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!