Scoble Is So Right About Kara Being SSSSSOOOOO Right About Silly Facebook Apps!
You always have to get a little worried when someone opens a post like this: Kara! Kara! Kara!
Besides sounding like I am about to invade Pearl Harbor, I thought blogger Robert Scoble was going to slap me around for insulting the inanity of most third-party applications on Facebook. Instead, he agrees and thinks there is a need too for more scalable applications. Go Scoble!
In fact, we got a lot of reaction to the two posts on Facebook widgets that I wrote earlier this week (here and here), in which I thought even my 5-year-old might find the apps on the social network a little silly (and this is a kid who thinks burping is the height of hilarity).
Here are some choice comments:
Wrote Luca Penati:
I think we will start to see more and more professional applications and applications to write our own application. We are still in an experimental phase. I am still experimenting. In the meantime I will continue to ignore vampires and Draculas and hope to not receive the Hot Potato. But will continue to click to your posts from my Facebook home page.”
Wrote Dave McClure:
I think you’re measuring the impact of the platform when it’s just barely into the top of the first inning of a baseball game.
“Platform has been out for all of ~5 months, and while adoption for many of these apps are impressive for that short a time frame, the overall maturity of the apps is still fairly limited.”
Wrote John Minnihan:
Facebook is trying to take a fad and sustain it.
“It was interesting for a while, but I already see a *marked* reduction in both my own use and those who are close to me.”
Wrote Mari Smith:
Hallelujah–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.”
And Lee Lorenzen wrote:
Your prior post about the childish nature of the first apps on Facebook that, as reported on the 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?”
Memo to Lee:
Why am I right (and I am!)?
I am condescending because I am a big grumpy adult and Facebook apps are like an army of tiny little Rugrats.
Comments
One thing that nobody has picked up on, as far as I’ve seen: for some developers, writing an App offers development experience they would never get outside of the Facebook environment.
For example, if you are a single web developer whose most complex application is a news database for a medium sized company website (5 authors/50,000 visits per month) then you will probably have no idea how to write an app that works when you have 100,000 users all reading and writing to the database on the same day. This is the point when concepts like DB optimising, indexing and caching start becoming essential – the Facebook environment is a hostile place, where a page load time above 8 seconds means failure.
A quick look as the Facebook Developer discussion boards shows a lot of people learning very quickly about these things, which can only be to everyone’s benefit in the long run. Perhaps, in a couple of years, we’ll look back at this period as the point when the bar was raised web applications in general, and ‘Zombie Bites’ was the unpleasant (but short-lived) price we had to pay to get there.
Posted by Iain Row at October 12th, 2007 at 3:59 amYou’re absolutely right. What’s the average age of a Facebook employee?
So far I’ve only installed, and used, business or personal brand-focused applications.
One thing that did resonate with me at the Graphing Social conference was a quote from Jeff Nolan, “Regardless of the app, it’s extending the brand into a venue where it didn’t have a presence before. It’s not about advertising or functionality right now. The widget is an ad for the brand. It takes the brand into a new medium where people, a lot of people, can be exposed to it.”
Posted by Brian Solis at October 12th, 2007 at 6:16 amI imagine by now you’ve seen the US Comscore numbers for Sept.
Though I’m inclined to say the drop (-9+% in pageviews and -3+% in uniques) is the leading-edge of a trend because it supports my view, we’ll have to wait to see what the international numbers look like. A close friend at Trinity believes the international numbers will be way up. We’ll see.
I talk a bit about it over at CommaVee (http://commavee.com).
Posted by John Minnihan at October 12th, 2007 at 7:01 amMemo to Kara:
I’m glad you weren’t at Kitty Hawk reporting on the Wright Brothers’ first flight. I can see the headline and story now:
===================
“Kara Kaptures Kid’s Kite Kontraption Krashing — How Juvenile”
[Kitty Hawk, NC] Today, an untethered kite-like device traveled a mere 120 feet in the air over our local sand dunes. This wouldn’t even be newsworthy expect that it required a gas engine, propeller and man aboard to even stay aloft (unlike any child’s kite which would have flown much higher and longer on this breezy December day). After the fourth flight, the “ground crew” was caught off guard by a powerful gust of wind which flipped the flimsy flyer over ripping it to shreds.
My question is when will these bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio who’ve invaded our windy climes finally get back to more useful pursuits? At least a bike can be used for transportation unlike their one-person powered glider that requires an assisted takeoff with two men holding the wings to steady it. This seems like an enormous waste of everyone’s time to me.
This reporter will be away for the next six weeks on my previously planned trip to England. You won’t have my stories to read because I will be boat-bound for two weeks getting there and two weeks getting back. I only wish I would have more than two weeks of my trip actually in Europe vs. dealing with the heaving seas of the Atlantic. Wish me luck — I get seasick and really wish there was a better way to get there.
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I wrote in a comment yesterday to your post
http://kara.allthingsd.com/200.....ne-update/ that I thought the Killer App for Business on facebook would be SuperGroups. I also see that one of Scoble’s commenters has an idea for a facebook app that would be a 1-Many shared conference app built on top of Skype and a shared Whiteboard. The innovation is just beginning and I’m quite confident that the inventors and entrepreneurs in the world will quickly make your “impatient grumpiness” go away.
BTW, if you ever want to have a live debate on this subject just let me know when and where.
Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the first facebook-only VC
(c) 2007 Altura Ventures LLC.
Posted by Lee Lorenzen at October 12th, 2007 at 7:05 amKara,
Posted by Mark Evans at October 12th, 2007 at 7:17 amAlthough they don’t get much attention, there are companies using Facebook applications to support their business/strategic growth. For example, my company, PlanetEye, has a FB application called My City that has given us tremendous value even though it only has a few thousand users.
And my last thought on this- my FB news feed is almost entirely full of “___ became friends with ___” and “___ added the ___ application” updates.
Do people actually *do* anything meaningful other than friending, adding applications, joining groups and updating status?
What about “___ beat __ in scrabblicious”, or even “Brad Fitzpatrick nailed his 95 theses on the opening of the social graph on Facebook’s door”?
I’d love to see the platform and the feed represent real activity, not just connection-forming.
Maybe the “next Facebook” (which might well be Facebook) will be the one that lets us really collaborate and not merely connect.
But first we need to figure out what we want to collaborate on.
Posted by Jay Parkhill at October 12th, 2007 at 10:29 amThis may be one reason why Facebook applications don’t show the powerful long tail typical of most online marketplaces. 87% of Facebook application usage goes to only 84 apps.
I think that there’s real opportunity to build a social network platform that allows for useful applications. Right now, there’s an enormous outpouring of trivia. I’m excited by the potential, but like you, disappointed by most of the applications so far.
Posted by Tim O'Reilly at October 12th, 2007 at 3:45 pm