When Facebook opened its API to developers in May, programmers scrambled to grab a piece of the Facebook glory. Now, nearly six months later, more than 6,500 applications adorn users' profiles. They span every conceivable interest and personality type, and yet, they have one striking thing in common: They all suck.
One might wonder why this is the case. Surely, at least a handful of developers would create truly innovative and useful applications, right? Nope. In fact, the way the system is set up discourages intelligent and talented developers. The reasoning for this can be summed up with a simple table:
| Create Popular App | Create Unpopular App | |||
| Innovative Idea | You gain a ton of users, and enjoy the glory for a while; that is, until facebook replicates your idea exactly and pushes for it. Now you have to deal with the granddaddy of applications on their turf. Good luck. | Great idea that just isn’t catching on? Don’t worry. The facebook team, or popular facebook developers, will gladly dumb down your great ideas and incorporate them into their silly existing applications. | ||
| Truly Idiotic Idea | This is where the majority of popular facebook apps exist; virtual object tossing, drink passing, and vampirism. If this is your cup of tea, facebook development is for you. | If you’re idea is so ridiculous that even the 14-year old high-schoolers can’t enjoy it, you might want to consider another profession; like flipping burgers. Maybe virtual burgers. |
In sum, the only applications that survive are the ones in the lower left quadrant. This reasoning developers go through ensures that useful applications never really make it onto facebook, and explains why the present applications are so ridiculous. If you have a great idea, you're better off trying to swing it on your own. Sure, users won't flock to your application the day you release it, but at least it won't get stolen or swallowed up by others in a position to do so. After all, what's stopping them?
Furthermore, the proprietary code you're forced to use makes it impossible to develop the application for other platforms. So much for every social network following in Facebook's footsteps; you'll still have to write your applications over and over again. Perhaps Google will change all of that soon enough.
The poor quality of the applications leads to decreased usefulness of the service, due primarily to excessive decentralization. But, decentralization and customization are good things, right? To an extent, yes. But why, then, do people often prefer Facebook to MySpace? Consider this example that illustrates a drawback of decentralization.
A while ago, Facebook removed the ability to list one's classes on his/her profile. I suppose the Facebook team had no choice, since expanding the user-base to high schoolers and graduates makes such a thing impossible to maintain. Well, no big deal - you can just add one of a dozen or so applications that lists your classes, right? Not quite. Adding one of these applications only links you with other students in your classes who use the same application you use; essentially, nobody. The result? A previously useful feature that will never again function the way it used to. Good luck finding study partners or searching for peers based on what classes they take!
Furthermore, the applications alienate Facebook's core (and most valuable) users. The heaviest application users are the high-school students, whose fickle hearts and fleeting desires change at the slightest whim. Is this the basket you want to put your eggs in, Facebook team? As soon as they find something more fun, they'll jump ship and forget Facebook ever existed.The valuable, more mature users are more often than not annoyed by the applications. They remember the days of universality; where everyone's page looked the same. Every profile was neat and clean. They knew where to find things on one's page, and everything was useful and universally connected.
Now, they have to scroll for ten seconds just to see a friend's wall posts. Certain core aspects of the service, like contact information, are either minimized or hidden altogether. They also get bombarded with requests for application additions, as if event and group requests weren't annoying enough! Now, my little (14-year old) sister's high-school friends not only ask to be my friend, but ask me to join in on their stupid little application games. Sure, a simple greasemonkey hack can fix this, but most people think greasemonkey refers to a place where you take your car to get an oil change! The vast majority of users are left to bear the annoying reminders (and sometimes e-mails).
Perhaps things will improve with time, though I wouldn't be surprised to see more news regarding traffic drops in the coming months.
25 comments:
well said!
I don't think you've been looking hard enough for good, useful applications. If you only look at the invites you receive you sure won't find them.
As for the classic "it's a proprietary API so if you write an app for it you're tied to facebook and have to rewrite everything to move it elsewhere". If you're a bad/lazy programmer yes. Otherwise you can write your application's code to be independent from the platform you run it on, using an extra layer of abstraction.
We don't hear much criticism about DirectX and similar APIs these days, but they're exactly the same deal and nobody wines about them being closed. If you're a lazy game developer you write DirectX-specific code which limits you to windows and XBox as the only platforms to run your game on. If you go the extra mile you add a layer of abstraction to port it to OpenGL easily.
Nothing new here, it's the way APIs work.
We don't hear people criticizing twitter, google maps or flickr's APIs either. They're all proprietary. Why not have an open API for all mapping, photo-sharing and instant message broadcasting services?
And by the way you might want to avoid 14yo on your friends list if you don't want to receive pointless application invites all the time. I have a decent amount of friends on FB and haven't received a single application invite in at least 2 or 3 weeks.
Next time try to do some real investigation work before claiming that all 6500 applications suck. I doubt that you've even tested one percent of that.
Sure, the most viral ones are pointless and generally stupid apps. In most countries the TV channels with the most viewers have stupid content too. Does it mean that there isn't any quality TV content somewhere?
Thanks for your reply, gilles. You make some very good points, and I can't disagree with anything you've said.
If you do have some neat applications in mind, please do direct me to them! I'd love to see them. It's difficult to find anything useful because everything popular, just, well, isn't.
Also, I had to remove just about everyone younger than 18 from my friends list (including my sister)a few weeks ago. The application requests I currently receive are almost entirely from college students...and Ivy League students at that!
A few examples of useful well-made apps I've come across:
"slates" a collaborative writing app
"weekly schedule", should be self-explanatory
"intune.fm", "audibie" and "music player", same idea by different people, a global music sharing flash payer. You can upload any song but can't download them, just listen inside the flash player. The song catalog is shared among all users.
"feedheads", displays google reader shared items. Quite useful to see popular news items you could have missed. Also most of my friends are interest what I post on there but generally don't use an RSS reader themselves.
"wikimono", to make your own wiki within facebook
Apart from the last one they all have decent userbases (at least in the thousands/tens of thousands).
I won't pimp my own apps, but I think that they fall into the useful category too.
Of course the usefulness of the above depends on what you're into, but I think that these can claim a whole new level of usefulness compared to "zombies" and the like. I'm sure that the ones I know are just the tip of the iceberg, I didn't actively look for them. I run a free service for developers which makes me come across "underground" apps more than usual.
Thanks again for your reply. I've just taken a look at the bunch you've listed here.
There's no doubt that these are more useful than the one's I listed. However, the kind of "useful" apps I'm really referring to are ones that don't exist elsewhere; truly unique ideas that could be stand-alone applications, but were instead built to be part of facebook. Most of those are just simple, pre-existing concepts "embedded" within facebook's pages. Wikis, calendars, and music players can all be found elsewhere. None of them really utilize anything unique or new, and none would ever survive on their own.
But you're absolutely right in saying that these are indeed 'useful.' The zombies, slayers, and bible-verse quotes of the community are extreme examples of uselessness, I'll admit. I guess we're just talking about different levels of usefulness.
Still though, if you come across anything in the future that is unique and innovative enough to be a stand-alone app, please do let me know. I'd like to talk to the creator and find out about why he/she chose to release on facebook instead of independently.
Again, thanks for your lengthy replies, and for looking at my blog, I appreciate it.
I see a contradiction in what you say. You are looking for an application that's "so useful" that it doesn't need facebook to survive. That's where you're wrong, true useful apps will take advantage of facebook and will most likely be unable to exist without a pre-existing social network to support them. All the applications I've mentioned integrate nicely with the existing online interactions I have with my friends.
How can an application be innovative if it's good enough not to need facebook? If that's just case, then it's like any other standalone website.
Since I didn't include it in my previous post, I'll explain my first application which is typically something that was not possible or viable before facebook.
It's an application that lets you list some (or all) DVDs/books/video games/etc you own. Your friends can see that, search through it and ask you if they can borrow items from you. Nobody would join such a service if it were standalone. It's not something you would use on a daily basis at all, as such the user retention would be very poor as a standalone service. But it fits nicely on top of facebook. When a friend of mine buys a new DVD and adds it to his list, I see it in my news feed and I can ask him if I can borrow it for the next weekend.
I don't know anyone who would give a call or email all their friends every time they buy a DVD. Nor anyone who would tolerate being notified by email/phone everytime someone they know buys something. And I'm sure none of my current users would have registered to it as a standalone website.
To me the whole point of it is that it adds new features or enhances interactions in your social life. You don't need my application to borrow stuff from your mates. The same way that you don't need the internet or a phone to keep in touch with your relatives. But doesn't having that extra feature make things so much easier and faster? Going "manually" to all your friends' places to look at what DVDs they have doesn't equal having the equivalent of a search engine on their combined borrowable belongings.
Plus facebook tremendously aggregates online social interactions. Sure, my friends can go to flickr to see my photos, to my blogs to read my latest posts, to their RSS reader to have a look at my shared items, to that hypothetical standalone website to see if I bought any new DVDs, follow me on twitter for my latest status, but can they be bothered? How much time would it take them to keep track of that with their mates? Doesn't it change the whole paradigm that they can access all of that at once in a single place and be notified when something newsworthy happens?
You dismiss all applications that are new variations on old ideas by saying "meh, none of these are new". According to your thought process no application can be useful then, because all you reduce facebook to is a signon system with your contacts listed. And you seem to believe that any application could be standalone because in the end, all they need is their own registration system. That's true, but that's an outdated way of thinking. People are tired of signing up for services that have limited functionality/usefulness on their own. So your friends are much more unlikely to join these social applications if they were standalone, which defeats the social purpose of them. It's the fact that all of these are in the same place, where many of your friends are, and that they share the same general interaction logic that makes it more useful than being standalone.
Oh fuck off - this is such a dumb negative post. You really have no idea.
too true. i'm tired of all the invites to applications i don't care about. even more is that i hate i have to add something like a video app just to see someone else's video...or question. ugh.
and yes, scrolling forever to get to the wall just makes me not want to write. if you are going to load up on apps, just move the boxes so people can interact with you! i've got a few myself just for fun, but try to keep them out of the way yet visible.
You're absolutely correct; the grand majority of Facebook apps to date are useless. However, I think that over the next year, we will start to see improvements. The main reason for this is the fbFund, a $10mil investment fund that they've opened to give non-recourse grants to would-be app developers. Something tells me the kind of apps they're looking for is exactly what you said: ideas that could be standalone sites but are instead designed to take advantage of Facebook's social graph -- instead of forcing to reconstruct it, as a standalone site would. As long as the managers of the fbFund (which includes Zuckerberg himself) choose the right apps to fund, I think that the Facebook platform will grow to be very useful in the coming months.
Well Facebook is just a bit of fun and the apps extend this so i'm not sure how usefulness can determine an apps suckiness. Since I use facebook to connect with people I dont have time to catch up with, game apps like Scrabulous, Bogglific and Chess etc. or even the stupid vampires are enormously useful for me for connecting with people and letting them know I still think about them. Useless in one sense if you choose to look at it in that way but useful in another.
I'm sorry folks,but you all might as well be speaking a foreign language.I don't understand any of it. All this jargon about
computer programming sounds like
the chattering of monkeys to me.
My attitude is that if I as an
uneducated slob am blind, deaf, and dumb, about programming, how can I ever find any interest in what it's all about. I don't really care for your stupid code like speech.
I do not need or want it.---BYE
Don't generalize all high-schoolers.
I'm a freshman but I hate all this application stuff.
the only people replying are the people who send those shitty app requests in the first place.
it's no better than myspace anymore.
I'm curious... do you have any proof (even anecdotal) of Facebook stealing someone's app idea??
Thanks for all of the feedback, especially those sent here from del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. I appreciate your input.
Also, I'm sorry if I offended any Facebook developers out there! Well, I'm not sorry if you're responsible for the viral Zombies, Slayers, or Bible Verses applications...but if you're one of the few developers whose apps are marginally useful, my apologies do indeed apply.
No thanks, These Comments and
arguments, I find too depressing.
I don't even understand them.
If people can't wrok together, they should just shut up and leave the rest of us alone. Mind
your own business and leave others the hell alone---Doug Rosbury
Regardless of your position on the issue, I think re-distribution of wealth is a very important subject in the world of "Web-as-platform". Kudos to Alex for bringing up a subject that is not just applicable to Facebook, but to every other Web "platform" out there making real money from the contribution of their user community (and not sharing it). Basically: Please do not shut up!!
Alex I am a huge fan! How is the crusade against Facebook apps coming? I was asked to be a zombie just yesterday and it made me think of you. xoxo Adiós!
Hola Alejandro! Soy un gran aficionado. Estas feliz como un lombriz?
Good day !.
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