Facebook Applications Trends Report #1
by asi
Last Friday I stumbled upon this fantastic facebook analytics site – Adonomics (previously Appaholic), which provides figures on all 8648 facebook applications. It’s similar to what you can view on facebook (i.e. most popular, % of daily activity) but with additional data such as estimate of the net value of each application as well as new and returning users.
The data immediately felt like a goldmine and prompted my curiosity to dig into the chart and to carry out a systematic analysis of the 100 most popular applications – those that have at least 1million users – in an attempt to get a better grasp on favoured activities that take place in this global playground. In a sense it is similar to my Youtube trends reports, only here instead of analysing what people are watching, I want to take a a look at what people are doing.
It is important to note that this represents only a slice of the social activity that takes place on facebook. It doesn’t say anything about what people say when they chat, what kind of groups they join, or what kind of videos and pictures they share). What I hope this report will do is to shed some light on the social meanings of these applications.
I wanted to go beyond the existing categories (i.e. just for fun, alerts, messaging, games etc) and to study the communication functions that are enabled by these popular applications. I looked for meaningful themes and patterns regarding the social needs as well as the social-communicative roles that take effect with these applications. In short – through anaysing the communicative nature of these applications I want to learn what actually happen when we hang-out on facebook?
How these social technologies weave into our offline social lives? What does it mean to poke someone? What social need is fulfilled by installing the Define Me application? Are there any common denominators between the most popular applications? Is it just life-mimicking or are these apps actually distort our social systems and generate new behaviors? These questions bugged my brain as I dived into the chart and I really hope to be able to provide some nuggets of interestingness that will help us better understand this highly addictive hype monster in general, and what makes a successful facebook application, in particular. I hope it would be interesting for users, for developers and marketers that are looking for ways to engage with facebook users.
Right, let’s start with some figures at the top and bottom of the 100 most popular apps. Leading the table is Top Friends with 22,285,000 installs and 8% daily active users. Closing this table at the time I write this report #100 is Games with 1,015,500 installs, yet only 1% of them are daily active users.
Looking at these 100 most popular applications a very interesting picture revealed. There are overall 3 categories that these applications can be organised into:
Identity formation – 43%
Phatic Communication – 37%
Other – 20%
Identity Formation – 42%
Smarter people already noted that large part of social networking activity is for the sake of working, tweaking and exercising our identities. Our facebook profiles are both extension of self and a public platform where we actively search and reflect both who we are, and who we want to be perceived as.
Within this overall category, we can find some interesting themes:
18% are self-presentation tools. From the results of a personality test presented on my profile, through applications like Hotlist (Are you Hollister or American Eagle? Heroes or 24? Canada or USA?), Live it Up! (create entries about things you want do), Cities I’ve Visited (life-streaming), My Heritage, the popular shared interests apps like Movies and ilike, to moods and emotics (ambient-intimacy/Twitter-like tools), these applications enable the users in different ways to dynamically present a rich picture of who they are. Installing common folk-mystic applications such as Horoscope, Tarot or magic 8 ball are another way of revealing parts of our selves, helping us to shape how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived by others. Even the silly Your Stripper Name and Sexual Name are mini identity games of which popularity derive from allowing us a humorous flirt with things that define our culture and moral boundaries.
Thinking of these applications in terms of Goffman’s theory (that self-presentation strategy depends on context and audience) and his dramaturgical metaphor for ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ which includes the idea of “frontstage” (public, to all) and “backstage” (private, to “insiders”), we clearly see the blurring of boundaries between public and private as different context and different audiences intertwine.
The second sub-category (24%) and the more fascinating to my view are what you can call ‘through others’ or, collective identity formation - those are the applications where the user invites others, his/her friends to take part in his/her identity formation. Mead wrote extensively on how our knowledge of ourselves depends upon what (and that) others know about us. Or, in other words, we find ourselves when and how others find us.
These application enable exactly that. Define Me is the classic case in point: “Define Me allows others to anonymously list words that define you. The words are then displayed on your profile in a cloud, with the most common words appearing larger to offer an honest look at how others really view you”. Or the approval-seeking-friends-poling My Questions that allow your friends to comment on everything from your new haircut to your new boyfriend to the dress you bought. Additionally some popular applications like Are You Interested or Hot or Not serve a particular need for flirtatious interactions. They invite others to give us straightforward feedback on our look and on how attractive we are.
I spotted an interesting pattern in this group of applications, which might actually deserve a separate category. While some of them are straightforward and mundane, there is quite a few applications that meant to be more ‘dangerous’ and hence more exciting… This is where the “we are reality TV” element of facebook is reflected in it’s most popular applicatons. Like Honesty Box that “lets users send each other anonymous messages, removing any inhibitions and letting people be completely honest with you” or the postasecret-likeSocialMoth (“Socialmoth is a group confessional. See which confessions came from friends, but not which friend made the confession) and Purity Test(“How pure do your friends really think you are? Do they think you’re pure like an angel or naughty like the devil?”) these applications fulfill our desires for secrets, gossip and flirtation, as well as excitement of the unknown (what people REALLY think about us). In other words, we invite and are invited to participate in these big-brother-like interactions, expecting to be both participants and viewers of our own show. It is a perfect double-edge social sword that has the potential to increase as well as relief our social anxieties, and we find it very appealing!
Phatic Communication – 38%
The second largest category is a group of applications that best defined as Phatic Communication. This refer to all the apps used for establishing an atmosphere or maintaining social contact rather than exchanging of ideas, or, in other words, apps used to communicate sociability more than information.
Grant previously put it neatly: “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.
So the sole purpose of this huge group of applications is to keep the network (and us) alive by keeping the communication flow. Now, since we are sophisticated social animals we’ve developed on facebook thousands of different ways to exercise points 1-8 above. These have evolved in form and content and we can now see 4 types (generations?) of phatic apps:
1. The pokes – what started as a simple feature built in facebook grew up to enhanced poking like superpoke, x-me, poke pro, etc.
2. The Themes – vampires, zombies, werewolves, slayers, Harry Potter spells and whatnot
3. The gifts – why poke somebody when we can give him/her a pint, hatching egg, a car or a growing plant?. The more interactive are tamaguci-like gifts (from
fluffy animals to snowman to plats) that one can stick on one’s profile and with some phatic interaction can see it grow, eat, breed etc.
4. Contextual/seasonal – mimic life and give your friends x-mass presents, or October-fest pints.
You can rightly argue that once we evolved from the generic unisex poking to a more elaborated themes and gifts-based phatic applications, there is more in these than simply to keep the network alive. After all people will give feathered handcuffs and fluffy bear to different people and that giving someone a flower or a whip can mean very different things so you are right. Same with vampires and zombies – we should ask why these particular cultural myths and symbols are so popular and have been re-coded into contemporary digital culture? I think that some of these applications indeed have some elements of the collective identity formation, or collective culture-making but in essence I believe they belong to the phatic group. Besides, I never promised 100% mutually exclusive categories 
Other – 20%
Social Oraganisation – 3% of these applications including #1 are tools for social organisation. Together with Circle of Friends and We’re Related these applications enable users to organise their friends and to some extant to create hierarchy/architecture of relationships. I suspect that as friends list will get longer, and context will interweave, these will grow in popularity as the need for an order and context will only increase.
Communication tools – 9% of the applications are simply enhanced communication tools. Like the popular fun wall and super wall (#2 and #3 most popular applications with just under 15million installs, these platforms do not carry information – they enable/enhance/extend communications between users. Included in this category are the mobile, Instant and SMS messaging applications.
Games – 8%. This is a tricky one as I couldn’t decide if it desrves a separate category or should actually be a sub-category (within the self presentation one, after all these are another decorations to one’s identity). For now I’ll leave it as a separate category. Games like pac-man, the inceasingly popular jetmen, puzzles and poker, some are social games some are solitary all facilitate non-verbal interaction and are just part of what w do when we ‘hang-out’ on facebook.
So is there less to facebook than meets the eye? It’s really your to decide. I think I’d better stop here as this is already too long. One point to think about – there are only 3 branded applications in the top 100 (netflix, ilike and tripadvisor – the latter being bought rather than created) I have a lot to say about that but I’ll do it in other posts.
In the next reports I will take a closer look at differences in daily users activity since although they 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. I think that for the next one I want to sample 200+ of my friends and my friends’ friends to see how representative are their applications in relation to the global chart and for what social needs and functions they are using facebook for? Additionally, perhaps we’ll find that there is far more diversity in the long tail of facebook applications? For that we can look at more middle chunks of the chart with applications that are still big enough (500K users) to be a key player.
I have a feeling that FB profiles are similar to desks – they need tidy up every now and than and so people will delete apps they don’t use and new viral tricks will take the lead. Apart from the social organisation and the communication platforms, I suspect that the majority of the applications should have a fairly short life-cycleand wil wear out in a mater of months – after all how many times you can bite your friends or send them naughty gifts?
That’s it for now. Please send me your feedback on anything you fancy – whether you liked it or not and what do you think will be interesting to do next. Cheers!
UPDATE: 2nd report is out - read it here
[...] Asi’s gone and done one of his mega posts. Now he’s moved from looking at the top 100 YouTube clips to looking at the top 100 FaceBook apps. [...]
Nicework Asi, looking forward to the next one.
Dear Asi, this is amazing….very interesting piece of research. Facebook is definitely a platform for the extension of the self. It plays an important role in the construction of a plural and multifaceted identity. They way these different applications are actively used by members seem to be a way of positioning oneself towards others and in this way actively constructing a sense of who we are …. More connections = greater possibilities to fulfill social needs such as self-esteem, recognition etc….and more chances to re-invent your-self!!!!
Fantasic Asi..thanks for giving us “food for thought”
Asi – isn’t this massively biased by the fact that iLike and the other early Facebook apps were able to become massively successful by spamming all of a users friends?
This was changed after the first month or so to limit the invites to 20 a day, but lots of the popular apps predate this….
Nice job! It’s great to see how something that is so common and ‘present’ can be dissected so simply. I suppose that the only way to identify whether your classification leads anywhere is by disaggregating it and identifying who uses which applications… Or, in other words, what is the combination of applications different people use.
A very interesting post. I did a (very basic) lecture on identity and one of the examples I used was MySpace – my daughters use it. The older has been tempted on to Facebook but didn’t like it so much because you can’t customise the pages like you can in MySpace and Bebo – but now I notice she’s adding all the apps like pirates vs ninjas. Apps definitely fulfil that function on Facebook because apart from the photo they are the only way of customising your page – but also (and possibly more important for a teenager) of showing your social identity. However, an interesting phenomenon which may have something to do with the enforced uniformity (or perhaps the limited customisability) of Facebook pages is that there seems to be more fluidity between generations. I find friend requests from my daughter’s friends – yes I’m a reasonably cool mum but being a friend on MySpace would be simply unheard of! The simplicity of the Facebook strapline – ‘Everyone can join’ – is brilliant.
There could be mileage in considering whether Facebook use is constituted by the individuals or constitutive – I guess both. But there must also be individual differences. I have no difficulty ‘ignoring’ requests to become a vampire or to resist the temptation to play poker – pretty much like in real life I tend not to join in unless I really want to. I am incredibly fussy about my photo though. I changed it to a more friendly smiley face and it just bugged me so I changed it back to the more serious/mysterious/moody one that I recognise as myself
On the subject of games – the Scrabulous app has been for me a wonderful way to connect daily with my best friend who lives miles away. We rarely phone and we’re both hopeless at regular emails but we play a couple of words a day and I feel closer to her than I have for years.
Sorry this comment is probably longer than your original post and doesn’t add much to the mix but your post was quite thought-provoking.
By the way – I was wondering – what do the app developers get out of creating apps for Facebook?
Thank you very much for this thourough analysis, your last point about tidying up is echoed in my post here, about what I would call “getting a facial” on your profile:
http://lab.netx.com.au/?p=75
Thank you all for your kind words – i’m glad you liked it.
Alicia – what a great surprise!
Robin – you are absolutely right and this is just the very beginning. I hope (and believe) that in the future users will tidy-up their profiles and we’ll see more diversity in form, content and function.
Rafa – always good to see you here…there are oh so many research avenues you can take with social media in general and facebook in particular…I don’t know where to start and i need 10 extra hours in a day!
Snowqueen – thanks for your words of wisdom, they greatly contribute to the conversation! I guess that games fulfill to sociability but on a different level than the phatic or the identity work. It allows a non-verbal/informational communications with your friends – just like you described.
Tim – great post! I like the facial analogy.
Fascinating information for a marketer like me! Thank you.
Facebook applications are hard to figure out. I am uncertain if any of them have much value. I have installed dozens of them. I have uninstalled nearly as many. There are a few that I use daily.
There is one I absolutely love. I would guess that you would place it in the Social Organization category though it also facilitates conversations. The application is Inner Circle, http://apps.facebook.com/innercircle. It is a real grouping tool. Circle of Friends is more like Top Friends with sections. Inner Circle actually divies up your News Feed by the groups you create. You can also participate in chats with any group in a pretty simple manner.
That gives me hope that Facebook applications will eventually become real and useful plugins. At the moment most of my interactions with other applications consist of friends trying to bite me, eat me, squish me, gift me, or other useless/ridiculous behavior that serves as nothing but a glorified poke.
Great article. Here’s to hope.
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Wow Asi, awesome work. In fact, I’m going to Facebook to poke you right away.
@ Alicia: “Facebook is definitely a platform for the extension of the self. ”
Like Second Life, but much, much simpler?
@ asi: “in the future users will tidy-up their profiles and we’ll see more diversity in form, content and function.”
Or maybe people will ignore Facebook and start their own blogs and/or niche sites instead?
@ snowqueen: “pretty much like in real life I tend not to join in unless I really want to”
I agree, but I that wasn’t the case at first. Since I joined about 6 weeks ago I guess I’ve followed a pretty standard pattern:
I ….
1. found as many old friends as I could (many of whom I’d lost touch with), and enjoyed chatting about the last 10 years or whatever.
2. accepted invitations to whatever apps those friends sent me and had (minor) fun playing with them.
But then I …..
3. began removing the apps that seemed pointless.
4. began ignoring requests and invites that didn’t interest me.
5. began to spend less time conversing with the old friends after the initial “Wow – how’ve you been for the last 15 years”, except with a couple of friends with whom I found I still shared common interests.
6. cut my profile back.
7. started logging on less.
From the point of view of connecting people, Facebook ticks all the boxes. No wonder sign-ups are stratospheric right now. But after that initial connection, I’ve found myself to be interested in quality, not quantity.
What does that mean? I’m not sure ….
That is some really good analysis. It is also food for thought for companies when they decide to build apps. Are people really going to install an app for buying a branded product for example? i doubt it – they would be better off sponsoring a great application that follows one of the social aspects mentioned above.
Hi
Interesting stuff. I have been working as a product concept developer for many years now and use basic catogories of human product experiences to help this.
I tend to use: social, express, success, explore and tool.
I consider express to be seperate from social…the art that is only for oneself, screaming in a forest etc. While success can be from social competition, it can also be figuring out somthing yourself. Explore is a massive one…and perhaps a key facebook thing..who are these people? who do they know? who am I? multiple identities etc.
The tool basically being a product that more indirectly leads to the others, ie: a food blender…html editor..
While the above are my favorite, the following are more eaisly understood in presentations: Entertainment, Information, Social, Personal
Cheers!
[...] Asi Sharabi hat sich unter Zuhilfenahme der Daten von Adonomics die Mühe gemacht und sehr detailliert aufgeschlüsselt, welche Motive die Nutzer verfolgen, welche Tools sie nutzen – und warum: The Facebook Application Trend Report #1. [...]
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[...] you’re interested in Facebook apps, you should check out this post by Asi Sharabi on No Man’s Blog. It’s a good analysis of the top 100 Facebook apps with some good insights into the different [...]
Great post!
I think it’s getting even more fascinating, now with the new and exciting opportunities FB solutions brings to brands. Combining solutions (FB pages, Beacon and apps) may soon (if not already) evolve into the next phase where I hope we will witness some very creative marketing ideas. It’ll be very interesting to see whether the fact that there are only 3 branded applications in the top 100 is going to last.
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Excellent. Thanks for the analysis and insights. I vowed early to never ‘Poke’ anyone, or throw a sheep at a friend…. Though, I threw a sheep at myself once, and it was quite uneventful. On my first glance at FB, I was left wondering what could possibly be useful about the space, but the media buzz and popularity brought me back to dig deeper. I’ve appreciated being able to find a few old friends. I find the whole phenomenon fascinating as I ponder our need for connection and identity…
The feeds of everyone’s activities is intriguing and strange at the same time… some of the apps create a connecting without connecting… but I suspect people will make of it what they will … I can see it becoming a portal to useful web functions, I’m discovering (and deleting) daily, but thus far it’s been mostly mental bubble gum, keeping me from real work!
The coming months will be interesting as more companies create api’s… Meanwhile, I’m enjoying it more than I should be allowed to.
[...] analysis of facebook app trends (tags: stats web2.0 socialnetworking) [...]
Fascinating. By this analysis, at least 88% of the top 200 Facebook apps consist of rather trivial or just-for-fun apps such as pokes, vampires, gifts, or games. This leaves the percent of Facebook apps offering real, lasting utility to at most, just 12%.
In my blog post at http://socialnetworking.activestate.com/2007/11/29/food-fight-zombies-v-usefulness/, I compare Facebook’s fun apps to the popular apps on other social networks — and there’s quite a contrast.
Is this Facebook focus on more trivial/fun apps simply a short-term fad, or will this change over time?
Nicely done analysis! I’m not sure I agree with your breakdown of “simple communication” ala Fun Wall vs. “phatic communication” – to me they fulfill the same purpose – staying in touch/ getting in touch. As a marketer, the other thing that’s fascinating to me is how these apps actually spread and how good the inventors are at using the viral loops within Facebook – might be another post.
[...] étude sur les applications Facebook : – 42% d’applications sont orientées sur l’identité : 18% d’applications [...]
This is really great Asi, I can appreciate how long it took to put together too so thanks.
Matt
Great facebook widget analysis!
Took some bite sized segments for my blog and linked back to you.
Keep up the good work
Cheers, B
http://www.b-side.com.sg
Where do awareness applications fit these categories? Causes is a pretty significant application, with almost 9 million users, and around 90,000 daily active users… with more charity awareness and related applications growing around the corder…
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Fascinating information for a marketer like me! Thank you.
you’re interested in Facebook apps, you should check out this post by Asi Sharabi on No Man’s Blog. It’s a good analysis of the top 100 Facebook apps with some good insights into the different ………..
onlineuniversalwork
Nice post, and glad to hear you find Adonomics useful. Let me know if there’s any data you’d like directly for future blog posts.
Another interesting app to create a Blog in Facebook:
http://apps.facebook.com/mi_blog/home.php
useful information in facebook aplications
[...] Facebook Applications Trends Report #1 : No Man's Blog – Last Friday I stumbled upon this fantastic facebook analytics site – Adonomics (previously Appaholic), which provides figures on all 8648 facebook applications. It's similar to what you can view on facebook (i.e. most popular, … [...]