8 Hot Facebook Apps Built with PHP (and 1 Built with Rails)

According to the Facebook infographic that we published last week, Facebook applications contribute more than $15 billion in wages and benefits to the U.S. economy. Clearly, the Facebook application space is huge – and with the recent Facebook IPO, it’s poised to grow even more.

PHP has always been a popular language for writing Facebook apps – Facebook itself was originally written in PHP, after all – and at Engine Yard, we constantly keep an eye out for cool, new apps taking advantage of the PHP framework. In this blog post, I wanted to highlight several Facebook apps built with PHP that have exploded recently. And, because rails is still near and dear to our hearts, I’ve also included a great Facebook apps made with ruby on rails.

Family Tree PHP The Facebook Family Tree app boasts 270 million potential relatives, and allows you to build your family tree, add photos, and connect with and search for family members. It was developer by livefamily (formerly FamilyBuilder).

YouNews.in PHP YouNews.in aggregates web content and serves content relevant to a user’s social patterns and social networks. It focuses on the India region and in April, it exploded, growing from about 1 million monthly active users to 6 million.

Car Town PHP Cartown for Facebook was developed by Cie Games, a development shop and digital agency that specialized in custom app creation. In Car Town, users can collect and customize cars and race them against their friends.

Are You Interested? PHP Are You Interested is an online dating app for Facebook that uses the social graph to connect users with like-minded romantic partners. It is developed by SNAP Interactive, Inc., and it has been installed more than 60 million times.

Diamond Dash PHP With more than 18 million monthly active users, Diamond Dash is currently the 20th most popular Facebook app. Developed by Wooga, it’s referred to as the 60 second gem rush: a game wherein users compete with friends to click as many colored gems as possible.

eBuddy PHP eBuddy is a web-based chat aggregator that has been going strong since 2003. Millions of monthly users access eBuddy on their computers, and millions more access it on their mobile phones.

Siz.net PHP Siz.net is a Turkish video app with 5.9 million monthly active users. It’s grown hugely over the last few months and ranks as one of the top 100 Facebook applications based on monthly active users.

schoolfeed PHP schoolFeed is a classmates network that connects users with old high school buddies. It scrapes Facebook data to automatically build user profiles, and it has more than 15 million monthly active users.

Socialcam Ruby on Rails If you read TechCrunch, you’ve likely seen one of the many stories covering Socialcam, Socialcam is being dubbed the Instagram of video and it currently ranks as the number one Facebook app based on monthly active users.

If you’re at all interested in building your own Facebook app, you might want to check out the webcast we recorded recently about Building Facebook Apps in the Cloud with PHP. It’s available now on-demand.