Mis-application

This week, Facebook announced that it had raised £51m to expand its server capacity, to help the social networking website cope with yet more explosive growth rate in user numbers. Growth is certainly something Facebook does well, and despite ongoing concerns over privacy it now has more than 70 million active users and is the sixth most-trafficked website in the world.

Ensuring longevity with users in an increasingly crowded marketplace was always, and still is, a major concern for all social networking websites. In May of last year, and whilst other social networks like Bebo, Friends Reunited and Myspace stood relatively still, Facebook took the bold and innovative step to launch the Facebook platform from which software developers could create their own unique applications to sit alongside original Facebook features.

Tremendously successful applications like iLike (which allows you to add music to your profile, has 299,183 daily active users) and Scrabulous (the word game, has 623,732 daily active users) were born, and subsequent growth has been exponential. Nearly a year on from this decision there are, of today, 24,814 applications. This helped reinvigorate Facebook, giving it a different dimension to other social networks and adding a further stage to its phenomenal development. But at the same time, I think this growth has also been chaotic, and from a user perspective it has created a far more crowded interface. These applications are everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

What made Facebook so successful in its early stages was what it enabled users to do. In their own words ‘Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you’, and it did this brilliantly. However, increasingly these applications can get in the way of the core Facebook brand. It can even be likened to Google putting anything on the homepage other than the search engine itself.

Facebook does need to innovate and to continue to develop its social network to keep users engaged, but it must ensure that this innovation is not only focussed but authentic. Facebook must stay true to what made it stand out from the crowd in the first place.

13 May 2008, posted by Richard Houston