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A while ago I was inspired by the O’Reilly Radar report on the Facebook application platform to do a deeper analysis on why some applications thrive and most don’t. I wrote a paper with the results and it was just published on O’Reilly Radar as:

The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive—And Most Don’t

by Shelly D. Farnham, Ph.D.

Here’s the main question: is it worth your time or money to either create a Facebook application, or integrate your existing social technology into Facebook?

To address this question, I looked at several things: What does healthy growth and success in Facebook look like? What user goals are being met by successful applications? What features help an application grow successfully? What kinds of applications have not been created yet—in other words, what are the opportunities for innovation? Finally, how much and what kind of advertising is required to be self-sustaining?

For the analysis, I took the application usage data collected by the O’Reilly crew and selected a subset of succeeding and failing applications for deeper examination, coding them by features and user goals met.

To see the results of the analysis, you’ll have to buy the report. ;) I will however share a couple of snippets:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain.

In examining each application, we spent some time with the reviews and the discussion topics, expecting that applications that were more active would have more posts by users. We found however that reviews were not reviews. Rather, the review section seemed to be largely used for users to communicate with application developers, giving their feedback and reporting bugs, and to each other about the application.

The discussion topics section was used more for users to connect to one another. What was striking, however, was that both of these sections tended to be used to a greater degree when social applications (e.g., social games) did not provide a venue for verbal interaction within the game itself. The reviews then became overloaded with demands for the user-to-user communication required to use the application. These overloaded review sections, much like the overloaded horoscope or game discussion areas, reinforce the message that people come to social sites to be social, and will twist any application into an opportunity to communicate.

Special thanks to Roger and Jimmy with the O’Reilly crew for access to your data and your help editing the paper.