Facebook Platform Decline: Good or Bad?

There's a lot in the blogosphere the last few days about declines in Facebook developer activity. (Very impressive post BTW!) It sounds awfully inside baseball, but it's an important metric for the company to watch, and not only for the obvious reasons.

To play Devils Advocate here, what if the declines in activity are actually a healthy sign? It's possible.

Facebook's platform-- hailed as a genius move last May-- has had some significant snags. It needs to mature. Facebook needs to be harder on spammers. (I'm bullish on Slide and Max, but I gotta say the FunWall is one of the worst things on Facebook. Please fix it! Or just kill it. Unless it really is Max sending me porn messages everyday, it is hopelessly compromised. If it is Max, I may need to write a new chapter in my book....) And, more importantly, real, substantial applications need to emerge if the promise of the platform announcement is going to come to fruition. As many people have pointed out, they are mostly frivolous now.

I think this is all completely natural on something this new, and there's nothing inherently wrong with applications that are just for fun. But the sign that developer "flavor-of-the-month" enthusiasm for the Facebook platform is waning may be a good sign for the company. A sign that the companies still developing for FB will be more serious, start to build more substantial applications. And I have no doubt Facebook will keep tweaking the system to support that.

It's not that early adopters aren't great. They're just by definition not a mass market. No successful company stays the early adopter darling forever. It's just the natural high tech evolution. Robert Scoble might have had the most positive Facebook analysis of the day when he Twittered: "What's wrong with Facebook? Easy early adopters are abandoning it."

Comments

[Jesse Farmer]

Sarah,

Thanks for the link!

I actually agree with this, to some extent. I believe the Platform, as executed, was a strategic and marketing mistake for Facebook.

It fractured their control of the social graph and associated them with apps like "What color barf are you?" Nobody at Facebook wants that, and advertisers certainly don't.

I think that's why, starting in mid-January, they started instituting these crazy, ad hoc rules and stopped interacting with developers.

Early adopters may or may not be abandoning ship, but the alternatives are pretty lame. OpenSocial sucks in its own right.

That still doesn't explain why apps built today aren't as successful as apps built four months ago. If anything you'd expect the opposite because today's developers are no longer competing for users' attention with the early adopter set.

Just some food for thought.

Cheers,
Jesse

[sarah lacy]

hey jesse-

i think you make some excellent points and i'll be watching your analysis closely from now on. you have an open invitation to do a sarah lacy guest post on open social whenever you want!! i think it's something there's not enough critical analysis of right now and would love more of your thoughts!! I'm sure my readers would too!

s

[Ben Rattray]

Lucy,

I think you make a good point about declining developer activity not necessarily being a bad thing. If the aim of the platform is to create useful apps, that doesn’t require 23,000 of them (in fact, the higher number makes it more difficult).

But this ignores the reason why few useful apps have been created why and almost none have gained widespread adoption thus far, which speaks to a much deeper problem with the platform as currently conceived. The reason these haven’t been created is not because users or application developers don't want to use or build them, but because Facebook's current structure is heavily biased against them.

In short, in the closed system that Facebook has established in which the only type of distribution is peer-to-peer (with no top-down distribution, as was the case Facebook’s original native apps), the only way for an app to get distribution is for it to have a viral coefficient greater than 1. And this is an enormously high barrier for an application not specifically built for virality.

I’ve written more about this problem in a post on Andrew Chen’s blog here: http://andrewchen.typepad.com/andrew_chens_blog/2008/05/facebook-apps-w.html

You mention that “I have no doubt Facebook will keep tweaking the system to support [useful apps].” I agree they will try to support useful apps, but this is no easy trick. The problem is rather fundamental the system they’ve created and it’s going to be difficult to make useful apps go viral – particularly if an app appeals only to a subsection of Facebook’s audience, as many will. If Facebook wanted to explicitly elevate useful apps and promote them to a wider audience of users that might do the trick, but they are currently hamstrung because they’re trying to be a fair broker between app developers.

Anyway, I think in the long term they will figure out a way to promote useful apps (they have no choice but to do so if they want to have a 'true' valuation of $15b or more), but it will take more than a few tweaks – it will take a more fundamental shift.

[sarah lacy]

hey ben:

thanks for the note. it's an interesting perspective and i'll take a look at your post. but i agree that in the business press we tend to focus on high level strategy and only execution once something has truly failed or succeeded. it is very very hard to be a platform business and no doubt facebook has a lot of work ahead.

[BTW- why do people always call me lucy!?]

[Ben Rattray]

Good lord, Sarah. I feel like a real jackass about calling you Lucy - sorry about that. No idea whatsoever how I messed that up. I'll blame it on how late it was when I wrote the comment, but I really am sorry. Not sure if I should, but I feel a little better that I'm not the first to make the same mistake. Although that it's a consistent mistake is odd - I wish I could tell you why.

Best,

Ben