Tel-Aviv based fring announced that they are releasing their API, allowing third-party developers the opportunity to develop new applications called fring Add-ons for the fring community. fring offers peer to peer mobile VOIP and allows users to chat, call, and transfer files from mobile to PC or mobile to mobile, completely free of charge, using the mobile devices’ Wi-Fi connection. The company has a strong managerial team led by Avi Shechter, Co-founder and CEO of fring, who was also the CEO of ICQ in its early days.

In our conversation, Roy Timor-Rousso, fring’s Product Marketing VP pointed out that currently the company is not focusing on earning revenue, but rather on building the fring community and brand. According to fring, they have experienced phenomenal growth since their launch in January 2007 with users in more than 200 countries, growing at more than 100,000 new users each month. fring is available on more than 600 mobile phones and devices, such as Symbian Series 60, Sony Ericsson UIQ, Windows Mobile 5 & 6 and the iPhone. In the past, users complained of a few problems such as a bug causing the deletion of SMS’s, however, Timor-Rousso affirmed that all these bugs had been fixed in the latest version, which came out in late May.fring is currently integrated with Skype, AIM, Twitter, Google Talk, SIP and more, and is working on a Facebook application The-New-Faces-at-Facebook that will be coming out soon. Of course, this will all change with the release of the Open API. There is an iPhone application, unfortunately if you want to use it you’ll have to jailbreak your iPhone.See my interview with Fring below:

This post was originally posted June 18th on Mashable.com

Technorati tags: fring, open api, api, mobile, voip, israel media tour, mashable, blonde20, blonde 2.0, developers, applications, wifi, avi shechter, tel aviv, roy timor-rousso, iphone, sip

My friend Dan Shamir has created this adorable Twitter Birdy. Birdy is a cute air Twitter client that sits on your desktop and twitts whenever one of your friends updates his status. Try it yourself. Almost makes you feel like you’re in the country….(please note it’s still a little buggy).

Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.

According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:

1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”

2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below).  It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.

I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.

In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed.  I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.

Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.

Asi writes:

“As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”

Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.”

I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.

There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users.  About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users.

Asi points out that he found a negative correlation between the number of installs and the number of active users. Looking at the top 50 apps in each group (number of installs), you’ll see that the more installs they have, the less percentage of active users they have:

From the group of top apps (over 1 million installs), there are very few with more than 10% active users.

Looking at the top 100 applications with over 1 million installs as well as the top 40 applications with 100K – 1Million, we can divide these apps into the following categories:

Identity Formation / Social Comparison 44%

These apps allow Facebook users to display more personal information about themselves affecting how others perceive them and receiving feedback from others about how they are perceived. This category can be divided into a few sub-categories:

Flirting Games

This is the largest category of popular Facebook apps. Examples include flirtable, are you interested, Likeness. Asi points out that these interactions trivialize a behaviour which in the offline social world would be perceived as overly blatant. This is probably the reason why these apps are so popular online. They allow us to interact with others in ways that are impossible in real life. For example, apps like friends for sale (13% active users) and owned (19%) allow users to buy, refund friends and actually put a price tag on their worth. These types of apps are the latest hot thing on Facebook.

Asi also indicates that Facebook is on its way to becoming the largest dating site in the world. He writes:

“I’ve spotted at least 5 different dating applications like spark (12%) , zoosk (8%) meet new people (9%) and Hotties for sale (34%). These, I predict will only grow in popularity.”

This should definitely serve as food for thought for dating sites that currently do not offer a Facebook app or for those entrepreneurs who are thinking of opening up a dating site.

Self presentations tools

These apps allow users to display to the world who they are. These tools can be divided into two sub-categories. The first sub-category:

Funny “virtual pub games”

Examples of these apps include: what’s your stripper name? which cartoon are you?what kind of drunk are you?. This is the second most popular category of facebook apps. These apps usually have a low percentage of active users because once you’ve figured out what you are, that’s it, you’re done, and the app offers you no further value. Yet as we see these apps are still very popular, thus we will probably continue to see more of them uploaded in the future.

The second sub category is

Hobbies/interests

These apps seem to be more sustainable than the previous because as people we nurture our hobbies on a continuous basis. Examples of such apps are: Films (5%), music (3%), Dogbook (3%).

Phatic interactions / games 39%

These apps allow users to interact with friends without the need to say anything meaningful. Pokes, hugs, kisses, zombies, are examples of these sorts of interactions. More recently longer-type phatic interactions apps have also become quite popular.

Games

Games apps usually have a higher percentage of active users. Poker for example has 8% active users, Chess 12%. Scraboulus has the highest number of active users (22%). Asi adds that since games have high durability, they make for very sustainable Facebook apps:

“The data shows that experiences designed for people and can adopted to facebook have more active users than made-to-facebook applications.”

Tools / extensions / social management 17%

These apps serve as tools allowing users to better manage their profiles and social lives.

Extensions: Apps which extend communications between users such as mobile (12% active users), IM (1%), super wall (9% active users) and fun wall (13%). The reason these apps are so successful is because users view them as a natural extension of Facebook.

Profile management apps such as: Top Friends (8% active users), Best friends (2%), Entourage (2%) enable users to “manage” their friends and an app like anti stalker allows users to see who checked out their profiles and whose online.

Final Thoughts:

As Asi writes, Facebook apps allow us to socially interact with friends in entertaining ways yet very few apps actually offer users any added value. As time goes on, users become more picky about the applications they install, and those apps that have the highest number of active users and not necessarily the highest number of installs will win in the long run.

“One can argue that that’s what people want, and that’s fair enough but I still hope that in the future we’ll see more applications that offer genuine, lasting utility – Marketers and developers - listen to David.

The opportunities with branded applications are yet to be realized. I’ve asked Facebook for some data as it’s impossible to dig among nearly 20K applications but unfortunately they couldn’t help. The easiest route is to engage people with ‘on brand’, humorous, culturally resonant ‘phatic interaction’ type of app (like the one Poke and Mother recently developed for KY Jelly UK - to launch this week). Think of it as simple interactive tools to extend your campaign that, if done well, can help raise awareness and build some emotional connections between people and the brand / product. Check out the recent Snickers widget “.

I completely agree. Widgets/applications are a great way to socially market your company and increase brand exposure. A successful campaign doesn’t necessarily involve having an app with the most installs but rather keeping your audience interested and active. Creating an app with added value to the user definitely increases its sustainability and the user’s dedication.

Check out Poke’s Orange Wednesdays application to be launched in few days. Every Wednesday users get 2 tickets for the price of 1 at cinemas across the UK, enabling users to easily invite friends to the movies. The app also gives information regarding movies playing, trailers, and directions to the theater. Now that’s what I call a useful app.

This week OpenSocial applications have gone live on MySpace and members can now install these apps and display them on their pages. Not only can these apps be used on MySpace but they support the OpenSocial 0.7 API which means that users will be able to use them on all member sites of OpenSocial such as: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. 

Developers can now upload their applications to MySpace. Currently there are 467 apps available on the MySpace platform and I am sure that this will change very soon as everyone jumps on the opportunity to offer their app to the millions of MySpace and OpenSocial members. If you’re a developer looking to upload your own app, check the MySpace Developer Platform for more info.

SeeToo which was founded in 2007, has just recently moved to public beta. SeeToo is a web-based application that allows people to invite others to watch home videos with them in real time. You can also chat while watching. In this manner, SeeToo allows you to share videos with people you want to share them with and not with the whole world. The video isn’t saved to any server and won’t be available on the Internet afterwards. Users can share video files of any size and don’t need to upload files anywhere.

Basically the process works like this: You download the SeeToo application to your PC. This application takes any video on your desktop, compresses it, and streams it right from your computer to the SeeToo Web page that is hosting the chat. You select a video file from your computer. You invite a friend by sending an automatically generated invitation over your preferred IM service or by sending the link in an email. When the invitee clicks on the link, the viewing experience begins. The great part is that the invitee does not need to install anything in order to start watching the video. The downside is that unlike in Meebo Rooms, where you can watch embeddable videos with a bunch of people, SeeToo only allows you to watch a video with one person at a time.

Though SeeToo provides a useful service, it faces fierce competition from Meebo as mentioned earlier and PalTalk which enables real time shared video viewing with a lot more people as well. I’d advise SeeToo to enable shared viewing with a a group of people as soon as possible if they want to offer a real challenge to their competitors and gain a larger share of the market.

The application is currently only available for Windows. A Mac version is scheduled for release next year.

Do you have a small startup with insufficient funds for a QA department? Or perhaps you work in a large hi tech company with an under-utilized QA staff when waiting for versions to test or over-extended when a new version comes? A new service called uTest can provide you with a solution.

uTest introduces the first global marketplace for software application testing. uTest enables companies in need of software QA testing to access professional testers on-demand whenever/wherever they need them. The platform is all Web-based, therefore it is accessible anywhere, anytime from any computer screen by customers and testers alike.

Other advantages uTest offers to companies include:

1) Pay Per Bug model - companies only pay for actual bugs found by the uTest testers. This helps companies greatly reduce their QA costs.

2) Releasing a quality product from the start - companies don’t get a second chance in releasing products to market. Poor releases (as we saw with Vista) often result in a large percentage of defects being found by users first. This in turn leads to poor user satisfaction and a ”buggy” reputation which may never be repaired.

3) Ability to organize all your QA activity with uTest’s unique management tools - companies are able to manage QA cycles, projects, and processes on the platform with a very clean, easy to use interface. uTest is able to easily integrate into all major bug tracking systems for internal bug track management.

Application vendors can load or link their applications to the uTest testing platform, define target testers profile, and get information quickly regarding bugs and usability from the types of testers they have specifically chosen. The uTest system can also automatically alert duplicate bugs with its own proprietary (and patentable) technology.

uTest essentially provides companies with access to a lower cost workforce via a platform that enables management of full QA cycles without them having to commit to long-term contracts.

In conclusion, uTest helps companies reduce time to market, release higher quality products, receive real market feedback and usability reports, eliminate under-utilized testers, handle peak QA periods effectively, and increase user satisfaction.

uTest has recently started recruiting testers and is expected to launch in February 2008. For testers this is a professional opportunity to gain great and diverse professional experience, become part of a groundbreaking social network of people in their field, and earn a significant income based on their performance. The more actual bugs they find, the more they earn and the higher they are ranked.

Roy Solomon and Doron Reuveni, the founders of uTest, tell me that a few very exciting companies have already signed on with them, including GroupGain, a new marketplace that gives you the ability to join together with other shoppers to buy a product at the lowest price possible through bulk buying.

I believe that uTest answers a real need in the market and will better enable technology companies, however large or small, to come out with improved products for us, the users. 

I have recently added the “Friends For Sale” application on Facebook and I’m lovin’ it. At first I noticed a lot of bugs. According to the developers this was due to an overload on their servers. Now the application seems to be working smoothly.

“Friends For Sale” allows you to buy and sell your friends. Once you’ve bought someone he becomes your pet and you can make him send gifts, poke, dropkick or karate-chop your other friends. You can also give your pet a nickname, for example, Michael Arrington was purchased and nicknamed “Crunched”. Currently Mike is the most expensive pet on my friends list. You can buy him for a meager sum of $45,605.

Once you add the application, you are valued at $100. Every time someone buys you, your value increases. You start off with $2000 in the bank and can use this money to start buying.  You earn $250 every 4 hours for logging in. You also earn a profit every time somebody buys a friend away from you or when somebody buys you. You make $150 for every friend you invite. If you get tired of a certain pet, you can also refund him.

Once you start using the app, you will see that there are gruesome wars going on over friends that people try to steal away from you. A feature I would add is allowing you to decide on the price you want to pay for someone so as to strategically disable others (who don’t have that amount of cash) from stealing your pet. Some extra things I would add:

1) Show attributes of pet on his page so as to let you know exactly what kind of pet you are getting

2) Allow people to request to be bought by specific friends

Yes it’s silly. Yes it’s ridiculous. Yet it’s still entertaining as hell. So go get some of your own pets and be warned: Do not touch any of mine!

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….

Jonathan Keebler has created an amazing bookmarklet that allows you to quickly upload your Flickr photo into your Facebook photo album. 

Follow these instructions: 

1) Log in to the Flickr2Facebook application

2) Save the bookmarklet to your web-browser’s bookmarks. You only have to do this once!

3) Surf to the Flickr page with the image on it you would like to upload.

4) Click the bookmarklet in your web-browser’s bookmarks.

5) Click on the Flickr2Facebook logo that appears over the image. This will popup the upload window!

6) Choose the album you would like to upload the image into.

7) Approve photo for upload

Voila! You’re done!