If you thought the last redesign spelled the death of the Facebook platform, you ain’t seen nothing yet! Last July Facebook released their new design and within a matter of months, widget applications had become a thing of the past. A few of those applications were able to withstand the changes but there’s a grim picture being painted weeks after Facebook’s latest redesign.

While LivingSocial and Quiz Monster have become leading developers thanks to the recent changes, many top developers like Slide, RockYou, Familylink.com, and a number of others are getting punished. Many of the top applications have seen a decline in usage of between 15 and 25 percent. Causes, the number one application on the platform (at least for another day when LivingSocial should take the #1 spot), has experienced a 24 percent drop in monthly active users.



Causes reached the maximum number of monthly active users for any application on the Facebook platform ever, maxing out at 26,949,385 back on March 20th. Since then it has been all downhill. Want to see other examples of applications that are tanking? Check out Top Friends, who has seen traffic plummet since the redesign. There are plenty of other examples within the application leader board including Bumper Sticker and Slide FunSpace.

Not All Doom And Gloom

Is it all doom and gloom for application developers though? Not really. We decided to compile the total monthly active users of the top 50 applications over the past 30 days to determine what the net impact has been. The result was that there was an insignificant impact. While there was a temporary decline, the total number of monthly active users among the top 50 applications has risen from 317.4 million to 322 million over the past 30 days.

That suggests that there has been a flattening of the top applications. While Causes has lost over 6 million monthly active users, there has simply been a shift of the top 50 applications. It also suggests that there is a shift in what types of applications will be top contenders. By tomorrow, it is expected that Living Social will be king of the hill. That may not last if previous redesigns can be used as an indicator.

Last time around many applications were pummeled but in a short period of time, many applications figured out what was key to success and adapted. For the time being there will be a changing of the guard at the top of the application leaderboard. As we’ve learned with this redesign though, leadership positions on the Facebook platform are not the most stable.