Jason Calacanis is loud, opinionated, and correct more often that I’d like to admit. He also calls for a reality check on Facebook (although we end up in different places).
It’s a long piece, but if you read one part of it, let it be this:
Additionally, people were speculalting that Facebook would have a major boost in September when people came back, but in fact it was the opposite (at least according to Comscore). I’ve heard some inside information on focus groups that were done by a VERY credible source outside of Facebook that found that students coming back found the applications to be annoying–the equivalent of spam.
We in the technology industry have a bias towards bells and whistles, but the truth is the public may not in fact like all these new applications. These applications might be a LIABILITY to Facebook. I know that’s hard for some folks to swallow, but it is a possibility. Clearly some applications have great value (top friends, photo slide shows, and casual games), but many are just annoying and stupid (Zombie, food fights, etc). Facebook’s challenge will be to throttle the bad and feature the good.
TRUE.
As a recent graduate, and someone who knows a lot of people still in college, in my experience this is 100% true. In the panel video that Scoble posted from Graphing Social, Rodney Rumford talks about how using a “spammy” approach to building your application is a no-apologies good way to grow your userbase. Other people at Graphing Social espoused that view from the platform. But when you do that you are almost definitely hurting the platform, and when Facebook sees that, there will be retribution.
There are good ways to build an application and a business in Facebook. But open season is going to end soon, and when you dive in, you should understand that there are risks you take if your application sits on the “spam” side of the line.
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Goob 10.15.07 at 5:29 pm
If I worked at Facebook, I’d print that blockquote up and hang it off of everybody’s computer monitors. It’s so freaking true, it’s not even funny! Yeah, the Applications are cool and all, but I think they bypassed the “Novelty” stage and jumped into the “Can’t live without them!” stage too fast by too many people.
I’d much rather have people complaining that it’s too hard to get their app approved due to a much higher bar of standards than to see the hundreds of pointless and wasteful apps that take up space now.