The top section of this week’s list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users is essentially a replay of last week. Treasure Isle, Hotel City and Family Feud remain the top three, with fairly steady gains.

Treasure Isle, the new Zynga game, picked up over seven million new players. It’s now Zynga’s fifth-biggest, and has a distance of fewer than three million players to cross to beat Mafia Wars. Another gain similar to the past week’s will put Isle in spitting distance of becoming Zynga’s top game besides FarmVille, which remains out of reach with over 80 million MAU. That’s not bad, for a game still under a month old.

Here’s the AppData top 20 list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	21,796,889	+7,386,930	+51.26
2.	Hotel City	11,658,606	+2,995,518	+34.58
3.	Family Feud	2,902,844	+972,936	+50.41
4.	Name Analyzer	1,136,818	+950,566	+510.37
5.	Zoo Paradise	4,480,205	+627,389	+16.28
6.	Tiki Resort	5,842,907	+621,080	+11.89
7.	Mall World	1,434,806	+553,600	+62.82
8.	Kingdoms of Camelot	2,086,825	+360,963	+20.91
9.	Bubble Island	6,055,854	+331,747	+5.80
10.	Garden Life	1,132,510	+291,177	+34.61
11.	Social City	12,537,726	+286,627	+2.34
12.	Fish Friends	1,008,319	+280,969	+38.63
13.	Texas HoldEm Poker	29,617,559	+262,724	+0.89
14.	Write In Pictures	523,958	+248,438	+90.17
15.	Battle Punks	308,912	+223,952	+263.60
16.	Ameba Pico	1,602,526	+217,806	+15.73
17.	My Stuff	3,743,402	+205,654	+5.81
18.	Funfari	249,384	+200,430	+409.43
19.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	379,671	+185,744	+95.78
20.	Bola	1,519,300	+184,544	+13.83

Playfish’s Hotel City slowed down a bit over the week, coming just short of three million new MAU. But it’s still poised to pass Social City, by Playdom, which was the top new game of the year before Hotel City and Treasure Isle came along. Family Feud, the game-show redux, is still gaining steadily as well.

In fourth is Name Analyzer — but you can ignore it, as it’s not really a game. Analyzer took the spot occupied last week by Zoo Paradise, which is now in fourth. All of the above games, along with Tiki Resort, have been steady gainers for two or more weeks.

With Mall World and Kingdoms of Camelot, we come to newer territory. Mall World is an incredibly girly game that was recently released. It purports to serve the estrogen market, and sure enough, a quick scan of a few hundred users reveals a 100 percent female userbase — there’s not even a way to create a male avatar. Camelot is a rather older game that recently began getting serious traction for its deep medieval strategy play.

A quick scan over the rest of the list will reveal a several more new gainers, but for a better view of them you should head back to our Friday list of emerging games, where we discuss a few in more depth.

Zynga May Limit Private-Market Employee Stock Sales – It’s no secret that Zynga has grown to tremendous numbers in terms of sheer size and success. However, CEO Mark Pincus states that the company may begin limiting its employees’ private stock sales. “I worry about someone buying my stock,” he says, “and I worry what they’re told at the point that they’re buying my stock.” Facebook’s stock has been traded in the same manner, and the company recently implemented a policy to preclude the practice, citing legal risks. Zynga stock is also popular with investors. It was just reported to be on a $450 million revenue run rate for this year. Its stock has been traded on private exchanges like SecondMarket.

Heyzap Launches Social Bar – Using only one line of code, web publishers will now be able to integrate online gaming platform Heyzap‘s latest creation, the Social Bar. Intended to create better user experiences by removing cumbersome widgets, the Social Bar will act as a minimalistic toolbar that sits at the bottom of the browser window. Of course, while it is smaller, it still includes all of the normal features, such as notifications or virtual goods, that both web publishers and players alike are familiar with.

Offerpal Launches Display Ad Network for Social Media – Monetization solutions provider for social networks and virtual worlds Offerpal Media, announced the launch of a new display advertising network this week. The new addition lets developers of social games, networks, and virtual worlds better target their specific audiences through new methods such as videos, branded goods, and offers. Furthermore, the new display advertising, in addition to Offerpal’s prior services, enables developers to monetize 100% of their traffic, all while making use of the company’s existing optimization engine and compliance processes (as they apply to relevant social platforms).

PETA Fights Mafia Wars Update- Earlier this week, the long-popular social RPG, Mafia Wars added an entire new category to character arsenals. In addition to weapons, armor, and vehicles, they will now get deadly animals. To name a few, pit bulls, lions, tigers, and other deadly creatures will be part of the new upgrade. Unfortunately… Zynga CEO, Mark Pincus received a letter from PETA attempting to get the developer to cancel the new update.

Apparently, using a picture of a pit bull in a text-based RPG about mafias can lead to real-world abuse: “Depicting ‘man’s best friend’ as a fighting machine can encourage the wrong type of people—those with no heart and no understanding of a dog’s needs—to treat these wonderful animals as inanimate objects,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “If Mark Pincus—who named his company after his own beloved dog, Zinga—can’t portray dogs as loyal and loving members of the family, we’d rather he left them out of the game altogether.”

Just a thought, but hasn’t the game been depicting violence, theft, extortion, and a laundry list of other crimes against other human beings for the past few years? So far, we haven’t seen any players start up an actual crime syndicate either, at least that they didn’t have running already.

FarmVille Going Mobile? – In another Zynga-related story, FarmVille will be spreading to the iPhone,  iPad and Android, soon. Superogatory spotted some rather interesting Zynga domain registrations including Farmvilleandroid.com, Farmvilleipad.com, Farmvilleiphone.com, and Farmvillesms.com. Obviously, these assumptions play off the existing stand-alone site of Farmville.com. These aren’t the most elegant domains, though, so maybe the company is just trying to preclude squatters?

PlayStation Home and Xbox Live Users Get New Virtual Goods - Looks like users for both the Sony and Microsoft consoles are getting some new goodies this week. For PlayStation Home users, Final Fantasy XIII avatar items, costumes, and virtual spaces have finally come to North America. All have been available in Japan since last year, according to Kotaku, but now Western fans can virtually cosplay as Lighting or Snow with the best of them.

As for Xbox Live users, they’re getting a taste of Street Fighter IV. Now, fans of the classic fighting game will be able to dress up as their favorite Capcom combatants, starting with Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile, and Ibuki.

News Corp. Acquires Irata Labs – In the past, Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer for News Corp. has noted that online games have been a missing part of the company’s online presence. Well, to remedy the issue, the company has acquired Irata Labs, the developer behind the Twitter-based game, Spymaster. The three-person developer will not be directly used for either News Corp.’s MySpace network, nor game review site, IGN. According to the Los Angeles Times, Irata is “expected to work with those divisions whenever it makes sense, said a person familiar with the matter.”

History Channel Indirectly Improves Foursquare – Location-based game Foursquare — now with over one million users – has always been an interesting app, but one of its features is that whenever you are in an area where another user has left a “Tip,” you’ll get a notification to read it. Well, the History Channel has begun to make use of this mechanic by leaving tips around historic areas within the United States. Since it’s the History Channel, the tips consist of an interesting blurb about whatever historic happening occurred at your current location should a tip have been left by them.

Linden Lab Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Virtual Goods – In the past year there have been a growing number of court cases across the globe reinforcing the tangible value of virtual goods. The most recent however, is a class action lawsuit being raised against Liden Lab regarding apparent misrepresentations of the value and ownership of virtual goods and currency. The plaintiffs include Carl Evans, Donald Spencer, Valerie Spencer, and Cindy Carter – all Second Life users. Their suit notes their complaint as, basically, a failure to “define the rights of the purchasers of virtual property in Second Life, monetary damages, and injunctive relief on behalf of Plaintiffs, and others similarly situated.”

Based on the full write up from Massively, Linden Lab had repeatedly noted how virtual items and land were owned by the users, not the company. And Linden Dollars, the game’s virtual currency, was no less or more valid than any other. But Linden Lab as been… “quietly” changing its tune on this matter as far as its Terms of Service go, and strategically inserting terms such as “limited licenses” into the documentation in an attempt to make itself the owner of all things in the virtual world, according to the report. This appears to alter users’ title “without consideration, the consumer’s knowledge or consent.”

Facebook is sending the clearest message yet that it intends to implement its own virtual currency, Credits, in a way that could be mandatory. This confirms months of speculation we’ve been hearing from developers. Because Facebook takes a 30% fee on Credits purchases, the decision could negatively impact the virtual goods revenue streams of some developers now — at least in the short term. If Facebook’s plan works like it intends, spending will eventually increase and developers will benefit.

At its f8 developer conference this week, company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that “‘there’s just going to be one currency that people use’ on all apps.” Later that day, Facebook’s Deb Liu was presenting about Facebook’s Credits plans, and she was asked if Facebook would continue to allow people to use third-party virtual currency services like Social Gold. She replied: “It’s still too early to tell, Credits is still in beta.”

Together with Zuckerberg’s statement, that sounds like it could be simply “no.” Another possibility is that third party virtual currency services can continue to exist, but will just be much less used than Credits, at least partially due to incentives Facebook will give to developers who use Credits – like free marketing.

To be clear, Facebook is also looking to work with third party payment companies for Credits. Liu said that these can include anyone from mobile payment providers to game cards to bank payment systems to reward cards, and it plans to get “100 to 200″ of them as options for purchasing Credits. The company already works with Zong for mobile payments and PayPal for web payments, and accepts credit cards directly. It partnered with Peanut Labs (via RockYou) and Trialpay last week to begin testing advertising offers that can be taken in exchange for Credits, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it work with more companies there.

We assume there will still be opportunities for other forms of virtual currencies, as most social games rely on dual currencies. Typically, one currency can be earned by actions in the game while the other has to be bought. There are many variations, this system allows some users to advance through hard work, while still incentivizing others to make purchases. It helps keep virtual economy inflation down by allowing developers to weigh the earnable currency more cheaply against the purchasable one. Even though many users might be cranking through games for free, buying currency can save them time and allow them to access otherwise difficult to obtain virtual goods.

What Facebook wants to do is handle the currency that involves real money. This way, it can take a 30% cut of all revenue coming through the system. The company has consistently framed this move as being about helping developers. Liu presented a few reasons why: Facebook can directly ensure the safety of the payment process, it can provide the currency at a scale where many users will have this currency than game or developer-specific ones, it can use its own brand and interface to promote the currency in ways others can’t.

What’s less clear is how Facebook plans to implement Credits as the one currency that people use on apps. We heard as early as November that the company was meeting with large developers and talking about ways they might make Credits mandatory; and, those conversations have continued through earlier this year. Credits now appears as in option in many of the largest social games, including Zynga’s FarmVille. CrowdStar has even been using Credits exclusively since last January.

Finally, there’s been a lot of speculation about Credits becoming not just a virtual currency but a payment wallet like PayPal. Credits as a virtual currency could be a “Trojan horse” to help the company go in that direction, as Dave McClure framed it at our Inside Social Apps conference earlier this week.

Salty sea spray, high seas, pirates, epic naval battles. What’s not to like about adventure in the 15th century? It certainly was an interesting time for mariners, back when “monsters” lurked the oceans, and it makes for a fantastic premise for a game — as Chinese developer HiThere has discovered with its launch of a complex Civilization-like app, Age of Ocean, on Facebook.

To be fair, the game is merely connected to the social network through a simple splash screen type of portal that sends you to the game’s stand alone site, using your Facebook credintials to seamlessly log you into the world. The game is a text-based massively multiplayer and strategy  title that tasks users with the creation of the ultimate fleet of traders, merchants, battleships, and so on. In this game, users select an avatar and specialty that improves your character’s abilities as far as trade, command, or seamanship go. From here, you are granted a free dock by your king, emperor, or whomever is in charge of the land you choose as your starting point.

These lands range from the tranquil shores of Nippon, to the cold beaches of Sweden. Each is represented by beautiful digital paintings of the region. In fact, all the artwork is fantastic, but it is a shame that it is all merely static. Aesthetics aside, players don’t have time to swoon too long, as they are immediately prompted by their first quest.

Quests are the primary means of progressing in the game; at least early on. Step by step Age of Oceans attempts to teach you how to play the game. Step, by step, by step, by step…. Yeah, there is a tremendous amount of complexity to this title.

There are four major sections of the game: The port, dock, base, and map. The latter two deal with social elements such as guilds and groups and traveling from port to port respectively. The former two, however, is where the bulk of game play takes place. Within each of these, there are nine more menus.

At the docks, you can upgrade “structures” (the menu buttons, essentially) to have more options such as building more ships at the shipyard, storing goods at the warehouse, recruiting navigators at the bar. This is just to name a few. Moreover, you can only upgrade one area at a time, which, as time goes on, will take upwards of a couple hours. Don’t worry, though, as even though this prevents other buildings from being constructed, there’s still plenty more to do.

If players go to the port, then there are nine more menus such as the tavern, market, bank, and city hall. Within each of these there are even more services and menus… starting to see the picture?

Essentially, the game is trying to recreate as realistic a naval experience as possible. Players have to distribute gold to hire sailors at the tavern, allot amounts naval construction at the waterfront, eventually manage multiple fleets, buy and sell goods within different ports‘ markets, and so on. It is unbelievably cumbersome, and no one but the most hardcore, of hardcore MMO players is going to last very long.

To be fair, however, once someone does learn everything, Age of Oceans does make for a fantastic business type of strategy game. It is rather fun to venture out to sea, attempting to find the greatest treasures and goods you can to make a profit. At the same time, with the threat of competition, pirates, and the like, there is a sense of risk too once you get going. It gets more interesting as you uncover actual equipment to improve your character’s skills and abilities, such as trading (which is very complicated when you start getting multiple “navigators” to run multiple fleets, who can also be equipped).

Unfortunately, the game just throws everything at the player at once. Granted, the quest system is much better than other titles of this ilk, as it really does go step by step. However, there is just so much that it just gets far too overwhelming, even with other players chatting and trying to help. That, coupled with the fact that there is no real hook early on (other than some attractively drawn sailor women on the Facebook page) and most users will stray away and give up before they really get into anything that is fun to them.

Complexity is fine. It just needs to be fed to a player slowly. Make them use features more than once before dumping more on them. Let them have fun with them first.

As if the game weren’t complicated enough, it does, also, have a few direct social elements as well. Most of it involves grouping with other players within the world to form alliances (guilds) or various purposes, be they for trade, protection, or conquest. Beyond this, there are plenty other classic social elements as well including leaderboard rankings based on multitude of criteria such as wealth, fleet size, places you’ve explored, and so on. Furthermore, the game even comes with mail systems and, while not exclusive to social games, a nice in-game store full of virtual goods costing the buyable virtual currency, White Gold. Anything beyond this that makes more direct use of Facebook Connect or any other social capabilities of the network is going to require a few more days of painful sifting through this app’s 9,000 features and game mechanics.

In the end, Age of Ocean is a pretty cool game if you get the hang of everything. Its just that most people will not, or will not want to give it that much of a chance. It is simply far to complicated for even the average “gamer,” let alone the average Facebook user – who, for the record, often does not consider themselves a “gamer” at all. There is one very important rule to game design: “Easy to learn. Difficult to master.” Unfortunately, Age of Ocean is simply just difficult to learn.

Currently, Age of Ocean garners around 75,000 monthly active users.

Independently-produced games are well represented on this week’s AppData list of the fastest-gaining Facebook games still under a million monthly active users. You’ll just need to look past the first three, which don’t count: Name Analyzer miscategorized itself as a game, Fish Friends is backed by Playdom, and ¡Teclas Machucadas!, a app about banging on your keyboard, isn’t particularly notable.

The indie list starts, then, with Car Madness, a game that has been around for a while but didn’t start to pick up players until recently. It’s leading the pack with 187,783 new players:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Name Analyzer	559,557	+432,916	+341.85
2.	Fish Friends	934,240	+428,760	+84.82
3.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	331,613	+276,567	+502.43
4.	Car Madness	721,577	+187,783	+35.18
5.	Funfari	174,752	+174,743	+1,941,588.89
6.	Battle Punks	206,542	+135,986	+192.73
7.	Evony	329,882	+127,222	+62.78
8.	Write In Pictures	380,779	+122,056	+47.18
9.	WPT Texas Hold ‘Em Poker	198,697	+113,127	+132.20
10.	Football Mania	118,219	+106,397	+899.99
11.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	110,523	+103,691	+1,517.73
12.	My Tribe	417,551	+103,255	+32.85
13.	Hızlı Yaz	349,664	+99,746	+39.91
14.	Daily Tarot Cards	361,093	+97,076	+36.77
15.	RockFREE	435,849	+94,758	+27.78
16.	Lords Online	188,333	+86,241	+84.47
17.	Bingo Island 2	348,527	+83,747	+31.63
18.	Top Gun	355,374	+82,589	+30.28
19.	DoubleDown Casino Blackjack	229,869	+74,681	+48.12
20.	Motorcycle Madness	410,945	+72,994	+21.60

A few more interesting picks: Battle Punks encourages players to create personalized avatars to fight it out in a fantasy world of, what else, punks. The game, by Gravity Bear, has significantly better graphics than most of what you’ll see on Facebook. That’s because Phil Shenk, a former lead designer for Diablo II, led development. We reviewed the game in early March, before it began growing.

Evony is a strategy game that made its name on the web — and became infamous for its racy ads, when it was still called Civony. For now, it’s the closest thing to Civilization on Facebook. ( Fupa Games ), a few places down, is yet another game publisher like MindJolt — we’ve been seeing a lot more of these pop up lately, especially since the big acquisition of MindJolt.

Slow and steady wins the race for My Tribe, coming in right under Fupa at number 12. This island civilization game from Big Fish has been around since early March, but stayed small for several weeks before beginning to grow. When we asked the company why, they said they have not added on any more advertising or promotion — players simply noticed the game’s deeper gameplayay and started trickling in.

Top Gainers This Week – Games

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Name Analyzer	559,557	+432,916	+341.85
2.	Fish Friends	934,240	+428,760	+84.82
3.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	331,613	+276,567	+502.43
4.	Car Madness	721,577	+187,783	+35.18
5.	Funfari	174,752	+174,743	+1,941,588.89
6.	Battle Punks	206,542	+135,986	+192.73
7.	Evony	329,882	+127,222	+62.78
8.	Write In Pictures	380,779	+122,056	+47.18
9.	WPT Texas Hold ‘Em Poker	198,697	+113,127	+132.20
10.	Football Mania	118,219	+106,397	+899.99
11.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	110,523	+103,691	+1,517.73
12.	My Tribe	417,551	+103,255	+32.85
13.	Hızlı Yaz	349,664	+99,746	+39.91
14.	Daily Tarot Cards	361,093	+97,076	+36.77
15.	RockFREE	435,849	+94,758	+27.78

Virtual spaces on Facebook have become a standard, to say the least, when it comes to social gaming. Similar to the massive influx of mafia-style role playing titles over a year ago, the now formulaic virtual space titles that appear attempt to sate different palettes of users. Be they farming, aquariums, islands, or whatever they all use the basic rules of buy, grow, sell, decorate. Using these same rules a new virtual space joins the fray: Birdland.

While a recent focus has been on safaris and preserves when it comes to animal husbandry, this application takes things back to the simpler concepts from the virtual aquarium boom. The only difference is they’re birds, not fish. To that end, the objective for players is to care for and grow, care for, and sell domesticated birds.

The actual care of your virtual pets is nothing terribly difficult. Users place a bird feeder, fill it up, and as the critters get hungry, they’ll automatically feed from it until it is empty. Beyond this the only other thing to worry about is keeping the cage clean on a daily basis, and keeping your birds happy by “playing” with them.

As odd as that might sound, playing with your birds really only consists of poking them with the hand tool. It’s nothing extravagant, but it is moderately amusing to chase them around the cage with it. Moreover, it does give you a small amount of experience and coin (along with feeding, cleaning, and selling), which is, expectantly, the gating mechanisms preventing users from buying the best birds and decorations right away.

Regarding the decorations, they are fairly typical of your average home aviary, as it were. This includes, random objects such as scarecrows, dangly, leafy things, ladders and the all mighty stick. As a matter of fact, as odd as it might sound, the sticks are actually the most important, because think about it, that’s what birds perch on. To that end, these vary from dull brown, well, sticks to icicles, to Arabic carpet looking deals. Furthermore, the more you have, the more your pets will actually move about as they almost always tend to hang out on them.

As for the birds themselves, they all look pretty good and animation-wise, very fluidly resemble the mannerisms of their species. Unfortunately, that selection of species is only limited to domestic birds, with the most extravagant being the macaw. Other than these guys, there are parakeets, canaries, cockatiels, and so on, but considering this is a game, it wouldn’t be out of the question to get a bit more extravagant. What about a flamingo? Or maybe a hawk? Maybe even an extinct species like the dodo?

Moving to social features, Birdland doesn’t really do anything very new out there. Everything appears to be your average set of mechanics which include leaderboards, gifting, and visiting your friends’ cages. Nothing we haven’t seen before. However, one interesting element is how the game almost guilts the player into publishing to their feed.

Most everyone is probably familiar with the mechanic where a screen pops up saying “you found such and such, and it needs a home.” From here, the player posts it for a friend to adopt, and that’s the end of it for a while. However, many people still say “no.” Well, in the case of Birdland, there’s a tiny little guy named Dinky who needs to be rescued and your options are to either publish and save him or “Let Dinky Die.” Coupled with the animations of him crying and shivering in the cold… see, now we feel bad.

To be honest, there isn’t really anything bad about Birdland. As far as the game quality goes, it’s pretty good at face value. That said, the app doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table. It doesn’t push any boundaries and just sort of plays it safe. It settles for average and what has done and worked before. Of course, if you like birds more than fish or safaris, than this might be a great virtual space for you.

Already, the game has been slowly growing over the last 10 or so days, and is currently at just below 240,000 monthly active users.

The term “role-playing game” tends to get thrown around a lot when classifying many games. Typically, the average person will classify anything with quests and a story as one. However, in its purest form, the RPG literally has users taking on the role of someone or something they are not. Unfortunately, they rarely incorporate all the aspects of being that someone or something. Well, Playdom seeks to rectify that qualm, at least to some degree with its latest title, Big City Life.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, yes, this is another Facebook RPG. Right now, many people are probably thinking something along the lines of “another mafia-style game,” but they would be only half right. Playdom actually takes all of the familiar elements of your standard RPG, stuffs them into a cannon and fires them onto the social network, using them in new ways.

You see, the objective is to get by in the “the big city,” but as people who live there know, it can be hard. You have jobs, friends, travel, fashion, and all those other things that make life worth living. Actually, that’s a lot like anywhere else.

The game is broken up into three major sections: Play, Work, and Style. Play is going to be the most familiar to Facebook users, as this is your quest (activity) section. All the standards apply: Do an activity, repeat until you’re a “master,” earn experience, money, and random rewards, and buy items needed to actually start them. Of course, guns, swords, and militias aren’t exactly commonplace in metropolitan areas, so if your activity is to work out at the gym, a pair of sneakers will suffice.

Now, this is where the game starts to get interesting. Before doing an activity, you must select a friend to do it with. The game gets you going with a non-player character called Emma (who is the tutorial NPC), but for more, you’ll have to invite your real friends. Doing an activity with them will increase how close a friend they become. Basically, they will start as a “New Friend” and the more you do, the more they will level up, until they become the maximum, “Best Friend.” This becomes extremely important later on when it’s time to use the Work section.

Obviously playing in downtown isn’t going to earn a whole lot of spending money, so like any budding individual in a place like, say, New York, you need a job. Players can start down one of four tracks: Science, Medicine, Entertainment, and Creative. Each group starts the user off as an intern, and they must do X amount of work to unlock better jobs. As an example, a Creative Intern will be able to start unlocking the Apprentice (craftsmanship) and the Blogger (writing). Unfortunately, these are the only two trees – in fact, all categories only have two trees – available at this time. More options on the tress will slowly become available by both doing random tasks under your current job title and having X amount of friends at Y level.

Once the player has met the requirements of the new, upgraded job, they can start doing tasks pertinent to that career move and even earn bonus such as “5% experience increase for Drinking events.”

As for the tasks themselves, these will earn a significantly larger amount of income than the different friend activities. Based on the level of your job, better tasks can be assigned for better money. Initially, only four can be scheduled at a time (though more unlock as you level up), and they each take a period of time to complete. Of course, do actually do them, you need to allocate enough stat points (earned every time you level up), which include Smarts, Charm, and Fitness.

The other three statistics are Energy, Health, and Stamina. The former is your typical gate to limiting how many activities a player can do during a single session, while the latter two are involved in a feature called “Run-Ins.” This appears to be your typical social feature involving other player versus player, but unfortunately, you have to unlock it, and we have yet to do so.

Of course, what’s all of this without a little style. Since players aren’t investing into weaponry or illicit arsenals, their “gear,” as it were, is some stylish clothing. To that end, players are granted a simple looking paper doll-type avatar in which they can invest a wide variety of fashionable apparel that will grant added bonuses to their character. Hmm, fashionable and functional. That’s rare.

A few other elements of Big City Life worth mentioning are that the game actually does have a story mode that players can run through. Granted, it’s not some epic adventure, but it’s still nice to have. Moreover, players get to see, on their profile, all the gear, rides, clothing, and other “stuff” they’ve acquired while playing. The profile also has stats on everything you’ve completed, and friends can even drop comments as they see fit.

As it stands, this new Playdom app only has three areas of activities to work with: Downtown, Uptown, and a Warehouse. However, based on the map, there are plenty more coming (seven, to be exact). Thankfully, the three existing ones should be more than enough to provide decent longevity for even the most dedicated players.

Overall, Big City Life is an excellently made RPG. It does nothing so drastically different as to scare away your average user, but it still feels distinct. That in mind, however, it is unlikely to appeal to as wide an audience as something like Mobsters, and all of the social management with friends and the “drama,” so-to-speak, that comes with anything involving the “big city,” doesn’t interest everyone. Consider it a Facebook game of Sex in the City, and that’s probably a good guesstimate of the audience that will be attracted to this app. Of course… that’s a pretty hefty demographic anyway, and with the game as well built as it is, it probably won’t make a single bit of difference in the long run. Perhaps this will capture people’s attention the way another city-living game, The Sims, did earlier this decade.

Treasure Isle and FarmVille, respectively the newest and most popular of Zynga’s games, top this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook games by daily active users. But right off, you can disregard FarmVille; its DAU has actually decreased slightly this month, along with Café World and Mafia Wars, both of which also appear below.

On the other hand, Treasure Isle’s gains are very real. And as the game prepares to break into Zynga’s top five hits, it’s finally pulling in enough traffic to push Zynga back into positive growth territory for the first time in a few months. If you haven’t checked the game out yet, check out our review from its launch in early April.

Here’s the full AppData list of 20 gainers:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	7,166,630	+2,783,169	+63.49
2.	FarmVille	29,344,187	+2,145,163	+7.89
3.	Family Feud	728,799	+314,140	+75.76
4.	Social City	2,928,313	+299,292	+11.38
5.	Café World	7,941,782	+294,876	+3.86
6.	Hotel City	2,932,326	+293,829	+11.14
7.	Country Life	3,013,934	+279,287	+10.21
8.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,791,894	+243,716	+9.56
9.	Garden Life	267,432	+178,260	+199.91
10.	Mall World	297,763	+166,291	+126.48
11.	Tiki Resort	1,088,916	+148,844	+15.83
12.	Mafia Wars	6,069,199	+111,689	+1.87
13.	Farm Town	2,139,586	+109,232	+5.38
14.	Kingdoms of Camelot	385,819	+78,685	+25.62
15.	Bola	292,658	+76,324	+35.28
16.	Name Analyzer	66,966	+60,988	+1,020.21
17.	Sorority Life	790,085	+49,430	+6.67
18.	Bubble Island	1,015,839	+40,706	+4.17
19.	FARKLE	615,054	+39,254	+6.82
20.	GooBox – Jeux Gratuits	377,821	+38,422	+11.32

Family Feud shows no signs of slackening growth. After it is Social City, the newish Playdom city building game that’s now that developer’s most popular on Facebook. Social City plateaued a few weeks back, but is showing signs of life again, with a few hundred thousand new monthly active users this week (new MAU often temporarily push up the DAU stats).

Hotel City, by Playfish, is still growing quickly, but the rate has slowed enough that its DAU as a percentage of MAU is dropping toward the standard 20 percent range most games have.

Many of the remaining games on the list haven’t made real gains, so skip down a few places to Garden Life and Mall World. Both are newer games by independent developers that are doing quite well; we review Mall World, an interesting girl-centric shopping game, here.

Finally, take note of Kingdoms of Camelot. This medieval take on Mafia Wars has done fairly well since its launch last November. But its growth is really picking up lately, possibly because Watercooler, the developer, has been running ads for the game on Facebook.

How large does the userbase of any consumer platform need to be before it can produce huge successes? For the “Idea to Successful Business” panelists at today’s f8 Facebook conference, who included Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital, the iPhone isn’t there yet.

“The iPhone doesn’t have a large enough network effect with only 50 million users,” said Cohler toward the end of the panel. “What’ particularly exciting is not only the innovative things Apple is doing, but the potential of things like the Android platform.”

Cohler’s examples of successful platforms included Facebook, with over 400 million users, and the internet itself after the 1990s, when Americans with broadband became the majority. Those two are among the few platforms that have produced the kind of huge business hits that venture capitalists are interested in –- like Google, which hit its stride with the spread of broadband, or Zynga (founder Mark Pincus also sat on the panel).

So what’s wrong with the iPhone? Pincus had two complaints that have kept Zynga off the iPhone: insufficient communication channels between users, and the slow pace of submitting and updating iPhone apps.

But Apple could potentially correct those problems (it’s already working on user communications with Game Center). Cohler, on the other hand, had deeper criticisms. Apple, he says, is in the business of selling pricey hardware, which supports the existing mobile model of signing up user for pricey contracts –- an inhibiting factor to growth.

Not so with Google. “The interesting thing about Android is that Google has no interest in hardware or software sales,” Cohler said. “Insofar as Google can find a way to profitably subsidize the sale of those devices, we could see a world in which hundreds of millions of people have 3G connected devices much faster.”

The only panelist who really seemed to appreciate the iPhone was Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp –- and that’s no surprise, since Yelp’s audience of urbanites is almost perfectly matched to the iPhone’s userbase. Yelp also has a successful website, making its mobile side a bonus instead of the centerpiece.

There was definitely no lack of admiration for the iPhone — see our Inside Facebook coverage of the mobile panel for more. But it was clear that nobody is yet certain how the mobile market will develop, or whether Apple will remain the smartphone leader in years to come.

Facebook has launched what it calls the Open Graph, a set of features that further integrates the service with the rest of the web. We’re in the middle of covering the launch today at the company’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.

We’ll be looking at how this launch will affect social gaming — but not in this post. For now, be sure to check out  our ongoing coverage over on Inside Facebook. Here are our stories up to this point:

Facebook Searching For Ways to Break Into Mobile Apps

New Facebook Activity Stream Plugin Brings Filtered Stream to Any Website

With the Open Graph Protocol, Any URL Can Be Treated Just Like a Facebook Page

Facebook Recommendations Plugin to Make Website Content Socially Relevant

Facebook Announces “App2User” Liquidity Program for Merchants to Convert Rewards Points into Credits

Facebook: We Want to Integrate 200 Credits Payment Options Worldwide

Facebook Announces Open Graph API and 5 New Social Plugins at f8

Facebook Removing 24 Hour Caching Policy on User Data for Developers

Live-Blogging Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference: The Open Graph Launches

Facebook Expanding Facebook Connect With New “Like Plugin” for Websites Today at f8