The Children’s Hour, Part 2: Can Facebook Apps Grow Up?
Yes, I meant it when I said that too much of the Facebook environment these days was like being present at a loud Wiggles concert in the kid mosh pit–and I have been there, so believe me.
Except, in the case of the hot social network, the Wiggles never ever stop wiggling. Or SuperPoking. Or Cartoonifying. Or inundating me with digital picture gifts of “giraffe love” (I could not make this up, you realize, as you can see here).
Yesterday, I did a long post on the fact that most Facebook apps, also called widgets, are startlingly juvenile and mostly banal.
My gripe was the lack of truly useful apps from either Facebook or the legions of third-party developers that it allowed onto its fast-growing platform to offer all sorts of services in the form of apps.
As I said yesterday, millions upon millions of people are downloading and using these apps, riding on the back of Facebook’s own hypergrowth to 45 million active monthly users.
Active maybe, but doing what, I wondered? A whole lot of nothing, which is the problem.
As I wrote:
And if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that [Facebook founder Mark] Zuckerberg has often told me was a ‘utility’?”
I have been thinking about that a lot, actually, since I started a Facebook group for our D: All Things Digital conference and our AllThingsD.com site not long ago. Not surprisingly, quite quickly, the group grew to almost 2,500 members.
We use all the group tools available to us (not much!) like: posting video and text from the daily site and posting photos from D and allowing discussions (mostly moribund as most message boards are these days). I do find the Wall feature a somewhat useful means of communication for that group.
After that, we fall right off a cliff. You can’t email your group members for events or to alert them to cool stuff, there is no version of the very amazing news-feed feature and there is no way to make it feel more interactive.
It’s like throwing a party, having everyone show up and then offering no food, drinks, music or coat check.
My hope was to create a digital version or, at least, feeling of our D conference. That event is successful, I think, because people like the big names, but mostly because people really value the interactions and the community there (also the cupcakes are most excellent at the Four Seasons Aviara).
There is none of that on our D group and there are no widgets allowed yet either in groups.
Not that I would want to subject our members to those apps, which I noted were useless to people with real stuff to do all day and in need of relevant ways to leverage an obviously viral site like Facebook.
As I wrote yesterday, do I want to SuperPoke Digg CEO Jay Adelson? No thanks!
Or do I want to Vampire Bite blogger Arianna Huffington? Maybe Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger does, but not me.
Or perhaps do I want to pop virtual zits with former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig? Well, maybe that would rock!
In point of fact, I don’t exactly know what I want to do with this group. But I know I have assembled a powerful and influential group of tech’s brightest stars and I have nothing to offer them.
So I would love products from developers and from Facebook and I want them to surprise me with innovation and not har-har-de-har apps.
Because I don’t get the joke and all I know is a good social network is a terrible thing to waste.
Comments
Kara,
I’m so proud of you… a serious post about Facebook with almost no name calling. Much better than I had to write about it my
recent post:
http://blog.adonomics.com/2007.....mplicated/
Perhaps you and Mark are reconciling.
Your prior post about the childish nature of the first apps on facebook that, as reported on the http://www.adonomics.com home page, have been installed a total of 365 million times and used 27 million times by unique users in the prior day seems a little condescending to me.
Why is Kara Swisher right and 27 million citizens of facebook wrong?
I would ask you to think back to the dawn of the PC era with a product called the Apple II that Steve and Woz thought was cool
and might impress their friends had interesting color graphics when hooked up to a TV monitor and a stripped-down BASIC. I believe it may even have lacked a SHIFT key. How childish… a machine for alpha geeks in the homebrew computer club to make games for and not much else.
Well, I worked in a computer store in San Antonio in 1980 when a little piece of software called VisiCalc came out. I was instantly selling a lot of Apple II’s to businessmen who were dealing with huge ledgers of white-out strewn inventory counts and balance sheets who would give their eye teeth for a spreadsheet template that auto-recalculated their work whenever they needed to correct a mistake.
VisiCalc was the killer app that put Apple and your buddy Steve Jobs on the road to billions in wealth. And with respect to
Tim O’Reilly’s concern about the fact that only a few big apps are getting most of the use on Facebook, isn’t that always the case. At least with facebook operating system, unlike Microsoft’s, the main apps are owned by 3rd parties. The real point is that Facebook is exactly ONE APPLICATION away from having their Social Operating System embraced and endorsed by the entire business world. This app will quickly zoom to the top of the list and will be the first app that causes new users to join facebook — just like Visicalc caused business people to buy the only computer that offer it.
Your mentioning of Groups on facebook as a possible starting point for a Killer App is something I agree with. Although you
said you can’t invite the group to an event, in reality you can (there is a link to create events right on the Group page — if you are the group creator or admin). These events filter out into message boxes without having to right e-mails to all of your friends and they automatically track who is coming and who is not and show up in newsfeeds to broaden who might want to join the group and attend the event.
With respect to sending a message to the entire group, the group owner(s) can do this at the beginning of the group but Facebook cuts off this capability when your group exceeds 1,000 members. I think this is kind of a silly restriction and it hampers a real business but I guess they are trying to prevent folks from using groups to spam folks. My own belief is that since groups are opt-in, I’m not sure this makes sense. However, it does show Mark Zuckerberg fanatical dislike of spam and groups could be mis-used to create spam-traps for unwitting users.
That being said, if App Developers could target the group page with the missing group features and if Group owners could
monetize their group members by either using ads or charging to join subscription groups via a single facebook payment system, then we have the makings of the first Killer App on facebook that every cataloger, e-tailer, retailer, brand manager, blogger, unique content owner, etc. would want to use to connect with their key influencer customers.
Since we just co-invented this Super Groups app here, Kara, I’m happy to create a company with you and pursue our Facebook App strategy. We could call it Groups for Adults or AdultGroups. Oops, that might not be such a good name, we better stick with SuperGroups. Assuming you’ll be the CEO, I’ll start getting the engineering team together. We can use a facebook group to schedule our first company meeting. Kind of like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a show in the barn.
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the first facebook-only VC
(c) 2007 Altura Ventures LLC.
Posted by Lee Lorenzen at October 10th, 2007 at 7:04 am@Lee - “…ONE APPLICATION away from having their Social Operating System embraced and endorsed by the entire business world. ”
If this can occur before facebook traffic is blocked inside the firewall, then you’re right - this will be huge (as opposed to ‘we have huge numbers of members, and maybe we can monetize them’) and will be welcome inisde the enterprise as a key enabler.
Until then, though, I have to wonder how many CIOs are requesting traffic analysis as a means of assessing impact on their bottom line.
Even if you argue that people who today waste time on facebook were likely wasting time in other ways before facebook, the fact that the traffic leaves a footprint won’t be ignored. There are several precedents to this; Yahoo Mail comes to mind first. That & other web-based mail services were broadly blocked inside the firewall as soon as IT saw the large traffic bursts.
If the most popular of facebook apps remain these silly ones of today for much longer, the blocking is an inevitability.
@Kara - another great post. I’m a member of your D Group as well; looked around a few times and haven’t been back. You’re dead-on with your analysis.
Posted by John Minnihan at October 10th, 2007 at 9:34 am*Online* social networking is a pale shadow of what we can do with *offline* networking, but it can be a valuable adjunct.
If conferences are useful for collecting lots of data in a compressed period and lunch is better for deeper discussions with fewer people, then social networks fit somewhere in between- more personal than big events, and reaching more people than one-on-one meetings.
I like FB because the “play” element can help me deepen connections with people I don’t already know very well- by sharing music, playing scrabble, etc. It lets me connect regularly with people I might otherwise see only infrequently.
Maybe the real problem with social networks is that they show so clearly how vapid most of our interpersonal interactions really are.
Posted by Jay Parkhill at October 10th, 2007 at 9:52 amIOW Facebook is like AOL circa 1994. A friend of mine built a very successful business discussion business inside AOL and it continues today at its own web site.
Posted by Derek Scruggs at October 10th, 2007 at 10:53 amHi Kara:
Great post. It seems like most facebook application developers are focusing on “going viral.” The easiest way: games.
Posted by Chris Lynn at October 10th, 2007 at 11:40 amKara, I am having the same problem you are with how to use Facebook for a business group (Stealthmode). I would love to be able to email the members about events, or to have a place to aggregate our mailing lists. So far, Eventbrite is proving more useful for that than Facebook, but we also need the multimedia and the forums. Maybe we need Ning? I struggle with these issues daily. I hope you draw some good attention to them.
Posted by francine hardaway at October 10th, 2007 at 2:59 pmBrava.
FB’s failure to attract serious apps could be LinkedIn’s salvation. A few entrepreneur-enabling apps on there and presto, folks abandon giraffe love (what *was* up with that?) for some grown-up fun.
To be fair, LinkedIn doesn’t let you email your Connections either - unless you pay a tidy $180…
Posted by Michele Clarke at October 10th, 2007 at 11:05 pmHalleluiah - someone speaking out about the frivolity of 99.9% of FB apps. I am *so* not interested in all the junk requests that keep piling up, and the poke thing is a bunch of nonsense.
I wish these requests would either not show up at all (sure, I can go in and block whole apps), or disappear if I don’t take action within a day or so. And, I’ve disable Fun Wall and Super Wall as it’s just a spammer’s playground.
However, I believe if you’re willing to ignore all the “visual noise” there’s an abundance of opportunity for the savvy business person… so long as it’s relationships first, business second.
Posted by Mari Smith at October 11th, 2007 at 12:28 amI would carry the VisiCalc analogy one step further. Not only would one killer app turn the Facebook platform into a serious tool, but corporate users would find a way to use it without asking for permission from their IT departments. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal itself runs articles on how to bypass the IT gatekeepers.
In the meantime, there are plenty of students, entrepreneurs, and people working in small companies who will use this stuff just as they use GMail and Instant Messaging. Once their customers and suppliers are using it, the more locked-down corporations will have no choice but to allow their employees to communicate with the people they do business with.
Posted by Christopher Herot at October 18th, 2007 at 5:25 pm