Last Tuesday, Wayne Mak (developer of Nicknames) stopped by Berkeley, and we managed to catch him and have a great conversation — not just about Nicknames but about entrepreneurship in general.
- What are the motivations of Facebook application developers?
- What makes them stay up and work around the clock?
Check out our app case study for more regarding what motivates Wayne and his thoughts about this space.
Last week, we Skyped our way to India to speak with Rajat Agarwalla of Scrabulous. Rajat and Jayant have turned their email version of Scrabulous.com into a very engaging, Facebook game, capturing a large fanbase. They’ve spent a great deal of time on building a strong user community and listening to feedback. For more details behind the Scrabulous story, check out our Scrabulous case study.
In our interview, Rajat shared some of his thoughts on analytics pertaining to the Facebook space.
“Well, in the Facebook space, the number of installs isn’t really that meaningful. Instead, we really track app activity, such as return usage. In fact, even metrics measured on a daily basis really aren’t that useful.”
Bingo! The insight we’ve gathered from testing our own analytics suite at dA has showed very cyclical patterns. That’s why at dA, we are working on changing the way we typically “view” Facebook applications.
Even “daily active users” is not meaningful enough. Because of the viral nature of apps, most daily active users could just be “new” users rather than returning. Our direct measurement analytics tool will be focusing on social networking-specific metrics like virality (”k factor” - for each user, the number of new users resulting from that user) and engagement (return usage). Over the next couple of weeks, we will be sharing more details on this so stay tuned!
We just came back from O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns West down in San Diego where we were invited to present Developer Analytics at AppNite. We arrived at 6:20pm (demos starting at 7:00pm), and the cab driver told us the hotel was 100 miles away from the airport. Fortunately, we phoned up Dave McClure, and he assured us that it was only 10 minutes away (crazy cab driver!). So, we got to present, and by popular vote, we actually won first place in the “Facebook” category, bringing home a very cool prize: MacBook Air etched with social graph. Special thanks to Dave McClure for getting us down there in time and all who were part of the AppNite selection committee and voted for us :)!
We met some amazing folks at the conference and heard some awesome panels. Andrew Chen has a great summary post on some of the key takeways from the conference.
Go check it out!
PS: Fritz Nelson from InformationWeek also did a video interview of us.
At dA, the developers we’ve met and interviewed have never ceased to amaze us. Granted, all these developers have taken varying approaches in succeeding on the Facebook platform. We just wanted to give a shout out and congratulations to Ankur Nagpal for his recent feature in BusinessWeek. Ankur, a 19-year-old sophomore at UC Berkeley has made over six figures, creating over 70 personality quizzes for Facebook. Ankur has taken a simple, lightweight model of viral success and replicated that over and over, succeeding with tactics such as cross promotion of apps. We have observed similar strategies pursued by the “versus” game-like apps as well.
Mad props to Ankur and his ability to execute (while being a student)! 
Last week, we spoke with Cliff Lerner, CEO of SNAP Interactive. SNAP Interactive is one of the early players in dating on Facebook. In our interview, Cliff notes that dating on social networks is very different than dating on a traditional websites, pointing out less successful applications made by players such as eHarmony and OkCupid. It’s interesting to see that what’s successful on a website may or may not be successful in the social networking space. This just makes it more difficult for traditional internet businesses to make the transition into social networks. That being said, at dA we are well aware that the top Facebook application developers -know- what they are doing and succeeding. There is an art to making a Facebook app
