If you haven’t checked out out Facebook application statistics over the past few weeks, you definitely should. Sorting the leaderboard by daily active users shows that 4 of the top 30 Facebook applications are now French applications. “Que Pensent mes Amis de moi?” or “What do my friends think of me?” now ranks as the sixth most visited application based on daily active users.

For some reason our system only picked up on this application five days ago but it is clearly popular. Another French application which is extremely popular is “Qui a la plus grosse …?” or “Who has the larger …?” You can only guess what type of controversy has been created among friends with that application. Interestingly, these applications are reminiscent of applications that were successful early on for the Facebook platform.

Apparently similar applications have returned to haunt us! Seriously though, why have these applications witnessed such a surge in popularity? Well the first reason is that France’s Facebook population continues to surge. Just over the past month the country has grown over 15 percent, at around the same rate that Facebook has been growing over the past month, if not a little faster.

Second, French users have not been on Facebook as long which means many of the old “tricks” that used to work on U.S. users are working on French users. This also means that there is still a huge opportunity to create applications for international users. Do international users monetize as well? Not necessarily but Europe is one area where there is still plenty of advertising inventory.

I could look in to each application and see what strategy each app is using for their massive success but I can assume they simply copied many of the strategies implemented by other successful applications. Go take a look at our Facebook application statistics to find other fast growing applications and if you are an application developer, you may want to learn how to speak French quickly!