Facebook 1st anniversary, application fatigue

It’s almost a year since Facebook opened its platform for third party developers. I have a mixed feeling about the kind of applications that are available for the users, and the kind of applications that are popular among the users. According to adonomics, there are around 1,000,537,129 installs across 25,914 apps on Facebook with over 200,000 developers currently evaluating the platform. These applications were used 34,175,797 times in the last 24 hours and have a combined valuation of $385,777,928. Wow! That’s pretty huge. Nevertheless I don’t think most of these applications are worth mentioning or talking about.

I agree with Jason from techcrunch on his analysis of facebook apps. There is dearth of “revolutionary” applications that has stickiness. Looking at the applications that are very successfull, it makes me wonder if this platform is worth spending time building something beyond fun stuff. Don’t get me wrong, the statistics says that most of the apps that are successful on this platform are those that are used for fun.

Without a doubt, facebook platform has been a phenomenal success with thousands of developers and applications. It has close to 70 million users. From a user standpoint, it is a sheer application fatigue when it comes to choosing the application from a list of 26000 applications. How many applications can a user add to his profile? . Too much of application choice is paralyzing. This is something facebook should be wary about. They should start some cleanup process to get rid of those apps that are either useless or not bringing in any value to the platform. I know it’s hard, but inevitable.

Apart from the platform, facebook has come a long way from supporting other cool features that in a way compete with the likes of FreindFeed,Twitter,Digg etc. There has been lot of talks about facebook becoming the Web OS. ( FYI, today facebook announced that they will open source their facebook platform , more on this later ).

Here are the top 10 applications on facebook platform:










Here are some details about Voice and SMS apps:















What an irony, jangl seems to be growing on facebook platform. Look at their valuation, its impressive. Only if the VC had faith in them . Comparing the top 10 apps active users with the Voice and SMS applications active users, it’s disappointing! . ( I have written about this earlier ).
It makes me wonder how much revenue is iotum’s Free Conference app generating with just 500-1000 active users per day. Not sure if this can generate enough dough to run the company. Well, I’m sure Alec must be working on that.