Facebook Growth By Country and the Slowdown in App Usage

With the Facebook Developers conference slated for later this week, I thought it would be a good time to give a brief update of a previous post on Facebook demographics. What follows are recently published number of users by country and region, along with growth rates for select regions and countries. Over the last four weeks, the fastest growing regions were South America, Central America and the Carribean:

While Facebook grew double-digits in Asia it did so from a relatively small base (approx. 3.7 million users), in a region with hundreds of millions of potential users. Of the countries in South and Central America, Chile is worth highlighting (up 67.5% from four weeks ago). As several Radar readers predicted, Facebook has grown steadily in Chile where it now has over 2.2 million users (around 14% of the population). In other parts of the Americas, Hi5 and Orkut remain the largest social networks:

Looking closely at the top 30 countries, a few European countries have grown more than ten percent over the last four weeks (France, Spain, Germany, Italy), with France having the most number of users (approx. 2.5 million). Skyrock remains the largest social network in France. Norway saw a decline but is still home to more than a million Facebook users. We will continue to track how Facebook is doing vis-à-vis other leading regional social web sites and whether their disputes with other companies affect their growth rates.

As far as recent trends in the Facebook app platform (the subject of this week's f8 conference), we have detailed reports (here and here) on the subject. At the last Graphing Social Patterns conference, Roger Magoulas provided highlights of our most recent findings. The number of published apps continues to grow steadily (to over 32K) but total usage remains flat. Besides the fact that the top 10% of apps account for 98% of total usage, aspiring Facebook app developers should know that only about 6% of apps average at least 500 active users per day:

(For specific tips on how to launch and build successful Facebook apps, consult this O'Reilly Radar Report.) Finally, as I noted in a previous post, the most popular applications on the Myspace platform continue to account for slightly less users than their Facebook counterparts.

The Suspended Facebook App Top Friends

Techmeme and CNET are reporting that one of the most popular Facebook apps has been "suspended" due to security concerns uncovered by a user:

Until Facebook suspended the Top Friends app, created by Slide, anyone could browse partial profiles of anyone else on Facebook who had added Top Friends to their page. CNET News.com confirmed that the security hole exposed the birthdays, gender, and relationship status of strangers, including Facebook executives, the wife of Google co-founder Larry Page, and one profile that seemed to belong to Paris Hilton that used her middle name "Whitney."

According to our research data, Top Friends has been among the Top 3 most used applications pretty much since the Facebook platform launched. Since early April 2008, it has averaged around 1.7M active users and has been the third most popular application:

With close to 30K Facebook applications now in existence, I'm sure many others suffer from similar security problems.

Myspace/Facebook App Platforms & Total Installs

Within a few months, Myspace has quietly built an application platform with over twelve hundred applications. I previously posted a graph for Facebook app categories, in which I compared the categories using the number of active users. Unlike the older Facebook platform, Myspace only provides the number of installs:

It took a few months before Facebook started publishing active usage and I'm hopeful Myspace will follow suit.

At a comparable stage, roughly four months after launch, Facebook already had 4,300 applications. On the other hand, developers should know that the most popular Facebook applications attract a higher share of installs and active usage. After four months, the top 10% most installed Facebook apps accounted for 97% of all installs. The top 20% represented 99% of all installs. The corresponding numbers for Myspace were 91% and 96% respectively. Economists sometimes use the Lorenz Curve to visualize and measure inequality. In both application platforms, the top applications account for most of the installs, with the Myspace platform being slightly less unequal:

[Note: When I drew the preceding curves, I sorted from the most to the least installed applications.] One year after launching their platform, there are now more than 24 thousand Facebook applications! With more than 24K applications, the top 10 & 20 percent Facebook applications still have roughly the same share of total installs.

For more on the Facebook and Myspace platforms, Roger Magoulas of O'Reilly Research will present some of our most recent findings at the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Facebook App Categories Ranked By Usage

We have been tracking the usage in each individual Facebook application since the launch of their platform, so I have been following the discussion questioning the utility of the majority of applications published to date. A lot of Facebook applications are perceived as "time-wasters", but I should caution that the number of apps in a category do not translate directly into active users:

As an example there are much fewer Dating apps than Sports apps, but Dating apps generate far more active users. Moreover, Messaging generates more active users than other "less useful" categories, and has grown the fastest over the last month:

Developers select the categories for their applications, so besides double-counting apps that are assigned multiple categories, inconsistencies in how the developers assign their apps to categories affect the results. We addressed some of these issues by categorizing the top applications ourselves. For more on the Facebook Application Platform, check the most recent edition of our research report. Also, Roger Magoulas of O'Reilly Research will present some of our most recent findings at the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Shelly Farnham on What Makes Facebook Apps Work

As many of you know, last fall, we released a report entitled The Facebook Application Platform, with analysis that demonstrated that far from being a "long tail" marketplace, Facebook has very much of a "short head" when it comes to applications.

As a social scientist, Shelly Farnham didn't think that was the end of the story. She asked if she could have access to our data set so she could do some additional analysis. We liked her analysis so much that we decided to publish it as a second report, The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive--and Most Don't.

Shelly just did a great blog post about the report, explaining some of what she found. Here are a few tidbits:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media...

In examining each application, we spent some time with the reviews and the discussion topics, expecting that applications that were more active would have more posts by users. We found however that reviews were not reviews. Rather, the review section seemed to be largely used for users to communicate with application developers, giving their feedback and reporting bugs, and to each other about the application.

The discussion topics section was used more for users to connect to one another. What was striking, however, was that both of these sections tended to be used to a greater degree when social applications (e.g., social games) did not provide a venue for verbal interaction within the game itself. The reviews then became overloaded with demands for the user-to-user communication required to use the application. These overloaded review sections, much like the overloaded horoscope or game discussion areas, reinforce the message that people come to social sites to be social, and will twist any application into an opportunity to communicate.

Good stuff, reminding us that social network applications are used socially, and that developers providing functionality that enhances social behavior are winning. These comments emphasize a basic web 2.0 (and open source) principle as well: users are co-developers. If you don't give them what they want, they will hack your system, overloading its features so they get what you didn't give them outright.