Windows Phone 8 sales likely to have a very merry Christmas, Facebook app usage indicates

Not that it is a tall order to beat the WP7 market share numbers, but, if mobile Facebook logins are any indication, Windows Phone 8 is doing much better this year.

For the months of October and November alone, 657,000 monthly active users have accessed Facebook through the dedicated Windows Phone 8 app. Compare that to the less than 150,000 Windows Phone 7 monthly active users registered in the October-November timeframe last year, and there's a drift to be caught, no matter that these are just the Facebook app numbers.

Of course, WP8 wasn't even launched until the very end of October, and its flagship Lumia 920 and HTC 8X Windows Phones not until a week or two later, so the overall Q4 results are likely to see an even more significant boost in comparison with the last quarter of 2011.

If WP8 devices manage to hit the 10 million sold threshold this quarter, the platform is likely to receive much more love from developers, as this is the magic number for the app writing efforts to be considered viable by the larger coding shops. Steve Ballmer already mentioned that they are seeing four times the WP7 numbers with WP8 devices, and those sold 2.8 million in Q4 last year, so the 10 million number is certainly achievable this holiday season.