The Next Web

Stop making useless Twitter apps, please

Written on March 30, 2008 – 2:20 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Ok, I admit, I’m not really good in keeping track of my Twitter feeds. My following list consists of only 116 people, yet I feel like I’m missing a whole bunch of stuff. For example, I’ve been following this guy who posts an update once a day about what good movie will be broad casted on Dutch television. Yet I’ve never, ever, seen one of his updates. Same goes for some of my friends, I’d love to know what they’re up to, but when I want to find out, I’ll have to check all their personal pages. That’s a lot of work on a busy day.

On the other hand, services like Twitterific drive me crazy. Since I don’t want a distraction moment every 5 seconds. So what I’ve been doing is gathering the RSS feeds of the people who are closest to my heart or professional interest to merge their feeds with Yahoo Pipes. Pretty ok as an temporary solution, but I’m still waiting for something better to come along.

I think I’m not the only one with this ‘problem’, as everybody has a limited attention span. So I figured I might write a post about this tool I saw on Killerstartups: Tweet Peek. It promises that you can group your Twitter contacts. Some examples:

• your company - updates from your office
• your industry -updates from your colleagues
• your community – updates from your friends

From the description Killerstartups gave, I expected to just join the service, mark the friends I want to gather in a group and paste a widget on my blog. But this turned out to be a wrong expectation. Tweet Peek does nothing more than just importing the tweeds of an account, so there’s no actual grouping involved. After a quick Google Blogsearch, I found some sort of manual:

• Create a Twitter account for the entity.
• Follow the folks whom you would like to participate in the flow of the conversation.
• Head over to Tweetpeek and tell it the name of the Twitter account you created.

Hey! That’s cheating! The actual grouping is done on Twitter, by myself. If I wanted to that, I could easily grab the RSS feed of that Twitter account. I don’t need some fancy-designed app to show me the result of that Twitter account. Moreover, I think creating new accounts is a hideous way to group youe friends. It just makes a mess of the Twittersphere.

Sure, Twitter is service that just begs for expansion by overlay-services. And there are some great examples like Twitterfic (not for me though), Twittermail, parts of Remember The Milk and Twitterfeed. But please, stop making useless apps that don’t add any functionality. Instead of that, focus on developing a service that really groups your Twitter contacts.

I hope you like that post!

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apps, twitter, twitterific, twitterpeek

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What does it take to become a sustainable Facebook app?

Written on March 27, 2008 – 11:00 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel

Asi Sharabi has written his second report on Facebook Applications Trends. You can see my post regarding his first report here. I find Asi’s reports to be extremely interesting and useful. Any person/company that’s currently offering or plans to offer an application on Facebook, should definitely read both reports to get an idea on “what’s hot and what’s not” as far as apps go. In the first report Asi focused on the 100 most popular apps according to number of installs. This report focuses on the apps that have the highest number of active users. Looking at these apps allows us to truly understand what makes a sustainable Facebook app. All data in the post is taken from adonomics , an amazing site which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding Facebook applications.

Asi writes:

As some people have already noted there is a sense of ‘apps fatigue’ and this indeed reflected in the data. Still, according to recent report while there is for the first time a slow decrease in the apps fair, on average 51% Facebook users interacted with FB apps pages in January.”

Most of the prevalent, multi-million installs apps have fairly low percentage of active users. Evidently, it is one thing to create a ‘viral’ application and get loads of users to install it (which occasionally been achieved with some dirty tricks and is getting increasingly difficult), but it is a different thing altogether to create a sustainable application, i.e. application that’s not just a passing gimmick but one that offer lasting value that people keep using over time.

I think that part of the reason why users are fatigued by Facebook apps is because there are very few apps that offer users real added value. Succeeding in getting people to install your app is great. But that’s only the first step. The real challenge lies in creating a sustainable application which people will actively use.

There are currently 20,861 applications on Facebook (140 apps are uploaded daily). Only about 170 apps have over 1 million users.  About 800 have 100K to 1 million users, around 2200 have 10K – 100K users, around 4300 have 1K – 10k users, which leaves us with about 13,000+ apps with less than 1K users. (more…)

apps, facebook, social networks, statistics, widgets

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