In the spirit of my continued quest to drive home the following point to marketers, "Facebook is not the silver bullet you seek" (nor is it capable of slaying a rapid werewolf, vampire or zombie...read on), here is a tremendous source/resource which you can thank me for later.
Or rather, just thank the following blogs, which provided the breadcrumbs that took me to this gingerbread house: here, here, here, here, and ultimately here.
The gist of the thread is simple, Facebook apps are declining in popularity. The questions are two-fold: is this (already) evidence of Facebook fatigue and/or to what extent is this trend direction permanent versus some kind of a "correction"
For what it's worth, I've had a number of conversation with blue chip marketers who have seemingly and giddily dived head first into Facebook as a cure-all "non-traditional" investment - one in the financial services sector and another in the family entertainment/event (whatever that means) space. In both cases, they've veered away from pursuing a more stable and deeper conversational strategy path in favor of "wild short-term success" (my words, not theirs). I wonder to what extent this is focused on Facebook apps, in which case they might want to think about reconsidering their eggs-in-one-basket position.
As the chart below demonstrates, the top 10 apps on Facebook have all declined or slowed down quite significantly from their peaks to present day.
| Peak | Today | ||
| Funwall | 5800 | 2500 | |
| Superwall | 4800 | 1800 | |
| Top Friends | 2900 | 2200 | |
| Likeness | 821 | 181 | |
| Super poke | 1500 | 500 | |
| Movies | 814 | 500 | |
| Compare People | 1000 | 471 | |
| iLike | 941 | 372 | |
| Causes | 469 | 110 | |
| Superlatives | 320 | 110 | |
| all figures in '000's |
Note of course that in many - if not most - cases, we're talking about an incredibly small window or timeframe e.g. Funwall, which has only being Bacn' through cyberspace for 5 months. That said, how many of you on Facebook that have the Funwall application (I'm assuming 90%+) are considering uninstalling it? Again, I'm assuming a large number, which would support the above assertion(s)
Anyway, check out Andonomic's Leaderboard and decide for yourself if Facebook is following MySpace, which in turn is following Yahoo!'s lead off the board so to speak.
