Facebook is enjoying considerable popularity as an applications development platform.

For example, Battle Punks:

Game startup Gravity Bear is unveiling its first original game for Facebook today. Battle Punks is a “3-D social game” that will debut this holiday season.

The game is set in a variety of fantasy locations, combining in-depth game design with social networking. As such, it’s one of a new generation of Facebook games that aims to deliver a better experience than the simpler two-dimensional games such as FarmVille that dominate Facebook today. Players create avatars and enter them into combat against others in a bid to become the scrappiest fighter in a kingdom.

– Dean Takahashi @ VentureBeat

This is interesting:

“The game will debut with analytics technology from SQLstream, which measures activity in an app and will allow Gravity Bear to tweak the game to suit the tastes of users.”