The Increasingly Competitive World of Facebook
Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 2nd, 2007 3:14 PMYou spend weeks or months developing an application excited about the explosive growth that you are about to experience. You rush to launch your application and your user base stalls out at 500 users. What happened? You got your application published in a few blogs and are waiting for a massive influx of new users. Not even a Techcrunch article can get you 1,000 users. The infamously powerful Techcrunch effect doesn’t seem to exist for Facebook applications. So what do you do? That’s a great question! I’ve been spending some time exploring the most viral applications on Facebook. Often times I don’t write about them because I don’t think they are great applications. The tech illuminati seem to be expecting (myself included often times) a slow down in useless applications, while in reality one after the other, useless applications gain millions of users. If you want examples, take a look at Pimps!, Candy Store, WereWolves, Pirates and others. While these applications may not be horrendous (they had to be programmed to scale well), they aren’t exactly the best use of time. My personal rationale for all these lower end applications is that they have a dominant real estate position.
Essentially the largest portion of the land grab has ended and now the real estate moguls are leveraging their power to build other applications. The Candy Store application has gone from 7,000 to 33,000 users in the past 24 hours! This is not because the application adds a lot of value but because it was developed and promoted by those within the newly founded SocialMedia company. These guys were smart and bought up the fastest growing applications and are rapidly forming other partnership agreements with Facebook application developers to help leverage their reach. They can now charge upwards of $0.30 per user for your application. That’s some serious cash flow potential. At this point in the game, new application developers better be prepared to have a marketing budget to get their application to spread virally. Alternatively, you need an extremely powerful idea that millions of people will be quick to latch on to. In my opinion, Facebook is one of the cheapest forms of advertising out there but the cost has rapidly begun to increase. I’m starting to wonder if the world of Facebook applications are slowly becoming equal with the world of websites. What do you think?
(4.64 out of 5)
(4.22 out of 5)
August 2nd, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I totally agree with this. However, I think that slow, true growth is ultimately going to be better than the invite spamming hyper growth apps we see now, both for users and for developers.
August 2nd, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I totally agree with this. However, I think that slow, true growth is ultimately going to be better than the invite spamming hyper growth apps we see now, both for users and for developers.
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:08 pm
It also seems like apps have slowed overall. Only TopFriends has over 10m while the group of apps with 1-5m users isn’t really that large. You would think that there would be some consensus on must have apps. Finally its possible that having 5 different versions of each app is slowing the development (fun wall, advanced wall, super wall)…
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:02 pm
I think people have been, and continue to be overwhelmed by applications — and most of them are just terrible.
I decided to make an app as an educational project, and started looking for “niche” areas that weren’t the same Flash-ridden piles of useless junk.
I noticed there were several to do list applications, but they were all difficult to use. So I made “To-Do List”.
One thing I’ve been tracking is the install “bounce rate” — the number of people that actually keep it installed after trying it. So far I’m at about 70%, so I think a good number of people are finding it useful.
It should be interesting to see how it does over time.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:08 pm
It also seems like apps have slowed overall. Only TopFriends has over 10m while the group of apps with 1-5m users isn’t really that large. You would think that there would be some consensus on must have apps. Finally its possible that having 5 different versions of each app is slowing the development (fun wall, advanced wall, super wall)…
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:02 pm
I think people have been, and continue to be overwhelmed by applications — and most of them are just terrible.
I decided to make an app as an educational project, and started looking for “niche” areas that weren’t the same Flash-ridden piles of useless junk.
I noticed there were several to do list applications, but they were all difficult to use. So I made “To-Do List”.
One thing I’ve been tracking is the install “bounce rate” — the number of people that actually keep it installed after trying it. So far I’m at about 70%, so I think a good number of people are finding it useful.
It should be interesting to see how it does over time.
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Useless crap seemed to win on myspace. Not sure why it’d be a whole lot different on facebook.
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Useless crap seemed to win on myspace. Not sure why it’d be a whole lot different on facebook.