Archives: October 2008

When Facebook launched their Facebook Vote ’08 page a few weeks ago there was no telling how successful it would be. Only a few weeks later and the tool has registered over 50,000 individuals to vote. Whether or not all those individuals actually make it to the polls on election day next week, this is a substantial effort to encourage users to vote and it appears to have worked.

I would have guessed that the majority of Facebook users 18 and older were registered to vote. Whoever these individuals end up voting for, the 18 to 24 demographic could have a huge impact on the election. Given that the 18 to 24 year old demographic is still Facebook’s largest group on the site, Facebook is in the position to potentially help swing the vote in key states.

While the tool has not actually been used to target specific users (as far as we can tell), the application was promoted heavily when it first launched and it looks like that promotion has paid off. Over 600,000 users have invited more than 300,000 of their friends to vote on election date. While these Facebook statistics don’t necessarily translate into real world action, the numbers are significant.

As the campaign draws closer to the end, Facebook is helping spread the word about the importance of participating in next week’s election. It’s great to see Facebook as well as other social networks take advantage of their influential position to drive people to action.

A new report out today from eMarkerter shows that 32 percent of online retailers have a presence on Facebook as compared to 27 percent on MySpace, making it the largest social network for online retailers. The findings suggest not only that Facebook is popular among online retailers but that social networks in general appear to be a promotional channel leveraged by a large portion of these companies.

One thing the report didn’t answer was how many retailers were polled. Additionally, one would expect online retailers to be quicker to leverage new technologies for promotional purposes. It would be interesting to know what percentage of offline retailers have a presence on Facebook or other social networks. According to a study published by Rosetta, of the top 100 online retailers, 59 had a Facebook fan page in September.

Have these new pages resulted in an increase in revenue? Unfortunately there’s no way to know as that information wasn’t provided in the study. It would have been great if this study provided more information but eMarkerter studies tend to be a bit sub-par in terms of the breadth of their findings. It will be interesting though to see how online retailer and offline retailer presence on fan pages shifts over the coming months.

GlobalGrind, the hip-hop news aggregator and community, will be announcing tomorrow integration with Facebook Connect. The service which is now available via the GlobalGrind login page imports your photo, birth date, and gender to quickly create an account. The service also lets you invite your friends to GlobalGrind using the Facebook invitation form.

Be warned though, if you have a lot of friends on Facebook, the invitation page can quickly freeze your browser temporarily as the invitation form attempts to parse your friend details. Aside from that, integration was pretty flawless and I am now a GlobalGrind/Connect user. You can proceed to “grind” articles as well as comment on them the same way you would of had you registered for the site.

I used the service to find this entertaining video of a man flinging his baby around … pretty entertaining if not slightly concerning. The site has been slowly growing in popularity slowly over the past few months and it will be interesting to see if integrating Connect will help speed things up.

As launch partners get Facebook Connect integrated, and Facebook prepares to launch all the features, including news feed integration, it will be exciting to see the impact that the service has on participating sites. For now, we’ll have to wait and see!

Global Grind/Connect Screenshot

Global Grind/Connect Screenshot 2

Global Grind/Connect Screenshot 3

This afternoon I noticed an interesting thing popup on the sidebar which was a sponsored event for the upcoming election. This appears to be a test of sponsored event ads, but this would be an amazing tool for event promoters. While Facebook is already an amazing platform for event promoters, it could get a whole lot better very soon.

This form of sponsorship shows up where gift sponsors and video sponsors currently appear. I have yet to see any other events show up in this area but I’d imagine that Facebook will be testing it out over the coming weeks and months. The potential is enormous in terms of driving people to rallies, or in this case driving people to vote. In any example you use, this is a strong call to action.

While we are not sure if this new form of advertising will be accessible through Facebook’s self-serve platform or not, we are definitely excited about this product! Facebook is a powerful tool for communication and connecting individuals and any service that embraces connecting, most definitely a valuable one. As such, this appears to be an immensely valuable advertising tool.

We’ll let you know if we hear more about this new advertising tool.

According to Mike Arrington Facebook Connect will be launching on November 30th. Facebook started rallying developers and partners around Connect just before f8 began earlier this year. There have been a number of sites already to release the service but as Arrington points out, most of them still haven’t rolled out any integration.

One other interesting tidbit that Arrington had was that Facebook will be launching a new feature called FriendLink. FriendLink enables users to pass an email address to Facebook and get back friend recommendations. This sounds interesting but I’m also wondering if Facebook will take this opportunity to promote to unregistered email addresses.

Right now there is very little information as to how this feature will be implemented but the more features that Facebook extracts for anybody to use the better. For those developers waiting to launch Facebook Connect enabled services, this is a pretty exciting time as there is one month left until launch. Will we see a timeframe push back now that an “official” date has been leaked?

We’ll have to wait and see!

Playfish, one of the leading social game developers on Facebook, has announced that they’ve raise $17 million in funding. While the company didn’t even launch it’s first game, “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” until October of last year, quickly grew to be come a leader in the social gaming space. Today, the company’s top four games have between 2.48 and 2.9 million monthly active users (as pictured below).

The company continues to find success with their fifth game, “Geo Challenge”, rapidly climbing the charts, soon to surpass 600,000 monthly active users. This is a large round of funding to take place in the middle of economic uncertainty. Accel Partners and Index Ventures are betting hard that this company is going to continue to find success, providing it more money than Social Gaming Network, which has received $15 million to day.

Zynga, the largest competitor for the company, has raised $39 million in funding so far (one round for $10 million and a follow-on round for $29 million). What is the company going to do with all this funding? My guess is that we will quickly see the company move into new platforms, such as the iPhone, while continuing a successful trend on the Facebook platform. I had the opportunity to interview Sebastien de Halleux, Chief Operating Officer for Playfish back in August.

This sounds like a great investment to us because even in poor economic times, consumers still play games. We will continue to track the growth of Playfish and other social gaming companies as this space continue to heat up.

When it was revealed last week that Facebook has no intention of supporting the Android platform, there was a ton of buzz generated in the blogosphere and I said that it was a horrible business decision by Facebook. I still stand by that position but one thing that had previously been discussed but sounded like fantasy was the idea of a Facebook phone.

While the company doesn’t necessarily have enough resources to develop the Facebook phone, partnering with an external company that wants to do much of the work makes a lot of sense. Considering that Facebook ignited the social platform wars, it wouldn’t be a far-fetched idea for the company to have a Facebook phone which is part of the mobile platform wars.

If Facebook is truly the platform for sharing and communication on the web, mobile presents a significant risk in that mobile activity could make web-based social networks practically obsolete. Well at least in theory. Anyways, even entertaining the possibility of a Facebook phone is a significant one and it’s something I previously wouldn’t have done, at least not until today.

Today I saw that 3 Mobiles, a U.K. based mobile provider, is announcing a new phone on November 13th which will “change the way that you use Facebook on your phone.” That would have been a significant statement a year ago but following the launch of Facebook for Blackberry and the Facebook for iPhone it doesn’t seem that significant.

My initial assumption is that 3 mobiles is trying to drum up some buzz about their service. Honestly, I’ve never heard of the company prior to today but then again I don’t live in the U.K. Could this company somehow have partnered with Facebook for releasing the mobile Facebook platform? I doubt it, and I have nothing to prove otherwise.

For the time being I’ll at least entertain the idea of a Facebook phone though. Since the industry is going through a substantial amount of change domestically I still have hopes for a Facebook mobile platform. Do you think there will be a Facebook phone? Is the one being advertised by 3 Mobiles going to be the “official” Facebook phone?

Facebook has been viciously attacking spam but the battle is proving to be a hard one. The most recent strategy by spammers is logging into other individuals accounts and sending instant messages to everybody on an individual’s buddy list. Just this weekend I received a few spam instant messages from users that I rarely talk to.

Spam will continue to be one of Facebook’s most important priorities as they move forward. Spam was ultimately one of the factors which drove many individuals from MySpace. I know that spam was one of the reasons I left the site. False friend requests plagued the site to the point where people’s requests page was getting flooded with false friend requests.

Then again the requests from applications when the Facebook platform first launched last year were almost as annoying for many users. Fortunately for Facebook it doesn’t appear that the site has suffered a massive outflux of users. Instead since the platform launched, the site has practically tripled in size. The last thing Facebook needs is a surge in spam though and it’s clear that spammers are taking advantage of all opportunities to get to users.

That’s why Facebook filed a lawsuit against at least one spammer back in August. Facebook is using all tactics available to combat the unrelenting spammers attacking the site. While Facebook has been relatively good at combating spam, it’s not rare for me to see a spam wall posting on my friends’ profiles. This will continue to be an issue for the company as they continue to expand.

Over the past few weeks I have spoken with a few people that are telling me whispers about Facebook potentially open sourcing their iPhone application. Then I read a post on Joe Hewitt’s blog about his experience with developing the Facebook iPhone application. It’s a great post that I highly recommend checking out. One thing that Joe touches on the issues presented by the iPhone SDK agreement. And due to that agreement Joe can’t release the whole framework.

Just yesterday Facebook announced that they have open sourced another application called Scribe. According to Facebook, “Scribe is a server for aggregating log data streamed in real time from a large number of servers. It is designed to be scalable, extensible without client-side modification, and robust to failure of the network or any specific machine. Scribe was developed at Facebook and released as open source.”

Ultimately the tool is useful for organizations that need scalability for rapidly growing networks. Regardless of the purpose of their tool, the main point on mentioning this service is that Facebook continues to make significant contributions to the open source community. One of the contributions that it appears they’d like to make is their iPhone application.

This would be extremely useful for those developers building iPhone applications as well as those developers looking to integrate Facebook features into their iPhone apps in the future. Unfortunately Apple’s restrictive policies are preventing Facebook from sharing most of their code. Hopefully this changes in the future but for now Joe Hewitt suggests that he will try to extract other components of the iPhone application for developers to check out.

Over the past few weeks there has been some debate going on about the overall impact of the new Facebook design. Scott Rafer declared the Facebook platform dead earlier this week. I had previously posted numbers suggesting that Facebook widgets were most likely dead as well.

Prior to the launch of the new design I decided that it was time to start doing some number crunching of our own at AllFacebook. How much number crunching exactly? A lot! I’ve been tracking thousands of the top applications for over two months now to track what the effects of the new design has been and the numbers are interesting.

There were a few days where my tracking got messed up so I had to backfill those days but even still the data is pretty accurate. Given our sample size of around 4000 applications, I’d say our margin of error is relatively low. Unfortunately I haven’t crunched all the data to calculate our exact margin of error but I’ll let you figure that out if you’d like on your own time!

Below, I’ve provided 3 charts that calculate the average number of monthly active users among a subset of applications. There are three sets that I analyzed for this study: the top 50 applications, the top 500 applications, and the top 1500 applications.

There is a ton of reports that we could produce based on this data, but I figured that it was more important to get out our initial findings and then produce other interesting reports in the future.

Findings of Our Study

So here’s a summary of the initial findings:

• When calculating the average number of monthly active users among the top 50 applications. The top 50 applications have gone from an average of 3,994,223 monthly active users to 3,835,430 monthly active users accounting for a 0.39 percent decrease overall.
• When calculating the top 500 applications, we found that the average monthly active users had dropped 13.4 percent from 637,807 to 552,343.
• When calculating the top 1500 applications, the numbers become much more dramatic. The average monthly active users for the top 1500 applications has dropped 15.6 percent from its peak toward the end of September.

Charts

Conclusion

The new Facebook design began rolling out on July 20th, but not until the end of September did we begin to see a decrease in application usage. Part of that has to do with the application statistics essentially being a 30 day moving average so there is a delay in monthly active changes. While the averages don’t help to explain the extreme changes that some applications have faced, it does help to paint a more general picture on the state of the Facebook platform.

Not All Applications Are Created Equal
Slide FunSpace for instance has experienced a 30 percent drop in their monthly active users since a peak in early September. Causes on the other hand has jumped 394.5 percent since the end of August. iLike, the other member of the “Great Apps” program, has grown only 15 percent since the end of August.

Total Impact Not Yet Determined
Since the Facebook redesign only became final earlier this month, it will still take a few weeks to determine what the net impact has been. Additionally, once users begin to understand how to access applications, we may start to see a growth in applications. Ultimately, it will takes weeks if not months for everything to shake out.

New Design Has Negatively Impacted the Average Application
There is no doubt that a large number of applications have been significantly damaged by the new Facebook design. Our findings that the average number of monthly active users among the top 50 applications, illustrates perfectly though that there is still room to succeed. Obviously users were confused by the new design but it doesn’t mean that they don’t want to use the applications.

Average applications will produce average results but breakthrough applications could still transform the Facebook experience.

New Design Requires New Strategies
Since not all applications have been negatively impacted, we can conclude that new strategies are required for success on the platform. Causes is the prime example of success on the new platform. While we have yet to analyze what is required to succeed under the new environment, we can definitively state that there is potential for success.

More to Come
Over the next few weeks, we will be working to provide a more in depth analysis of the state of the Facebook economy. If there is any other data that you would like us to produce, please let us know!