Thursday, October 25, 2007

Statistics of VOIP apps in facebook platform

Social networking or web 2.0 is the hot thing happening to the web. From a social networking community standpoint, there are so many different ways to communicate within the community and outside the community. Voice is one of the most popular communication tool used in these communities. Most of the VOIP startups are trying to play a niche role in this arena. Despite the fact that there isn’t a good revenue model in this direction, most of the voip startups support some kind of voice widgets for social community. Nevertheless, I’m not going to dwell into the revenue models or business case.

I was quite interested in knowing the acceptance of voip/voice apps in social networking community. What better place would that be than facebook, with a valuation of $15 billion dollars, that’s insanity? (Myspace $530 million dollar acquisition looks miniscule) Well, it was a very sorry tale for all the voip/voice apps on facebook. At least, to me it looked like these were not the real hot apps or active apps in the entire application directory that has around 6607 applications (as of today Oct 25th 2007). In addition, I didn’t find a category called voice apps. I had a hard time finding all the voip applications in the applications directory.
So here is a quick look at some statistics of different voip/voice apps on facebook platform (as of today, Oct 24th 2007) -- Total facebook active subscriber count 42 million.

Jaxtr
MyPhone
1,110 daily active users
2% of total
Total users – 55,300

GrandCentral
grandcentral
13 daily active users (4%)
Total Users – 325

Rebtel
letstalk
224 daily active users (6%)
Total Users – 3733

Jangl
phonebook
1,654 daily active users (2%)
Total Users – 82,700

Yackpack
27 daily, 0%

SightSpeed Video Chat
0 active users
Total Users - 0

Talkster
75 daily active users
31% of total
Total Users - 242

Iotum
FREE Conference Calls
245 daily active users
4% of total,
Total Users – 6125

Getabuz
Getabuz voice message
Users:964 daily active users
4% of total
Total Users – 24,100

Snapvine
1,090 daily active users
1% of total
Total Users – 109,000

Skype
Skype me
1,214 daily active users
2% of total
Total Users – 60,700

Babytel
55 daily active users
6% of total
Total Users – 916

Yeigo
yeigo me
18 daily active users
15% of total
Total Users – 120

TringMe
2 daily active users
2% of total
Total Users – 100

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7 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Omfut, nice post, I like it.
It doesn't really come as a surprise to me that these services do not have many users. Although I am a strong believer that interaction is the most vital thing for success in social network services, voice is one particular kind I thinks is less suited. Voice calls do not work very well on-line. They force the user to become entirely focussed on the call, while the on-line world is in essence a multi task world. Try talking to someone on the phone and at the same time read something that is not related to the call. It is impossible (unless you are a woman, they ave the natural ability to multitask ;-))
The most important interaction services for social networks are things like messaging, SMS, live streams, IM, sometimes video (although I must confess I hardly ever watch a video, but instead I listen to the sound and start doing something else). In other words, things that allow me to multitask. It would be interesting to see if such services are used more often.

Unknown said...

media like picture, video and sms are more priority for me than voice. I agree with alex on that.

Ravi Shankar said...

Thanks alex and john for the comments.
Looking at the statistics, It was bit of surprise to me. I guess voice support for community interaction is just catching up. To me, SMS is still the killer communication tool. Gosh, look at the revenue this is generating. Mind blowing. Iam a beleiver of voice communication-- that leaves me hoping for something to boost the acceptance. some killer feature

Cheers,
omfut

Anonymous said...

Hi Omfut,

Thanks for sharing Talkster with your readers.

Some people that have heard about Talkster's Free World Dialing have thought it's too good to be true. It isn't. We took a moment to address some of the most common questions from people who believe that free international calls just for listening to a 10-second ad can't possibly be true. You can check out the Q&A here: http://www.mobilitywire.com/consumer/straight-talk-from-talkster

Unknown said...

Really nice piece of work there. I think the view on sms and multi-tasking are spot on: people work and act differently than just a pure "office based environment" so people will behave differently. That's why straight "Voice Calling" doesn't hold any huge attractions.

Http://voicesage.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

alec saunders has written a post with latest facebook statistics. Here is the link
http://saunderslog.com/2007/11/20/some-voip-applications-are-failing-on-facebook/

Facebook Development said...

What you're saying is completely true. I know that everybody must say the same thing, but I just think that you put it in a way that everyone can understand. I also love the images you put in here.