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Although there has been a lot of speculation in the last few weeks, the long term impacts of the profile redesign on the Facebook platform have certainly yet to be fully felt. Since the redesign fully rolled out a few weeks ago, there has been significant outside scrutiny of the little publicly available evidence that has indicated upticks for some apps (like Causes, which we profiled yesterday), and major traffic drops for others.
Today, we shift our focus to the top 3 apps on the Facebook active user leaderboard as well we three mid-sized applications to get a better cross section of application traffic patterns over the past 30 days.
Super Wall (RockYou!)
While some hypothesized that Facebook’s enhanced Wall and Publisher integration would threaten the major “wall” apps, Super Wall has thus far proven those fears to be unfounded. Over the past month, Super Wall has trended slightly upwards, coming in with roughly 18.5 million monthly active users as of today.
Top Friends (Slide)
Included in the profile redesign was a tweak to the Facebook’s own friends box. The update allowed users to specify which and how many friends’ pictures appeared in their own friends box - functionality that previously only Top Friends provided. Over the past 30 days, Top Friends has trended downwards, falling from 19.5 million monthly actives to roughly 16.8 million monthly actives as of today.
Slide FunSpace (Slide)
Slide, which recently announced distribution partnerships with several media outlets, has for the past month experienced a significant downturn on Slide FunSpace (formerly FunWall), another one of their core properties. The app has fallen from 20.8 million to 15.2 million monthly active users, nearly a 37% decline.
Movies (Flixster)
Flixster’s Movies application is on a sharp upswing, with a jump from 4.86 million to 5.86 million monthly actives. That growth has come mostly during the past 10 days.
Word Twist (Zynga)
Word Twist, a part of the Zynga game network, has remained almost perfectly flat, resting at 650k MAUs.
Dog Book (Refresh Partners)
Finally, Dog Book suffered significant loses, falling from nearly 464k MAUs to 320k MAUs, nearly a one-third drop in traffic.
Conclusion
This handful of apps may not be indicative of the platform at large, but their performances do paint a mixed picture of the ecosystem’s overall health. While it may be appealing to simply state “apps are dead” or “apps are up,” the real story is thus far less definitive. It is clear, however, that the Facebook Platform has changed, and applications need to adapt to the new Facebook dynamics and integration points to continue to grow and prosper.
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October 23rd, 2008 at 10:49 am
Interesting thesis, but I think there is a major point that’s not being accurately reflected. The main point of the article is “how has the redesign affected some large apps”. The Facebook redesign rolled out to all users on Sept 10 (or a day or two from there). Your graphs start on Sept 22. My hunch, based on chatter from other folks, is that the Sept 10 - Sept 22 period had pretty significant traffic impacts for some folks. Doesn’t it make sense to measure the traffic changes related to the redesign from the day the redesign actually took effect?
The graph I would like to see is August 1 - September 10 and September 10 - October 20.
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for showcasing DogBook. A couple of points of interest:
Dogbook relaunched during f8 a few months ago with a new look-n-feel plus new features to support the new profile.
From August 1 to September 12, we had about 36,000 DAU. From September 13 to October 22, our DAUs are around 20,000. The key dates of the drop-off were Sep 10 to Sep 12.
Although the new look and functionality was very well received, in the last month we have seen a loss of active users. Going through our support email, it is clear that the redesigned APPLICATIONS menu and the Facebook’s bookmarking feature are the reasons for the loss.
At first, our users couldn’t find the Application’s menu. Then they couldn’t figure out how to ‘Bookmark’ the application which resulted in the application not appearing in their Application menu.
We suspect that our loss would have been greater if it weren’t for the campaign that we ran once we relaunched that contacted all of our users who had a dog/cat/…
btw: Dogbook is owned by Poolhouse (http://poolhouse.ca) and managed by Refresh (http://refreshpartners.com)
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Can you get any more anecdotal?
Causes has seen traffic increases because of massive advertising. Do your research..
October 23rd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Again, Facebook basically only feeds their own apps to the home page. I have not seen a single 3rd-party app on my homepage and only a few of my friends have said to have seen 1 or 2 per week.
That is a big reason my apps have died and yet nobody seems to be addressing this issue.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
[...] third-party data sources have also been showing mixed results from the redesign. See this earlier report by Facebook-focused blog Inside Facebook and another by rival [...]
October 30th, 2008 at 11:01 am
[...] The new application bookmarking system has been pinned as a primary cause of developer uncertainty with the new design in recent [...]
October 31st, 2008 at 6:01 am
[...] that many application developers have been seeing since the Facebook redesign launched last month have been mixed, some developers are finding ways to grow fast in the new Facebook world. One such developer is [...]
November 3rd, 2008 at 4:58 am
[...] SuperWall, a media-sharing app similar to Facebook’s wall feature. SuperWall is still doing fine. Note: Applications are basically widgets with additional features enabled by the [...]
December 7th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
[...] Now the second largest application on the AppData application leader board, Super Wall’s traffic has remained strong since our last report posted in late October. [...]
December 8th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
[...] on the AppData application leader board, Super Wall’s traffic has remained strong since our last report posted in late October. 2. Hug Me +589,804 MAU, up 13.87% in the past 30 days 3. Pieces of Flair +143,995 MAU, up 3.32% [...]
January 29th, 2009 at 8:16 am
[...] the Facebook ecosystem and research firms support some of his conclusions, at least by the numbers. An analysis by Inside Facebook, an independent blog that follows the social network and its ecosystem, found [...]