As promised, Facebook has updated their application directory with new statistical models for determining popular applications. They now display “Active Daily Users” when determining what applications are popular. This is a big change from before when all you saw was how many users were present. Are other applications such as Appsaholic going to be forced to modify their statistical models? I believe so.

Actually, after taking a look at Appsaholic, they have now officially been forced to recreate how they measure application statistics. Ouch! I also wonder what determines an active user. As usual, Facebook has not clearly stated what determines an active user so we’ll have to wait to find out. If anyone has found any documentation about it, please be sure to let me know.

This new model is definitely an effective model. While you can still roughly calculate the total number of users an application has, the number of daily active users has suddenly become much more important. Additionally, there is no perfect method for determining the exact number of users for an application. This is a pretty significant change to the platform. It will be interesting to see how this effects application acquisitions!

Update
Facebook has stated what all the touch points are for the applications. According to their documentation, the touch points are:

• Canvas Page Views
• Link Clicks in FBML
• Mock-Ajax Form Submission
• Click-to-Play Flash

If a user interacts with any of those items they will be counted as active for the day. These new metrics are much more effective at determining user interaction.