Earlier today LivingSocial, the Washington D.C. based social discovery network, launched their deal of the day product. The new tool let’s you find deals on local products and services that are listed in the LivingSocial network. The LivingSocial deals are currently limited to Washington D.C. but will be expanding over the coming weeks and months. Next on the list are New York City and Boston but there are many others in the pipeline.
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Just over a week ago I wrote that LivingSocial has become the top Facebook application. The company has continued to expand their lead and as of today have become the largest Facebook application ever based on monthly active users. Previously, Causes held the record of 26.95 million monthly active users. Today LivingSocial breached the previous record, jumping to 27.13 million monthly active users, up from approximately 20 million just over a week ago.
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We’ve been expecting LivingSocial to become the top application for a week or two now but as of today the statistic is official. With 20,009,207 monthly active users, the application has surpassed Causes who has dropped to 19,930,177 monthly active users. We haven’t been able to put our finger on the reason of the massive drop by the leading application but whatever the cause, LivingSocial has leaped to the top of the leaderboard in just a couple of weeks.
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When the Facebook platform launched two years ago there were hundreds of copycats of successful applications that popped up almost instantaneously. Two years later we are back in the same position except this time it’s big app developers stealing from each other. Flixster and iLike have literally stolen entire chunks of Living Social’s extremely popular Pick 5 application which has attracted over 14 million users in a couple of weeks.
Early on the Facebook platform was considered the wild west but it appears that not much has actually changed. Large developers publicly steal from other developers which occasionally end up in costly legal battles. This time around there’s no indication that it will end up in court but for large developers with millions of dollars of funding and cash flow, directly ripping off other companies seems like a pretty weak strategy. Then again Facebook directly rips off features of other companies, such as the “Like” feature on feed stories which was lifted from FriendFeed.
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When the new Facebook redesign rolled out a couple weeks ago, many users were confused by the new layout, some of which were threatening to leave Facebook if the issues weren’t resolved. Whether or not the users are angry, there have been a few silent winners of the new redesign: quiz applications and Living Social. Many users have complained about the non-stop quiz stories in their feeds but there is no doubt that it has driven substantial traffic to these applications.
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LivingSocial, the social discovery tool for sharing your favorite media items, has just added a couple of new features that make its user experience a little better. For starters, LivingSocial has added TV to its growing categories for media sharing and recommendations, broadening your options further than just books (which LivingSocial started out with), dining, movies, music, beer and more.
Read more on the Social Times
This was originally posted on the Social Times. We have reposted the full article below.
LivingSocial, the company know for their suite of social discovery applications made popular on Facebook, has released an iPhone application which was available tonight. We previously wrote about the company when they raised $5 million from Steve Case and D.C. based Grotech Ventures. The application integrates all of the channels currently provided by LivingSocial including books, music, film, dining, gaming, and drinking. One of the best components is that their dining application actually enables users to review from the phone!
For some reason Yelp decided not to include this functionality in their mobile edition, making it impossible for users to review on the go. One other cool feature is the ability to take photos and upload them directly to restaurants when you are visiting them. This is a pretty powerful feature. Personally, I believe that the dining, reading, and drinking components of this application will be most used as they are activities that people do while on the go.
That’s not to suggest that the other components won’t be successful but I have a feeling that these 3 channels are the most significant. This is a giant step for LivingSocial though as they strive to make social discovery a completely ubiquitous activity, accessible from anywhere. This application immediately takes advantage of the reviews provided by millions of users across social networks and LivingSocial’s destination site.
There were most definitely a few bugs when trying out the first version of their mobile application though but as most iPhone applications have the first time around. Most of the bugs stemmed from load-time issues. Additionally, I think that having people fill out an entire registration form is excessive. Perhaps there would be one option to tie the phone number to an account?
Whatever the case is, the LivingSocial application is currently one of the best social recommendation applications that I’ve seen. Given that they already have a large inventory of reviews, the application is pre-populated with valuable data. If you have an iPhone and want to have recommendations on the go, go download the LivingSocial iPhone application.
This afternoon LivingSocial published a white paper giving their lessons learned from building successful applications on the Facebook platform. The argument presented in the company’s white paper is that if developers take advantage of the profile publisher, “the recent losses in page views and engagement” resulting from the new site design “could be mitigated”.
I definitely agree and as Mark Zuckerberg emphasized at f8, Facebook is all about sharing. LivingSocial made what I consider an accurate assumption which is that users wouldn’t realize their applications had been moved to the “boxes” tab. As a result, they integrated a substantial amount of functionality into the publisher which enabled users to easily interact with the application from their own profile.
The white paper is a great overview of the various types of integration points developers should make when building for the new site design. LivingSocial has taken advantage of all the new channels and as such, they should at least continue to maintain a substantial majority of their avid user base. Another interesting case in the white paper is when both a profile owner and the user visiting a profile have an application installed.
The publisher shows information that is relevant to the relationship between those individuals. I cannot emphasize how important this is and how much value is produced by making this type of information available to users. If you are information in more of LivingSocial’s lessons from the new site design, go download their white paper. If you’d like more information about the company check out the LivingSocial website.
