Slashkey\u2019s Farm Town has been the runaway hit on Facebook, the current number one application and game on the social networking site. The torrid growth started shortly after its February 2009 launch, reaching over 4.5 million daily active users as of today, which I believe is a record number for any game application on Facebook.<\/p>\n
While Slashkey\u2019s rise to the top has been impressive, we\u2019re also seeing unprecedented growth from competitor Zynga\u2019s own Farm Simulation game, Farmville, which has already topped 3 million daily active users since it\u2019s June 23rd launch, landing it in the #5 spot according to Developer Analytics.<\/p>\n
While Zynga was able to cross-sell from other games like Mafia Wars (Slashkey doesn\u2019t have any other Facebook applications), they also seem to be better at engaging users, seeing more Facebook status updates from the Farmville users than Slaskey is getting from Farm Town users.<\/p>\n
To try to quantify the level of engagement by the users of each application, I used Facebook Lexicon data from June 29th (there is a lag so no more recent data is available) and the Facebook Lexicon Activity Pixel Index \u2122 (or FLAPI) that measures the number of pixels from the x-axis and to give you a number you can use to benchmark competing brands when using Facebook Lexicon graphs (see other posts using FLAPI<\/a>).<\/p>\n
So while not as impressive as