Asi Sharabi wrote an an excellent post analyzing the top Facebook applications trends. All of his info is based on the Facebook analytics site Adonomics (previously Appaholic), which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding all Facebook applications.

Here are some stats for example which may blow your mind:

• There are 609,690,058 installs across 9,781 apps on Facebook with over 168,000 developers currently evaluating the platform.
• These applications were used 40,418,045 times in the last 24 hours and have a combined valuation of $524,855,449.
• Facebook has approximately 56 million Unique Active Users in the past 30 days and a valuation of $15 billion.
• This translates to $267 per active user

While analyzing the figures on the most popular applications, Asi “looked for meaningful themes and patterns regarding the social needs as well as the social-communicative roles that take effect with these applications.” This analysis should be quite valuable for users, marketers, and developers in understanding why certain applications are more successful than others.

From his research, Asi concluded that the most successful Facebook applications fall under 3 main categories:

Identity Formation - 43%
Phatic Communication - 37%
Other - 20%

Identity Formation

I’ve already written in this blog about the human need to define one self and interact with others while receiving feedback from our community. The fact that identity formation applications are so popular only emphasizes this point. It is important for us as individuals to define ourselves and at the same time present ourselves to the public in the way that we want to be perceived. 18% of the most popular applications are self-presentation tools. Examples of such applications are: My personality, Likeness and iLike. It would be interesting to find out how many Facebook users actually answer the personality questionnaires truthfully and how many answer with the goal of receiving a certain result which would help them be perceived a certain way by the public. Asi also notes that such “personal” applications intertwined into our public profiles depict the blurring of boundaries between our public and personal selves (you can see my related post here).

24% of the top applications are collective identity formation tools. These are the applications where the user asks his friends to take part in his identity formation. Applications such as Hot or Not or Are You Interested define our social need for flirtatious interaction and the need to be perceived by others as attractive or desired, whereas applications such as Define Me emphasize our personal need for feedback from our network.

We also see that many of these types of applications are what I call extensions of our personal selves. Applications such as (fluff)Friends allow others to express their affection for us by petting or feeding our pet (which symbolizes ourselves). My Aquarium allows others to show their love by sending us fish or feeding them. The constant reassurance of love and affection from the public fills us with joy.

Asi also points out an interesting pattern in the collective identity formation group of applications which are more truth-driven, dangerous, and hence more exciting. This is where the element of reality TV comes into the picture on Facebook. Honesty Box for instance, allows users to send each other anonymous messages, removing any inhibitions they that might have and letting them be completely truthful with you. Another example is the SocialMoth application which shows you anonymous confessions from your friends.  These applications feed our desire for secrets and gossip, as well as the thrill of the unknown (what others TRULY think about us).

Phatic Communication

37% of the most popular applications on Facebook fall under this category. These applications allow us to be in constant connection with our network without exchanging information or ideas.

As Grant writes:

“The phatic messages “stack” nicely, each message presupposing and building on its predecessor.  These messages are:

1. I exist.
2. I’m ok.
3. You exist.
4. You’re ok.
5. The channel is open. 
6. The network exists.
7. The network is active.
8. The network is flowing.

When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty, sure gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. But they are reminded that they have someone called Grant McCracken exists in their network. 

This is not nothing.  Facebook sustains social knowledge and networks that begin in conferences and then fade almost immediately until a couple of months later we have a hard time attaching a face to that business card still banging around in our briefcase.  A “newsflash” about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out.”

By using these phatic communication tools we remind people that we exist, that the network is live and kickin’, and that communication is flowing. Actions such as poking, updating our status, and sending people gifts or drinks, characterize this sort of communication.  

Other

Social Organization tools make up 3% of the top applications on Facebook. Top Friends (which is the #1 most popular application on Facebook), My Heritage and Circle of Friends allow us to organize our friends and create some sort of hierarchy or relationship tree between them. As we add on more friends, these applications become more useful to us. Since we as individuals can only truly hold close relationships with a limited amount of people, these tools fulfill our need to bond with certain users more than others and present our close relationships to the world.

Communication tools make up 9% of the most popular applications list. Super Wall and FunWall are the #2 and #3 top applications on Facebook (respectively). These applications allow us to better interact with our friends, send them videos we like, and fun messages. Mobile, Instant Messaging and SMS messaging tools fall under this category as well.

Games make up 8% of the top applications list. These include card games, puzzles, and others. Here’s just another way that we interact with others on Facebook without needing to verbally express ourselves. 

Another interesting fact I found is that “Causes” is the #10 most popular application. This definitely shows us the human need to be socially involved and active in causes that we relate to and our desire to increase public awareness and support for such “personal” crusades.

In conclusion, we need to ask ourselves what information can we gather from this data? What do these statistics tell us about user behavior on Facebook, and more importantly, on the Web? How can we create better and more successful applications that will rise “above the noise” of the thousands of applications that already exist?

Asi writes in his post: “…although these top applications have millions of users installs they nevertheless have very few percentages of daily active users. In fact, not more than a quarter of the 100 most popular applications have more than 10% daily active users.” This is fact that we definitely need to look at more closely and examine. It seems like most of the applications that are currently offered are what I call “Vanilla Apps”. They are fun and sweet but not necessarily useful or productive tools for the users. Where will the future lead us? When will we be able to install a hidden application (only visible to us) which shows us our bank balance or allows us to do financial transactions? Do we even want such applications to be available on this platform? 

Food for thought….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Applications, Social Networks, Social Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.