With over 650,000 developers building Facebook applications and upwards of 275 Twitter applications, does there come a point when one more developer or one more application is one too many?
Regarding the posterity of LinkedIn as an everyday application–a term describing a website you visit every day–Joshua Porter questions whether developers ask themselves how often potential customers use their applications.
Vectored from an MTV Asia study, Joshua shares this chart that helps frame his argument:
If the chart holds water, then the average internet user does not visit many websites–and in turn, use many applications–every day. Do you see yourself in these numbers?
Falsely believing that one has an everyday app is partially why advertising has failed to support so many entrepreneurs who envisioned financing their app that way. When people do the math and try to figure out how much engagement they’ll need to make a profit off the ads run on their site, they too often assume that they’re building an everyday app. They calculate the number of users times the number of days, when in fact they should be calculating a fraction of that. When it becomes clear that people aren’t using their app everyday, their advertising strategy falls to the ground…hard.
Do the 650,000 Facebook developers and who-knows-how-many Twitter developers recognize this? Do the respective management teams? And, what does this say about the future of social media development?
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Ari Herzog is an online media strategist and Newburyport City Councilor-Elect.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I am addicted to them now. Pretty much use it daily (specially twitter)
I use social media everyday for both business and persoanl entertainment. While I am a member of about 7 different social media groups I really concentrate on the top 3 (Linkedin, Twitter & facebook).
I find the others not as user friendly or don’t have a big enough following to make it engaing. I LOVE social media and would be lost without it.
Time wise, I probably spend an average of 3hrs a day indulging in it.
Monica McPherrin´s last blog post..Are You Taking Advantage of Friend Connect?
I still do all of my social networking on the site itself, not with apps, unless you count the Selective Twitter Status that I use to put select Tweets as Facebook statuses. I am considering an app to manage multiple Twitter accounts though, as I am operating one for myself, and one for my job now.
~ Kristi
Kikolani´s last blog post..Fetching Friday – Resources, #FollowFriday, PageRank & SEO
I wish they would realize there are too many. Every day I read about some new tool that is out there trying to basically be the next one in a million tool and network. All these are the same just with one variation. Hard to keep track of and basically pointless. Wish they would come up with something more worth it or a service that is more worth it instead of crap that will be forgotten in a week.
Craig´s last blog post..Snap Review of “UP”
Funny how you’re the first person to grasp the question I was asking, not to answer the blog post title.
I wish there were some demographics to get a sense of exactly who the heavy users are. My initial suspicion is that it’s marketers and people otherwise in the business of creating such apps or of selling the idea of marketing, without any regard to what one might market. Oh, and kids, too, I imagine are big, big users.
Otherwise, who has time to try out, much less use, more than one such app?
Every time I get an invitation to test some new service with a funny name I groan, but then I go look because I’m naturally curious. There are far too many services out there to keep up with. But I can see why people keep developing them as there are always going to be new niches to fill or features to provide that don’t currently exist.
Alas, it’s not just about building a better mousetrap, it’s also about popularity. If X is brilliantly useful and Y is so-so, but everyone is using Y, then we have to use Y too. The nature of social media is that we have to go where the people are. There’s no using in using X if it means I’m talking to myself.
It wasn’t so long ago that Twitter and Pownce were often mentioned in the same breath, in the same articles comparing their various features. Pownce had a much richer feature set than Twitter but the latter took off. Perhaps it was the simplicity that made it work but Twitter now has millions (12ish?) of users and Pownce is gone.
I use a number of different services but I’m not sure that I have even one that I use each day. (I’ve been experimenting with Twitter-free Saturdays). Obviously I do use Twitter a lot, but the one I use most is probably Delicious. I’m saving things there (or referring to prior saves) on and off throughout the day. As to LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. my usage varies. I rarely update my FB status, but I try to schedule 1 day a week to answer questions on LinkedIn. There is only so much time in a day so I have to focus my energies on the services that both offer the most value to my life as a Web designer/strategist AND cater to my core audience of potential clients and peers.
I’m a heavy user, because as Steve suggests, I’m in the Web biz. I can’t advise clients on social media if I’m not out there using it myself. But for people outside the industry I can see how they’d spend much less time online.
Heidi Cool´s last blog post..Is Flash evil? No, but Flash-based sites can be a marketing nightmare.
This is exactly why I left *website* development last year… it’s no longer about destination sites, it’s about the services that tie information (and people) together.
Andrea Hill´s last blog post..Does your Organization Need a Wikipedia Entry?
Its not about the number of applications its about the amount of money you get from them. Almost all social network apps are about making money, promote them for a month, make a new one, its all about changing interests and attracting different people. Except for Mobsters, that is addicting.