Facebook Platform Hype is over. Does it matter?
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008Jesse Farmer has provided the blogosphere with an excellent article on the state of the facebook platform, after doing three months of meticulous research on developer activity and active users in newly launched applications.
He’s looked at how many developers are active in the facebook developers forum and finds that the posts per day have decreased by 51%!
Here’s his graphic on weekly postings (graph done by Jesse at 20bits.com)
The trend is pretty clear. The facebook platform is losing it’s hype status. That doesn’t mean nobody is developing new apps, it just means that not everybody is trying to get a piece of the cake anymore.
He’s also looked user activity with new applications and we see the same trend. A new application launched today in average will have 3 times less users than if it was launched 3 months ago!
Obviously the overflow of applications and the increasing limits on the virality (no I’m not the inventor of this word, people have used it before) of facebook apps as imposed by facebook trying keep users unspammed and happy are making it harder and harder to gain a large audience quickly.
Jesse also points out developers are increasingly focusing their time and energy on other platforms, where the conditions for creating a successful app might still be better. The people he’s talked to say they’re not leaving facebook as a platform, but it’s just becoming one of many.
From this we can draw the following conclusions:
a) the dream that facebook will become the new web os is dead. It was probably more created by the media than really targeted as a goal by facebook. There are still almost no useful apps out there and with so much clutter of “my drunk friends” apps it is becoming even harder to stick out as a useful app. Many people just don’t use any apps at all. This is visible now in the declining application developer activity.
b) The fact that developers are less active on the platform than a few months ago may hurt facebook’s valuation in an IPO setting. But then again, how much more are they worth than before their platform launch?
So does the end of the platform - “everybody and his auntie is developing an app” - gold rush matter?
Not really. This is probably one of the most successful marketing and PR campaigns ever created.
How many newspapers and bloggers have written about facebook, how many people even started their blog on facebook since the release of the facebook platform? (The facebook blogs were around before, I know guys…).
How many app developers have invited even more people to facebook just to get them to install their app?
Who has invested in facebook?
Think about how massively this move has brought to everyone’s attention from the biggest tech (but not only tech) corporations to journalists and finally, to new users.
If you divide the worth of the immense amount of free publicity they got by the amount of money they invested in developing the facebook platform, I’m pretty sure that’s a deal most of us would not have hesitated to open up our piggy bank for.
It was a genius move by facebook and allowed them to overtake myspace in reach (at least according to alexa, not so according to compete and quantcast)
Facebook could shut down it’s platform tomorrow and would still be worth as much as today.
