team with music industry experience that touts its company as being formed by musicians, for musicians. Artists looking to have their music be a part of the game can do so through thebizmo site.

We spotted some minor fluctuations in the MySpace charts when we covered December’s numbers. It was much of the same for the number two social gaming developer platform in January. The social network saw virtually no change in rankings except for the curious case of BitRhymes’ Cheers!! and the #23-25 spots (PhotoBuzz, Bloodlines, and Green Spot).

MySpace has been working on meaningful changes to its developer platform lately, including a forthcoming analytics tool upgrade. While not as big as Facebook, it continues to be a good place for many developers to find users, gain experience and make money. We’re interested to see how MySpace’s efforts affect the rankings from here on out.

The highlights on today’s list:

• Surprisingly, Playdom‘s top dog, Mobsters, gained very few new installs in the past month. It still sits at #1, but Zynga‘s Mafia Wars still creeps closer with a roughly a 1.2 million install difference.
• Zynga Poker sits tight at #5, gaining less installations that last time around: 87,235 compared to a previous gain of 130,507.
• Cheers!! from BitRhymes swaps spots with Zynga’s Street Racing with the two apps coming in at #11 and #12 respectively. However, and despite nearly 5 million installations, Cheers!! has once again disappeared (at least for the time being) from MySpace’s app gallery.
• Moving forward, Playdom occupies #13-16 with Kiss Me, Sorority Life, Poker Palace, and Overdrive. Each earned around 4 million, 3.5 million, 3.4 million, and 2.6 million new installs respectively.
• The tail end of the list saw the most swip-swapping as a fairly new title (only a few months old to the Top 25), PhotoBuzz from Oxylabs moves up from #24 to #23 with 1.8 million installs. Behind it, comes the role-playing app Bloodlines from Playdom (1,666,466 installs), followed by Green Spot from GoodTree (1,666,445 installs).

Note: MySpace currently just provides the number of total users of an app. We track these numbers every month to spot changes — we don’t currently have a good way to track daily or monthly active users.

Many social games saw traffic stagnate or fall in December due to the usual holiday decline, if not new Facebook platform policy changes. This past month has seen some recovery.

Zynga continues to hold the top position with FarmVille; that game has managed to continue growing in the past month to reach a whopping 75.5 million monthly active users (MAU), far more than any rival.

Meanwhile, CrowdStar has solidified its place on this list with three titles. RockYou has been having something of a resurgence from its earlier days building simple apps — although one Birthday Cards, is still a pretty simple app, Zoo World is a game and it’s been doing quite well.

Here are the highlights of this past month’s Top 25 Facebook Games:

• Zynga‘s FarmVille garnered more than 1.5 million new monthly active users (MAUs) with younger title, Café World coming in a distant third with just over 30 million MAUs (compared to FarmVille’s 75+ million).
• As with last month, Birthday Cards from RockYou has climbed up the charts,and it comes in at a decent second with over 40 million monthly actives. However, the app is mostly for virtual card giving. The part of it that’s a game is a window you can access to play Zoo World — an actual game that separately made our list today.
• Crowdstar rose to prominence last fall with virtual fish-caring game Happy Aquarium. That title comes in at #4 with over 25 million monthly active users. The developer’s other titles on the list include Happy Pets at #16 (down from #14 last month) and Happy Island at #17 (up from #25).
• Mafia Wars continues to decline in popularity, as of late — relatively speaking. It has droppped down to #7 from #6, tallying in at 24,398,295 MAUs.
• Also, Playfish‘s Pet Society and Zynga’s PetVille vie for the cute animal avatar position at #8 and #9 respectively. Currently, their MAU difference is roughly 1 million.
• Speaking of animals, zoo- keeping seems to be growing as RockYou’s Zoo World shoots from #16 to #10 with 16,206,134 monthly actives.
• Digital Facebook pillow fighting proves to be oddly popular as the new comer to last month’s list, Pillow Fight, appears yet again, but this time up four spots, coming in at #14. Like Birthday Cards, this app is not actually a game, and only gets counted as such because the developer marked it in the “Games” category on Facebook.
• Rounding out the list comes the return of Bumper Sticker at #22 (6,640519 MAUs), new Playdom title Tiki Farm at #23 (6,143,715 MAUs), Sorority Life at #24 (6,111,378 MAUs), and Fish World at #25 (6,107,978 MAUs).

There are no big surprises on this week’s AppData list of top games by growth in monthly average users (MAU), but several games are present that look set to become big successes, including a pair of newer titles from the larger developers Playfish and Playdom.

The pack is led by Birthday Cards, a persistently growing gifting app that we’ll cover over on Inside Facebook. Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Birthday Cards	41,242,773	+6,009,722	+14.57
2.	FarmVille	75,476,475	+1,120,699	+1.48
3.	Happy Island	10,612,387	+892,445	+8.41
4.	Tiki Farm	6,333,103	+801,700	+12.66
5.	FishVille	25,221,818	+705,243	+2.80
6.	Mafia Wars	24,398,295	+591,077	+2.42
7.	Gangster City	706,173	+568,997	+80.57
8.	Little Warrior	1,057,079	+530,889	+50.22
9.	Wild Ones	2,197,693	+523,510	+23.82
10.	MindJolt Games	16,109,140	+472,473	+2.93
11.	Texas HoldEm Poker	25,066,873	+464,276	+1.85
12.	My Town	1,551,376	+390,730	+25.19
13.	Country Life	8,017,883	+379,550	+4.73
14.	開心寶貝	1,158,474	+316,825	+27.35
15.	Garden World	1,469,260	+232,973	+15.86
16.	Nestle Crunch Challenge	282,214	+215,813	+76.47
17.	Café World	30,264,162	+195,691	+0.65
18.	MiniPlanet	473,165	+172,923	+36.55
19.	Sanalika	445,682	+170,589	+38.28
20.	DRIVe Around The World	547,196	+169,296	+30.94

As usual, the presence of Farmville on the list doesn’t mean much in terms of its percentage growth, not to mention the four other Zynga hits that registered: Fishville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World and Texas Hold’em Poker. Still, it seems that almost all of these games are continuing their growth, if very slowly, and Farmville did pass the significant milestone of 75 million MAU this week.

The island games, Happy Island and Tiki Farm, appeared to be slowing down when we posted last week. Nevermind; both have added more players this week.

Down in the seventh, eighth and ninth positions we have a trio of interesting games: Gangster City, Little Warrior and Wild Ones. To some degree, these are all action oriented games, at least insofar as they don’t involve nurturing something furry or scaly.

Wild Ones, a Worms-style artillery game by Playdom, has been appearing here for several weeks and hasn’t slowed its trajectory much. It does, however, face challenges in retaining players. The other two games are newer, and Gangster City is especially of note, as it’s Playfish’s challenge to Mafia Wars. The growth of Little Warrior, from an unknown developer, is also nothing to sniff at.

Glancing down, there are a couple more games that have consistently appeared on this weekly list: My Town, a sim-town game from Broken Bulb Studios, and 開心寶貝. Judging from their traffic (see My Town’s chart below) both will continue to be fixtures for some time to come.