It's early in the lifespan of the MySpace platform but a week after the first apps went live we did some counting and the user spread seems just as imbalanced towards a tiny percentage of top players as the Facebook platform is, despite concerted effort by MySpace to democratize things.
According to a recent premium O'Reilly report on Facebook, 1% of the applications on that platform see 74% of total use and the top 20% have 98% of usage. MySpace tried to combat that trend so that developers would be more engaged in its platform, but that platform's numbers so far aren't looking much better.
When Facebook began publishing the percentage of each app's users who engaged with an app daily, it moved the discussion beyond mere installs. Installs are all that's available from MySpace so far, but here's how their distribution looks. All these numbers are moving targets, but we went in and did some counting anyway.
Fred Wilson has stats on growth rates, too.
MySpace hasn't begun promoting the app platform to users yet, but the apps are live and have every opportunity to spread virally. The people behind the platform have worked hard to offer app developers equal opportunity for success. The MySpace developer platform opened to all developers at the same time, one month before apps went live to users, so that everyone had an equal chance at the first movers' advantage believed to be so beneficial to the select few apps that launched with the Facebook Platform. MySpace also took the brilliant step of allowing apps to live on users' homepages, not just on the public profile pages where interaction with Facebook apps is limited to. The vast majority of MySpace apps are taking advantage of that option.
Has any of that mattered? Not so much, so far. Early performance matters a lot, too. At least according to the O'Reilly report linked to above - on Facebook apps either came out of the gate fast and then plateaued or they never really took off at all.
The five dominant apps so far include Yahoo's Playlist.com Music Video Playlist Generator, the Fred Wilson backed Zynga's Texas Hold'em, Photobucket's Top Pics (my favorite so far!), the fairly insipid Quote of the Day and Bonehead Labs' Pokey, a puppy you can pet and play with.
MySpace users aren't stupid and as Mark Zuckerberg said in our interview at SXSW, app developers aren't inherently spammy. So what's going on?
Again, those 5 apps above account for about 45% of the 85k app installs that have happened so far. Say hello to the future of computing: web based platforms that anyone can find success on by building apps that deliver value to a diverse group of social networking users? Maybe not.
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As an application developer for both FB and MySpace the issue is people don't see the application. It's buried under the fold. When Myspace gets their self service advertising up and redesigns access to these applications we'll see a great jump in applications getting well deserved installs.
Posted by: Antonio Evans | March 18, 2008 1:23 PMThis is in some part an effort by facebook developers to recruit users of their apps to add the same app on myspace.
Posted by: Ryan | March 18, 2008 2:27 PMInteresting point... I'm still in the stone age, so I don't really use any FB or MS apps, but I like MySpace's approach.
The real question is how can average developers become top players? Is it that they aren't creating valuable apps or are they not getting a fair opportunity to promote their apps.
I'm asking because I have no idea.
Raza Imam
Posted by: SoftwareSweatshop | March 18, 2008 3:02 PMhttp://SoftwareSweatshop.com
MySpace did a better job at democratizing the platform, whereas Facebook was invite-only at launch time, and everyone else had to play catch-up. Still, the "winners" so far, mainly, have the marketing muscle behind them. For example. RockYou (as reported by PaidContent) puts 30% of their ad inventory to promoting their widgets.
(Shameless Plug) For those that want good video on MySpace, check out:
Posted by: Frank Sinton | March 18, 2008 5:10 PMhttp://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=348664757
Insightful observations, Marshall, as always.
So as you know I have more than a passing interest in this (disclosure: I'm advising MySpace on platform stuff and kinda involved in this very aspect of the proposition).
I too am slightly surprised by the skew towards the top - but given invites/notifications are not live yet there is still no direct advantage to be had by apps with the most users. They don't benefit from being able to invite more users or appearing on more bulletin notifications (ie activity streams).
I have some thoughts why this is occuring, which I kinda have to keep guarded for now but there are definitely some things we can do to ensure better democracey than other networks.
Finally, I'd be interested to hear other app developers thoughts and views on this - they're free to email me: bmetcalfe [at] myspace [dot] com
Posted by: Ben Metcalfe | March 19, 2008 5:03 PMAs I mentioned on top I am an application developer, (Food is name of the app). As I mentioned above finding applications on your page is a big difficult. We did a press release today and got two consistant responses from people :
Posted by: Antonio Evans | March 20, 2008 5:30 PM"Myspace has applications?" and "I can't find directory on my page."
This is a valid point, and highlights a big flaw in the Facebook system: Search.
One of the key hypothesis in "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson is the place of search in allowing users to find relevent information/applications/entertainment.
This is currently just not possible in the Facebook system - the only thing possible to search for is an application name (obviously no use if you don't know it). Although there's the 'viral' element, there's no way, for example, to search for a type of application and see how many of your friends have added it, or friends of friends. It is these kind of features that will finally allow a long tail of applications to come about.
Posted by: Joshua March | March 23, 2008 12:44 PM