Hey, did you hear? Facebook launched its IPO today. It’s pretty big news. What’s that? You’re too busy playing Facebook games to care? You should care because the IPO will most assuredly have an effect on the Facebook app ecosystem that you love so much.
Putting aside the whole app-IPO relationship thing for another time, let’s look at the top apps on Facebook at the moment the IPO went live. They really have nothing to do with each other at the moment, but these apps will be soon be tied to Facebook’s IPO whether they life it or not.
Inside Facebook took a data snapshot from their AppData service to give us a clear view of which apps are on top in this post-IPO world. The results are a mix of both surprising and not so surprising. The surprise is that Microsoft is sitting at number one in the daily active users list. It could be because Facebook and Microsoft are pals now, or that people really like being able to Facebook chat with their friends who may be on Windows Live Messenger or vice versa.
The rest of the top five are games with Draw Something taking the number two spot followed by the usual suspects like Texas HoldEm Poker and Words with Friends. The top 10 gets a more varied, but still mostly games. Besides HTC Sense being at number six for some reason, Yahoo and Spotify fill out the rest sitting at nine and 10 respectively.
The list of monthly active users are a completely different game with most of the top 10 being populated by social apps instead of games. According to Inside Facebook, this is due to the more apps taking advantage of Open Graph. As various Developer Spotlights have said, Open Graph is the key to more traffic referrals from Facebook. That is obviously reflected here with Socialcam and the Yahoo Social Bar taking up the top two spots.
There are still a few games in the MAU list like Draw Something and Texas HoldEm Poker, but there’s other big players like Viddy, Bing and Microsoft all in the top 10. It just goes to show you that regular social apps have much larger growth over longer periods of times. Games on the other hand have great days, but not necessarily great months.
It will be interesting to watch apps and games over the next few days as Facebook enters into this bold new territory. I don’t know if we’ll see an immediate effect on apps, but the IPO is going to have an effect one way or the other.
