“FarmVille” Loses Number One Facebook App Slot to Phrases, But For How Long?

FarmVille has been unseated as the most popular application on Facebook by an application called Phrases, ending FarmVille’s long domination of Facebook’s top application charts — at least if you look at monthly active users.
In February 2010, the massively popular FarmVille game had more than 80 million monthly active users, towering not only over all other games on Facebook (), but also over all other applications of any kind. Currently, Phrases is on top with 54.4 million monthly active users, followed by FarmVille, which has 53.9 million monthly active users. However, since Phrases — a do-it-yourself quiz and trivia application — is not technically a game, FarmVille is still the most popular Facebook game.
Digging deeper into the numbers from AppData, which tracks applications on the Facebook platform, reveals that Phrases probably won’t stay on top of the monthly active user charts for long. Looking at daily active users, FarmVille is still well ahead, and Phrases has in fact been losing ground as it recently stopped serving U.S. users. With a sharp drop in daily active users in the middle of November, Phrases is likely to lose the number one spot when the monthly user data gets updated.
It’s also important to note that FarmVille is a huge time investment, while Phrases is an entirely different type of application, one that doesn’t require nearly as much activity from users.
As for the rest of the list, Texas HoldEm Poker (), FrontierVille and Mafia Wars — the third, fourth, and fifth apps respectively according to AppData — are also created by Zynga, the company behind FarmVille. Add to that Zynga’s plans to release another FarmVille-style game soon, CityVille, and we can safely say that Zynga is still the absolute king of the Facebook app platform. FarmVille’s temporary slip from the top app position won’t hurt it much, if at all.