At least X users Total applications Percent of total 10 274 22% 100 492 40% 1000 290 24% 10000 110 9% 100000 38 3% 1000000 21 2%

Application Total users Top Friends 7,490,104 iLike 4,217,171 Fortune Cookie 4,107,451 Graffiti 4,085,170 Horoscopes 3,892,656 X Me 3,628,523 SuperPoke! 3,351,597 Free Gifts 3,106,403 Video 3,063,761 Movies 2,775,538 Moods 2,186,767 Mobile 1,954,245 Honesty Box 1,904,742 My Questions 1,556,722 Favorite Peeps! 1,459,334 Food Fight! 1,387,109 Causes 1,283,009 Quizzes 1,234,102 Slideshows 1,216,217 HOT or NOT 1,138,625 Where I've Been 1,027,373

Author User count Goowy Media 10 6,248 Astrology.com 9 8,459 Sze Tan 8 3,670 Patrick Shyu 8 27,621 Kevin Koder 8 230,164 Pete Crucian 7 503 Lucy Silverman 7 1,180 Sari Williams 6 599 Zach Smith 6 19,397 James Tyler 6 487

Author Total user Slide 7490357 RockYou! 5108967 Facebook 5018170 Jia Shen 4583310 R. Tyler Ballance 4556234 iLike 4217269 Ted Suzman 4085317 Nikil Gandhy 3351734 Zachary Allia 3107219 Flixster 2775591

Lately, I've been developing a little application using the Facebook Platform (my Easter Egg and Four Secrets, One Lie application) and I started wondering about the statistics surrounding Facebook applications. So, a little WWW::Mechanize application later here's some facts that are true today:1. There are 1,225 Facebook applications available in the Facebook directory.2. There are 73,109,074 installed applications in Facebook users' profiles.3. Hence the average application has about 59700 users.The problem with the average is that it hides a savage reality of Facebook applications: some have many users, most have almost none. To analyze that I broke the data logarithmically counting the number of applications with greater than 1,000,000, 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, 100, 10 and 0 users.So, 86% of applications on Facebook have less than 10,000 users, with 62% having less than 1,000 users. The 'big applications' (with over 100,000 users) account for 5% of all the applications, and only 2% make it over 1,000,000 users. So for most people developing a Facebook applications means very, very few users.Graphing that you get a classic Long Tail picture:The top 21 applications (over 1,000,000 users are):Another way to examine the Facebook data is to ask who the most prolific authors are. The top most profilic authors are:Only Kevin Koder (with 230,164 users spread of 8 applications) is anywhere near being a 'top application' on Facebook. Kevin's top application is Family Guy Quotes.The top 10 authors by number of users are:Unsurprisingly Facebook is one of the most popular authors given their advantage of actually owning the site. Ignoring the companies on the list there are a few individuals who've hit the big time on Facebook. Whether that turns in to any money for them is another thing... but Facebook benefits from this Long Tail because the cost to them of the vast underbelly of barely used applications is close to 0: they don't even host those applications, you do.

Labels: facebook, pseudo-randomness