Mark Zuckerberg has said on a number of instances that the future of Facebook does not exist on Facebook.com. The emphasis is on Facebook as an identity platform and Facebook Connect which will continue to expand over time. If the entire platform is going to take place elsewhere on the web then it would only make sense that we begin to see Facebook Pages do the exact same thing.
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This is a guest post by Bill Grosso, the Chief Technology Officer of Twofish.
As the social application space has started to mature, more and more application developers have adopted a “metrics driven” approach to game design. Driven partially by the availability of data gathering and analysis tools, partially by the distributed nature of the internet, and partially by the quick turnaround times that are possible if you analyze customer behaviors in real-time, it seems like almost every aspect of application design has gone under the analytical knife.
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Facebook’s most recent feature announcement about the new granular publisher controls received a lot of attention for being a move against Twitter. We’ve been covering the drawn out battle between Facebook and Twitter for months now but what’s more important is the immense amount of control that Facebook is attempting to give the user. While Facebook has been criticized on numerous instances for aggressive new features that push the limits of access to our friends’ information (news feed, beacon, etc), the company is trying to hand control over to the user rather than giving them the twitter-like option of private or public.
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While there are many uses for Facebook, the most popular use of the site within applications has become games by a large margin. 7 of the top 10 non-Facebook applications based on daily active users are all games and the trend continues on down the Facebook application leaderboard. I’ve been speaking with a number of new developers who are looking to build successful applications and I keep emphasizing the importance of integrating some sort of game feature.
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First Facebook and then a number of other sites were being blocked by Iran. It isn’t exactly an atypical action by a regime who has done so before on a number of instances. This time something was different though. Twitter became the unlikely hero of a large group of individuals who were calling for a vote recount and regardless of the outcome were furthering a movement. What’s becoming increasingly clear is the widespread impact that social technology is having on the world.
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We’ve been saying for a while that Facebook’s payment platform is a huge opportunity for the company to start making serious cash but there’s one issue with that logic: the majority of users don’t have credit cards. While nobody knows the exact number of Facebook users with credit cards, the most recent estimates are that only around 30 percent of Facebook users 25 percent of internet users have access to a card. The other 75 percent either have a mobile phone, that they can pay with via Boku or Zong, or are out of luck when it comes to making an online transaction.
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Facebook is in the midst of transforming the way businesses interact with their customers and it has all been built on top of the Facebook platform. In an interview with Robert Scoble, Mark Zuckerberg only briefly mentions the Pages product and how that has been a recent focus of the company. It’s entertaining watching the video because Zuckerberg and his team of developers are in the process of developing a product which essentially duplicates the majority of the features within Ning, the product of Marc Andreesen, a fellow Facebook board member.
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The “How Well Do You Know Me?” application is now the largest Facebook application ever based on monthly active users but how much is that worth? Considering that the developers behind the application have been using aggressive ads to monetize the application, it’s worth a lot but is that a sustainable business model? For the past few weeks I’ve been repeatedly arguing that it’s not a sustainable model and unhealthy for the state of the Facebook application economy. So if these aggressive ads are not the most effective business model on the Facebook platform, what is?
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Earlier this week I published an article about the long tail of Facebook Pages, exploring the distribution of fans among over 1.2 million Pages. Today I decided that it would be a good idea to do a similar analysis of Facebook applications, the findings of which are a stark contrast to Monday’s article. One thing that’s immediately clear is that Facebook applications have an extremely steep drop off from the top applications. The most interesting statistic that I found was that over 60 percent of applications have between 1 and 100 monthly active users.
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The Facebook data team has published an interesting note about some research they’ve conducted which explores whether or not Facebook is in fact increasing the size of our networks. While Facebook has become an extremely efficient communication tool, does it help us stay in contact better with our existing contacts or is it more efficient at expanding our networks? The results are interesting. According to Facebook, “while the average Facebook user communicates with a small subset of their entire friend network, they maintain relationships with a group two times the size of this core.”
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