Facebook Applications, Option F, and the Vanishing Point of User Adoption
Just a short month ago, Facebook made its new development platform, F8, open to the public and with it came the beginnings of a cottage industry of micro application development. The success stories are quite amazing, no matter what scale you consider it at. On the one hand, there are a dozen or so apps with 1M+ users already and growing. On the other hand, there are hundreds of applications that have been adopted by many thousand users. As an application developer, the notion of launching an application built in just a few weeks and seeing huge adoption is both exciting and frightening at the same time.
Of course, getting that many “users” in that short a period of time is somewhat suspect, no matter how you count it. We’re more accustomed to this type of growth in things are are either highly fashionable (think Tamagachi, ipods) or highly utilitarian (think vaccines, technologies). In certain circles, software, services, and the combination of the two) are often trumpeted by waves of early adopters. It’s this particular pocket that’s most curious.
Paul Kedrosky raises the specter of this in his recent post, “Option F and the Facebook 500,000”:
Around this time last year Josh Kopelman came up with the idea of the Techcrunch chasm. The root idea is/was that too many companies were targeting the then-53,651 readers of Mike A's popular Techcrunch blog. A good review in Techcrunch, as Josh pointed out, gets you 5-25k beta users, and then you're stuck.Indeed, there probably is a great deal of tire-kicking going on with loads of applications, but the rate of decay is not clear. While it’s not a bad bet that something which grows with meteoric rates will burn back down to something much smaller over time, the unique circumstances of Facebook applications may work to preserve the scale. Specifically, while other applications build their audiences, they require that we, the user, go to a variety of different destinations to participate. With Facebook, we largely broadcast our usage and the stream of incidents that define our involvement. This town-sqaure, gossip-oriented model seem to create a different set of wrappers on how we approach our usage:I’m wondering if something similar isn’t happening in Facebook. I keep hearing about companies that are exercising “Option F” and launching a Facebook version of their app, only to suddenly have 500,000 users. But for how long? I’m betting, pace the Techcrunch chasm, that those people are an ephemeral crew, and that they try pretty much anything, and then drop it again.
I see that behavior quite clearly in my Facebook news feed. People all add one app; people all drop that app. Repeat, repeat, repeat. This is not a mainstream audience, nor does it seem to have much permanence. It’s just tire-kickers and try-ers.
- You can be an early adopter by discovering and app first amongst your network of friends (a network you don't need to invite over and over to prove you made a discovery).
- Your usage is not only informative, but competitive. When everyone sees as you do, they can learn quickly about what drives you. When groups of friends emulate, there's often a bit of one-upsmanship to see who can find the more interesting resources to lasso into the mix or who can most cleverly make use of something already assigned a "purpose."
- Your interest in a subject matter is perpetuated by your peers' involvement and usage
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