FarmVille still tops Facebook apps charts

FarmVille still sits astride the top of the Facebook app charts, closely followed by the recently launched Windows Live Messenger app from Microsoft.

The latest Facebook app data comes courtesy of AppData's Facebook app top, which shows that over 16 million people are still tending their virtual FarmVille crops every day.

Perennial Facebook favourites

Other games in the top ten include perennial favourites such as Texas HoldEm Poker, FrontierVille and Café World.

Perhaps one of the biggest surprises is the massive popularity of Microsoft's instant messenger app Windows Live Messenger – which is the second most popular app in the Facebook app chart right now, with over 9 million daily active users.

This follows Microsoft's latest release of Windows Live Messenger featuring full integration of Facebook chat earlier this autumn.

Microsoft claims that only around 20 per cent of Messenger users currently have access the Facebook chat integration feature.

Facebook, meet Microsoft

Dharmesh Mehta posts more details on the growth of the Facebook-Microsoft partnership over on the Windows Live blog:

"In the last few updates, we made a number of changes across Windows Live that made it both more valuable to connect Facebook to Windows Live, and easier for you to do this.

"We're still early in the release, but to date, over 10 million people have connected their Facebook accounts with Windows Live. One thing that excites us about this is not only the scale of this adoption but the fact that it is already 6 times more than we saw in all of Wave 3 (our previous set of releases)."

You can see more details online relating to the various options for connecting Windows Live to Facebook.

"We're excited to see how this is continuing to grow as more people connect their Windows Live accounts to Facebook and as we begin to offer chat integration in more countries," adds Mehta.

"On the PC side, many device manufacturers and retailers are choosing to pre-install Windows Live Essentials on their new Windows 7 PCs – helping bring together a complete Windows experience.

"We're continuing to work with these partners to make this possible, and we expect over 100 million new consumer PCs to ship with Windows Live Essentials next year."