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The Snap Summit 2.0 conference yesterday in San Francisco was supposed to be about the new wave of social applications, but it turned into a Facebook conference.
Here’s why: The number of Facebook applications and downloads just keeps growing — at a faster rate than other social network companies are experiencing.
Dave Morin, the senior platform manager at Facebook, was the event’s main attraction. He opened his talk with a story about a woman he had met outside. She had created a Facebook application “Easter Eggs” three weeks ago. She built it in a week with the Ruby on Rails programming tools. She released it and saw it grow to more than 300,000 users. She sold the application on Tuesday. While this is an unusually good scenario, there are still many developers trying their luck: More than 100 such apps are launching every day.
And now Facebook’s going to be launching a new e-commerce technology, giving users and applications better ways to make, bill and receive payments in a “frictionless way,” meaning applications can make money beyond just through advertising.
So there’s even more reason for developers to jump in and build applications.
Facebook now has 67 million active users. It’s like an obsession for many, despite the general skepticism about the revenue potential of social networks and the widgets that live on them.
Stanford professor BJ Fogg is actually paid to teach on the psychology of Facebook. During his talk at the Snap Summit 2.0, he recounted lessons that came from teaching students who created Facebook applications. These apps had 16 million users by the end of the ten-week class.
Fogg recounted facts well-known to insiders, but which served to remind of the astounding growth of Facebook applications in the early days — such as iLike, a music discovery app, which hit nearly a million users a week after it launched on Facebook’s developer platform in May of last year. “I would wager that no company grew so fast in history,” he said. “It was clear that something special was happening.” Read the rest of this entry »
