Farmville Unseated as Facebook's Top App

How could it be? Farmville spent over a year as the number one application on Facebook. But now it has been knocked off that perch. As quickly as that, the Facebook world we know has ended. A newer app known as “Phrases” has been responsible for taking down the farm simulation game that kept people busy for countless hours over its top-spot period of fifteen months.

The chart of top apps is based on how many active monthly users an app has. Farmville had previously reached its peak, at 84 million active monthly users, earlier in 2010. The new app Phrases was created by a company named Takeoff Money, a relative unknown. Phrases will allow you to post sayings, quizzes and images on your newsfeed. This app is right now on top of the apps list, with over 54 million active monthly users. Farmville has fallen to number two, with over 53 million active monthly users.

The game of Farmville has been steadily losing numbers of users since Facebook changed their notification policy this year. This was in response to non-Farmville players who were tired of seeing all the game progress notifications posted by their Farmville-playing friends.

Don't feel bad for Farmville's creator, Zyuganov, though. They still have four out of the top five apps on Facebook, including Farmville, Mafia Wars, Frontierville and Texas HoldEm Poker. Plus, their newest game, Cityville, is poised to overtake Phrases already, after users find the public beta of Cityville.

Phrases is not expected to keep the number one position on Facebook for very long. Takeoff Monkey disabled the app recently for U.S. Facebook users, with no explanation, which will cause their user count for Phrases to drop rapidly. The game grew because of the links that were attached to the posts that contained those quizzes, quotes and pictures. And Phrases did not defeat Farmville by very many users.

Inside Facebook has noted that checking active monthly users is not a perfect science. The problem with the app Phrases' count is that it takes a month to see the numbers. The day to day counts are more accurate, charted on a graph, on which you can see the more recent decline of Phrases after the company that developed the game pulled it away from U.S. users. Since that decision, which has still gone unexplained, the daily average user count for Phrases has fallen by over three million users. This count will be reflected in the next monthly data when it becomes available.