It’s been really busy here at dA.

Where We’ve Been

We gave a quick demo of our upcoming analytics suite at the Bay Area Developer Meetup last March 19th hosted at AOL and received great response. Since then, we also had a great time hearing some excellent speakers and panels at Snap Summit 2.0 on March 25th in San Francisco.

Where We’re Headed

Direct measurement analytics tools (in private beta, public beta in upcoming weeks) for developers! We will be releasing our analytics tools on our website in the upcoming weeks, so developers can monitor the health and growth of their apps. And yes, we are developers ourselves, so we keep up with changes to the platforms. If you are around the SF area, we’ll be speaking more on analytics/metrics and best practices at SocialMedia’s Business School this coming Thursday, April 3rd.

New Interview

We interviewed Justin Smith, Product Manager of Watercooler, a while back, so check out the interview for the story on how their TV and sports apps started. Oh, Justin also writes an terrific blog at InsideFacebook.com, so hit that up too

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!

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

This weekend, we got a chance to speak with Andy Triboletti, who made Pirates and LOLcats. Andy shared with us his experience as a developer on the platform since day one.  His team has had much success making fun, lightweight casual games on Facebook. Their top game app, Pirates (launched back in July 2007), has around 1.7 million installs. They are currently working on a more real-time interactive game, and we can’t wait for that to be released! Check out the interview to learn from the team’s experience.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Mosher, Senior VP of Operations and Business Development at Frengo this morning. They are the makers of the popular Flirtable app on Facebook, one of the first dating apps on the platform. Dan shared with us his thoughts on the social networking app economy and opportunities for app developers in the mobile space. Check out the interview transcript for details. Frengo has been working extensively with partners such as Slide and RockYou in creating mobile extensions for their applications, Top Friends and Horoscopes, respectively. They recently released their Mobile Toolkit, an API for any size app developers to leverage and integrate into their own apps.