Hey guys. I’m Siqi, and I’m your guest blogger today. Alex Notov invited me to write a little about the Facebook platform. Since I have over zero users in the three weeks since I launched my own app, I am eminently qualified to pontificate on why you too need to have a Facebook app this very second, what works on Facebook, and how to build something that works.
To pimp Startupism, this will be a series of three articles entitled “How to Not Suck at Facebook Apps”, wherein:
- Part I: Why It Matters
- Part II: What Works on Facebook
- Part III: Building Something That Works
Enough of that, let’s get to the important stuff. Let’s talk about me. In previous lives, I’ve been a software engineer working with robots in space, an user experience consultant for defunct startups, a product manager for that other video sharing site, and I currently I work at what is probably the awesomest company in the world. I also have an aforementioned Facebook app on the Facebook Platform.
So what’s with all the hype on the Platform?
THE PLATFORM IS THE NEW INTERNETS.
I’ve been grabbing anybody who’s willing to listen and screaming those words in their ears. I’ve been saying that since day one, and I said it a month before Max Levchin did. (Ask Christian). I’m saying it today even though a considerable number of people way smarter than me think it’s faddy and overhyped. I know what you’re thinking. One is, wow this guy is kind of an asshole. The other is, “How the hell does more ways to poke and saving a buck on icons make it the new internet?” Allow me to retort.
First of all, I’m actually much nicer in real life. Secondly, take a look at some statistics on Facebook. 50% of their users login EVERY SINGLE DAY, spending an average of 20 minutes a day. Those are amazing numbers, but what I really want to talk about are photos. On Facebook.
More than 8.5 million photos are uploaded to Facebook Photos every day, for a total of 1.8 billion photos, as of last June. That number, according to Facebook, is more than twice the next three photo sharing sites, COMBINED. Similar statistics exist for Facebook Events and Facebook Groups and their competitors.
Those are pretty interesting facts to consider. Flickr is certainly way more full featured than Facebook is for photos. Evites is certainly does way more for events than Facebook. Yet Facebook dominates over websites that specialize in the space. Doesn’t that seem a little counter intuitive?
The reality is that differentiating on features, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t going to help you win on web. What’s really important are relationships - the real people you meet in real life, hangout with, talk over the phone with. It’s why nobody starts a startup without mentioning “community” somewhere - it really is fundamental to long term success. Facebook calls this the “social graph,” and it, more than anything, is responsible for the success of Facebook Photos and Facebook Events.
The social graph trumps everything. Having your friends automatically see your photos trumps cool embedding features and tags. Being able to invite your friends from a single network that they check daily trumps fancy algorithms for selecting times. Facebook understood this in a way nobody else did, before anybody else did, and that insight - coupled with impeccable technical talent, are why they are winning. Facebook’s social graph is the most complete and accurate social graph in existence today.
As danah boyd pointed out, you want to be on the social network that has all of your friends, not just some of them. Today, that network is Facebook. Next year? Probably still Facebook. Facebook, if it hasn’t already, has become to your relationships what Google is to your searching habits. You could make a convincing argument that a monopoly over personal relationships is a lot more powerful than a monopoly over information retrieval. Facebook describes themselves as a “social utility” for a reason. “Utility” not as in “useful tool”, but as in “electric company”, or “Google”.
And that’s where the Platform comes in. Facebook has created a platform that lets you take direct advantage of the social graph in the same way as Facebook itself, allowing you to create applications just like Photos, just like Events. They give you full access to every user’s social graph, profiles, newsfeeds and alerts. Facebook, in one stroke, opened up their most important asset to the universe of developers, allowing you to create applications built right on top of their social operating system.
This is big. Consider:
One of the fundamental problems facing any 2.0 company is the cold start problem: i.e. how do you get from 0 to a community? A lot of 2.0 ideas sound something like: “We’re building a community/network/commune of artists/photographers/rollerbladers in order to sell shit/put up ads/raise funding.” Sounds great until you realize that a million people divided by million social networks means: 1. Nobody wants to join a million social networks, 2. Nobody wants to join a social network that their friends aren’t already on, and 3. if your idea relies on the existence and active usage of 1 million users, you will never get there anyway.
Facebook has solved that problem for you. The users are there. Just make something useful, leverage the social graphs, and you could be bigger than Flickr, bigger than eVites. Overnight. And even possibly take in more revenue than Facebook someday. (I’m betting on exactly that happening eventually.)
You might say, “I’m not buying it. All I see are stupid widgets like Top Friends and Free Gifts. It’s all hype. Where are the real apps?” My response is: 8 fucking weeks. How many real, solid, useful apps can really be built in 8 weeks on a shifting platform? Give it 6 months, give it a year, that’s when we will see some apps that take advantage of what the platform can really do, and that’s when things start getting interesting.
That’s why I think the Platform is a bona fide Big Deal. In a few days, I’ll be taking a look at some applications on the Facebook platform, examine what works, what doesn’t, and what is likely to work in the next few months to a year. I’ll also be talking about why the install count is not all that important, and which metrics you want to pay attention to. In Part III, I’ll be talking about some subtle but very important technical and design gotchas when creating an application to maximize virality and minimize churn, and how to differentiate against the nth Free Gifts or SuperPoke! clone. Not all Facebooks apps are created equal.
In the mean time, my advice is this: if you have a company, start building an app now. If you’re starting a company, build it on Facebook.
Siqi Chen is really good at Mafia. Once a year, he blogs at designed|experience.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:03 am
Hi Siqi Chen, good article. I guess today is the day where you can see the downside of relying on somebody else’s platform. There have been several outages this morning 10am GMT and now there are more outages….. This spoils your user figures for the day. Good luck with your application and I am sure it will be successful. I am also sure facebook will grow and stay a very strong platform in future. I admire them that there systems have been so stable. I mean they added 130,000 people per day!!!! Regards André
July 31st, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Congrats on the success of your Facebook application, but “If you’re starting a company, build it on Facebook.” has got to be the worst advice ever. The correct phrase should be “If you’re starting a company, build it on a realistic business model.” What good is your popular Facebook application if you can’t monetize it?
So far, I have not seen one Facebook app make anyone any money. When you build an application inside someone else’s application, you cede a lot of control. Has everyone already forgotten the carnage when MySpace blocked a few widgets?
Frankly, I can’t see how a Facebook application can be monetized, ever. Can any of the standard IAB sizes even fit into that little box in the profile? And will users throw a chunk of advertising into their profile? Unlikely.
Facebook users are almost as notorious as Digg users for not clicking ads and not converting. You’ll have quite a hard time finding advertisers for your Facebook app, no matter how viral.
A Facebook application might be good for driving traffic to your main site, where your real business takes place, but not much else.
Bottom line: Facebook is a wonderful application platform for developers to play with- but it’s a terrible business platform.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Ilya - you seem to have some misconceptions about the platform.
Can standard IAB sizes fit into that little box? Will users accept advertising on their profile?
Those questions are moot, since Facebook doesn’t even allow any applications to put ads on user profiles.
The important point is this - “Profile Widget” doesn’t equal “Facebook Application.” This is a pretty common objection and misunderstanding, because taking a look at the Facebook Applications available today, you’d think that’s all you could do. You’d be wrong.
The canvas pages are where real apps are built. They replace the ENTIRE Facebook page aside from the side menu with your own content, you can fit as many IAB size ads as you like there. You keep all the advertising and transactional revenue.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself here - I’ll be talking about all these issues in Part II.
July 31st, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Indeed, I was under the impression that profile widgets are where most of the pageviews for your app would be coming from- I could be wrong. Looking forward to your next post
July 31st, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Ilya - No worries. =) In fact, my own Facebook app has absolutely nothing on the user’s profile.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:26 pm
I think Alex Notov made a really interesting point about how nobody has yet monetized successfully on facebook, because nobody has created anything that facebook users will pay for. But once a real need is catered to, you have yourself a built in business model.
I think facebook has a platform that most companies can take advantage of. You may not be able to directly monetize from it, but you can send your facebook traffic over to your main site, and vice versa. Either way, facebook platform is pretty cool.
August 1st, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Hey Siqi,
Long time no see (hyuk hyuk). I wrote a post that was supposed to go up on insidefacebook.com, but it got canned: http://20bits.com/2007/08/01/rules-of-thumb-for-successful-facebook-applications/
Let me know what you think.
Jessica,
For the same reason people don’t click on ads in Facebook, they don’t want to leave the site. Apps that actively direct users away tend to do poorly, or more poorly than they would if they didn’t do it.
A few examples along these lines:
1) I wrote the PopSugar 100 application for Sugar Publishing. All celebrity story-links point to the external content sites and it drives only about 5,000 visitors per week. That’s totally pathetic: I get more visitors than that organically on Appaholic in two days, and Sugar Publishing has upwards of 4.5 million uniques per month.
2) Talk to Patrick Koppula of iLike. They essentially have two users bases now, one on ilike.com and another on Facebook. He told me there’s very little interaction between the two and that it’s unclear how one could transfer the userbase of one to the other.
Bottom line: the Facebook is a blackhole right now. Users enter, but they don’t leave. If you’re going to monetize on the platform it needs to be within Facbeook or by providing services to developers. Most ad models don’t seem to work, and any pay-per-use model can’t be easily duplicated (see, e.g., Free Gifts vs. Facebook’s gift feature).
Just my $0.02.
August 1st, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Jesse is pretty much spot on here.
I hope to convince readers in the rest of this series that building a business solely within the Facebook platform is a viable and desirable option, and that the strategy of using Facebook as a channel for user acquisition is not ideal.
August 3rd, 2007 at 6:49 pm
I don’t think it’s necessarily about either traditional advertising, or about creating something that facebook users will pay for. I believe there is still a lot of value in raising product awareness, and facebook is already interested in doing that via sponsored groups, pay-to-play polls, and stuff like that.
Given that their user demographic info is part of the site by default, they have an incredible opportunity to target advertising and help raise brand awareness at the very least for a whole lot of companies. Just because they haven’t been very good at it yet doesn’t mean there’s no ‘there’ there.
Even if eyeballs don’t always translate into sales, there’s no reason developers can’t be creative with that same kind of access.
August 5th, 2007 at 9:30 am
[…] This is part II of a series. […]
October 13th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Siqi, you have a fantastic writing style!
October 26th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
I’ve been at this platform for a while, but only in the past couple weeks have I taken very serious steps to build a business on top of it.
And I realized — you wrote this 8 weeks after the platform opened, and still there are hardly any very deep, useful apps out there. Here is what I’m notificing about facebook: the deep, useful apps are not as viral, because while being useful they actually don’t involve inviting all your friends as part of the core functionality (that makes sense). However, they would like all your friends to already be on them.
Therefore, you have to build a stupid app that’s nevertheless viral, and then push all your users onto the useful apps where they will get value. But ultimately most of the honestly useful apps are like open source … they won’t make you come back and get addicted to them day after day. Are you addicted to Photos or Events? no. Mafia? Yes
November 26th, 2007 at 7:57 am
It is possible to monetise application on Facebook, evenmore, FB just made it easier. However, what’s better no, develop apps for FB or Opensocial?