Valleywag and Danah Boyd are throwing around analyses of social networking services. Like we did with Om's analysis earlier this week, we'll provide you with some additional insights to give you the a more accurate picture.
Valleywag took a breath from the iPhone coverage today to "Hypebust" the Facebook Platform (which we've covered here a couple of times). A developer using the Facebook platform sends an unhappy letter using the adjective "juicy", and Nick Denton runs with it.
The letter says, in part, "over the past week we've begun to realize that the whole thing has been much more hype than reality, and has thrown the entire startup world for a loop. The numbers speak for themselves. There are a total of 1,131 apps. Of the last 500 to be approved, only 5 have over 100,000 members, and none have over 200,000. Put in other terms, the largest application (Top Friends by Slide, which has 7 million members) has several times more members than the than the last 500 apps combined."
To decide whether that's a failure, you have to compare it to other similar "open web" efforts. One of the applications got 7 million users in the first month? That's practically unprecedented. Developers deployed 1,300 live applications in a month? Again, I can't really agree with someone who thinks that sucks. Facebook's developer community hasn't produced as many apps as eBay's has, but eBay didn't have near that many in the first year, let alone month.
Next, skew is called out as an issue. But skew in adoption is a well-known characteristic of two-sided markets. The skew is so typical and distinctive that it's been given a name, "Long Tail Distribution". Sean Moffitt at Agent Wildfire analyzed the adoption curve of Facebok apps and found that it sure looks like a boring old long tail distribution. That's not a bad thing; that's a good thing -- in a traditional marketplace a "long tail" offering wouldn't even get shelf space at the store.
I can't speculate about the other points raised in the letter, but from my read of the facts I don't think it's accurate to say that there is a hype bubble that is "fizzling out".
~
Danah Boyd on the other hand, thinks that Facebook is prepared to wrest all of the high-value users from MySpace, and is a portent of a major rising socio-economic rift among America's youth.
For starters, market share of big brands seems to settle out a Zipf law distribution as the market matures. We don't know exactly why, but it's a common pattern to see something like the #1 company have 50% market share, the #2 settle at 25%, and the #3 at 12%. Market share for the big social network sites seems to be settling into this kind of pattern. If you expect to see a major deviation from this pattern, you would expect a good explanation for why the #1 is about to topple (like a series of serious blunders on the part of the #1).
But more important is the issue that Valleywag raises -- Facebook started with ivy league college kids, so it's absurd to think that they wouldn't have a higher ratio of college kids. If you use that logic, the month they started, their "advantage" in ratio to MySpace was at it's highest ever, and that ratio advantage has only declined since then.
It's a bit surprising to me that Danah would even act as if the issue is relevant, since it's been beat to death before with Livejournal, Xanga, and others. People go where their friends go, so social networks tend to take on skews -- just like social venues in the real world. But when the network gets to be gargantuan like MySpace, you have a lot of little cliques. Theses sites are too big to be homogeneous, and if they are homogeneous they can't grow. So you should expect Zipf's law to play in the top tier, and the cliquishness happening in smaller niche newcomers.