Facebook has been continually altering the face of their website, bringing us closer to the launch of their redesign. One major change recently has been the location of the application presence, moving from the profile to tabs, the left hand navigation to the header and now to the status bar. As Facebook moves towards a more OS like experience, it made me wonder, just how many applications out there add any true value to the users beyond entertainment? This list is applications I found interesting in my survey of successful (according to Facebook) apps to be interesting. These applications are not focused on entertainment. So immediately quizes, games, poking and wall applications are out.

Note: I also did not include applications that I have worked on, you should evaluate those yourself.

Causes
This is a fantastic application for finding and spreading the word about a cause through grass roots organizing. Any non-profit in the US (and abroad) should be taking note. The application itself is simple. You create a profile of the causes you support. Support is more loosely defined that it would be by a traditional non-profit. For example, to be a member/supporter of most non-profits, you need to contribute money. However, with causes, anyone can be a supporter - significantly increasing the likelihood for adoption. Then you tell your friends (if you wish) about it. You can contribute money directly as well and Causes keeps 4.75% of the fee to cover bank costs etc. The money is handled by NetworkForGood.

Visual Bookshelf
The application is part of a suite of applications by LivingSocial including Reading Social (aka Visual Bookshelf), Tune Social, Reel Social, Dining Social, Gaming Social, and Brew Social (aka Drinking Social). The application suite provides folks with a clean interface for managing their digital library (or movie collection etc). The value here is in the sharing. LivingSocial is quickly creating a huge asset tracking system as well as allowing you to see what your friends are reading etc. Helpful conversation starters if you’ve read some of the same books etc. The app tightly integrates the Amazon affiliate engine. This application adds a nice filter to the raw Amazon dataset even if a search for a popular book returns all the editions as matches. If you like to read - I highly recommend checking out this application.

Birthday Calendar
This app isn’t all that complex and doesn’t do all that much, but it provides functionality that is just handy. It provides a simple calendar view of the next 2 months of birthdays for people you know on Facebook. You can also add birthdays of other people manually - although I have Apple’s iCal for that. The application provides ample time to send a physical card through the mail. Unlike the Facebook newsfeed notification that might let you miss someone if you take a 3 day vacation from Facebook. Developers if you’re listening - an iCal export filtered by Friend List would be handy…

Where I’ve Been
Much like the LivingSocial applications, this app allows you to keep a digital log of places you’ve visited. Furthermore, it provides a nice interface for exploring the globe. Noticably missing is a nice way to research other locations. I’d love to get a nice feed of what others who match my demographics or are in my friend list think of Ft. Lauderdale for example. The application does what it promotes well and despite heavy promotion of the Travel Channel is a good application.

Picnik
This web based photo editor aims to give you basic photo retouching tools right in the facebook experience. The app lets you correct red-eye, adjust colors, and add silly borders etc. I still prefer using a desktop application for real adjustments. However, this is really handy for tweaking the photos you’ve uploaded from your camera phone directly to Facebook. Picnik is also a free standing website and they’ve integrated the application with Flickr as well.

(Lil) Green Patch
I had a hard time adding this application to the list but I have a particular soft spot for saving the planet. At it’s heart it’s a viral gifting application. However, there’s a twist - they donate money to save the environment. They appear to have contributed via Causes to the Nature Conservancy and have contributed $54,560 so far. However, I wasn’t able to find any sort of balance sheet for them and there are a significant number of ads on their site - including a huge integration with OfferPal media. I would expect they gross at minimum $20K per month so clearly there’s a huge expense to running their business - don’t feel too good about yourself using this app.

Are YOU Interested?
I’m not one for online dating, but if I weren’t married with children, I’d probably give this application a try. The premise is simple. Rate people attractive. If they rate you attractive as well, you’re given the opportunity to connect. Quite possibly the simplest dating application around.

Is there a great non-entertainment focused application I’ve missed? Leave it in the comments and I’ll check it out.

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.

Today the MBA Gear Up application for Facebook officially launches. The application, developed for Leading Edge, provides a quick and easy survey to see if you are ready to pursue an MBA. It’s a fun 10 question quiz that provides good insight where you might be underprepared and just where to get the information you need to get prepared. If your considering an MBA, give it a try.

This interesting story about how one man was able to make a huge profit off of software that did nothing. TechCrunch humorously covered the story yesterday but it had been removed before I could even see it in the app directory. Of course, without $1,000 to buy it or an iPhone/iPod to run it on, I wasn’t going to be giving any hands on demos anyway!

Imagine how much people would pay for an application that actually did do something… the sky is the limit!

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?

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!

This week O’Reilly Media is sponsoring the Graphing Social Patterns West (GSP West) conference in sunny San Diego, CA. Many leading application developers and minds are present discussing the future of social media as we know it. What follows is an excerpt from a proposal I developed for a potential client recently. I fell it brings value to the social networking community. It serves as an introductory piece in a series of posts for traditional media who have not yet grasped social networking for lead generation.

Leveraging the users social graph has grown increasingly more difficult in the last few months as providers such as Facebook lock down their social graph. Days of early growth fueled by numerous friend invites, notifications, newsfeed and messaging components has been replaced with systems of quotas and restrictions on use. Additionally, users are now more sensitive to the behavior of applications and quickly discard the apps they deem annoying or spammy. Not yet launched platforms from MySpace and Orkut have yet to implement these types of restrictions, but they have already received a bit of blogger attention for a platform thatʼs still in development. Given a little more time, more and more folks will be complaining and something will be done.

What this means for a content provider, seeking new audience through social media, is that growth must be fueled by highly engaging content and/or functionality. That’s right, just like traditional media - you can’t provide lip service. Applications now destined for failure include vanilla RSS feeds of site content, newsletter signups, subscription ploys and 1 time survey style quizzes that put a warm fuzzy icon on your profile. The limited engagement of one to many fails. Instead, engagement of new audience must include something for the user that makes them feel good about themselves and allows them to express themselves digitally, with their friends, in a way that no other application is already doing.

Users of social networking applications have a very low attention span and applications are competing in a more and more hostile environment each day. Applications are having to diversify their offering beyond the core application to retain users and increase traffic. Applications like Free Gifts have begun virtual economies leveraging game play, ultimately designed to increase time spent within the application, and rewarding users with special virtual gift incentives.

Revenue models that seem to have some success include pay per click ads and sponsored partnerships. Realistically, very few apps are able to sustain the technology costs, let alone development costs, with Google ads alone. There’s still a huge untapped market here for those who are willing to brave it. A few specific advertising networks have grown up to fill this space and offer CPM rates roughly double Googleʼs, but they are fueled primarily by other applications and not external advertisers seeking new audience. Likely due to poor performance of advertisements on social networks at large. Applications for existing media should be considered marketing expenses and not thought of as revenue streams (at least not initially).

Competition between friends (or even beyond immediate contacts to the network in Facebook or entire user-base elsewhere) definitely does very well with the Facebook / MySpace audiences. Applications such as Likeness show this daily. Additionally, leveraging user established in a recommendation style format is also highly effective. If your considering this type of application, be aware that there is a lot of competition in this area and micro-niche audiences on Facebook or MySpace are still too small to be sustaining.

Rewards based behavior works - however - there is a very short life span for actions that force virility based on user actions - that’s called SPAM. Meeting new people based on shared interests within a network will really enhance a users adoption and ultimately interaction with the application rewarding this behavior will enhance a products utility. Rewarding the users for daily and weekly interaction with desirable rewards will push the application much further along.

So the ultimate question then, how to promote a business on Facebook and other social networks? I’ll follow up with a post on that in the near future.