Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

Social social social, there has been so much emphasis on the word and an excessive emphasis on its benefits that it used to bite me hard. Never liked anyone talking about it and now I am here, because it is important in every manner. We have seen so much revolve around the word that it will be pretty stupid for anyone to deny its importance. Now I am just dragging this one and getting into a lecture mode. Lets be specific and talk about the Social gaming.

I talked about Zynga’s Farmville in detail yesterday and how it continues to grow exponentially. And that is bound to increase as Christmas approaches and users get showered with more Christmas centric apps. What is this doing? Well there has been a marked improvement as Zynga got a boost of over 1.8 Million users everyday to crawl over 28 Million mark while, followed by Birthday Cards from RockYou, which climbed to 2.9 Million after it added another 1.7 followed by the third placed Quiz Planet which went past 1.2 Million daily users. Each of those apps has increased by over 50% but look at the drastic difference between Farmville at one and those at number two and three that is phenomenal and I am being humble here. But that isn’t my point of the debate here, given that those apps have been around for quite some time.

While each app has grown by quite a margin, but the apps for the holiday season appear to be the puller here. Christmas Cards has increased by more than 94% compared to last weekend followed by Christmas Goodies which registered an 84% and Christmas Cheer by 52%. All those numbers are bound to increase in the coming week as Christmas approaches near.

What Does This Signify?

Everything. It just shows the potential of the social networking platforms out there, especially our beloved Facebook that people continue to use despite their issues with its privacy settings or whatever. It is a Pandora’s box, the power of which is so visible to us all. Secondly, people are more than willing to spend time using these applications given that it keeps the users engaged. I bet Facebook would have still done good had it been missing these applications, etc but the platform has seen a massive boom largely due to the content that keeps users addicted.

I have been waiting to ask our readers this: what apps do they love using on Facebook and why?  The best three replies will get a chance to have their say featured on our blog!