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.

Nick O’Neill has recently interviewed Mark Zuckerberg (in a slightly different manner than Sarah Lacy). Here’s what Mark had to say:

1) He believes the reaction to his interview with Sarah Lacy was overblown.

2) Mark claims that the 5,000 friend limit on Facebook is more of a technical limitation than anything else and even though users have been complaining about this, it is not something they plan on changing any time soon. However Nick adds:

“I received a different response from one Facebook employee later that night who claimed that it would only be a few lines of code to change. I’m sure there is more to it than that but it definitely is not a high priority at Facebook currently.”

3) Mark claims that Facebook does not want to compete with other application developers. However, this still didn’t stop them from sending out a message to thousands (if not millions) of college students recently telling them to install the March Madness application. Over the last few years, CBS and Facebook had worked together in creating and promoting this application. The fact that Facebook is not allowing other developers the same promotional capability for their applications is angering many developers and justly so. When asked about this controversial issue, Mark mentioned that this year they had actually messaged less users than in previous years.

4) Mark mentioned that he is focusing on building the Company for scale and will in the future place more of his responsibilities on others.

5) Mark thinks that in the future, the social web will move away from social networks and many of the new applications will move outside of Facebook.

6) When asked whether he would take a proactive role in fighting anti-semitism on Facebook, Mark said that rather than fighting hate movements on Facebook, the Company intends to continue focusing on providing useful communication tools allowing users to connect and discover new worldly perspectives.

7) Mark emphasized that Facebook’s aim is to create the most accurate representation of our “social graph.” However, as Nick points out:

“There’s only one problem with Facebook’s attempt so far though: all our interactions don’t take place within Facebook. We send instant messages to our friends, send at replies on Twitter, have telephone conversations and exchange emails. All of these things help construct the summation of our interpersonal communication.”

Mark agrees that Facebook needs to improve its messaging system and says that the Company will be focusing on providing new tools to users in regards to messaging. In fact, three days ago Michael Arrington reported that Facebook was launching a new instant messaging service and it will be available to the public soon, perhaps in the next week. Michael writes:

“I’m now hearing that this won’t be Jabber-compliant, at least at first. That means access will be Facebook only unless they create an API and/or third parties figure out a way to hack into the service as they’ve done with Yahoo, MSN and AIM in the past.”

8 ) Mark believes that the viralness is done for many Facebook applications and that the Company needs to incentivize differently in the future. Instead of a good application being one that has a lot of users, there will be other incentives. No further elaboration was given but Mark did mention that the system for deciding which are “good applications” would be automated.

As all of you know, I love Facebook but frankly I was a bit disappointed by some of Mark’s answers. For example, the fact that Facebook does not allow all applications an even playing field is quite disturbing to me. In addition, the fact that users are complaining about Facebook limitations and not receiving a response is not right either. It does however seem that Facebook will be providing more communication tools in the future and enabling users to more easily find “good apps” amongst the thousands of apps currently being offered, which is definitely something to look forward to.

Technorati tags: interview, mark zuckerberg, nick o’neill, sarah lacy, facebook, applications, developers, march maddness, cbs, social web, social networks, anti-semitism, communication tools, social graph, twitter, messaging, instant messaging, michael Arrington

Here’s 60 Minutes’ interview with Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder of Facebook:

I wanted to let you all know that I currently have an unlimited number of invitations to MeeMix. So if anyone would like to receive an invite, please just leave a comment below.

For those of you who don’t yet know MeeMix, it is a personalized internet radio community which aims at identifying individual taste and taste prediction in music using its own behavioral-based algorithm and additional methodologies.  MeeMix takes into account your behavior on the site (for example, which songs you added to your favorites) and uses it to predict what music you might like to listen to in the future. It is one of my favorite Web products and I highly recommend you all to try it out.

Barak Hachamov has written a fascinating post regarding our gradual metamorphosis into digital beings as more and more of our every day activities occur in our virtual worlds. Unfortunately since the post is in Hebrew, many of you will not be able to read it so I wanted to share its key ideas with you.

In the past, the internet used to be only an information source for us. However, in the last few years, and especially since the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet has become more than just an information source. It has become our way of interacting with our friends, expressing our thoughts and interests, and handling our day to day activities. Web 2.0 has turned the internet into something completely different than it used to be. No longer are we the passive viewers. Now we are the active users, creating content and building our virtual worlds with our virtual friends and virtual events. The cold, alienating experience of using the Web has turned into a personalized, customized experience for each of us. Information that we view is gradually becoming more and more targeted to our our immediate needs, our interests, etc. through the usage of personalized tools and the early beginnings of artificial intelligence capabilities.

Social networks such as Facebook allow us to interact virtually in ways that were not possible before. If someone were to describe to you ten years ago that in the recent future you’d be able to hug virtually, throw a sheep at someone virtually, even buy and sell your friends virtually, you’d say he was crazy. With all this interaction and the growing number of online friendships that we build, how does one give each of his friends the attention they deserve? How does one deal with this overwhelming amount of of personal, relevant information that requires his attention?

Just like the telephone, cellular phone, and internet are allowing us all today to do more and meet less, our gradual transformation into digital beings will soon allow us to do more and meet more. Our virtual reality creates more opportunities for us online as well as offline.  How many social events have you gone to thanks to Facebook? How many new people have you met with in real life due to Facebook? Those of us who have been internet freaks for a long time, secluded in our homes from the offline world,  have come out of our shells due to Facebook.

Barak writes that Facebook which we now use mostly to entertain ourselves with lots of silly applications and connect with our friends, is gradually turning into the first human attempt to launch a Human Digital Operating System. As each of us creates a profile, adds applications, schedules events online, etc. he creates the digital self. Whether we realize it or not, we are all participants in this human experiment. We are creating and enhancing the prototype of our own operating system.

Our operating system is working all the time without us even noticing and is digitally mapping our way of thinking, our habits, and our interests. Gradually activities and experiences that were only available to us offline are entering our digital world. One day we will all wake up and see that most of our daily activities happen online. On this day we will know that we have become digital beings. Think about how privileged we are to live in this era where we are able to view this evolution from DOS to HOS, from cold windows to warm, emotional, social platforms.

It is certain that Facebook will invest enormous efforts in improving navigation capabilities between the different applications and information sources it offers as well as the communication and semantic capabilities between them.  These capabilities will improve over time and develop into the first platform which will allow me to create the Digital Me.

Just like in Lego, we will build the digital us out of hundreds of “small applications” which consist of our way of life. As we build the digital us through what seem to be “innocent” actions and games, hidden sophisticated algorithms of artificial intelligence will gradually learn who we are, as well as possible semantics with other applications, and will allow these applications to communicate with each other, draw conclusions, and handle tasks for us automatically. 

The management of my life through my digital world in combination with the collective intelligence of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence create exciting possibilities for the future. The combination of all these capabilites will allow us to  break through the information barriers and limitations we have today and allow us to better process the overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to. In the future we will be able to handle a few tasks at once without damaging the quality of our actions and without wasting precious time. We will then find it very hard to perform in a world without digital technology. Yet more than this, in the basis of our thoughts there will be virtual terms and underlying digital metaphors, and perhaps we will even feel in a technological format. To many of us this future world may seem quite scary, however ironically, as we become more digital, we will also become more social and emotional with a larger number of people. 

Thanks to Jeff Swearengin for the pic.

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!

Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group, had recently written a guest post on TechCrunch regarding the strategies his company uses to promote his clients’ videos online. He writes:

“Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.”

Dan argues that content is not king and you can get at least 100,000 views even if your video doesn’t have killer content, given that you use the following techniques:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: Dramatic Hamster
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: UFO Haiti
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: Stolen Nascar
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: Yoga 4 Dudes

Then Dan continues to go into the specific marketing strategies that his company uses in order to make these videos attract at least 100,000 views.

He writes:

“The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.“

How do they do that?

• Blogs: They approach bloggers who write about relevant topics and actually pay them to post their embedded videos.
• Forums: They start new threads and embed their videos. Sometimes, they even kickstart conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different (fake) users.
• MySpace: They embed the videos in the comments section of MySpace users’ pages. 
• Facebook: They build a large friends base on Facebook and then share the video with their entire friends list. Other times they create an event that announces the video launch and invite friends to watch it by writing a note and tagging them. They also post the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: They send the video to an email list of users.
• Friends: They make sure everyone they know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Dan adds: “Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly.”

Here are some more techniques Dan’s company uses:

1) Title Optimization - they use catchy and misleading titles for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Examples of phrases used: “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

2) Thumbnail Optimization - attractive video thumbnails, Dan says, are what will get users to click on your video as opposed to the rest of the videos on the Most Viewed page. Edit the video and make sure that the middle frame is interesting. The middle frame is important because YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. The thumbnail should also be clear and should preferably have a face or person in it.

3) Commenting - different people in Dan’s office log in to their YouTube accounts and post heated comments back and forth in the comments section under the video so as to create a controversy and get attention. They also delete negative comments about the video or brand. Dan writes: “We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

4) Releasing Videos Simultaneously - if they have multiple videos, they post them all at the same time. The logic behind this is that if someone watches the first video and is intrigued then he would want to watch more later, so why make him wait?

Once the first video is done, they delete their second video and then re-upload it. This gives them another 48-hours to push it to the Most Viewed page. They repeat this with all the next videos.

5) Strategic Tagging - Dan’s company discovered that instead of using tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube, one can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box. They choose three or four unique tags (tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos) and use only these tags for all of the videos they post. This allows them to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views decrease, they start adding some more generic tags that will help people find the video when searching on YouTube and Google.

In conclusion Dan writes:

“The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.”

Well, it wasn’t surprising to see that Dan got a serious beating in the comments section of this post. Michael Arrington himself commented: “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.” And later…”I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.”

Another reader commented:

“Misleading titles, creating fake user accounts and talking to themselves, deleting comments they don’t like, paying bloggers to post videos … what a great company that would be to work for, I can’t imagine why anyone (knowingly) would use them, with all of the “fake” views the videos get because of them.”

Dan comments back:

“What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment - we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.”

To which another person replies:

“Of course, Dan. Who would care about a little fraud in pursuit of a buck? I mean, as long as it moves the goods, there’s nothing wrong with fooling the populace.

Idiot. The reason your trickery is necessary that your venal predecessors in advertising have burned their credibility in other media already. And now here you are, a leech on a new medium, feeding off the trust that other people have built up. Pathetic.

I can’t help but note you don’t provide a single verifiable fact about your business above. The simple assumption is that you lie to your clients just as glibly as you lie to the general public. If fake videos and fake comments, why not fake views, fake click-throughs, and fake campaign success? I’m sure it pays just as well.”

For me, it was quite interesting to read this post, entertaining to read the comments, and hilarious to read Dan’s follow up post of apology and defensiveness. Especially since all of this seemed quite coincidentally to cause quite a controversy.

In any case, here are my thoughts on this post:

Some of these tactics such as creating an attractive thumbnail and title optimization make sense. However, why mislead people? Why not give the video a relevant and catchy title so that if someone is looking for a video of this kind or from this brand, he will find it?

Using a company like Dan’s to spam random people to death on various social networks with videos they don’t want to watch, about topics they’re not interested in, with misleading titles, and fake commenting, can only damage your brand, not help it. If I as a user, receive an irritating spam video from a certain company, I would only think negatively of it. These sorts of strategies abuse the democracy of Web 2.0 where people come to view and rank content that is relevant to them. These schemes create false impressions of high ratings and manipulate the democratic ranking system on which Web 2.0 is based. 

In my opinion, Content IS king. Relevant content is even more king.  - if you produce an entertaining, creative, clever video and share it with people who actually find an interest in the relevant topic or brand, then you win. Why push people to watch content that doesn’t interest them? What is the point of delivering your content to an audience that will only get irritated? 

I’ve said it over and over again, when you market your brand on social networks, you must make sure that you’re delivering the right content to the right people. Find the people who might be interested in your product within your social network. Converse with them. Find out what their needs are. Make sure that the content interests them. Don’t just spam people. Social networks are all about your honest interaction with others. Don’t create fake profiles. Don’t create fake commenting. Be yourself. You should get to know your community and become a truthful and active participant in it. Marketing on social platforms if done in an open, honest, and intelligent manner can be very effective indeed. However companies like The Comotion Group only hurt the reputation of other marketers who try to sincerely interest users in products that match their needs and do not try to mislead them into clicking on content based on false declarations.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the picture.

The next Oliver Stone movie?

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….