Like the rise and fall of great empires before us, it looks like even the mighty Facebook is not immune to its community deserters.
According to a report from 20bit entitled The State of the Facebook Platform, the number of active users within the Facebook developer community has declined 27% since January, while the number of highly active users has plummeted 47%.
In the article 20bit argues that there are four main reasons why activity within the Facebook developer community has fallen.
- Facebook’s proprietary platform pigeonholes developers into an either-or proposition. Bebo and MySpace use OpenSocial, which allows developers to create a product that can cross multiple social networking environments and audiences. This makes developing on OpenSocial a more financially lucrative solution than Facebook.
- Developers are consolidating together, which may have had an impact on the number of users within the Facebook developer’s forum. With an increase in competition, developers are less likely to help one another out.
- Facebook is taking action to limit the spammy aspects of applications, which has had a negative effect their “viralness.” For instance amount of people you can send the application invitation has been limited to 5, news feeds and alerts have also been restricted.
- Increasing competition from other social networking platforms like Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, and Bebo has taken a bite out of theFacebook populous.
All of the statistical data is interesting and does confirm the author’s hunch of some sort of ebb in the activity of Facebook application development. It seems likely that developers are not going to exclusively develop applications for the Facebook platform. It is too risky to become dependent on one social networking platform.
What is also interesting is Facebook applications are predominantly games or “just for fun” applications as defined in a report by Flowing Data, entitled A Breakdown of Facebook Applications. You can actually track the analytics of Facebook applications from a website called Adonomics.
It still is a bit of a wild west out in the land of social networking applications. Developing a lucrative and successful Facebook application is still an uncertain path. There is no doubt that social networking is here to stay, and developing for it will be worth it at some point. However the last standing platform may not be in Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, or even Bebo down the road.