Facebook Metrics, the Good and Bad

John Musser, October 10th, 2007

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In Tim O’Reilly’s keynote presentation yesterday at Graphing Social Patterns he highlighted some interesting metrics about Facebook applicatoins drawn from their just released report The Facebook Application Platform. You can get a good synopsis of this from Tim’s blog post and this chart showing the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers:

The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users. This is a long tail marketplace with a vengeance.

This doesn’t mean that Facebook won’t become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism.

A few stats of note his talk yesterday:

• 87% of usage goes to 2% of the Apps
• Most active category with > 100K users is Messaging
• The growth rate of the top applications appears to be slowing

The speaker after Tim was Facebook’s David Morin who highlighted a few more stats about the Facebook Platform:

• There are now 90,000 registerd Facebook developers
• 100 new apps are added per day
• 80% of Facebook users have installed at least one application

We’ll have to see how these trends are impacted by the impending launch of the MySpace Platform.