CARRIER DECKS AND AGGREGATOR STOREFRONTS are so last year. Because application developers are quickly discovering that the hottest places to showcase their wares are the top social networking sites.
Facebook last year opened its platform to third-party developers, spurring a flood of applications that users can access, add to their profiles and share with friends. MySpace quickly followed Facebook’s lead, employing a set of common application programming interfaces developed by Google Inc.; Bebo in turn adopted Facebook’s open platform.
The moves have resulted in vast new distribution channels, allowing developers and publishers to distribute and market their applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional customer acquisition methods.
“Facebook is definitely the front-runner, they’re the ones that revolutionized this whole thing by opening it up,” said Brian Levin, CEO of Useful Networks Inc. “OpenSocial is the platform for MySpace and everyone else (on the social networking field), so it’s still new and fresh in the game. It’s playing catch-up to Facebook.”
20,000 and counting
Useful Networks’ Sniff Nordic Friendfinder – a location-based application available through two carriers in Europe – is one of nearly 20,000 applications available to Facebook users. Roughly 300 mobile applications are available, allowing Facebookers to play cards, send messages, “nudge” others or (of course) create their own pimp names online or from their handsets.
While the overwhelming number of mobile offerings claim only a few dozen daily users – and many drawing fewer than a dozen – a handful of titles have established impressive followings. Facebook Mobile leads the way, of course, with more than 350,000 daily users; other popular offerings include the messaging application Frengo’s Flirtable and a product from Social-Telephony that allows users to hear the voices of their online pals.
Some publishers are simply trying to draw traffic and worry about converting users into dollars later. Others, like the mobile game maker Digital Chocolate, dangle the free applications in the hopes of enticing users to shell out for premium offerings with more bells and whistles. The San Mateo, Calif.- based company used Facebook and other sites to breathe new life into Tower Bloxx, a simple stacking game that was available on carrier decks a couple of years ago. Users can play Tower Bloxx free – the game had nearly 35,000 daily Facebook users as of last week – and are offered instructions on how to buy the mobile version via a short code or their carrier deck.
“We put this game out as a free trial on the Web, and it had a button that said, ‘mobile Bloxx.’ Since this was our first experiment, we weren’t very optimistic,” said Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins. “But we had over 200,000 people click on that button. This is from millions of people trialing the game on the Web. What we found was that it was not that different for us to get a trial version of a game out on the Web.”
I’m different
Standing out on a site teeming with applications is a daunting task, of course. But Facebook’s “news feeds” automatically deliver updates to users when their friends add a new offering to their profile or launch a new application: “Joe started listening to a station on Pandora,” for instance, or “Kathy has added the Whereboutz application.” While some members at first objected to having Facebook constantly looking over their shoulder, the feature has become a key component of the site – both for members and for those targeting them.
“When Facebook first came out with the news feed, everyone freaked out, they thought it was creepy,” Levin said. “That took about a day and a half to blow over, and then it became the biggest part of Facebook.”
Facebook appears poised to overtake MySpace as the top social networking site in the world, according to figures released by comScore last week. Facebook had nearly 101 million unique visitors in January, the online market research firm said, and continues to close the gap with MySpace, which had 109.3 million visitors. But while Facebook is the flavor of the month – or perhaps the year – among such destinations, it seems the move to open up its platform has permanently changed the landscape for mobile publishers.
“MySpace was all the rage, and who knows how long Facebook will last,” Levin said. “But from a communication and social-networking aspect, the whole open-platform thing was massive. It will not go away.”
