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 
Interview: SNAP Interactive, Makers of “Are You Interested?” and “Meet New People”
Facebook App Category Analysis: Wall Apps, Dating, and Games
As promised earlier, we’ll be taking a closer look at the Facebook app economy on a category-level, looking at trends between different categories or “types” of applications.
To start, we’ve chosen to display advanced stats for 3 categories: wall apps (the most popular), dating (the most ‘crowded’), and games (highest engagement based on % daily active).
Wall Apps
The data shows that Wall apps are split fairly evenly between males and females. Please note, however, that we did include Honesty Box in this category as well.
Dating Apps
It’s not surprising to see that the highest affinity category to Dating is Cars, given that Dating is slightly more “male.”
Games Apps
Games have a more “male” audience (not too surprising). Note, the actual percentage may actually be much higher, given that our games categories only has 3 apps, and Scrabulous is one of them (e.g. word games tend to have a larger female audience). For more analysis on game apps, take a look at Bret Terrill’s post. Bret has taken our “advanced stats” and performed his own analysis on the top 3 game developers on the Facebook platform. This is precisely the kind of insight and analysis that dA wants to provide to developers and the larger community. We definitely love to see more people look at our data and draw their own conclusions.
Notes and Considerations
- Data is dependent on our categorization procedure — specifically, which apps we’ve included in each of the categories. That being said, we only have chosen to look at the top apps on our Leaderboards in order to ensure that our data is statistically significant.
- Data is a “snapshot” overview of the economy and time-sensitive since our Leaderboards change over time.
- Data is biased towards users who have installed the app and may not necessarily reflect true “daily active.”
- Data is currently heavily based on US users, so data will be skewed for apps with a heavy non-US userbase.
Interview: Andy Triboletti and Brian Phillips, Makers of Pirates and LOLcats
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.
Facebook App Economy: Trends & Opportunities
At dA, we’ve been working closely and analyzing the rich dataset from the Facebook application economy. In future blog posts, we hope to share some of this information with the larger community as we feel it can help developers and investors, whether it is to make more sense out of all this data or identify potential (or overlooked) opportunities.
Last week, we released our Advanced Stats feature to identify interesting trends (app overlap and app affinity) for a specific application. Now, we’re moving to the category level, looking at patterns between similar “types” of applications — be it dating, games, or movies.
Most Popular Types of Applications on Facebook
There’s a snapshot view of the overall Facebook app economy ranked by most popular “category” (or type of app installed):
Methodology
We grouped the top apps from our Leaderboard into 13 custom categories (the 12 shown above and “Mobile”). We did not use the categories provided straight from Facebook as we know these are provided by the developer and have inherent biases. This is one of the reasons why dA feels strongly for having a third-party provide analytics to social networking applications.
The Big Trends
- Facebook is a “communication platform.” The top 3 app categories are essentially all variations of lightweight messaging. At its a core, a poke, a gift, or a wall post are all direct one-to-one interaction between two people. Also note that these are all extensions of the original features of Facebook. (Related link: “3 ways that social networks are different from other forms of online communication“)
- Facebook is about friends. Friend group apps, such as like Top Friends, Entourage, and Circle of Friends, are inherently viral apps by nature. It’s also something we are all used to (like how instant messenger buddy lists work). It was only later that Facebook introduced the concept of “Friend Lists.”
- Facebook is about having FUN. The majority of users are not joining to be “serious.” Entertainment (music, movies, and games) is their top priority with music (by iLike) and movies (by Flixster) as the two dominating categories. This trend very much echoes the real world as well. It’s interesting that these two categories are pretty much “owned” by only 1 player (as opposed to games with multiple developers). Does this mean there’s no more room for another highly successful movies or music app?
- Dating is becoming the hottest (and crowded) market. It’s not a surprise that a good number of the developers we’ve interviwed had either developed, are developing, or thought about developing a “dating” app at some point. While only 9% of Facebook users have installed 1 dating app, there are already 12 top apps inside this category. This shows that multiple apps can be successful in any given category. However, whether or not this is sustainable over the long-term is a different story.
- Games and “cause” apps are also hot. As noted by Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew, social gaming is quickly becoming a very attractive market on Facebook. These casual gaming apps, ranging from Scrabulous to Texas Holdem Poker, have very high engagement compared to other apps. “Cause” type apps are also very popular, though this category may be overlooked compared to most. Interestingly enough, this was one of the reasons (Lil) Green Patch got started.
Interview: Frengo, Makers of Flirtable
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.
Advanced Stats Beta Access!
Hey guys! We’ve been quite busy on our end but wanted to keep everyone posted on our updates.
So, this past Monday, we released our “Advanced Stats” (featured on Mashable!) for public private beta access. Use the promo code “mashable1000″ upon logging in to view these stats.
Here’s a quick preview for “Top Friends”:
This is just the beginning of our backend analytics capabilities. There’s a lot of rich data that exists on social networks that is still untapped, so stayed tuned for more…
You can now confirm your apps!
We’ve updated the site so that you can now confirm any unconfirmed apps that were added on the “My Account” page. This way, we will be able to ensure that no developer takes credit for apps they were not actively apart in making. We highly encourage developers to do this as only confirmed apps are reflected on our Facebook Developer Leaderboards.
Still in pre-beta
Hey everyone,
As you know, da.com is still in pre-beta mode as we have not yet officially launched. We already have over 100 developers signed up and have gotten a really positive response so far! Please give us your feedback, comments, and suggestions by emailing feedback[at]developeranalytics.com. We’ll keep you posted on all updates on this blog!
