There was clearly disparity between the 'Most Users' list and the 'Recently Popular' list on Facebook - and that seemed justified... afterall, if you only promote the apps with the most users, you're not giving the new apps the promotion they may need to be recognized to grow into a an app with 'most users'...
But I had guessed that the growth rate of an app plays a large part in the 'Recently Popular' ranking - and looking at the data, that too looks untrue.
Only 19 of the Top 50 Fastest Growing apps from July 17-22 had appeared in the top 1000 'Recently Popular' (on July 22). In fact, the 1st (Advanced Wall), 5th (Lego Man) and 8th (Apples 'n' Oranges) fastest growing apps were among those not mentioned in the top 1000 Recently Popular (that's 40 pages of browsing the Recently Popular list).
Worse than that - 15 of the BOTTOM 50 - that is, apps which are all LOSING USERS - appeared in the top 1000 'Recently Popular' ! Wah?!
Lots more to say on this ... but figured it would be good to at least publish the prior top 50 table with the Recently Popular rank added...
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Monday, July 23, 2007
Top 50 Fastest Growing Apps July 17-22
Only 34% of the apps in this weeks top 50 fastest growing were even alive back on July 11... So the trend is clear now - that newer apps have a better chance to have a burst of growth than the more mature apps... As they age, a few keep growing but most don't.
Which ones in this list do you think are one-week-wonders and which ones will keep growing strong?
Advanced Wall had quite an explosive showing this week after a month of respectable, but not crazy growth....
The success of Harry Potter Magic Spells this past week is not surprising... annoying, but not surprising ;)
The TV Fans continue to flock to Facebook apps aimed at meeting their needs (whatever those are) - with the "Addicted to ____" and "I Watch ____" series having a very impressive showing in this week's growth list... including
I Watch So You Think You Can Dance?
I Watch Heroes
Addicted to Greys Anatomy
Addicted to The OC
Addicted to Friends
Addicted to Desperate Housewives
I Watch Lost
I Watch House
...and, so... when you include the other 7 TV-Related apps in the top 50:
Scrubs Quotes
Friends Quotes
Seinfeld
Prison Break
Big Brother
One Tree Hill
Sex and the City
... that makes 30% of the top 50 fastest growing apps... all about specific TV shows... and you wonder why more developers are jumping on the bandwagon...
I'm afraid we're in for a much longer list of TV apps next time we see this list.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
What does it take to be "Recently Popular"? (early data)
We've got some new stats to discuss.... Since will take a bit of work to get the details to you, it seemed worthwhile to share just a couple of interesting discoveries this week where we've actually considered the Recently Popular list as well as the plain old "Most Used" list...
As of 8pm PST on 7/22/2007:
- 77% of the top 1,000 Recently Popular apps have less than 1,000 users.
- Only 3 out of the top 10 Apps on the Most Users list are also in the top 1,000 most Recently Popular [Video by Facebook, Fortune Cookie by R. Tyler Ballance, and Horoscopes by RockYou!]... Yes, that means 7 out of 10 of the apps with Most Users are NOT in the top 1,000 Recently Popular.
- 66% of the top apps with Most Users are NOT in the first 1,000 Recently Popular.
Ok... that's enough for now... it seems interesting at minimum and worth more stats... which you'll get tomorrow (Monday).
As of 8pm PST on 7/22/2007:
- 77% of the top 1,000 Recently Popular apps have less than 1,000 users.
- Only 3 out of the top 10 Apps on the Most Users list are also in the top 1,000 most Recently Popular [Video by Facebook, Fortune Cookie by R. Tyler Ballance, and Horoscopes by RockYou!]... Yes, that means 7 out of 10 of the apps with Most Users are NOT in the top 1,000 Recently Popular.
- 66% of the top apps with Most Users are NOT in the first 1,000 Recently Popular.
Ok... that's enough for now... it seems interesting at minimum and worth more stats... which you'll get tomorrow (Monday).
Friday, July 20, 2007
Facebook Wall Apps - How they holdin' up?
It's probably a good time to start looking at Facebook apps by category... using real usage data to see which category's are hot and which apps are ruling or gaining in a given category. Many people have been giving subjective views within categories - like ReadWriteWeb's "top 10" series, where they've gone out on a limb to say what they like in categories such as Work,Play, Media,Utility, and, just today, a post on "Extension" apps - which "extend Facebook's core functionality to improve upon existing features"... [we did a quick spreadsheet to show how some of the Utility apps chosen are actually shrinking in terms of usage, but that doesn't prove they are bad apps.]
So here is a quick summary of all the Wall Apps we could find...
So here is a quick summary of all the Wall Apps we could find...
"Saw my picture in the paper, Read the news around my face, and now some people dont want to treat me the same... When the walls come tumblin' down"- John Cougar Mellencamp - Crumblin' Down
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Who lost the most users July 11-17: the bottom 21
As shameful as it may seem... even good apps see a period of profile and home page cleansing following that period of explosive growth.... and, sometimes, there never was any explosive growth... just pure rejection. These apps, in the table below, had the most negative growth rates in the most recent period (July 11-17)...which shouldn't imply anything about prior periods - but, as you'll see, it does, as only 3 of the 21 had any positive growth in prior periods.
Some of them are actually born from good non-FB apps (you be the judge of that), so maybe they're just not following the rules of good Facebook app marketing design as told by Dave McClure.... or, better yet, Facebook news feed optimization, as told by Justin Smith and Jonathan Lipps. Or, maybe they just suck and people had to add them to find that out.
It's the WWW (Wild Wild West) all over again... at first, everything draws traffic... then, value prevails and we're not all just surfin', lookin' fer the next best thing.
Some of them are actually born from good non-FB apps (you be the judge of that), so maybe they're just not following the rules of good Facebook app marketing design as told by Dave McClure.... or, better yet, Facebook news feed optimization, as told by Justin Smith and Jonathan Lipps. Or, maybe they just suck and people had to add them to find that out.
It's the WWW (Wild Wild West) all over again... at first, everything draws traffic... then, value prevails and we're not all just surfin', lookin' fer the next best thing.
Growth Trends reveal true growth
I realize every time we rank apps on the basis of pure growth rate between two dates we open the door for lots of questions:
- What about NEW apps which didn't have users at the start of the period (we leave those out, but every so often we have one which makes us re-think that - this latest period it was Likeness by the successful FB developer Peter Louis, which entered the scene with over 800,000 users!). Peter co-authored SuperWall.
- How can you compare the growth rate of an app with 100,000 users with an app with only 1,000 users? (It's easier than trying to put them in groups... but we may start doing that).
- Isn't it more important to see the TREND of growth across multiple periods rather than just ranking based on 1 period? (YES! .. hence, this post..)
So we decided to tackle that last question just a bit here... We looked at the trend of growth across 3 periods: June 28 through July 6, July 6 through July 11, July 11 through July 17. Three growth rates tell us much more than only one.
Overall, most apps growth rates decline after the first burst. And, in fact, we've seen about 200 out of 1000 which just disappear after their first showing on our list... mainly due to not growing fast enough to stay in the top 800 or so most used apps. Consistently increasing growth rates are very rare indeed... only 24 apps in our list of just over a thousand achieved this, and that includes 3 which started with a negative growth rate, one of which is still negative (Lamefactor) - just less negative than when it started ;) [BTW, 167 apps were noted as "turn-arounds, which saw a decrease in growth rate from the first period to the second and subsequently increased in growth rate again in the third growth period...]
There are two notable exceptions, which you can see clearly in the chart above which shows all 24 of those with a positive trend:
PuzzleBee , by TheBroth: Started with 3,158 users on June 28th... then had a consistently increasing daily growth rate - 10.55%, 15.94%, 92.04% - to end on July 17th with 68,259 users. An average growth rate of 39.51% ! Take note... and give Nick O'Neil some credit for spotting the value in this app back on June 22, when he blogged about it.
Google Reader Shared Items, by Mario Romero, was growing at a respectable 1%+ per day and then Robert Scoble wrote about it as a Digg killer, others picked up the story and wham - the daily growth rate of this app jumped to over 41% ! Let's see if that trend continues since at the end of the period we're discussing (July 17th eod), it still had only 4,064 users.
There are a few others with a continuing positive trend, but most of them are still light on users in total - and the 24 in the chart only included those with over 1000 users as of July 17th.
- What about NEW apps which didn't have users at the start of the period (we leave those out, but every so often we have one which makes us re-think that - this latest period it was Likeness by the successful FB developer Peter Louis, which entered the scene with over 800,000 users!). Peter co-authored SuperWall.
- How can you compare the growth rate of an app with 100,000 users with an app with only 1,000 users? (It's easier than trying to put them in groups... but we may start doing that).
- Isn't it more important to see the TREND of growth across multiple periods rather than just ranking based on 1 period? (YES! .. hence, this post..)
So we decided to tackle that last question just a bit here... We looked at the trend of growth across 3 periods: June 28 through July 6, July 6 through July 11, July 11 through July 17. Three growth rates tell us much more than only one.
Overall, most apps growth rates decline after the first burst. And, in fact, we've seen about 200 out of 1000 which just disappear after their first showing on our list... mainly due to not growing fast enough to stay in the top 800 or so most used apps. Consistently increasing growth rates are very rare indeed... only 24 apps in our list of just over a thousand achieved this, and that includes 3 which started with a negative growth rate, one of which is still negative (Lamefactor) - just less negative than when it started ;) [BTW, 167 apps were noted as "turn-arounds, which saw a decrease in growth rate from the first period to the second and subsequently increased in growth rate again in the third growth period...]
There are two notable exceptions, which you can see clearly in the chart above which shows all 24 of those with a positive trend:
PuzzleBee , by TheBroth: Started with 3,158 users on June 28th... then had a consistently increasing daily growth rate - 10.55%, 15.94%, 92.04% - to end on July 17th with 68,259 users. An average growth rate of 39.51% ! Take note... and give Nick O'Neil some credit for spotting the value in this app back on June 22, when he blogged about it.
Google Reader Shared Items, by Mario Romero, was growing at a respectable 1%+ per day and then Robert Scoble wrote about it as a Digg killer, others picked up the story and wham - the daily growth rate of this app jumped to over 41% ! Let's see if that trend continues since at the end of the period we're discussing (July 17th eod), it still had only 4,064 users.
There are a few others with a continuing positive trend, but most of them are still light on users in total - and the 24 in the chart only included those with over 1000 users as of July 17th.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Facebook Top 101 Growing Apps - July 11-17
New data! Here's a new view of the fastest growing facebook apps. More than half of the fastest growing 101 facebook apps over the past 6 days were not even on the charts just 11 days ago (less than a couple of hundred users on June 6th).
Just a few quick notes (more to come soon):
A new class of apps - "I watch _____" was introduced by Watercooler, Inc. (who, btw, have no author link in FB). While none are huge in terms of total users (approx 2000 each), they have 5 in the top 101 fastest growing list - and all of them are new within the past 11 days.
Vibrating Hamster? I'm not even going to ask, no less add the app to my profile... but over 17,000 people were curious enough to push this "app" to the 4th fastest growing over the past 6 days.
9 out of the top 10 apps practically didn't exist 11 days ago...
Just a few quick notes (more to come soon):
A new class of apps - "I watch _____" was introduced by Watercooler, Inc. (who, btw, have no author link in FB). While none are huge in terms of total users (approx 2000 each), they have 5 in the top 101 fastest growing list - and all of them are new within the past 11 days.
Vibrating Hamster? I'm not even going to ask, no less add the app to my profile... but over 17,000 people were curious enough to push this "app" to the 4th fastest growing over the past 6 days.
9 out of the top 10 apps practically didn't exist 11 days ago...
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