Using data made available by Adonomics (aggregating app install and active user figures available on Facebook), we did a comparison between app install and active user numbers from January 30, 2008 and February 23, 2008 — over this time period for the top 1589 applications from January 30 (all those with over 22,250 installed users as of that date) there was a 9.6% increase in number of installed users and a 16% drop in total daily active users. We are not fully confident in the integrity of all the figures since these numbers are gathered from Facebook by Adonomics and there do appear to be a few gaps in their reporting. Nonetheless it appears, on the whole to be a fairly good reflection of what is going on.

If the figures are correct, in three weeks the top 5 applications added 10.8 million installs but lost 2.19 million daily active users. Excel file with full data as aggregated is here: Application install barometer