Mobsters, Likeness, Top Friends, Super Wall, Own Your Friends, Bumper Stickers, Movies and Poker - this is just a sampling of the highest engagement applications on Facebook and MySpace. What these applications all have in common is a mass market appeal. They are general enough that just about everyone can find something cute or fun about these applications for at least a day or two. The applications measure success in installs, page views and virility. However, another classification of application, specific to much smaller audiences, is emerging as a stronger player in the application space which requires a different measurement separate than the categorical classification that application developers can choose to place themselves in.

The goal of these other applications is not monetize via CPC, CPM or CPI advertising, nor to be bought by the large application shops RockYou, Slide, Zynga or SGN. Instead, these applications exist primarily to provide a service to their users. These applications will fail when measured using the traditional methods of installs, daily active users and day over day growth. The audiences are much too small. They require a new metric to measure their success. Success within this category isn’t reaching 22%¹ of Facebook’s user base. Success for these applications is defined as increased affinity for a product, service or company. It needs to be measured and reported differently.

This might be measurable through acquisitions, loyalty, usage or retention. Using Twitter as an example, it’s certainly capable of becoming a mainstream product, but hasn’t reached mainstream adoption - at least not yet. Twitter currently reaches an estimated 2.2 million users a month². It’s regarded by some as having moved beyond the early adopters³ and easing into the early majority on the technology adoption lifecycle. The Twitter application launched May 25th along with the Facebook platform. It currently boasts 64.5K monthly users of which is hardly chart topping - in fact, it’s really quite dismal - it’s not even one of the top 500 applications. What the application does though is provide enhanced user experience by integrating status updates between the two sites.

The Twitter application is valued by Adonomics at approximately $105K. However, this number means nothing! The goal of the application isn’t to sell it or even monetize the traffic. Even the overall ranking of the application is irrelevant. A better way to measure the ROI of the application is to measure the interaction and retention. This metric that can accurately quantified by answering a series of questions.

1. Does the application impact the retention and interaction of users for Twitter?
2. Does the application increase usage of Twitter?
3. What overlap in the userbase exists between Facebook and Twitter?

Lacking quantitative data from Facebook and Twitter, you’ll have to settle for my observations.

Does the application impact the retention and interaction of users for Twitter? Yes. I suspect if we could peek into Twitter’s database, we’d see that interactions for users continue for longer periods if they’ve installed the Facebook application. Why do I think this? Read on…

Does the application increase usage of Twitter? Yes. I know from personal experience that I’ve continued using Twitter longer than I had expected to because of the integration. At times I’ve used it only as a status update tool. Sending a SMS or using a phone specific tool is easier than the mobile facebook application available for my phone. Other times I use it as a conversational tool. The main point here - I continue to use it.

What overlap in the user base exists between Facebook and Twitter? Again, this is an estimate but nearly 100%⁴ of the people I follow on Twitter have Facebook accounts. However, only about 20% of my friends on Facebook have (or use) a Twitter account. While Twitter clearly has the potential to be a mainstream tool, it doesn’t have the presence that a MySpace or Facebook does.

The Twitter application likely has positive reprecusions for Facebook as well. By integrating the status update directly from Twitter, Facebook continues to get more content contributing to the “virtuous cycle of sharing” Mark Zuckerberg spoke about at F8 ‘08. Wouldn’t this classify the application as a success? As of this writting, Twitter doesn’t have an official application for MySpace. I expect we’ll see if MySpace allows applications to update the users status.

The question remains, how can we take these difficult to obtain numbers such as audience overlap and integrate it with the more available metrics? We need a metric that holistically evaluates an application. Measuring mass alone is no longer sufficient to define success. I propose they’re measured by interactions, retention and perception. Mix into that formula monthly reach and install and we’ll be able to arrive at a value that more accurately ranks and sorts applications on the whole.

¹ Slide FunSpace reached 22.3 million Facebook users according to the monthly active user count on September 5, 2008

² Compete reports 2,218,330 visitors to Twitter.com in July of 2008.

³ Robert Scoble stated April 9, 2008, “Anyone who joins Twitter after today is not an early adopter. So, not interesting for me to follow.”

⁴ Conducted using PollDaddy and an analysis of people I follow.

This morning I decided to follow TheOnion on twitter. I love how TheOnion is leveraging twitter, effectively to reinforce their brand. Much to my surprise I received a direct message shortly there after…

i suppose we should thank u for following us, but do the gods thank man for his dutiful sacrifices? we’re watching you.

When I finished the Facebook version of Muddl, it was clear the game wasn’t sufficiently viral to draw big traffic on it’s own, it needed a little boost. Zynga was present at GSP East and talked about their game network that developers could join for free in a link exchange type format. I’d heard about it before and even looked at it for a different application I work on — I signed up to give it a whirl. Since I’m not one to put all of my eggs in one basket I also looked at the game bar from SGN as well — here’s what I found. (more…)

This week at GSP East the big names in the OpenSocial space came forward and basically gave a brief sales pitch on why they’re the platform to build on. Allen Stern has a nice synopsis of the panel. As a developer making decisions on where to focus time and efforts it seems like OpenSocial itself is really just playing catchup to Facebook. Most of the development folks I know are focused on Facebook still and are waiting for OpenSocial. The philosophical discussion aside, OpenSocial is looking stronger and stronger each day. Facebook recently open sourced their platform, but they’ve yet to announce any partners (beyond Bebo) who are adopting it. So their late foray into openness may be moot now.

2007 Facebook launched their platform. Quickly applications were built that leveraged the communication tools on the Platform and apps became viral. Virility for developers isn’t a bad thing. Virility means users, it means page views, it means eye balls, it means investment dollars. As we prepare to close Q2 in 2008 - Facebook is clamping down the communication channels open to applications. Slide has said publicly that they will stop creating “viral” apps and focus on generating good content and monetizing the massive audience they’ve amassed. Early 2008 MySpace followed suit releasing an OpenSocial platform. Their strategy was to allow no viral channels to applications at launch (although they are slowing opening the valves). This effectively crippled applications that didn’t have nice hooks.

So as I’m sitting at Graphing Social Patterns East this week, listening to speakers discussing the future of this industry it makes me wonder. Is this the year where applications that actually “do” something will succeed? What is the measure of success for these non-mass adoption applications? Will the money flow to these smaller more niche audience applications? My prediction for this year is that with the launch of applications on LinkedIn and more of the social networking platforms is that applications that provide real value beyond the “poke” type applications will succeed. The only question that remains, will the money be there to support the developers as they venture out into this brave new world?

OpenSocial, a group effort to create a widget platform spear headed by Google, has a few glitches that I’d love to see fixed. They are largely comparison items from Facebook, who has recently announced that it will open source it’s own platform. Regardless of the motivation, there are a couple of items I’d like to see ported from Facebook to OpenSocial.

1. Support for FBML like syntax: “Hold on a second! Standard HTML is the benefit of OpenSocial over Facebook” folks are probably thinking. While that’s true, without an effective way to capture and store user information for more than 24 hours (pesky terms of service documentation) developers are left querying for friends pictures etc over and over and over again. While this isn’t inherently a problem, if you wanted to display a 1,000 profile pictures for some unknown reason, you need to call the API a large number of times. Then generate the HTML and pass it to the client. This makes applications painfully slow. It’s great to store the numeric id (12345678) and be able to pass it back to the pre-client for parsing. The best examples are and . These really are very handy.
2. Support for FQL like syntax: OpenSocial does a great job of providing methods for gathering most of the information you would want from the social graph, but it’s lacking in the ability to remix the data in new and interesting ways (easily). OpenSocial requires all of the heavy lifting to be done on the client (or the application backend if their API allows it). Most clients have a reasonable limit as to how big data structures can effectively be and have the application still function. Processing on the applications infrastructure negates another advantage of OpenSocial which is requiring very little in the way of hardware to operate.

There are also some learnings here for Facebook. I’d like to see a few OpenSocial conventions ported from OpenSocial to Facebook.

1. OAuth Signature: To be fair, Facebook does provide signed requests, but it would be great if they’d use a standards based signature instead of their own homegrown version.
2. External JavaScript Libraries: Facebook’s FBJS is powerful and provides most functionality that developers need. It’s even been open sourced so it can be used outside of the Facebook universe. However, developers who’ve been working with jQuery, ProtoType or any of the other numerous javascript libraries have to start at the beginning again. Additionally, they may be missing the functionality in the FBJS library that they need.

Both platforms still have a ways to go in terms of making developers life’s easier and users application experiences more robust. I think it’s great news that Facebook is opening their platform more. It’s really more symbolic than anything, because they still ultimately control what they do or do not implement on their platform. Bebo is the only other social network using Facebook’s model and it still requires some re-writing for developers because of syntax difference and lack of some features.

Data portability has been a hot topic as of late. What I think everyone has neglected to consider is who owns which bits of data. For example, my email address is mine. I choose to give it out to friends, family, associates that I want to be able to contact me. That doesn’t, however, mean that it’s also theirs to use how they see fit.

For example, if you’re my friend and you wish to download your social graph to port it to Hi5, Ning or somewhere else, you should be able to do that. However, that doesn’t mean you can take my email, phone, physical address etc with you. What needs to be preserved is our association, not my data. This could be achieved by a public identity such as OpenId and a UUID value tied to each user - ideally the solution would be easier to create so even my mother could do it. Conversely, your data should be able to be ported to the new network without interference from Facebook, MySpace or anyone else.

What makes this discussion difficult is shared property. Consider a tagged photo on Facebook for a minute. I’ve taken the photo which includes you. To make it more complicated, let’s say you tag yourself in the photo. I still own the photograph, it’s even protected under US Copyright law should I choose to exert my rights. But you’re in it - and you want to use it as a profile picture… what to do? This type of shared relationship requires permission in my opinion. Since we’re friends, you know if I’m likely to grant you permission or not when you ask. This process could easily be automated. This could even be automated to the less vague bits of information such as contact information (email, phone, address etc).

Today marks a milestone for my Twitter usage. I tweeted my 1,000th tweet. What does that mean exactly, well, honestly not very much. However, as I scanned over the last 2-3 hours of tweets when I woke up this morning I noticed the increasing number of flame wars between thought leaders in technology frustrating. A feed of 20-30 tweets might contain 5-6 messages back and forth between folks who are in some sort of pissing contest about who’s right, wrong, cool or whatever.

It’s kind of sad.

As everyone struggles to really figure out how to effectively use Twitter it becomes hard to determine the best method for leveraging the technology effectively. I’ve been using it to keep up on industry insiders thoughts (which is probably why I get so much noise and childish banter in my feed). Others use it as initially intended, to tell folks what they’re doing and yet more for shameless self promotion.

I’d love to see more quality information from the industry visionaries who could all take a lesson from @jowyang and @guykawasaki and less banter about who’s right and who’s wrong. Guy and Jeremiah, and I’m sure many others, somehow keep above the fray and still add value to my Twitter experience.

Last Friday afternoon I wrote a MySpace application called Visitor Track. This is not a wholly original idea - nor was I the first to try it on MySpace. As of this writing there is even another application still listed in the application directory.

Before I explain how I went about going from 0 to 12,000+ users in a matter of 48 hours, I want to mention a few things.

1. It’s critical to understand that the MySpace audience clearly demonstrated a desire for more information about who’s looking (or not looking) at them.
2. Having a fantastic marketing plan will not make an application succeed no matter how cool YOU think it is, it needs to find an audience.
3. There is AMAZING growth potential in the MySpace application domain, even without notifications, invites and the viral components developers desire and users loath.

What I did was leverage the users profile well, provided a clean canvas with only what the user was expecting and was straightforward and honest in the application description. While I certainly could have leveraged advertising to promote the application, I chose not to so I could watch the growth of the application as it progressed organically.

The following chart is from Zynganomics who’ve been tracking MySpace applications since the initial launch of the platform.

As you can see, prior to the suspension of the application, growth was extremely strong.

Leverage the profile:

This is the single most important thing developers on the platform can do right now. With a general lack of viral push channels, developers need to hope that users find them. MySpace has recently started adding friend feed notifications about application installs and that has helped fuel growth through awareness within social circles.

The Profile for Visitor Track was a plain white box with two lines of text. I made the box as small as I could so it didn’t clutter the users profile with useless information. You can see what it looked like here:

The language, placement, size, color - everything - about the profile should be considered over and over and over and over again.

Name of the application:

The name of the application is very important. The largest viral channel available to applications today is the Friend Subscriptions. Basically a copy of the Facebook Newsfeed feature, this is the one place that the application will be seen by users you won’t otherwise touch.

Graphic design is over-rated:

My application about page had a poorly created icon and just a few lines of text to describe the application. I spent no time creating a fancy graphic interface - no time altering the colors of the page or install buttons with CSS and kept everything about as plain as it could be.

Compare that to the highly designed canvas pages of larger applications from widget giants like Slide and Rock You below:

Note: that the arrows facing the install buttons are animated in both cases and that neither app has more installs than Visit Tracker did.

Speed is everything:

If you aren’t tied to OAuth authentication and tight OpenSocial integration use an IFRAME - it’s less secure for you as a developer, but you ultimately control the communication between your application and your users. You’ll rely on REST requests to gather information about your users which means you’ll leverage the backend hardware more. However, what you lose in signed ajax requests and opensocial.postTo(), you make up for in speed and reliability. I’ve observed continual performance bottlenecks accessing AJAX content during peak times. While it’s reasonable to assume that this will continue to become more stable, now is the time to begin capturing audience before it’s too late.

Deliver:

Because it’s so easy to get started as an app and because the market of available users is so large, even knockoff applications can be quiet successful in terms of capturing users and market share. Consider the number of applications attempting to build on the success that applications experienced on Facebook like Honesty Box (of which I am a developer) on MySpace today (there are no less than 5 copycat applications).

It’s critical to deliver on what you told the users you would do! Below is a screenshot of the canvas (I omitted the right hand column which was advertising - a naive attempt to make money in this endeavor).

As you can see I kept it really simple. I leveraged the amazing Google Charts API for the graphs and the rest is just text. There’s gold in them hills, and a diligent miner with the appropriate tools will find it. Even this relatively little application had nearly 20K page views, which monetized effectively could yield ~$120/month or more.

I want to apologize to any MySpace users and employees who might have been offended by my application. I sincerely hope you’ll forgive my transgression against the TOS and that we can make beautiful applications together in the future (that don’t violate the TOS).

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for just over 4 months now, using it in my personal and professional life. There seems to be a large and still growing developer community building up around it churning out great applications, including one I heard about (via @purplecar on twitter of course). The application by tweetclouds.com aims to create a tag cloud (much like the one on this and many other blogs) from your tweets; you can see mine here in all it’s glory.

If you’re on twitter, follow me - I’d love to hear from folks who are experimenting with new ways of extending twitter.

Some other interesting tools include Twitter Stats, which received some coverage on TechCrunch in January.

Quite possibly my favorite is TwitterVision, a nice mashup leveraging the public tweet stream and google maps to visualize the public feed. Incidentally David Troy (the author) has also created FlickrVision, basically the same app but using photos instead.

There’s also Twitterholic a top 100 twitter user board, Twubble a great way to find people you might be interested in following (recently featured on FaceReviews), Twitterverse another cloud app but for the entire twitter universe and if your totally lost as to why anyone uses twitter, I recommend the Twitter in Plain English video by CommonCraft.

If I’m missing a way cool web based app, please let me know in the comments below. I’ll save desktop applications for another post, there certainly are plenty of those too!