This article from O’Reilly on the long tail of Facebook applications ties in with some of the comments I made on the Exponetic blog a few weeks ago comparing Web 1.0’s history with Facebook’s own progress.
The key points are:
- Some applications are getting huge traffic
- The majority of applications aren’t
- Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users
100,000 users is still a lot of people (bearing in mind an active user is one who visits at least once per day).
As I originally said, I believe the best prospect is not in creating one killer viral application but in working towards a suite of applications. That’s the way to make the long tail work.
The long tail of Facebook applications
The Facebook platform: Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 a second time around?