If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed a significant decrease in reviews of Facebook applications. Why is that? Aside from being insanely busy, there has been a serious lack of great applications. In the first few months there was an insane influx of applications to review. There still is a huge influx of applications but many of them are seriously horrendous. There is no point in me reviewing a “Buffy the Vampire, Photos, Quotes and Trivia” application. Unless you are a huge Buffy fan.
As I watch people churn out applications at a grueling pace, I begin to wonder what these individual’s goals are. A quotes application can attract thousands of users (the Buffy one has over 6,000), but is that a lot? For any website, 6,000 active users is relatively significant. For a Facebook application though, many of us have the idea that we are suddenly going to have hundreds of thousands of users as soon as we launch our idea. Honestly, most won’t.
Isn’t this the same case for websites though? I’ve worked at agencies where we provide clients with websites but have no marketing plan involved. That’s the way that many of these interactive agencies work. They assume that their brand alone is going to drive significant traffic. Occasionally they are right but frequently they are wrong. So what is an acceptable level of users? I have seen national campaigns worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that include television advertising that attempts to drive users to a website. The one I saw failed miserably and the client remained unscathed as their yearly advertising budget is hundreds of millions of dollars.
What I’m trying to get at is what is this all worth? For some it is simply for branding. Others see golden opportunities to make money. What many of us can’t seem to figure is why some people are putting so much effort into these small applications. So I have a few questions that I’ve been wondering. Is the Facebook real estate really worth that much when all of your applications have under 5000 users? What do you all think the value of a Facebook application is? What do you think are the most important features of an application? Finally, what determines a successful application? I know this is a lot but they are some of the things I’ve been thinking hard about.
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for us, it's getting in touch with our users and about community and about collaboration on development. I wouldn't know what makes a successful application: i've been a very enthusiastic vampire app user, but it functions completely differently in the network than the way i use my reb me app. For me, features that strengthen community and network ties are what i desire most in an application.
Comment by Alex de Jong — August 16, 2007 @ 12:14 pm
for us, it's getting in touch with our users and about community and about collaboration on development. I wouldn't know what makes a successful application: i've been a very enthusiastic vampire app user, but it functions completely differently in the network than the way i use my reb me app. For me, features that strengthen community and network ties are what i desire most in an application.
Comment by Alex de Jong — August 16, 2007 @ 1:14 pm
i wondered the same thing about fb groups/networks. some groups have thousands of members, yet hardly any postings (same for networks).
Comment by mark — August 16, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Hey Nick, I'm Tommy, I've seen in my bloglog you've been to my site a few times, so thanks for visiting, I like your site a lot and I even run your feed on my new section.I know exactly what your saying. I was thinking about this last night, I was looking at the most uses for apps and the apps just suck IMO. One of the top apps is zombies vs vampires, I mean I understand people want to have fun, but there has to be something more usefull than that.I don't know the limits of building facebook apps, but their are some obvious apps that could be put out there that would be so much better than whats currently out there
Comment by Tommy P — August 16, 2007 @ 3:49 pm
A few thoughts… The Social OS paradigm is here to stay so working on apps and figuring out this space is in and of itself of value. Monetization is going to improve in the short term as ad networks figure out the space and, in the long term, as FB or whatever might replace it grows its user base (by a factor of 10 or more). Finally, you never know what secret sauce is going to pop, hindsight is 20|20 but who knows how close that failed app actually was to having 10million ad impressions a month which would be worth large caishe… I hope!
Comment by Paul Malin — August 16, 2007 @ 3:56 pm
Hey Nick, I'm Tommy, I've seen in my bloglog you've been to my site a few times, so thanks for visiting, I like your site a lot and I even run your feed on my new section.
I know exactly what your saying. I was thinking about this last night, I was looking at the most uses for apps and the apps just suck IMO. One of the top apps is zombies vs vampires, I mean I understand people want to have fun, but there has to be something more usefull than that.
I don't know the limits of building facebook apps, but their are some obvious apps that could be put out there that would be so much better than whats currently out there
Comment by Tommy P — August 16, 2007 @ 4:49 pm
i wondered the same thing about fb groups/networks. some groups have thousands of members, yet hardly any postings (same for networks).
Comment by mark — August 16, 2007 @ 5:41 pm
A few thoughts… The Social OS paradigm is here to stay so working on apps and figuring out this space is in and of itself of value. Monetization is going to improve in the short term as ad networks figure out the space and, in the long term, as FB or whatever might replace it grows its user base (by a factor of 10 or more). Finally, you never know what secret sauce is going to pop, hindsight is 20|20 but who knows how close that failed app actually was to having 10million ad impressions a month which would be worth large caishe… I hope!
Comment by Paul Malin — August 16, 2007 @ 7:56 pm