Exploring social utility in Facebook apps
I am writing this quick post to talk about a new direction I've taken with my work as Mappdev. It's no secret that my traffic on Pop Answers has taken a dive in recent months, and recent games that I've built (Battle Classic, various Flash games, etc) have not taken off. Essentially, while Pop Answers still has a notable amount of traffic, none of my games are doing well enough to justify the amount of time that I've put into them. So I've changed my "mode," so to speak, as an independent developer. I am currently out of "make money" mode and in "build traffic" mode. I'm working on some short-investment, highly social applications right now that I hope will build a large amount of traffic quickly that I can then "upsell" to my other properties: Pop Answers, Battle Classic, Ruby Rocket, etc. In the past two weeks I've built two apps that fit this focus, and I think they are worth checking out:
How Popular Are You analyzes your # of friends, tagged photos and wall comments to determine your "popularity score" and tell you how you compare to the rest of Facebook when it comes to popularity. For example, I have a total score upwards of 3k and I'm considered to be more popular than 88% of Facebook users. You can also view your friends' popularity scores and post the results to your Facebook wall.
My Photo Stats analyzes your photo albums and your tagged photos to show you combined stats on your photos and your #1 paparazzi (the person who has taken the most photos of you). As you can guess, my #1 paparazzi is my wife. Creepy! Anyway, you can view these stats for your friends as well and you can post the results to your wall.
The idea behind these apps is that the data they reveal is interesting to the user and their friends, and each story encourages other users to visit the apps and find out their own data. At least, that's how I hope they will function. I think it's likely that "How Popular Are You" will be the more successful of the two since it really plays on social affirmation, while "My Photo Stats" just looks at photo information. As far as I'm concerned, I just need 1 application to be successful right now so I can build some serious traffic and get the rest of my games in front of an audience.
Tomorrow I'll start working on yet another application, and I hope that in the meantime you will check out the two that I have mentioned and share them with your friends!
2 Comments
Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.
Hi
I have written a similar application to My Photo Stats and would like to know if this Idea of yours was genuine or did you copy it off someone else (me?).
Otherwise, do you develop your facebook applications using PHP? Python? Java?
Thanks
Asaf
Asaf: I was inspired by Status Statistics, and I write my apps in PHP.