Every software developer these days seems to be working on a Facebook app, but relatively few get any traction. Tim O’Reilly reports that of the more than 5,000 Facebook apps available today, only 84 account for nearly 90 percent of all the usage. Of those, only about half boast more than 100,000 active users, and only three have more than one million active users. For instance, Top Friends has 2.8 million active users, FunWall has 1.9 million, and Super Wall has 1.1 million. Then it drops off to 500,000 by the No. 10 app (Likeness), and to 270,000 by the time you get to No. 20 (Scrabulous). Now, some of these apps may have become popular by notification spam or other questionable means, but that’s another story.
Below are the top 20 apps as of October 5, measured by number of active users (For a complete spreadsheet of all top 200 apps that O’Reilly Media prepared for me with all the data, download this file:top_200_2007-10-05.xls):
Facebook Application
1. Top Friends (Slide)
2. FunWall (Slide)
3. Super Wall (RockYou!)
4. SuperPoke! (Slide)
5. Video (Facebook)
6. X Me (RockYou!)
7. iLike
8. Movies
9. Graffiti
10. Likeness (RockYou!)
11. My Questions (Slide)
12. Quizzes
13. Mobile (Facebook)
14. Free Gifts
15. Booze Mail
16. Compare People
17. Honesty Box
18. (fluff)Friends
19. Vampires
20. Scrabulous
As you can see, the most popular apps are dominated by some of the same developers. Nine of the top 20 apps come from three companies (Slide, RockYou!, and Facebook itself). Here’s a graph of the Long Tail distribution (although, technically, it is not) of the most popular Facebook app developers sorted by the total number of active users across all of their apps (the Top 5 are Slide, RockYou!, Facebook, iLike, and Flixster):
Erick,
Does anyone have a view of how much people are making per user, when they use the three different advertising platforms? Also what is the acquisition history thus far? Other than the Where I’ve Been app, it doesn’t seem like there have been any?
It’s amazing what the definition of an ‘app’ has become.
So the Long Tail strikes again.
That’s no surprise, 90% of the digg posts are written by the same people as well.
Facebooks apps have very little to no monetization value, so being funded by facebook helps if you want to create them. Otherwise you need a lot of free time.
twenty trivial dispensible apps i can definitely live without. not sure how zuck convinced levchin to front his r&d budget, but its working
waiting for the pin of reality to hit this bubble….
> It’s amazing what the definition of an ‘app’ has become.
Yes it’s both amazing and very lame !
this list makes me want to stab myself in the eyeball. aside from the video app, which honestly is a bit lacking, these “apps” are all useless. although i hear scrabulous is fun. i honestly don’t interact with folks that use these apps heavily. it’s a good indicator for low intelligence.
God, I love facebook.
I love the virtual drinks and gifts!!!
Texas Hold Em is the only reason i go to Facebook.com.
Welcome to FLM (Facebook Level Marketing.) I feel for the poor sucker at the end of this pyramid scheme. Kudos to RockYou and Slide for turning “installs” into a commodity.
THERES NO MONEY IN THIS
all these “apps” suck, plain and simple.
THIS IS MALARCHY!!! I WILL HAVE MY TEAM TEAR YOU A NEW ASSHOLE TECHCRUNCH!!!!
Oh i don´t think these apps are very interessting, its more bored lamerstuff
@Fake Mark Zuck – Hey dude… what’s up? Wanna be fb friends?
How does the distribution of facebok apps usage compare to those on different platforms? Like Windows, Symbian, etc. Would it look something similar?
I think people should remember that the FB “environment” is only a few months old and it would be surprising if any of the top apps at this point were anything other than fluffy time wasters.
And yes, they are monetizing by selling eyeballs while they have them. Will these apps still be on top six months from now? I doubt it. The first Java apps were stupid too.
The FB environment presents a compelling new breeding ground for interesting apps because of the huge user base, the API and the built-in connectedness of the crowd.
God, am I the only person who feels these “apps” are horrible…
Don’t even get me started on Digg. One of the most overrated, worthless sites on the net.
This pretty much proves my suspicion. To succeed, you have to be one of the first, you have to aggressively promote, and the idea has to be solid
In about a few more months, FBK will own 100% of the app marketshare that Slide doesn’t have (since Max and Mark are friends). That will make all apps worthless since FBK already makes other things worthless like display advertising and virtual puppy dogs.
Jason,
I agree with you, Digg is hype and ridiculous. Anyways some apps are worth trying.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Slide is constantly copying other apps and use their reach to beat the creators to the punch. At 60% (if I am correct) dominance of FB, you can argue they are a monopoly in the FB environment and should be stopped!
“Fun/Superwall/poke” etc. are little addons to FB’s wall at best – there goes 90% of the traffic – useless duplication of existing FB core functionality.
I am not sure this is specific to Facebook.
Everything is ruled by the few. Similar graphs could be shown for world wealth repartition, successful open source projects ratio, successful startups ratio, and so on. This is what we do best, build things that will be ruled by the few.
It always makes good headlines, though.
so???
Anyway see the pattern here? Just design a myspace feature as an “app” and you’ll be successful.
Whoever makes “Profile Uglinator” or “Friend Collect” will get a ton of users.
@Killer App Designer
Profile Uglinator has already been developed. It’s called Facebook Applications.
There are several concerns I have with this report – you can read them all here:
http://www.centernetworks.com/facebook-app-usage-report
But suffice it to say, there are easy ways to manipulate those numbers and in fact Mike wrote a lengthy black hat post about 2 mos ago which included the top 3 as the biggest offenders!
Warbook by Freewebs is number 51! We should break into the top 50 soon. We are in the top 10 in terms of percent engagement which is actually a more meaningful measure for social apps.