The State of the Facebook Platform
by Jesse Farmer on May 06, 2008

Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community. Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.

But it's numbers that matter, not vague impressions, so does the data back me up? Is the Facebook developer community retreating from the public space of the forums? The answer is yes, on both accounts.

Looking at five key metrics we'll see that the activity level of the Facebook forums is a fraction of what it was at the beginning of 2008. The number of active users1 has declined 27% since January, for example. And this is the best-performing metric discussed.

Furthermore, this decline in forum activity correlates to an overall decline in activity on the Facebook platform. Applications launched in early January were on average 1.5 times more successful than applications launched at the end of March.

The turning point occurred in early February where several interlocking factors came into play. First, Facebook finally saw real competition in the form of other social networking platforms, particularly Hi5.

Second, Facebook started instituting increasingly demanding and arbitrary rules on platform developers, which they then enforced selectively and for their own benefit.

Third, a trend of application consolidation began and accelerated through March, locking up developer resources inside private companies.

Contents

  1. What is Activity?
  2. The Data
  3. The Trend
  4. Analysis and Hypotheses
  5. Facebook Application Data
  6. Conclusions

What is Activity?

You can define activity in a lot of ways and I tried to be as liberal as possible. The Facebook forums have three main objects worth measuring: users, threads, and posts.

The forum is "active" when users are signing up and creating new threads and posts. To measure this I created a script in Ruby that can scrape any PunBB-based forum, like the Facebook forum. This basically results in a local copy of the forum database.

I then broke the data down in two ways. In the first I compare the activity in Janurary 2008 to the activity in April 2008. In the second I break down all activity from the launch of the forum in October 2008 through April 2008 on a weekly basis.

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Adonomics, a key player in the Facebook platform ecosystem, although I no longer work for the company that now owns it.

The Data

Monthly Statistics for the Facebook Developer Forum
Month: Jan 2008 Apr 2008
Posts per day 461 225 -51%
Signups per day 38 27 -29%
Threads per day 80 44 -44%
Active users 1,606 1,168 -27%
Highly active users 461 225 -47%

An "active user" is defined as someone who makes at least one post in that month. A "highly active user" is defined as someone who makes at least five posts in that month. The per day metrics are averaged over the number of days in each month.

The big picture doesn't look so good. But is the lower level of activity in April just a fluke or has this been a consistent trend? Let's extend the timeline from October 2007 to April 2008 and take a look at these metrics on a weekly basis.

The Trend

I'm going to post weekly graphs for only three metrics: posts per week, signups per week, and active users per week. The other two metrics show the same trends.

Each graph contains the weekly data plus a red line that represents a four-week moving average. This is to remove any noise produced from dips or spikes in activity and reveal the actual trend.

Posts Per Week

Posts Per Week

You can look at the graph for weekly active users, too, but it exhibits the same downward trend.

Analysis and Hypotheses

These graphs show the two main trends for the Facebook developers forum: engagement peaked in late-January while new signups have continually dropped since the launch of the forum.

In fact, since the start of 2008 we've seen 3.4% week over week decline in new posts. For new signups and active users these numbers are 1.7% and 0.8%, respectively.

The other metrics, new threads and highly active users, show the same downward trend.

Why has there been a steady, three-month decline in activity on the Facebook developer forum? What explains the peak in late-January?

Other platforms are more attractive

Since Janurary several other social networks have launched their own platforms. Those based on OpenSocial are wholly incompatible with Facebook and so far Bebo is still the only company to launch using Facebook's architecture for their base.

This means developing for other networks becomes an either-or proposition. Coding on OpenSocial precludes me from spending that time coding for Facebook. Hi5 and MySpace, in particular, are interesting because they potentially offer the huge growth opportunities that developers saw in the first six months of the Facebook Platform.

Developers are consolidating

Networks like Zynga and Social Gaming Network (SGN) have cropped up in the last few months and have made it their business to consolidate the game space on Facebook, probably the only real vertical that has found success on the platform. Bigger companies like Slide and RockYou have been actively recruiting from the Facebook developer pool all along, too.

Perhaps the open community that existed four months ago is closing up. Developers working for the same company talk to each other rather than on the forums, and developers working for different companies don't want to talk in public for competitive reasons.

Facebook has made it too hard to win

Starting in the middle of January Facebook began instituting ad hoc solutions to curb the spread of abusive and spammy apps. The side-effect of these measures is to make it harder for applications to spread.

These measure include banning the word "message" from news feed items, disallowing passive news feed stories, instituting feedback-based request and notification limits, and banning "forced invites."

The ad hoc and arbitrary nature of these rules makes it hard to keep up because Facebook generally gives less than a week's notice. This only serves to increase the relative cost of developing on the Facebook platform.

This is not to forget mini-scandals like the Facebook/CBS partnership, where Facebook removed invite restrictions on CBS' sponsored March Madness application, even though there were other, independent applications in the same category. It's hard to say how this affected developer morale, but it showed that Facebook was willing to hurt independent developers when it benefitted them.

One other possibility is that the external developer resources are now rich enough that people have to spend less time asking questions. This might be a contributing factor but is probably not a critical one given that the decline beginning in late-January is so well-defined.

Facebook Application Data

If it's true that winning on Facebook is not as easy as it used to be then that should be reflected in the application statistics. How can we measure this?

Success, for most developers, is defined as attaining a certain level of activity within a specific timeframe. There are two ways to measure this: one, take time-based cohorts of applications (e.g., all applications started in the same week) and measure their average level of activity some number of weeks later; two, measure the number of active applications as a percentage of the total application space over time.

I will do both. For the first I'm going to take weekly cohorts and measure their average level of activity three weeks later. That is, I am going to group all applications by the week they were launched2 and see how they were doing three weeks later3.

For the second I am going to measure the number of applications with at least 100 daily active users (DAU)4 as a percentage of the total number of applications on Facebook.

Here are the graphs.

Posts Per Week

Posts Per Week

These exhibit the same trends as the data from the Facebook developer forums.

Conclusions

Correlation is not causation, of course, so we can't say whether the decline in developer activity means less application activity, if developers are leaving because applications are no longer as successful as they used to be, or whether there is an unknown factor causing both of these phenomena.

What we can say is that the vitality of both the Facebook developer community and the Facebook platform is not what it was even four months ago, and that these two phenomena are closely related.

Moreover, talking to developers and investors inside the industry it's clear that the excitement over the Facebook Platform and its promise have waned. Application companies are branching out to other social networks not because they necessarily show more promise than Facebook, but because the future of the Facebook Platform has become murky.

Nobody knows how committed Facebook is to improving the platform or the role applications are meant to play in the overall Facebook ecosystem. Signals like the reduced level of direct participation in the developer community, increasingly restrictive developer policies, and the Facebook profile redesign seem to indicate that they are trying to regain control over some, if not all, aspects of application development while maintaining an aloof demeanor towards developers.

It boils down to this: investing most of your man-hours into Facebook at this point in time is a mistake. The potential return on that investment, a year after launch, is a fraction of what it once was. And the fact that Facebook continues to change the rules and selectively break them for their own benefit means the risk is comparatively higher.

It is better to branch out into other social networks or to piggy-back on Facebook as a means to establish your own, more independent social network. This is what the top companies like Slide, RockYou, Zynga, and SGN are doing, and what many of the independent Facebook developers I've talked with want to do.

The luster of the Facebook Platform might be gone, but that doesn't mean there aren't opportunities in the space. I just wouldn't go looking for them at the other end of Facebook's newsfeed.

Misc.

All application data courtesy of Adonomics. A spreadsheet containing the forum data is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution License, below.

Download the Facebook data used to generate the graphs for this article.
I've posted an update clarifying some of my opinions.

  1. An "active user" is defined as someone who has made at least one post in the period being considered. Here, a month [back]
  2. Really, I am going to group them by the week they began to be tracked by Adonomics. [back]
  3. Three weeks is arbitrary, but you can look for yourself — we see the same trend whether it's one week, two weeks, three weeks, or four weeks [back]
  4. Again, 100 is arbitrary, but we see the same trend whether it's 10, 100, or 1,000. [back]

Viewing 33 Comments

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    Great research and write-up - I'd been sensing the same too, but the figures tell it all. My own opinion: the decline started early January when installs and page views dropped off as the pre-Christmas goldrush came to an end. As a result application revenues tailed off and this is filtering through the developer community. I don't know how much Facebook's attitude to applications has hurt, but that and an uncertain future can't have helped.
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    Karl,

    I don't know if that's true — the decline between Jan. 31st and Feb. 2nd is just so well-defined. In fact, January as a whole was the best month for the Facebook platform so far.

    I included a timeline in the spreadsheet and lots of stuff began happening right around then. On the 16th Facebook began instituting all these new rules, and other platforms finally began implementing OpenSocial 0.7 which included proper distribution channels. Before that OpenSocial was a joke.

    The decline in app activity happened right around then, too. If you correlate the % Active App graph with the Posts per Day graph from 2/2/2008 onward you get a correlation coefficient of 0.95, for example.
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    Maybe I'm drawing too much from my own experience whereas you have more data, but I certainly saw traffic drop a lot around Christmas and not return in January, coupled with much lower eCPM figures. I was generally making about 1/3rd of the return pre-christmas.

    On your graph of application success by week of launch, the 4 week moving average seems to decline most significantly from early January to early February, so doesn't that indicate something similar? Or am I reading it wrong?
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    I think everyone is just incredibly bored.
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    Maybe it's just that it's spring and people are going outside...
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    would be interesting to correlate this data with the # of new apps created, # of apps users are actively using and and # of new users on facebook and see if usage of apps ion general has been going down as well....
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    Great post. i've almost completely given up on facebook but I check in once a month to see what's happened, because i'm connected to a lot of people and they are what i care about.

    the reason i find facebook so awful is because of the incredible over-featured heaviness of it. and the Apps don't help. They really degrade the value of facebook to me. What a mess they are.
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    Heh, I think Zach has the right idea. ;)

    Very nice write-up though, interesting to see the numbers to back you suspicions up rather than just what you think is happening.
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    "The forum is "active" when users are signing up and creating new threads and posts."

    This is not a terrific metric for developer activity -- it doesn't measure what you purport to measure. Developers generally view and post to forums when they have problems; if fewer developers are posting to the forums, it may mean that there are more developers who are having less trouble.

    Leading off with this assertion makes it seem like you started with a thesis ("winning on Facebook is not as easy as it used to be") and then went out to try to find data to support this. Your thesis may be correct, but your data doesn't support it, since you aren't measuring "winning".
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    Jeffrey,

    I fail to see how that's a bad measure of activity on the developer forums. The question is, why are fewer developers participating?

    One hypothesis is that developers know what they need to know and have stopped using the forums. Do you have any evidence for this? Even if it is true, it doesn't explain the data. Why are fewer applications succeeding today? Why was there noticeable decline beginning around February 2nd? Why don't we see spikes whenever Facebook pushes a major change? These are the things I'd expect to see if forum usage were really just a documentation issue.

    Anecdotally I know that's not true — people used the forums to talk about more than just API questions. Look at how they're structured. Only 1/4 of the forum is dedicated to technical issues. In fact, the "business" section has just as many posts overall as the technical section.

    Another hypothesis is that developers are becoming less active because it's harder to succeed. This seems more likely given the high correlation between application success (see the section "Facebook Application Data" for these numbers) and forum activity. Correlation is not causation, of course, so something else could be going on, but it's wrong to dismiss these phenomenon as unrelated out of hand.

    Here, anecdotally, I think I'm right because many of the top developers agree with me in private. See Zach Allia there, above? He wrote Free Gifts. Since writing this article I've been contacted by a significant number of Top 50 app developers telling me I'm spot on.

    So, am I crazy? Prove me wrong — don't just insist on it.
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    most important missing stats: THE MONEY.

    specifically:
    1) funding
    2) revenue/profits
    3) acquisitions

    developer activity stats are interesting, but these are the ones that make or break this market, and/or Facebook relative to other platforms.

    (virality & engagement matter too, but funding & monetization & acquisition trumps uber alles)

    my .02 anyway ;)
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    Dave,

    I don't disagree, but I what data I have in that respect I'm not free to talk about publicly. Heh!

    You should write a post about it. It's all about the (virtual) benjamins.
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    "One hypotheses is that developers know what they need to know and have stopped using the forums. Do you have any evidence for this?"

    No, but unlike you, I'm not making any assertions about the state of developer activity on Facebook. ("Prove me wrong" isn't valid evidence. I could say that sun won't come up tomorrow -- prove me wrong.) You're the one making the assertion, so it's up to you to prove your point.

    I'm not trying to say you're wrong, necessarily. I'm saying that the data that you're pulling together does not prove your assertion. People participate in online forums for a lot of reasons.

    Here's a thought experiment for you: let's say that Facebook rolled out a change that broke in some fundamental way. Would the corresponding spike in activity on the forums be indicative of an increase in the health of the platform? Of course not. But it would make as much sense as what you're asserting.
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    Jeffrey,

    You didn't really address my response. Even if what you were saying is true it doesn't explain the high correlation between developer activity on the forums and the reduced level of success for Facebook applications launched today versus four months ago. Nor does it explain the sudden decline we see beginning around February 2nd in five of the seven measurements I took.

    So, can you offer an alternative hypothesis that explains the data? Also, my claim is falsifiable, so I invite you to falsify it.

    Cheers,
    Jesse
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    They should invent a social network that anyone can create content on that would then allow for a high degree of inter-linkability between that content with the content of others on the same platform. The platform should allow for the posting of not just text, but pictures, video, and other forms of data as well. They should invent this social network and then call it something like, oh, I dunno, how about the "World Wide Web".

    Yeah, and then, you could build a network like Facebook or Myspace ON this "World Wide Web" and then, within those Facebooks and MySpaces, you could then build NEW social networks that would allow people to sign up and share pictures, video, text, and all kinds of data.

    Dave
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    People are fickled. The attrition rate for most social networks is fairly consistent. Everyone wants to be an early adaptor/user. Once the novelty wears off, people move onto the next platform. It's becoming increasingly more and more difficult for social networks to develop stickyness.
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    Interesting, but I'm not sure if this is really the right trend analysis. First, signups sooner or later had to start falling, there is a finite number of developers out there. Second, activity must fall as developers who came in to 'tinker' and explore slowly disperse - this is normal. Third, as you've pointed out, there's not quite the pot at the end of the rainbow many people thought there would be, causing developers to retreat to more profitable zones.

    So I don't think I agree that the "luster is gone", more that the "hype luster" is gone...
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    very interesting post. i do agree that there's too much crappy apps in the mix, and it's definitely tougher getting attention on a given app.
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    As a FB user and observing some other user feedback about FB apps, the reason IMO some apps are losing popularity is because they are so darn viral! Apps that don't work, or only work as little as possible so they can force you to invite friends to "unlock" new items or look at quiz results are uncool and obnoxious. So is whining about FB's limits on mass-invites. Mass-invites are spam and forcing you to invite friends just so you can use an app to its full functionality is viral AKA spamming. It's annoying adding an app only to find out you can't play the game, or you're only given 6 virtual items out of a possible 60 to send to friends, and you have to invite friends to get a few more choices. It's gotten to the point that whenever I see a friend has added a "send (virtual stuff) app in the newsfeed, I'll block that app so nobody can send me invites. I'll check out other apps to see how functional they are, and if they force you to invite friends before you can use them to their full potential, they're crap as far as I'm concerned. At least the super poke gives you scads of actions to choose from right at the beginning, so, it's still a fun app. But other apps just skirt by the rule against forced-invites by doing as little as they can get away with for the user and forcing them to invite friends to get any more use out of them. Blech.
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    Capri,

    I'm not unsympathetic. I've personally blocked most applications, for example. This article was written from a developer's perspective, though.

    I agree that from a user's perspective these are (potentially) good developments.
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