The new Facebook application ecosystem

A post written for Social Agency’s corporate blog, Socialsama.

One of the interesting parts of developing social applications is that the platforms and technologies we interact with are periodically changing, and we must keep pace both with our platform and with our application marketing strategies.

Facebook recently completed a fundamental redesign of much of its site.  Transitions on such a big platform are always painful, and a portion of the Facebook user base was vocal in their opposition (and were covered widely in the media).  Nevertheless, the new Facebook is now fully implemented, and we are starting to see the application ecosystem adapt to the new restrictions and features.

The biggest change from the application point of view is the fact that most of the profile boxes that were the prime source of application virality have been pushed onto a rarely-visited tab of the profile. Previously, going to a friend’s profile displayed all the boxes from their various applications, and users tended to discover new applications by seeing cool things on their friends’ profiles.  This meant that the most successful applications were those that made the user say “I want that” when seeing the profile box on their friend’s profile.  Of course, this led to a competition over profile real estate from applications, and a top user complaint about the old Facebook was that the profile pages were crowded and difficult to use. The new Facebook has made the profile box irrelevant for most apps.

The new profile page is centered around a feed of user activities on Facebook and its applications.  This means that the way a user discovers a new application is by seeing an action by one of their friends and saying “I want to do that”.  The feed is the central interface for Facebook, and much of the social interaction a user has now on Facebook is to consume new feed entries created by their friends.

So, what does a current successful Facebook app look like?  It invites meaningful and frequent user interaction, and posts these interactions to the user’s feed.  Users can discuss feed entries in the feed itself, so a successful app’s feed entries invite conversations between users.  Additionally, the new Publisher interface lets applications integrate completely into the feed interface, letting users compose entries from their home page with an application-defined interface, lowering the barrier to creating a new entry.

In a future post, we’ll look at what makes a successful MySpace app and what an app needs to do in order to succeed in both worlds.