I’ve looked around quite a lot of products/brands fan pages and while it is impossible to say what is the percentage of user generated pages vs. official branded pages (far more of the former thats for sure), it is very easy to spot the different once on the page. Branded pages usually have some additional content / module on the page while UG will have a URL, short description and the rest are just the community features (the wall, feed, fan photos etc)

I like to think about fan pages on facebook as a visible cross between newsletter and a mini-microsite (by visible I mean that everyone can see how many people have subscribed to your page – something which no one knows in newsletters or any other email marketing program). To date apart from the O2 unlimited orgy of fun of which phenomenal success took me by surprise, I haven’t seen anything worth mentioning. If there is anything interesting that goes beyond simply extending the reach with what they already have – please do let me know. It’s not wrong, it just feels like an opportunity waiting to be realised.

These pages for the most part are mini-microsites in a sense that they usually tell you what this brand/product is up to these days and contain some content (photos, videos) as well as promotional stuff. The Apple student page is the best example for a full blown promotional microsite on facebook. Check also urban outfitters’. From a media brand POV, The Economist is doing a rather good job of extending it’s website content offering while linking back to The Economist website for further reading. I would like to see a better ( 2 way, that is) integration between FB and the mother website – currently it’s linking one way and I think that creating FB only polls or debates and presenting them back on the main website could be more interesting.

Fan pages are the new newsletters in a sense that by becoming fans people in-effect subscribe to the page’s notifications and updates. So if you have something new on the page, whether it’s a piece of content or promotional stuff you can notify your fans. But bare in mind that just like your newsletter lands on a cluttered inbox, your notifications are mixed with all the rest of the social activities/notifications and updates on people profiles and they can auto-delete / ignore them just as they do with emails.

So is there value for people? Well, not really, or, at least not added value beyond any other channel. Some brand might do facebook-exclusive promotional deals and thats indeed could be considered as value but as I said earlier, I’m waiting to see a more innovative use of the platform.

Is there value for brands? To some extent, yes there is. Consider this hierarchy of participation:

- become a fan/friend
- consume content (video/photos)
- vote in poll
- leave comment on wall
- read more on page/portal
- start a discussion
- actively share with friends
- upload content (video/photos)

So there is quite a lot of potential interaction with the brand here. However, I suspect that the ongoing interaction is far smaller in numbers that the actual fans figure. People on social networks are looking to socialise with their mates and express themselves; they’re not searching for information or products. So for the vast majority of ‘fans’ the ‘engagement’ with the brand starts and ends with becoming a fan – a quick, one-off gesture of showing emotional proximity.

Therefore, the main value is potentially a PR one which lies in the number of fans and the rate of growth of that figure. Consider the notion of visibility again. Unlike traditional newsletter where apart from limited active ‘tell a friend’ functionality, in the case of FB fan pages the social newsfeed means that every time that someone becomes a fan his/her mates read about it in their news-feed. That implicit or auto-WOM can be hugely beneficial for the brand especially in the beginning if the brand in question enjoys the herd effect (when you read 36 times about your friends becoming fans of marmite, unless you hate marmite you are most likely to become a fan yourself). I reckon that a conservative estmate will tell you that over million of people have read that their friends became fans of marmite. That a hell of a lot of free PR.

The visible semantics of becoming a fan is obviously far stronger than if it were ‘Asi subscribed to the Apple page updates”. Becoming a fan is publicly declaring their emotional proximity (brrrr. love, that is. must stop using stupid marketing jargon!) and thats a massive value for brands. To use the marmite example again, I reckon that a conservative calculation will tell you that over million of people have read that their friends became fans of marmire.

So to conclude, in the case of popular pages currently there is far more value to brands than to the people. I don’t think that people accept some reciprocity or thinking in terms of value but it would be nice if brands will adopt the mantra that the love that you take equals to the love that you make.

I’m waiting to read about marmite (for example) sending free special edition sample to all it’s facebook fans or free marmite for life for active fans, or any other nice gesture that people will talk about. They should look at how innocent, the masters of nice gestures handle their fan base

naff said.

Two men, two American heroes, clearly dominate the chart. Obama is the undisputed king of facebook, yet Phelps is closing fast behind (mind you – yesterday Phelps fan base was ‘only’ 900K)

37 music acts
The biggest category, comprised of contemporary as well as long gone acts

15 TV shows
As long as South Park is in – I’m happy. Friends and Top-Gear and on top 10.

14 Brands/products
Surprising entries – mostly by the absence of some ‘loved’ brands. Apple student group is still the largest, following by victoria secret. But Coke has two fan pages so coke is the most loved brand on facebook. Oreo and Macdonald’s included as well.

7 Film stars, 6 Films, 4 Websites, 3 Generic indulgences, 2 Politicians, 2 Comedians, 2 Olympic sport stars, 2 TV channels, 1 Dance group, 1 Radio show, 1 Chef, 1 DJ, 1 IM tool….and 1 Pirate.

The full chart:
**I highly recommend to take the test: how many of these are you familiar with? Leave your score at the comments below (mine was 89).
Also, it would be nice if you’d left a comment with the most surprising entry for you – While I found The Stig and Scrat quite surprising, if there were to be a DJ in that chart does it have to be David Guetta???

1. Barack Obama 1,360,874 fans
2. Michael Phelps 1,254,534
3. Batman: The Dark Knight 644,493
4. Friends (TV Series) 570,324
5. Apple Students 560,568
6. Coldplay 518,559
7. The Chris Moyles Show 513,013
8. The Stig 481,226
9. Victoria’s Secret PINK 480,854
10. Linkin Park 474,435
11. Chris Brown 472,459
12. Will Smith 460,065
13. Facebook 442,529
14. Red Hot Chili Peppers 428,824
15. Windows Live Messenger 427,058
16. Adam Sandler 415,320
17. Justin Timberlake 413,532
18. Top Gear 411,455
19. Lil Wayne 404,781
20. Daft Punk 402,526
21. Pink Floyd 402,019
22. Jonas Brothers 383,462
23. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air 381,926
24. Scrubs 380,320
25. Sex and the City: The Movie 370,946
26. South Park 370,722
27. Pizza 366,185
28. House 354,509
29. Radiohead 346,234
30. Avril Lavigne 342,002
31. Simpsons 336,403
32. YouTube 334,889
33. Metallica 321,382
34. Evanescence 308,471
35. Foo Fighters 298,520
36. Coca-Cola 297,015
37. OREO cookies 296,506
38. Amy Winehouse 291,828
39. Lord of The Rings Trilogy 288,151
40. Ice Cream! 282,420
41. PostSecret 282,332
42. Queen 278,739
43. adidas Originals 276,125
44. Rihanna 275,992
45. Jeff Dunham 270,757
46. Chocolates 268,272
47. AC/DC 264,607
48. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation 253,188
49. FERRERO ROCHER 251,529
50. Beyoncé 245,750
51. Led Zeppelin Fans 245,554
52. Jack Johnson 243,714
53. Guns N’ Roses 241,137
54. Star Wars 240,291
55. The Godfather 239,274
56. Madonna 234,407
57. Gordon James Ramsay 233,765
58. Red Flavour Pringles 231,864
59. Shakira 228,996
60. captain jack sparrow 227,213
61. Jabbawockeez 221,740
62. AKON 220,683
63. Nickelback 219,247
64. Miley Cyrus 219,132
65. Dave Matthews Band 219,002
66. NBA 218,873
67. That ’70s Show 218,683
68. Pirates Of The Caribbean Trilogy 217,911
69. Ferrari 217,841
70. MTV 217,688
71. Fall Out Boy 216,271
72. One Tree Hill 212,828
73. Michael Jackson 211,585
74. H&M 210,098
75. John McCain 209,811
76. The Doors 208,629
77. Paramore 207,928
78. Hollyoaks 207,742
79. Scrat 205,431
80. Alicia Keys 204,967
81. Los simpson 198,947
82. Bon Jovi 198,255
83. Pearl Jam 197,598
84. Shawn Johnson 244,771
85. Heath Ledger 224,245
86. Futurama 195,025
87. Prison Break 188,035
88. Wikipedia 185,205
89. Red Bull 185,072
90. Mcdonalds 182,787
91. Britney Spears 182,600
92. Johnny Depp 182,511
93. Jessica Marie Alba 181,510
94. Juno 181,401
95. Kanye West 180,676
96. David Guetta 180,348
97. Gad Elmaleh 180,190
98. Official Skins and Parties 179,707
99. Coke 179,346
100. Playboy 178,558

If you need another sign that facebook apps have lost their mojo check out this interesting data:

Facebook applications trends report #1 (November 2007)

36K unique visits in 10 days since publication

529 diggs

348 Delicious bookmarks

20 comments

18 trackbacks

Facebook applications trends report #2 (March 2008)

4200 unique visits in 10 days since publication

12 Diggs

28 Delicious bookmarks

4 comments

5 trackbacks

Adam sums it best here. (Cheers for the image)

Damn it feels so good to be right…

I must admit that I haven’t fully comprehended the metrics and architecture of active users across the whole range of applications functionlities but looking at the applications with the most active users can give us, I believe, a more truthful view on what makes a really good application. 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.

Crunching numbers:

Mind you, just 4 months ago when I wrote the first piece there were ‘only’ 8648 applications. There are now 20,046 (140 new apps uploaded everyday). With all the hype and noise it is easy to forget that there are very few thriving applications: only 168 have over 1 million users, 786 have 100K to 1 million, 2148 have 10K – 100K, 4293 have1K – 10k which leave us with 11,823 applications with less than 1K users – that’s a very long tail…

One of the most interesting trends I’ve noticed is a seemingly negative correlation between number of installs and active users. If you look for example at the top 50 applications (ignore the long tail) in each group (number of installs) you’ll find that the more installs you have, the less percentage of active users they have. Here are 3 screen grabs to illustrate this point:

As you can see, of the 160 top apps (over 1 million installs), there are only 9 with more than 10% active users, 29 with 4%-9% active users and 120 with 3% or less. It would have been nice (if not necessary) to juxtapose these findings with some timeline/adoption of installs as its only natural that newer apps will have more active users. My guess is that there is also high correlation between the people who are using these applications and new FB users (i.e. the 1% active users on zombies are those new to facebook, the rest are board and moved on). But let’s leave it for now and move on – please leave a comment if you want to discuss this further.

So in order to balance this a little and to get more insightful view I looked at the top 100 applications with over 1 million installs as well as the top 40 applications with 100K – 1Million. Ready?

Trends

The data reveal some very interesting themes. It gives us a hint on where facebook is now and where is it going. The categories I’ve used in the previous report haven’t changed much but there are some interesting new developments in form, content and architecture of applications.

Identity Formation / Social Comparison 44%

Identity formation and social comparison apps’ still generate the most prevalent trend in facebook apps. These applications enable varieties of social interactions that fulfill different social functions. Above all, they enable users to dynamically present a rich picture of themselves, helping us to exercise our identities and shape how we perceive ourselves and how we want to be perceived by others. Additionally, these apps allow us to compare and be compared and by that finding our place / space in our social matrix. Within this overall category one we can find the following:

Flirting games: This is the single largest category of popular facebook apps. Hot or not, flirtable, are you interested, will you kiss me, Likeness (the list is long), these apps serve a particular need for peers evaluation, social comparison and flirtatious interactions. They invite others to give us straightforward (or anonymous) feedback on how physically and socially attractive we are and by the popularity (average of 4% active users on the biggies, 12% on the newer apps’) of these apps people just love that stuff. Interestingly these interactions trivialised a behaviour which in our off-line social world happen to a large extent less blatantly. Yes we do gossip with each other on who’s hot etc but the volume of these apps allow people to participate in a massive collective truth or dare game. From these type of apps I found two two emerging sub trends.

First, a couple of applications that have grown massively in popularity and seem to be quite addictive (but might be just a passing fad) are what you can call social capital apps or put differently, Hot-or-Not with a market economy – friends for sale (13% active users) and owned (19%) that allow users to get a fiscal valuation of their worth, attach a price tag to their profile and buy/sell their friends are the latest Facebook craze (read more here)

Secondly if this category is mostly (but not exclusively) singletons’ planet then the shift from friendly flirtatious to upfront dating applications is only natural and facebook, I believe, is on its way to become the largest dating site in the world. 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.

Self presentations tools: This category consists of mostly “This is who I am” tools that allow users to present themselves to others. Sub categories include all kind of jokey meaning-making virtual pub games like what’s your stripper name? which cartoon are you?what kind of drunk are you? to name but a few. This is the second most popular category of facebook apps. However, the problem with these applications is that once you’ve done it and harassed your friends to do the same, the application sort of come to an end – like a joke, it’s a one-off thing and therefore the average active users is usually low (1%-2% on the older apps and 10%-15% on the more recent).

The popularity of this category proves that people are still interested in these amusing instant gratifications so my guess is that we’ll see a constant flood of them (coming soon: how much gay are you? what’s your fungus nickname? If you had a baby with Britney what would it look like?)

Second sub category is hobbies/interests and these seem to be more sustainable. Films (5%), music (3%), Dogbook (3%) potentially have longer shelf life. They provide people with more meaningful, lasting engagement and since they are based on people’s interests off-line they have far better longevity than the ‘phatic’ quizzes – we read new books, we watch new films we listen to new music and we like to share these experiences with our friends.

Phatic interactions / games 39%

We dealt with this category at length in the previous report so just to quickly refresh your memory, it comprises of 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. They allow us to interact with our friends without the need to say something or exchange anything meaningful – just to say wat’sup, really.

There are quite a lot of the rather irritating pokes and hugs (4% active users), zombies (2%), werewolves (2%) and the like, yet there is now a whole new generation of applications that facilitate slightly more than one-off interactions. From car races (8%) to environmental concern (14% – interesting case of a very popular cause-based phatic interaction), knighthood (10% fantasy game reported to be highly addictive), parking wars (29%) the architecture of these apps is designed to engage users beyond a single peep to a more lasting interactions (indeed some almost qualify to the next category, i.e. games).

One extremely popular app with close to 10 million installs and 12% active users is Bumper Sticker. It’s a good example for a phatic app with great longevity. Because it is based on verbal + visual communications it is far more open. But the key reason for the success of bumper sticker is that it created a community of fans, a LOLCATS-like sub-culture where people uploading their own stickers. There are over 40K stickers on the application page.

Games: these applications are traditional games adapted to facebook and they kick ass. On average they have higher percentage of active users. Poker (8% active users), chess (12%) puzzles, betting and mindjolt (10%) to name just a few are an easy win for people who have interest in a particular game. Leading this category is the hugely popular Scraboulus with the highest number of active users (22%) among the over 1 million users. I wonder if there’s any other app that can galvanise Facebook members into mounting a vigorous defense campaign if it would be removed. Just like in real life, games have good durability so they make for good applications with potentialy high levels of activity over time. 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%

The applications in this final category (previously ‘other’), while vary in form/functionality are all those applications that enhance the experience and /or help people to organise their profiles and social lives. Their usage varied from occasional organisation to everyday interaction and therefore can have various percentages of active users. These can be break down into sub categories as follow:

Extensions: These tools do not carry any information – they enable/enhance/extend communications between users. Included in this category are the mobile (12% active users), and IM (1%) . Also included here are those tools that extend the basic Facebook experience like the killers apps super wall (9% active users) and fun wall (13%) – The brilliance of these apps and the reaon they are so successful is that people perceive as an organic part of FB (rather than a 3rd party addition) – they simply complement the platform and invisibly enhance the FB experience.

Profile management: From the likes of Top Friends (8% active users) and the wannabes, Best friends (2%), Entourage (2%), that enable users to visually organise their friends and to some extant to create hierarchy/architecture of relationships to utility apps like anti stalker (allows you to see who checked out your profile) and whose online.

Conclusions:

Facebook applications fulfill different social-communicative needs, mostly to facilitate maintain sociality and keeping the network (and us) alive by keeping the communication flow. Very few of them offer real value beyond an occasional gag or to have a sense of purpose. In that sense I find the Adonomics evaluations rather flight of fancy…

As facebook matures, applications as a concept looses its novelty and users are more resistant and selective to invites, the apps that will thrive won’t be the vampires and the zombies. I cautiously predict that while in the near future we’ll keep seeing constant flood of phatic applications, it’s applications that have longevity because they offer either ongoing meaningful social interactions or utility of some sort that enhances the experience of facebook that will flourish in the future apps economy.

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 realised. 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 can also imagine some transmedia branded applications that are tied for example to reality TV programs where people will be able to interact with content extensions, replay, compete, vote and get updates, news and gossip straight on their profile, as well as heros and villains of fantasy movies can play on the fields of the zombies and vampires space. We’ve already seen a good example of Sony taking over the vampire application for 30 days so there’s no reason not to build bespoke frodo, gimli and gandalf games.

As noted throughout this post, the concept of utility social applications is still up for grabs. It is always easier said than done (Can I take this opportunity to ask everyone to stop using NIKE+ as an example, it’s in a league of it’s own) but brands need to work hard if they want to participate on this clogged platform. As long as you’re not doing something overly lame that can backlash, it’s worth trying to experiment.

It doesn’t have to be a multi-million installs for it to be a winning app. If you manage to engage tens of thousands of your core consumers-fans with a meaningful interaction / experience you’ve done a pretty good job – there’s social life and WOM outside Facebook and the value you provide could come back at the back door…

Watch out for Poke’s Orange Wednesdays application to be launched in few days (Orange Wednesday is the most loved ongoing treat from Orange UK to it’s customers – every Wed you get 2-for-1 tickets at cinemas across the UK – one of the most brilliant marketing services ever). We’ve created a useful tool for people to extend the experience, making it easy to invite friends to the movies and complement the service by helping you decide on the movie you want to see, providing you with info from trailers and reviews as well as maps and directions.

Thanks for your time, I hope you found it useful. Let the conversation continue!

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