Facebook Applications that made it big in 2010

Amongst all the other applications, its really no surprise that Farmville still comes out the winner on Facebook with 73.6 million users. With Café world coming in a far second at 30.2 million users. Texas Holdém coming in at 8th with 23.7 million  users & Mafia Wars at 10th with 22.6 million users.

The Top 10 list adjusts a little to allow for the addition of an older application, recently added to the metrics group used to track usage each week. iHeart, which has been an extremely popular application on Facebook for some time now, jumps onto the list in the #3 spot.
The addition of iHeart bumps some regulars such as Pet Society off the list, as it continues to face stiff competition from the ever rising newer PetVille game, developed by Zynga. Interestingly though, FarmVille, Cafe World and Mafia Wars have all been experiencing user decline over the past few weeks. Mafia Wars alone has lost almost 5 million players in the last 6 weeks.

Topping the Top 10 Gainers list is Pillow Fight. It’s a time-sensitive game allowing you to pillow fight with your friends, crushes, affair, love or enemies. The winner is declared within two days if the opponent fails to hit you back.
Next is a newer game called Tiki Farm, that seems to be a cross between Happy Island and FarmVille. You get to farm on an island, grow pineapple or sugacaner to please the Tiki Spirits, and yes, even wear grass skirts!
Rounding out the top 3 gainers is an application sure to appeal to the younger crowd – Graffiti. This app allows you to draw on the photos of your friends. Could be fun!
As predicted, Dantes Inferno appears on the list as well.

Facebook tabs - Developing a Tab Internal Website

You can actually develop a mini 'tabbed' website within a Facebook fanpage tab using div ids to make content dynamic. Spent a lot of time researching this and was happy to see the final result. Although my design skills are crappy - I managed to put a few things together.

The only difference in this case I noticed between FBML and HTML (and/or JS) is that the onclick function is replaced by "clicktoshow" & the "clicktohide" attributes. Separating the static portion from the dynamic portion can be quite a tedious job when you try to incorporate image previews (which onclick expand to full view). The code gets a little too huge and the number of ids that have to be set 'to hide' increase exponentially.

All in all, I felt it was a great week for Facebook. All that left is for me to sort out my underdeveloped artistic streak - then maybe it'll be a whole new ball game

Website iframe on Facebook Fan Page Tab

I had been pondering over this issue for quite a while now, as to how can I embed my website into a facebook fan page tab. (Kinda specific isn't it).
I looked around and found a few static iframe apps on Facebook itself - but guess what?? - They are limited trials (paid versions for an iframe app???) - something so functionally simple in HTML been made so complicated on today's most visited social network was truly mind boggling to me.

So i did a little research further and found that although Facebook does not accept the iframe tag in FBML for a page tab, but instead has to be used in an app, then the app has to be added to the Facebook page (and then the tab) - a bit of php, app creation (from a techie friend, of course) and voila - it was finally possible to embed a webpage on a Facebook fan page tab.

I owe this spark to the guy who designed this page called - "Pages Design" on Facebook - he's managed to give a simply amazing look and feel to his fan page