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.

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…)

While at GSP East, I presented on Muddl, a light fun word game that is anagram like in nature. I received lots of great feedback on the game from folks and encourage everyone to check it out.

It’s currently available on Facebook and Bebo. I’ll be finishing the port to MySpace and other OpenSocial containers soon.

The game play is very simple. After you go to the app you’re presented with some scrambled up letters. You then try to figure out what the word is. If you don’t get the word correct the system gives you a clue. If you’re still wrong you’ll get the first letter of the word revealed. After 3 tries you’ll be provided with another word. The game continues to challenge you as you play by increasing the length of the word.

Photo of Erik © James Duncan Davidson used with permission.

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.

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.

Just saw a tweet about this from SXSW conference folks. Drop.io is providing private online temporary storage to folks - and the cool part is you can add items using just about any method you can think of, email, phone, computer… you get the idea. I decided to give it a try to see what the service was like. The site is very responsive and the application is simple and easy to understand. The announcement from SXSW is that the company is working on a Facebook app to bring this very cool functionality directly into Facebook. (more…)

I’m onto my third Blackberry in the last 12 months (my second in 30 days) and I’ve put this together as a list of the applications that I constantly need to re-install as I’m getting the device back up and running. If anyone has some that should be on the radar, please let me know.

• Google Maps - The built in GPS + Google Maps = navigation!!!
• Twitterberry - Twitter on the go
• OperaMini - While the built in browser works, this gets the sites that aren’t so handheld friendly.
• Y! Go - I’m a huge fan of Flickr and use this to title, tag and upload photos.
• AT&T Blackberry Start - AT&T’s website for changing the device (without redoing all your email setup)

For anyone using their device as hard as I do, I recommend picking up a microSD card for photos and ring-tones (if your into that sort of thing.) It’s always easier to swap the card out than fight with buying and downloading them again.

Yesterday I posted about how bleak the social networking landscape was becoming on Facebook and by extension, other social networks as well. Today I want to explore what a traditional media and existing business can do to promote themselves on Facebook without assuming that a widget is the panacea to save their business. This is another excerpt from a proposal I developed and felt was worth sharing with the community at large.

Gone are the days of instant success large scale applications. Users have a plethora of options when selecting their applications. For example, Twitter has their own application - but there are more than 20 others that seek to compete against it, each leveraging the utility of Twitter in it’s own way. Success in this overly saturated market will come from the niche audiences and remixing successful sites that are not already on Facebook.

Businesses need to leverage the “page” feature more extensively on Facebook to build up their brand as well as a buzz. The “fans” of this page have indirectly offered you their email address through Facebook. While you can’t export them into your current email marketing campaign system, you can still target these folks directly using updates. You can promote products, actions and even feature partnerships. Very few companies are effectively leveraging this right now. (Red) and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama being two I’ve seen, although there are likely others.

Companies that have existing media outlets such as newsletters, brochures and websites can leverage their existing media to build the fan base within Facebook. Creating an online persona for their product or service is the first step. When users take action within the Facebook “page” they’re actions are recorded and eligible for promotion on their friends and larger network news feeds. This viral component is critical for success because their friends likely have similar interests. This indirect endorsement of your product reaches a like minded audience that is between 1 and 5,000 people each time one person becomes a fan, rates your application and so on. The implications are huge; it gets your brand in front of many many more people. MySpace is slowly copying this feature, under the name Friend Updates, from Facebook. This is a powerful tool that companies need to leverage effectively in their social networking strategy. How access to this feed of information is gated by MySpace will be interesting to watch as their platform goes live.

To show an example of this, I recently created a Blackberry Pearl “page”. With out advertisement, corporate sponsorship or endorsement by the parent company - without having any real content - it continues to attract “fans” whom I can now send messages to as I see fit! Not unlike traditional media, it’s important to respect your users, but you can see the power here. If RIM were to provide incentives on this page, they could grow this into a powerful advocating tool. Incidentally, if someone from RIM would like to take over this page, please just let me know. I’ve also noticed someone else followed suit and has created one for the Curve.

Depending on your core business, there may be an existing Facebook application that you can leverage to build your brand more completely. For example, if your business involves publishing of content, a RSS feed on your Facebook page is a no-brainer for driving traffic back to your website. In the event that building out your own widget is something you’ll likely follow through on, you’ll be able to leverage the fan base once you have an application. Spreading the word through direct communication with each and every fan of your application.

Last, but no least (truly most important) social networks are about making connections. If pursuing a widget is the correct strategy for your business, be warned that it must somehow allow self expression while allowing the user to feel they are connected and part of some larger community. You might be better served purchasing an existing widget that has some traction within the network, then building one from the ground up.