Andrew Chen

I think when you look at the FB app environment as a whole with FB you can see why it is slowing down:

1) cap on the invites,

2) apps seen as spam and now invites are ignored,


3) existing users are tiring of FB - rush of new people are like people walking into a high school reunion an hour late - they are all keen but those that have been around are looking for their coat.


4) after spending a month on a FB app only to watch it not go viral - the wind in entrepreneurs sails is dissipating quickly.

Time for FB-Connect - the excitement begins but not within FB.

Great post Andrew - thanks a lot for the data as always.

Cheers - Eric

Wow, that is a really steep drop for just 4 months

thank you, it is a very interesting post !

All the low hanging fruit easy stuff on Facebook has mostly been done. The potential to build a big audience still hasn't changed. The thing that people are realizing is they need to build all the real company stuff such as a sustainable competitive advantage, monetization strategy, etc.

@Dave MacClure: The pony may be the ability for social apps to attract and aggregate targeted audiences via the social graph. Attract the wrong audience and you have crappy CPMs ($0.10-0.30). Attract the right audience plus build the right context and you have the potential to command higher CPMs ($2-10 CPM).

This is nothing new and is very much like the early days of the web where the companies that stuck to the fundamentals and focused on building real business rather than a massive land grab made the most money.

love that picture. ZING!

re: relevent stats, there are 3 notable ones missing from the analysis above:

1) Funding for FB apps / co's

2) Revenue/Profits generated by FB apps / co's


3) Acquisitions of FB apps co's

all the rest of the above is chicken poop compared to these.

my guess is #1 is up, #2 is flat or down, and #3 is limited in # of txns, but possibly could be up in future (re: Flixster, others)

the shine's off the rose & developer activity stats may be down, but long-term there's a pony in here somewhere.

Thanks for the find & link to the article! As a post-January app developer, the analysis done by Jesse echoes a lot of the thoughts I've had about Facebook recently. It's hard to play, the chances of a win are low, and there's tonnes of uncertainty! Makes for a highly motivated developer community :p

While it's true that developers may need less help from the forum once familiar with Facebook's platform, a large part of the discussions revolved around sharing ideas; comparing notes. I used to check out the forum for these types of discussions, but have found fewer and fewer reasons to come back in the recent weeks.

Simon,

I mention that argument in my article. That doesn't explain why (1) fewer apps succeed today than did in January and (2) the sudden decline up through today that began around 2/2.

What's more, Facebook is constantly changing the rules and adding/removing features from the API.

Or alternatively... most developers have figured out how to use the platform now, so they don't need to hang out on the forums asking each other for help as much.