The premise here doesn't support the hypothesis. We start out talking about Facebook apps, and it makes sense. The name of a game, when it appears on a timeline, is far more compelling than the brand names. If you're trying to sell a product, you need to get the product in front.
Here's where things start to break down. People don't look for meetups in their apps - they look for meetups online. No one looks for a "SF singles app." They don't even go to the appstore for that - they go to Google. And despite the fact that I pulled this term out of a hat, guess who's first in Google for "SF singles meetup"? Meetup.com.
The second reason this doesn't apply - meetup isn't selling a SF singles app like a company sells a game. They're selling a platform to help people organize. By putting the app name in front, they put the product in back.
Honestly I think the fragmentation of apps would be a mess, and that it would ultimately result in lower visibility, awareness, and traffic figures for meetup.com as the meetups themselves become the brand.
You cannoy simply assume that a branding strategy/architecture that worked in one case will work as well for a different product or industry. Sometimes umbrella/family branding is the way to go.
As some have mentioned, this is essentially spamming the markets with shallow copies of your apps, which is typically verboten by major app stores. What's really necessary to truly take advantage of this concept without being spammy is a better form of keyword association for apps, allowing you to associate a gift app with "birthday", "holiday", "diwali", "christmas", "hannukah", and all the other holidays and occasions I can't think of at the moment. Of course this would need some sort of check to prevent people from spamming keywords you're not really relevant to (maybe a means of downvoting one of the keywords that brought you to the app on the app's page?), but assuming you can enforce a degree of responsible usage, this would allow app makers to build out the semantic associations of what their app can provide to people. Google in particular ought to be interested in something like this, as it would allow them to further build out their sematic trees, and associate holiday gift apps with specific holiday keywords more easily, enhancing their search results and ensuring they stay ahead in the app-market game.
So, in short, spam the app stores? ;)
This makes a lot of sense. Someone should be an easy GUI to create lightweight Facebook apps like the Meetup apps the author talks about. (Maybe this exists. I've never developed for Facebook.)
I think this is a unique observation that doesn't really scale to other platforms: Facebook is a giant sea of rubbish apps, and the goal is to snatch attention from someone scrolling through a whole pile of their friends' updates. In this case it makes sense to post something as appealing and specific as possible to the timeline, to better appeal to a random passerby. App discovery on mobile is not drive-by: none of these apps will ever hit a leaderboard (splitting them up fragments the userbase), and they'll look bad in search results because of few downloads, few reviews, and a seemingly over-specific purpose.
That's not to mention the fact that Apple won't let you publish 200,000 apps from one account. This is like an article recommending that everyone become a bounty hunter because it was a good way to make money in the Old West: it takes advantage of a single market at a specific point in time. I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook starts cracking down on this sort of spam as well soon.