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Very well said Ben. Do you think Facebook will have to sacrifice some of its efforts to become a communication platform in order to provide more 'utility'?
Ben, great post. I think there are two separate ideas here 1: "Facebook is for kids", and 2: "Only viral apps spread". Apps that are useful in a social context (like a friend quiz) can be successful even if they are less viral. "Just for fun" isn't necessarily the opposite of useful.
I do agree it is surprising that there is 10x more writing about the "Facebook is for kids" aspect. I also agree that having a viral coefficient > 1 is the whole game. But I've come to understand "utility" on a social network of personal connections means optimizing what you do with friends.
the simple, old MOTED IRC feature can propagate selected apps: friend-biased 'app of the day'.
no reason to trust everything to the users. moderation works for communities, period.
Good analysis, but I don't think it fully explains the situation. After all, things like Hotmail and LinkedIn are utilities, but seem to have achieved widespread usage regardless.
While you point out that the rise of so many recreational apps has a tendency to crowd out utility apps, it seems like you can get around it by using the email invitation systems of Hotmail and LinkedIn.
It just seems to me that folks are in a recreational mood when they use Facebook. This may change in the future (as our perception of the Internet has changed over time).
(i'm not quite clear on whether the entire post, or just the bold italics was ben... andrew, can you clarify? i was assuming only the bolded part was ben, and the rest was yours... but the comments here seem to think the entire post was his)
i think the only thing that's surprising is that most people don't seem to think all these apps are written for fun as a way to mine/capture social graph data that can be monetized later in different ways. to me that seems incredibly obvious, but maybe i'm wrong.
to summarize:
1) the most viral apps are the ones that are a) social, and b) the most fun -- which means by definition, they're probably not very productivity-focused
2) creating these apps provides the developer(s) with access -- at least temporarily, if not permanently -- to a large amount of profile & connection data
3) once a large body of such data is gathered, it could be used for very "non-fun" productivity and/or transactional apps / features that monetize at a much higher level
in other words, give away the "fun games" to get access to profile & connection data, then use that data to monetize more powerful monetization... like for example, social commerce.
(and why is this so hard to figure out? )
ps - final observation: Facebook could very easily pump up the virality on productivity apps by making it easier for 3rd-party app news items to be discoverable in the Feed. the reasons they have not done this to date seem curious, unless you consider FB may be worried about a few very smart 3rd-parties with dominant position hijacking that behavior to drive massive adoption.
hmmm. curiouser & curiouser said alice...
Great comments - two quick responses (this is Ben):
Chris - you're entirely right that some utilities can be inherently viral, such as Hotmail and Plaxo. These are great examples of viral action apps because the use of the application inherently involves spreading it to friends. But this type of virality is rare for utilities, and the broader point remains that if they are not structured in this unique way they will never be found in Facebook, regardless of how useful they are. And that high barrier cripples the distribution of most utilities.
Dave - I think your analysis about app developers aiming for widespread distribution to capture data for the purpose of future social commerce apps is great and definitely part of their motivation (at least for Slide and RockYou). But the question is, will having a huge user install base be necessary for making successful utility-based apps since they can't organically grow much on their own? If so, this is a big problem and hugely constrains the number of potential developers for these apps.
Also, I agree that the news feed could be successfully used more aggressively to spread more utility-based apps, and that it is curious that Facebook has not done this. I think part of the reason is that are hamstrung by their need/desire to appear "fair" in their treatment of all app developers, and they can't make an easy, unbiased judgement about which apps are useful and which aren't in an automated fashion. They have taken some steps in this direction by basing the level of access to distribution channels (news feed frequency and number of daily allowable invites to an app) on user engagement with the app, but it's not clear whether the metrics they're using to differentiate "good" apps they want to promote vs. "bad" apps they is sufficiently weighted toward utility. (Assuming this is their aim, it certainly hasn't had the intended effect thus far.)
Of course, there is one more possible option: that Facebook itself doesn't think that its users want utility-based applications and that it's therefore not aggressively pushing them. An interesting possibility...
Great comments - two quick responses (this is Ben):
Chris - you're entirely right that some utilities can be inherently viral, such as Hotmail and Plaxo. These are great examples of viral action apps because the use of the application inherently involves spreading it to friends. But this type of virality is rare for utilities, and the broader point remains that if they are not structured in this unique way they will never be found in Facebook, regardless of how useful they are. And that high barrier cripples the distribution of most utilities.
Dave - I think your analysis about app developers aiming for widespread distribution to capture data for the purpose of future social commerce apps is great and definitely part of their motivation (at least for Slide and RockYou). But the question is, will having a huge user install base be necessary for making successful utility-based apps since they can't organically grow much on their own? If so, this is a big problem and hugely constrains the number of potential developers for these apps.
Also, I agree that the news feed could be successfully used more aggressively to spread more utility-based apps, and that it is curious that Facebook has not done this. I think part of the reason is that are hamstrung by their need/desire to appear "fair" in their treatment of all app developers, and they can't make an easy, unbiased judgement about which apps are useful and which aren't in an automated fashion. They have taken some steps in this direction by basing the level of access to distribution channels (news feed frequency and number of daily allowable invites to an app) on user engagement with the app, but it's not clear whether the metrics they're using to differentiate "good" apps they want to promote vs. "bad" apps they is sufficiently weighted toward utility. (Assuming this is their aim, it certainly hasn't had the intended effect thus far.)
Of course, there is one more possible option: that Facebook itself doesn't think that its users want utility-based applications and that it's therefore not aggressively pushing them. An interesting possibility...
I'm very surprised that the leading social networks have yet to be leveraged for discovery (besides iLike, which could still do more). Most of these services (Stumble/Del.icio.us, Yelp, last.fm) would rather build out their own social graphs than piggy-back on Facebook/Myspaces.
Part of me believes that truly useful apps (like those listed before) are confident in their ability to re-create a social graph and therefor, end up sitting largely outside of Facebook with only a "profile gadget" application to market themselves.
One more thought:
Adoption of utilities is slower because they generally require a bit of learning, or re-tooling one's existing habits.
I saw within an msn email received "invite your facebook friends to msn". Gee Wow, the reverse was true at the beginning but with msn floating between 4th & 5th positions on Alexa top 10, isn't it prudent for facebook (currently 8th) to change the game? What is new? Give away some of that revenue to the users and watch the #1 slot for 1 year.
Really enjoyed it, I wanted to click out and
you kept pulling me back in! Many thanks
and keep up the great work!
I'm still fairly new to all this social networking online. It's just become imperative since I own an ecommerce. I actually find MySpace more interesting than Facebook. However, that said - there are others that really make the entry and visit likened to Happy Hour like TeamSugar which is more of a young women's social network and more hip and youthful than iVillage. I think there's still major room for growth in this area overall.
I blogged about this a while back when I saw the decline on the horizon:
http://ignighter.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/its-not-i-have-a-dream-but-its-something/
Andrew and Ben do a great job of showing the mathematics behind the decline though. Great piece guys!
Great post guys, couldn't have said it better.