What’s a successful viral app look like? How about a six-hour drive?

Screenshot of a wall post on Hatchling’s Facebook event: “Austin Hatchlings Meet Up.”

On Monday we posted a story about Hatchlings running a charity campaign called “You Play, We Pay.” Hatchlings, which can be described as a virtual egg hunt inside of Facebook and other online apps, plans to give a total of $60,000 to three causes. In our story, Hatchlings founder Brad Dwyer told us that his aim was to extend the Hatchlings platform to build “viral good” on top of the entertainment experience they already provides.

So, what’s this word “viral?” If you’ve followed Web 2.0 jargon for some time (do people still use “Web 2.0?”), you should be familiar with it, but if you’re not, it basically means that a website, application, video, etc. can be and is easily and massively shared on the web.

With over 3.4 million users, it’s evident that Hatchlings is a viral Facebook app, spreading from one user to the next (for more stats, see our article: “Hatchlings by the numbers“). For a quick sobering comparison, however, in early January Inside Social games reported that the single largest Facebook app, Zynga‘s CityVille, had 84.2 million monthly active users.

Now take a look at the screenshot above from a Facebook event titled “Austin Hatchlings Meet Up.” According to an update from Dwyer on Hatchlings’ Facebook page, this is the “third ever Hatchlings meetup.” The woman who made the wall post is thinking about driving six hours for this meetup, but she’s not the only one. Here are some other wall posts:

Amy Lee Halbleib Fisher – as much as i would love to come, being poor and in PA kinda makes that a bit difficult LOL. how’s about a meetup in the lancaster pa area sometime?

Lisa Beth Huston – I would love to go– but too far to go. I love how Hatchlings is like a community, there is no other game like it.

Sheila Marie Dempsey – How about coming to New York, or PA, CT, ….:+

Gail Davis – when r u coming down under ??????????????

In addition to solid numbers, I’d say a six-hour drive to attend a meetup of a Facebook app is a pretty convincing measure of success. It’s also a measure of community engagement, of which Dwyer alluded to in our interview: “So far about 3,000 of our members have left their old teams representing their cities and regions to participate in the fundraiser.”

To learn more about Hatchlings’ “You Play, We Pay,” see our article: “Hatchlings launches ‘You Play, We Pay’ charity drive.”