+ If you are thinking of tapping into the social game industry, know that 1 In 10 Internet Users Buys Virtual Goods. According to a survey released yesterday, 12 percent of Americans said that they spent real money on virtual items in the last year. Via Information Week

+ One big news on the technology side was the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal to try to better compete against Google supremacy on the search engine market. You will find some key facts about the deal on Mashable.

+ Looking at the avatar of my friends, I say that that the “Mad Men Yourself” microsite launched Wednesday created attention for the AMC’s TV series. I am a fan of the show. People use the head shot as an avatar on Facebook or Twitter. You can also swell your body image on your iPhone or on your Facebook profile. Or if you are still into that, display the scene on your desktop.

+ One thing that I am not convinced yet that it was a worthy investment for Eight O’Clock Coffee. It is the brand that fuelled (i.e. sponsored) the microsite. AMC approached them to sponsor the Mad Men Yourself microsite. Out of curiosity, I am running a small Twtpoll at the moment to gauge if people have noticed the Eight O’Clock Coffee’s sponsorship. So far, no one answered Yes. I need more votes for a proper assessment. Voting will be open until August 1st. Vote or see the results at http://twtpoll.com/r/l4u99j

Let’s take Farm Town, a recent social game on Facebook by SlashKey.

As of today, the game has 4,778,781 monthly active users.

From information gleaned from the developer and the moderators in the forums, Farm Town’s user growth is simply astounding. The game is still in beta and cannot yet be found when searching the Facebook Application Directory.

A developer (known as Bert) said that they initially only sent 12 invitations on February 1 to friends to test the game with a few users. They went from 12 users to 3 million users in 2 months with zero marketing. Today, a bit more than 4 months later, they are nearing 5 million users.

A single MAU can be expected to generate between $ 1 and $2 per month for a successful online game. Make a quick calculation. With more than 4.5 million MAU, you can see that if Farm Town is intelligently monetized, it has the potential to generate major monthly revenues. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an acquisition of Slashkey in the near future.

The game has experienced some growing pains in managing this unexpected growth. At one point, they were adding between 1 and 2 servers a week. I tried to contact the developers to get more insights but understandably, I did not get any answer. They must still be very busy adding new servers or features!

For a quick glance at what the game is about, I suggest your read Kim’s post about Farm Town.

Excerpts

As background information, here are some excerpts of information I found in their forums at different points in time.

March 31, 2009

Just to give you some idea of what we are dealing with here is some information about the game development:

Some basic stats:

• Farm Town launched on February 1st. (we did some testing in 1/31).
• Over two million monthly active users.
• We have 550K visitors per day, and we are growing about 10-20% daily.
• The game is running on 11 servers, and we are adding 1-2 per week.

It is easy to see that some growing pains should be expected!!

April 8, 2009

From 0 to 2,453,182 monthly active users in just over two months, do you have any idea how much hardware and bandwidth growth is needed to keep up?

Originally Posted by sfppfo
when i do a search on facebook for farm town it says no application found. so i tried just farm and still Farm Town didn’t come up on the list then i tired town and still Farm Town didn’t come up on list and i was wondering why not?
•    Interesting that you should ask that question. I just learned some interesting information in the last few days and hadn’t had a chance to convey it yet…
•    Quote:
Originally Posted by Bert
Farm Town is not “public” per se. If you search for it on Facebook, you won’t find it. We haven’t published it to the application directory. You cannot install it.

The only way to install Farm Town is by following an invitation from a friend.

We needed to test how the application would perform in real life. To do this we sent it to a dozen people to test. The idea was to test with a handful of users, iron out all bugs, and then publish the application. What happened is that in 2 months, we went from 12 users to 3 million users, with 1 million users playing in a day. And we’ve been trying to slow growth since day one.

Currently our servers are processing 4,000 requests per second, and transmitting 200 MBytes per sec. To put things in perspective you would need 1300+ DSL lines to serve this much bandwidth…

April 20, 2009

3,466,004 monthly active users.

April 26, 2009

3,925,219 monthly active users.

POST UPDATE – 2009-06-09

As of today, June 9, 2009, Farm Town has 8,482,129 monthly active users. Farm Town, which is now officially in the Facebook directory, makes an appearance in the rankings as the fourth most popular game on Facebook.

POST UPDATE – 2009-10-24

Please note that we are not the makers of Farm Town. We are not related in any way to Slashkey, the creators of Farm Town and we do not know how to contact them. We just wrote about their game.