Facebook Apps

February 28th, 2008 View Comments

Stealth Ninja

From the better late than never category comes my take on Facebook apps.

The idea was genius. The implementation is pretty damn good. Most of the apps suck. A few of them like Scrabulous are absolutely rockstars. They can provide companies with a ton of traffic. I think I recall seeing Iamfreetonight.com, a somewhat bootleg ad-driven online personals site owned by the folks behind 2 of the most irritating but genius apps on Facebook, either in an blog article or on Alexa’s Movers and Shakers index a week ago. I also happen to know that successful Facebook apps can take a surprising amount of bandwidth.

My personal favorite involves a battle that has around since the beginning of time: Pirates vs. Ninjas. Pirates don’t stand a chance against Ninjas in a fight, but I’ll concede that they probably have more fun if getting drunk, not bathing, and having scurvy is fun.

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  • http://www.studiodenim.com Jeff

    I agree that it’s pretty genius to have facebook apps. I’m still curious how effective it is, monetizing wise. I would love to see some stats on click-thru’s on ads as well as how these apps actually drive people to the parent site. An example of this is Zynga, a company that has over 23 facebook games a popup that resembles an IM client specifically to engage other gamers to play. Do people end up ever going to the parent site?

    I also think it’s genius to have Facebook host apps for you that you can put on your own site. It’s the internet within the internet. Once users get familiar with Facebook and Google, is there any need to go elsewhere?

  • http://www.kungpowthinking.com Josh Viney

    I think the proof of concept is right there in the example I mention in the post. Iamfreetonight is a bootleg online dating site that is succeeding solely based on their facebook apps. The right app can make the difference. The problem that many companies are starting to face is competition against other apps. I’m considering an attempt to add every single facebook app, but I don’t know if I have the time.

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