27 Comments »When speaking at the Facebook developer conference today in Berlin, Scott Rafer declared 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 halved since the new site design was released. Ultimately, I think we may see an increase in traffic as users become educated on the new design but there is no doubt that developers were impacted significantly.
So what is Scott’s solution for developers looking to thrive following the shift to the new design? Leave the platform and jump on the Facebook Connect opportunity. He suggests that the benefits gained from integrating with Connect will be short term just as it was with the Facebook platform. To increase your odds of success with Facebook Connect, Rafer suggests ganging up with other Conenct applications.
If you are to heed Rafer’s advice, it is time to get back to basics and focus on off-platform activities such as search engine optimization (SEO). While it’s easy to be dramatic and have an attention receiving headline for a presentation, I’m not quite sure that Rafer’s conclusion is completely accurate. I know of numerous applications that continue to be exceptionally profitable despite the platform redesign.
I do agree however that Facebook Connect presents a great opportunity for developers. Over the past few weeks we have seen numerous beta implementations of Facebook Connect and this trend will continue. The real test of Facebook Connect will be the opportunity for viral growth. So far there have been few implementations of Facebook Connect and it is difficult to test the success of each of these applications.
Do you think that the platform is dead? How much emphasis should be placed on Facebook Connect development?
Update
I’ve posted the video of the presentation below.
I don't understand how you see Facebook Connect as an alternative for developers who are suddenly struggling under the Facebook Platform. If their apps are not being discovered by users on the Platform, those users are certainly not going to find them on a completely separate site just because there's a Connect login there.
Connect is more of an opportunity for existing sites which have so far been unable to capitalise on Facebook at all. Perhaps I've misinterpreted who you're referring to as 'developers'.
I wrote about this trend back in May: http://20bits.com/2008/05/06/the-state-of-the-f...
The Facebook Platform has been dying a slow, intentional death ever since Facebook realized it was a strategic mistake. The profile redesign was just the final nail in the coffin.
Also, it's a mistake to conflate the Platform and Connect.
The key driver behind the Platform was distribution, from top to bottom. Connect reduces the cost of acquisition, which is a part of distribution, but there's no news feed behind it.
The Facebook Platform is not dead. The new design is killing off all the crappy little apps that have no substance, which is a large number, but many of these were created in haste to take advantage of the spammy, viral nature of the platform in its early stages
Now the platform requires some quality and thoughtfulness in its applications for them to become popular and viral. It also requires some rejiggering of existing apps and widgets to take advantage of the new opportunities the platform provides but most don't want to do that.
I think as we see more apps built with these new features (e.g. The Publisher) in mind, apps will become more successful. Some old ones will never be able to surpass where they were before, others will do even better because of the new design.
sadly true.
sadly true
@Dan Lester I'm saying that investing additional resources in FB apps is a waste of time and money. economically, coding to the FB Platform was a tradeoff of growth for control. Now that theirs no growth, the tradeoff is gone and you are better of finding other social graphs to piggyback on. _except_ if I'm right and Connect provides a big growth spurt for developers.
I've never seen FB apps as anything but web sites, viewed via FB, so I think it is exactly the same group of developers. Everyone will need to re-do their product thinking for the world of having “to build a real web site,” but too bad. life's tough.
@Steve if your situation means that slow, high quality growth is right for you — proceed as you are. If you've got mouths to feed or investors to satisfy, what you are suggesting won't work.
@Jess au contraire! Connected web sites can push off-FB events into the feeds of their FB authenticated users. i missed that for a while, but it is (as you inadvertantly indicate ), exactly the point.
The reply links are white on white. Heh.
Anyhow, didn't know that. I guess it's like Version 1 of the Platform, which allowed authentication via FB, plus the better parts of Beacon.
The “boxes” tab is definitely a ghetto, though.
Sorry about the link colors … I'm working on fixing that
Obviously I'm biased, working for Google on OpenSocial, but here are my 2 cents:-)
The growth opportunity is not in Facebook Connect but in OpenSocial: there are new OpenSocial containers every month (Netlog and Friendster in september), making social applications available to new users, with a total reach of 375 million users today.
These social site's user base are located in different geographies: hi5 in South America, Orkut in Brazil and India, Friendster in Asia, Netlog in Europe, so you need to localize your app.
Or they have a different type of user base, like professional social networks Viadeo, Xing and LinkedIn: there are opportunities to build a different type of social apps in these environments.
Your best investment today as a social app developer is to port your app to OpenSocial, localize it and deploy it to all the networks that support it. Networks like hi5 and Netlog have systems in place where they will do the localization for you.
—
Patrick Chanezon
OpenSocial evangelist
The new design is not so bad, look at this a multimedia app on FaceBook :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLAkUHK1lNs
The link seems to be hidden
youtube.com/watch?v=iLAkUHK1lNs
@rafer I disagree. Viewing FB apps purely as websites on facebook is shortsighted. Applications that maximise the value prop of fb must leverage its usp, which is identity. I wrote about this some time ago (http://www.jonathannguyen.net/2008/06/future-so...). FB as an ad portal or traffic driver is really a web 1.0 mindset overlaid onto web 2.0. I say throw the paradigm out (not quite…but) and think about what we can do with the available technology.
Since I started to use Twitter I now nearly never get to login to facebook. Maybe it is just that I am so busy and that Twitter (using Twitterfox) is so in my face all the time, I do not know.
I personally think that this just a temporary setback for Facebook and that it should get up to speed again. In South Africa it is just starting out. Now only if Twitter do not take over the whole scene getting them to sign up with twitter before they know what facebook is - now then I suppose they will suffer huge traffic loss.
All I can see that they can do id to bring out a huge FireFox Plugin that stays open on their profile all the time…
Speaking from a marketing and advertising viewpoint, I don't believe Facebook is dead or dying. As long as there are subscribers interacting on the site it will continue to survive.
The big question is now that the honeymoon's over (and by that I mean the novelty of having 6000 friends and biting them all to turn them into zombies) how do we use the platform to ADD VALUE to these subscribers (READ: Make it worth their while to communicate with the brand via that platform) and in turn convert them to consumers and advocates?
For me, it's not about using the latest, greatest platform but rather making use of all of them. The wider the net is cast the better your chances of catching the fish…and if you make the holes the right size and shape, you'll get just the fish you want.
Scott, I've now seen your full presentation on the Lookery blog. I think the crucial thing you're missing is possibly also absent from Nick's original post about the decline of his Bush countdown clock. Yes, his user count dropped due to the FB changes - and as you stress, he's also failing to pick up new users.
But that is because he hasn't gone to the trouble of adapting to those changes in Facebook Platform.
Apps that want to survive need to reinvent themselves. That's a big thing to ask, and many developers will not have the resources to do so. OK, that makes the cost of building on the Platform higher than we first thought, but it does not in itself mean that new and engaging apps will find the Platform dead.
http://blog.lookery.com/2008/10/21/the-facebook...
Social Media is going under!
Facebook is for sorority girls to trade SB pics and send each other digital flowers. Good riddance.
@13 we’re effectively agreeing. i’m saying that developers should move outside of facebook using facebook’s new Connect services.
@15 Facebook is fine as you say. all we’re talking about are the third party developers who built apps on the Facebook Platform.
@16 Name one that’s making it work. I can’t. I believe that it’s not possible.
scott speaks the truth. i own a top 25 app that has avg. rating of 4+ stars. my traffic has been cut in half. f8 platform is dying, if not already dead.
The facebook platform is not dead.
It just smells funny.
Scott,
Inside Facebook has profiled Causes:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/10/22/not-all-apps-are-dead-causes-traffic-triples-in-last-30-days/
And provide an overall review of a handful of apps, saying pretty much “no change”:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2008/10/23/traffic-analysis-top-three-facebook-apps-mixed/
Again, the Bush Countdown Clock just didn’t have the resources behind it to keep up with the redesign…
Dan
[...] some debate going on about the overall impact of the new Facebook design. Scott Rafer declared the Facebook platform dead earlier this week. I had previously posted numbers suggesting that Facebook widgets were most [...]
My experience as a Facebook developer tells you the Facebook platform is becoming less attractive for application owners. For a few reasons.
First, the new profile design ; apps don’t have dedicated areas on people profiles, which is a big marketing & visibility concern. Second but not least, Facebook users can’t send more than 8 invites per day.
Globally it appears to me that Facebook owners don’t want to share their success anymore, or maybe they’re not technically able to do it, anyways, if Facebook is not dead, it’s a hard time for Facebook appications.
The platform isn’t “dying”, it’s just that most apps aren’t engaging. If an app doesn’t bring users back on a regular basis, then eventually it will die. The platform is around 18 months old, so the early apps had their fad period and generated lots of pageviews. When the fads died out, the pageviews went away.
Some apps are very engaging, especially game apps. Those may also be fads, but their lifespan has certainly been longer than most apps.
I agree with Patrick Chanezon that Open Social is a good opportunity. But in the long run, if your app died on Facebook, it will die on another social network. If its not engaging, it will die.
This must be such an old post as it is dated October. It’s amazing that October, which is only a few weeks, mths back and now this should be so outdated. In a literal sense. The apps have been handled. Facebook is far from dead! Check this out, I am about to connect this comment with my facebook acct! Pretty cool for being dead, eh?
I do think that facebook should be a little more mature. With all of the pillow fights and giving plants to save the world. Come on Now? What is up with that?
Facebook has reconnected me with so many people! I went to catholic Grade school and I am now looking at and talking to kids I went to grade school, high schools(I took a tour), college, and careers. Facebook is a great site for social networking that turns into real networking. This past month I got 2 new clients that saw me on facebook. Also, I had a career opportunity come knocking on my door. She saw me on Linked and looked me up on Facebook and emailed me! I think that since our world has changed so much with the different avenues of networking! It’s great!
If you know me in RT! Then you will know that I am a warm, loving woman. One who when I meet you, I will kiss and hug you. When I leave you, I will kiss and hug you. That is the great thing about this. But, it must be followed up with meeting in person. As one can not determine who one is just by seeing their pictures or reading their blogs. One really needs to meet people! So, get out there and knock on some doors.
Facebook is dead. To give you an idea as to how bad facebook has got, just go to the poker rooms on facebook and you see that all the middle class people that used to use the site have all vanished. instead facebook is now awash with losers, fake porno profilers, stay at home mums with kids, drunken unemployed bums red necks, trailer trash. this is what facebook has become. theres already millions of defunct profiles on facebook. facebook is finished.