Top 5 Facebook Apps: Lessons Learned

July 28th, 2007

Everyone is talking about the facebook platform and how it allows application developers to acquire users quickly through social network word of mouth. As of 28 July, 2007 there are 2290 applications the top 5 of which are:

TopFriends (10M users) by Slide, the company started by Max Levchin, cofounder of PayPal. TopFriends lets you add a section to your profile that lists your top 32 friends. Like most people you probably have 100+ ‘facebook friends’. TopFriends lets you highlight the ones that matter most to you.
Graffiti (5.5M users) by Ted Suzman, Tim Suzman and Mark Kantor at the University of Washington. Graffiti is a mini paintbrush tool that lets you draw small graffitis on your friends’ profiles.
Video (5.2M users) is an application developed by Facebook itself and lets you upload a video of you and your friends. Once uploaded, the video can be annotated or tagged with all your friends that appear in it. Each of those friends gets notified. The video app also lets you upload a video from your cellphone and record live from your webcam.
iLike (5.1M users) by iLike, inc. is a music application that lets you add your favorite songs and video clips right to your profile.
X-me (5.7M users) by Jia Shen. A lot of the interaction on Facebook consists of ‘poking’. You poke someone to grab that person’s attention or to say hello. For example you can poke a person that is not on your friends list in order to initiate contact. It’s sort of like a smile in the real world. Adding the X-Me application to your profile will let people do much more than plain poking like ‘hugging’, ‘tickling’, and ’slapping’ you.

So what does this short overview of the top 5 Facebook applications tell us?

The Facebook Platform has a low barrier to entry: Everyone’s joining the party from university computer science students (Graffiti & X-Me) to startups (Slide & iLike) to Facebook itself.

Facebook is a level playing field: Out of the top 5 most popular application only one, the video app, is developed by Facebook. Facebook is wise enought not to use its home court advantage against the application developers.

You succeed by enabling people to express themselves: X-Me lets you hug, slap, or do other basic actions to a friend. Graffiti lets you draw and post a basic drawing. If you think about it, the top 5 apps do completely different things. But they share one thing in common, they let users express themselves. The companies behind the facebook apps might have diverging end goals. Maybe Slide wants to get more people using their photo slide show functionality. And it’s likely that iLike wants to gather a database of people’s music tastes to offer better recommendations. But no matter what the end goal is, every company wants to get as many users as it can. And I think that the best way of doing that is to build something that empowers people to express their personality.