The Future of Widgets on Facebook: Dead
Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 30th, 2008 8:43 PMEnjoy this article? Subscribe to our RSS feed
When Facebook released their platform last year, the company generated more buzz in the Valley since Google went public. Thousands of developers flocked to their platform and now more than 40,000 applications have been built. Many of the early applications were widgets and one application in particular, Bumper Sticker, attracted over 12 million installs and was reaching more than 1.5 million active daily users at one point.
As a joke I created the Bush Countdown Clock when the platform launched and amazingly I attracted close to 50,000 users. While the application was nothing more than a simple flash badge, it helped a lot of people express themselves. Expression is not Facebook’s purpose though, sharing is. Widgets or badges that help users express their personal beliefs, ideals, and personality are now harder to find with the new design.
Thanks to the redesign all the badges which were “cluttering” the profile have been moved to a “Boxes” tab which most people don’t visit apparently. When the new profile was first rolled out, the traffic to my application actually jumped a little but oddly enough on September 11th, things took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure what happened but my guess is that a lot of the profiles started to get shifted over.
While many users still don’t like the new design (including close to 194,000 people who’ve signed a petition requesting that Facebook put back the old design), the decision to switch appears to be final. The implication is shown in the chart below which illustrates the dramatic drop in traffic. Ultimately my application has been cut by more than 60 percent.
While my application was only build as a joke some applications were attracting hundreds of thousands of daily users. My application was completely a widget though and provided practically no interactive substance. Other applications which actually provide users with a valuable experience in addition to help them share information appear to have survived the shift over to the new design.
It’s clear though that widgets have not survived the shift over and my guess is that within a matter of weeks we will see most top-performing widget applications practically disappear.
(4.64 out of 5)
(4.22 out of 5)
September 30th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Expression = sharing of the highest form
September 30th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
you are spot on……. i'm glad this is coming out more and more
Chris Cunningham
October 1st, 2008 at 9:29 am
Hey Nick, A badge by definition does not have “Active Users”. Apps now have to be actionable and post newsfeed items to get attention. So add some polls or something to it!!!
October 1st, 2008 at 11:20 am
Nick, the expression vs. sharing theme is a great one. If you pursue it in the context of comparing/contrasting FB and MySpace, people in the biz would eat it up.
October 1st, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Good Points
I think companies should start focusing on their Fan pages and on Facebook groups rather than widgets, in order to generate new and repeat users
October 1st, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I believe that
October 1st, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I don't know if it's so much sharing versus expression as communication versus expression. I have some market research stuff on this re: tweens v. teens — I'll post something when I find it.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I wrote about the very fact that an order magnitude fewer Facebook applications would achieve any sort of viral adoption. Take a look to read more about how the Facebook design will (and is) changing the way people use it…
http://tpgblog.com/2008/08/18/facebook-shows-fo...
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com
October 1st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I've been talking about self-expression versus social interaction since the FB platform launched, that was the main difference between FB and MySpace widgets. FB was always heavily skewed towards social widgets, but the latest redesign was the final nail in the coffin for self-expression widgets.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I hate to play devil's advocate, but as a Facebook User and not an app developer, I like the change because some people were “expressing” themselves to the point of being unable to even visit their page. Some of the people on my friends lists were preyed on by spammy apps and resulted in literally hundreds of apps being installed into their profile. These are not overly computer literate people (that's why the spammy tactics worked) and as a result they had no clue how to even remove some of the stuff.
I'd personally like to see something where facebook users can vote on specific apps which make it out of the boxes area, but other then that 90% of the apps were just spammy junk cluttering up profiles…
October 1st, 2008 at 2:55 pm
no surprises here. you make something harder to find, and people use it less. newsfeed and notifications are even more important now. btw, they now offer some feed integration from page activity. apparently, when i bitch, we all win!
http://baratunde.com/blog/archives/2008/09/face...
October 1st, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I would argue that widgets could start evolving a bit to serve Pages. The concept of “using” widgets would change as well. I can envision widgets designed and marketed specifically for institutions and brands to put on their Facebook Fan Pages for manipulation by visitors - but this model has less of a viral one-to-one quality and more about leveraging new features on popular pages to their fans….
October 1st, 2008 at 4:00 pm
As a users, the new look has increased my Facebook usage massively. As Facebook started getting more and more MySpacey with all the damn applications, I maybe looked at it once a week. Now I am on at least once or twice a day.
Sucks for app developers for sure, but I feel like the continued appification of Facebook's prime real estate would have eventually led to an exodus of users like me.
October 1st, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Nick, it would seem that with the combination of Connect and posting on the Feed, the hope is that Facebook will become the first page you go to on the web to see your friend's actions on the web.
October 2nd, 2008 at 3:48 am
“the company generated more buzz in the Valley since Google went public”
what a strange sentence.
October 9th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I'd like instructions on how you got the facebook profile box in your sidebar, and the “friend me” button as well. Thanks.
October 13th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Thanks for sharing
John
http://thenewsempire.com
October 20th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
[...] that Facebook platform dead. He posted statistics including one that I posted that suggests Facebook widgets are dead. Lookery’s own statistics from Quantcast suggest that their publisher traffic has been almost [...]
October 24th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
[...] the Facebook platform dead earlier this week. I had previously posted numbers suggesting that Facebook widgets were most likely dead as [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 8:55 am
I completely agree with Dave Johnshon (#10) in both seeing this as an attempt by Facebook to both a move to protect users from spammy apps and to also force app developers to develop more useful apps. They may also be trying to minimize their potential risk when (not if) app developers begin abusing the information that they’ve collected.
I like the suggestion that Facebook (or a member review committee) bless certain apps thereby allowing them to post to Profile homepages.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
good, applications are the thing that i hate most about facebook, with reams and reams of spam flooding my inbox daily as i block each new application. the new facebook is good as it streamlines the core ideas as to the platforms potential. social networking, not advertising. i wholeheartedly agree with dave gibson and dave johnson and their comments.