The mysterious world of Facebook apps
September 27th, 2009 | by elisabeth | Published in Facebook | 9 Comments
CIO.com offers a fascinating article on the Facebook economy and how much app use has plummeted since a Facebook user interface redesign de-emphasized outside apps. I’d noticed that, too, and wondered what Facebook was thinking in stripping the site down so much (or Twitterizing itself, depending on how you look at it). The article does a good job describing the problem, but doesn’t really answer the question of why Facebook made apps so much less prominent. The Facebook higher-ups continue to insist that they can make third-party applications a key feature of the site, despite seemingly moving in the opposite direction.
More generally, I’ve never understood why Facebook apps didn’t take off. The idea had such potential—developers could take advantage of the social context in a unique way—but it seemed like 98% of the actual offerings were on the spectrum between boring and infuriating. Any ideas on why that is? Did anyone out there love (or continue to love) Facebook apps?
—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer
September 27th, 2009 at 7:01 pm (#)
98% of everything on the Internet is on the spectrum between boring and infuriating.
September 27th, 2009 at 7:06 pm (#)
Maybe because everyone figured out that they were storing all the data and selling it to marketing firms – or that the ACLU could set up an app to see things on your friends’ walls (!) and show how unsecure they are? Maybe because we have really shoddy privacy protections in the US?
Facebook wants to instrumentalize everything and sell our private info to the highest bidder. People suspect that maybe the apps they choose or what they say in (say the quizzes) is someday going to come back to haunt them. The Beacon fiasco destroyed any hope for Facebook to be seen as non-invasive…even after backing out it was shown (on wired?) that they were still retrieving data and selling it.
That’s their right, I guess, for a free service (if they are up front about it) but the fact is no one trusts FB and especially not the 3rd party apps that are basically data-mining.
Apple apps, at least, just feel like software.
September 27th, 2009 at 7:43 pm (#)
The problem is twofold:
(1) Facebook, as a development platform, is constantly changing and hardly elegant. Making apps for it is hardly easy. This difficulty is one of the reasons for the second part of the problem:
(2) It’s easier to get growth and usage of your app by clever marketing tricks on the various communication channels (notifications, requests, invites, etc.) than it is to build quality apps.
You can more than double your install rate if you change a button from small and blue to big, shiny, and pink. The market forces literally force mediocrity.
September 27th, 2009 at 9:08 pm (#)
Here’s a free 18 week “iPhone Application Programming” course I’ve posted to the open World University & School – like Wikipedia with MIT OCW – from Stanford http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Courses. Does anyone know of any online courses that show you how to write a FB app?
September 27th, 2009 at 11:47 pm (#)
I suspect some part of it might have been that apps on the iPhone are like apps on a PC – we expect that the apps (and their motherships) will only know what we the users tell them about ourselves. In contrast, on Facebook, the app (and its owners) are tied right into our entire digital persona. The big advantage of an app on Facebook is its ability to leverage the social network; but that same feature may also be a big liability in that many users are no doubt concerned about an app that seems to “know” too much about its user.
September 28th, 2009 at 12:41 pm (#)
I have always had an aversion to Facebook apps – for a number of reasons. Probably the one that effected me the most in my decisions to ignore them is that they made my Facebook page really cluttered. They were difficult to move around, made my organization scheme uglier – you had to wait for them to upload. And they didn’t seem like part of the essential Facebook experience, which I would describe as twofold: one, sharing information about yourself (in contact information, lists of things you like, and photos) and two, sending short messages to other people. Applications are superfulous to this experience and if they are not completely convenient, they don’t feel like an important part of the service, and I then have no motivation to spend my time with them.
September 28th, 2009 at 6:11 pm (#)
From my observations, Facebook is moving toward a platform untethered from the site itself. Hence, it would make more sense for them to partner more closely with developers and existing web services through Facebook connect — leveraging their most important asset, the community — rather than narrowing their reach an ecosystem of apps that orbit their own site.
Hopefully, they’ve learned from newspapers (arguably the first failed social network) in recognizing it’s not the real estate they own but the community.
September 28th, 2009 at 9:30 pm (#)
Might applications’ success and functionality depend on the relative openness of the iPhone OS or FB codes, as well as ease of writing programs for them? Both have large user bases … Does anyone know of an online course to write FB apps, that we could post to World Univ & Sch similar to the free, Stanford “iPhone App Programming” course here: http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Courses?
Also, many of the iPhone applications are useful, which hasn’t been my experience with FB’s.
The head of each organization’s focus, and the resulting culture, also seem relevant. Did Apple’s Steve Jobs want many developers to write applications for the iPhone, in specific ways, while Mark Zuckerberg seems not to care too much about people writing applications for FB?
September 30th, 2009 at 6:07 am (#)
one funny thing is that when apple first launched the iphone, there was no app store, there was no official way to run third party code on the phone, and apple wanted instead that one made special iphone pages.
what i think is the issue is the ease of finding, not the level of data access.
the iphone web pages never really took of, but i suspect that was more because it was hard to tell if a page had a iphone version, unless it automatically redirected you there. In contrast, the app store is right there. It’s like apple was running a big bookmark recommendation service.
also, what are most of the apps ones you remove the games and the joke apps (farts, beer and similar)? They are mostly glossy front ends to online services.
i suspect facebook was hoping the apps would bring it ad attention, but it did not, but at the same time the worst they can do is kill the app system fully, so they push it aside while trying to hook into the twitter craze.
but that will not work either, as facebook is all about old class mates, friends and whatsnot, twitter on the other hand can be as informative or as anonymous as you want it to be, so there is no chance we will see some person doing facebook updates from the middle of some riots (at least if there is a bit of brain left in the body, we see criminals checking facebook from places they break into), while twitter is the perfect way…