Application analytics provider AppData announced the launch of its proprietary iOS application and developer revenue estimates. Metrics are provided by week, month, and year-to-date for the top-grossing applications and developers on iOS.
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Facebook users most likely can’t go one day without seeing a someecard pop up in their News Feeds. People love them. Brands love them. They’re funny, snarky, honest — and ubiquitous throughout Facebook. Someecards Co-Founder and CEO Duncan Mitchell told AllFacebook that the site sees somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million visits per month from the social network. But how did it all get started?
Facebook has a sizable share of the games market, but it wants more. Most of the people who pay for games on Facebook are casual gamers, with titles such as King.com’s Candy Crush Saga at the forefront. But as Sean Ryan (pictured), Facebook’s director of games partnerships, discussed at the Game Developers Conference Tuesday in San Francisco, the company wants to become a bigger player in the games market through more action and console-like games.
Namco, maker of Pac-Man S and other games, announced that it is retiring its Facebook titles, sister site Inside Social Games reported Tuesday. The games will still be playable until March 19, at which point they’ll go offline. Inside Social Games noted that Namco’s Facebook games have not been popular, likely leading to their demise.
Facebook has not been hesitant to cut off data to applications that don’t share back, as Vine and Yandex discovered recently. Now it has blocked a photo app — Vintage Camera — with filters similar to Facebook’s Instagram, claiming that the app has received overwhelming negative feedback. But developer Presselite said negative feedback has been rare, and it feels that Facebook’s ownership of Instagram influenced its decision.
It appears that Facebook decided on a way to avoid negative stories about Instagram user data, such as a report late last month by the New York Post about the photo-sharing application’s sinking numbers: Now, Instagram user data are not available at all.
After mass confusion over Instagram’s updated terms of use, several users took to Facebook and Twitter to express their outrage over the company supposedly selling photographs. But how many people actually stopped using the application? A report in the New York Post dubiously claimed that Instagram has lost one-quarter of its users, but the math used in the story is a little fuzzy.
One of the hottest Facebook applications may have just made photos boring. Comic creation community Bitstrips, which recently launched its Facebook app, is growing rapidly. Bitstrips allows users to create fun, engaging comics starring themselves and their friends. On Dec. 8, Bitstrips had just 10,000 monthly active users — now more than 110,000 people and counting are animating themselves.
Many popular Facebook games are like fireworks: They rise and explode, then disappear. SongPop, recently named Facebook’s top game of 2012, relies on more than pyrotechnics to please users. Mathieu Nouzareth, CEO of SongPop developer FreshPlanet, told AllFacebook that the game has stayed popular simply because people have always and will always love music.
The Avengers didn’t just slay the competition at the box office — they were quite successful on Facebook, too. Facebook highlighted the game Avengers Alliance (developed by Playdom) on the site’s developers blog, praising the game’s ability to implement quickly and its use of open graph technology.
