I had the chance to sit in briefly on the “Why Social Media Marketing Fails” panel featuring Peter Kim, Charlene Li, and Jeremiah Owyang.  The discussion centered around the measurement of social media marketing efforts and the growing need for better accountability.

At one point, Charlene asked the audience to members to raise their hands if they were meaningfully measuring their social media efforts – a small sample went up.  The follow-up question, when asked how many were engaging in social media marketing in general, showed quite a bit more hands from the packed audience.  Her point was simple and spot on – start measuring your efforts or your budgets will be capped or cut.

Peter made an interesting point as well and brought back into focus the need to keep track of the bottom line. As he reminded us all, the marketing department has often escaped the traditional modes of accountability within the organization.  While there have been many successful measures taken to add structure to internal processes, the default position of marketing has been “we’ll make it up in brand equity” (love that one).

Jeremiah added some interesting insight into another aspect of failure – engagement.  He pointed to an example of a financial services client that they advised to not pursue a social media strategy.  The main reason behind the guidance was the internal protocols that prevented employees from actually engaging with customers via the social tools.  If there aren’t any real people at the helm, how social can it really be?

Jeremiah followed up with another take at the engagement model.  Citing Wells Fargo, he showed that engaging customers via their lifestyle or workstyle could actually be a very successful mode.  As he mentioned, Wells Fargo created their Guided By History blog which actually connected them with exactly the right kind of customer.

Tags: #w2e

For some time know, I have been looking at the shifts in social bonds as a result of social networks.  The outgrowth of Facebook, MySpace and a number of similar services has us re-evaluating things we traditionally understood without ambiguity – like friends, groups, interests, and status.

My good friend Brian Solis has an interesting post today that discusses some of the changes that are happening.  As Brian writes in “Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect“:

“Relationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It’s the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It’s the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.

On Social Networks we’re bound by context and not necessarily by the relationships that link us in the real world.

Source: Brian Solis, “Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect“

I think it’s an interesting notion that we’re bound by context.  I think that this is true at the most basic level – there is a general sentiment about the venue through which we network.  Social networks are marketplaces of intention.  Daters flock to online dating sites in search of relationships, LinkedIn caters to the business professional, Facebook caters to, well that’s not that simple anymore to provide a single context – but friendship seems a suitable bucket.

I think, however, that we’re just scratching the surface.  Our networks are being bastardized in lots of ways.  We glom together everyone into one pool and then we’re overwhelmed with having to deal with it all at the same time.  In our real lives, we are capable of maintaining many granular networks of individuals.  We’ve moved past the differentiation of social networks (see Social Networking Differentiation 2.0, June 2006) but there’s still quite a bit left unsettled.

It seems we’re ready for the next phase of differentiation – where micro actions are aggregated back together to resemble real things.
I’ll use an analogy to better describe just what I think this looks like.  If we imagine our network of relationships as a home, the foundation is made up of those real, physical relationships that we have with others.  Right now, we’re on the ground floor – where we welcome new people at our virtual front doors.  With time, attention, and enthusiasm, those same guests on the ground floor are invited upstairs: they’re the friends that come to visit from out of town, that make your home their own home.

The second level of relationships I call Affinity Networks.  They are truly contextualized networks of friends and family and other individuals that you care about.  Brian nails it when he points out that “We listen to relevant keywords to learn from others who share our interests and passions.”  Truth is, however, that those are just directional pointers to the individuals that are seemingly important or relevant.  Beyond that initial interest, it takes a great deal of interaction and discovery to actually forge real relationships that last through time.

Affinity networks differ in that they don’t deal with the people connected but instead with the subject at the core.  That “subject” may be a person, place, or thing, but everyone gathered shares a bond to this central concept.  Affinity networks allow us to re-constitute all the micro actions and gestures and give us focus again on those trends, themes, and individuals that mean the most to us.

I’ve often noted that as much as technology provides us new ways to reach out to more and more people, further and further away, it’s our nature to seek out the solutions that mimic or engender closeness, touch.  Seems we’re ripe for something new.

The battle between free and paid services continues to evolve in new and interesting directions.  Glenn Fleishman has an interesting article out that takes a look at some of the changing economics.

While there are some instances where the company/vendor have purely altruistic goals, the usual, underlying goal is that by offering something for free, some other monetizable action exists.  As a business offer free as a lead-generation tool, focus on filling this pipeline is critical to its success or failure.

Kodak Gallery, once know to us as OFoto, is carving out a new, rather interesting, pathway to revenue:

In the past, photos were stored by Kodak indefinitely at no charge. Now, Kodak has imposed the equivalent of a yearly service fee made through a purchase. Storage is free for 90 days after creation of an account. For accounts with less than 2 GB of stored photos, you must spend at least $4.99 over 12 months; more than 2 GB, $19.99.

Source: TidBITS, “Kodak Gallery Joins Parade of Free with Payment Services“

However, I disagree with Glenn that this is a step towards free.  This is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

If you think about the actual economics, what’s happening is we’re making a move towards paid services over free ones.  In this case, we saw a service that was free now having a cost – a declared cost. This differs from before where the photo hosting itself was the loss leader.

Every business that hopes to turn a profit has to recooperate the costs associated with providing its service.  This responsibility is three-fold, of course:

1. To Shareholders – every shareholder in the company has made an investment in the future of the company and cannot provide an infinitely supply of resources to that success
2. To Stakeholders – this includes the employees of the company and the universe of companies that supply services to the company
3. To Customers – most importantly, it’s our inherent responsibility to make sure we persist to continue service to the customer in the method they’re accustomed

Glenn continues on to point out an interesting fact about the economics:

As Web advertising dollars have shrunken from click fatigue and the declining economy, focusing more closely on the most loyal users may shed overhead while increasing ARPU (average revenue per user). A million ad impressions at $10 per thousand views ($10,000) doesn’t add up as fast or come as easily as 1,000 subscribers at $10 per month.

Source: TidBITS, “Kodak Gallery Joins Parade of Free with Payment Services“

Despite the continuing downward pricing trends for storage, cpu capacity, etc. these costs are still not zero and without alternative means to subsidize these sub-systems, growing these features “to scale” quickly becomes non-trivial.

One caveat here, though.  I don’t necessarily mean to equate loyalty with value.  I think that there are a number of different prisms through which we can look our customer-base.  While revenue is definitely a hard metric to avoid, many others come to mind as well.  Will explore those at a later date, though.
For a bit of history, I discussed this topic in September 2005, “The Fine Line Between Free and Profit“

Web 2.0 San Francisco is just a few weeks away now and I’ve been spending some time looking at the schedule.  This year’s schedule is very interesting in that it has a lot of timely guidance (evidenced by topics that reflect the changing needs of a weakened economy) and sage advice (from those at the helm of some of the largest 2.0 efforts so far).

While I’m hoping to attend as many as possible, I’ve made a very short list of the ones that I am looking forward to.  But before you read that, I’d like to give you a chance to attend on your own.  I have two full-access passes ready to send off to the two best answers I receive.  Here’s the rules:

1. Visit the schedule listing at http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/full
2. Choose your favorite session
3. Tell me why you want to attend that session – what you’re hoping to get out of it and how it will impact your own work – comments are under repair here so mail me gregarious AT bluewhalelabs DOT com

I will select two winners and re-publish their posts here.

Here’s a few of my top picks:

‘S’ Factor – why sales shouldn’t be a dirty word in Web 2.0

For many start-ups making money remains an afterthought. But developing a great application and building community around it is no longer sufficient. Both consumers and businesses are getting wiser about Web 2.0 tools, awarding their attention sparingly.

Good product is more than technology. In order to succeed it has to have the ‘S factor’ (‘S’ for sales) built into it from the very beginning. So why is ‘sales’ still a dirty word in Web 2.0?

My Take

As someone who’s launching one product and advising many others on their own strategies and futures, this is a topic that always comes up.  I do hold dear to my heart that we should build things that change peoples lives and in doing so, create enough value that they have no problem paying for that difference.

Can’t We Just All Get Along? Human-centered Design Meets Agile Development

How can designers and developers work together in a process that seems to be contradictory in nature — and how does visual design fit into the picture? How can we best create integration, collaboration and implementation around seemingly divergent methodologies and languages?

Human-centered design — basing its insights on thoughtful user research, iterating early through documentation, and beginning development much later in the process once the design has been fully fleshed out — has become the de-facto process and approach for the creation of useful and desirable products. At the same time, Agile Development — promoting developing early and often in short iteration cycles with tight feedback loops — has become the standard for developing useful software.

My Take

As an advocate of the “me-first” design philosophy, it’s clear to me that any design that does not sufficiently and effectively explore the users of an application, service, product or device have failed in their ultimate mission.

Finding Influence: Design Patterns for Smarter Crowds

In May, I wrote a post about the “Pervasiveness of Streams” where I posited, amongst many other things, that the Stream is a new data type that poses new challenges for us as individuals, designers and developers:

So when you think of digital presence – the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence – how would you best want to represent that? The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating. I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another. There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

Around that time, Brian Solis (@briansolis) and Jackie Peters (@jackiepeters) were discussing the topic and thought it would make a great panel for next year’s SXSW.  I’m happy to announce that our panel made it through the first round, but now we need your help.

For our panel to be officially approved, we need the community on our side.  Feel free to read more about the panel here.  If you like the topic, please cast your vote.  If you have questions or comments, post them there, here or send them directly.

A Discussion on the Pervasiveness of Streams

What is It?
Lil’Grams is a real-time baby book designed to make it absolutely simple for parents to capture the precious moments of their baby’s life and share it with their family and friends instantly. If you like to draw comparisons, you might consider some of the names early reviewers have come up with:

• Twitter for Parents
• Pownce for Parents
• Dogster for Babies

I’m flattered to be compared to such well executed tools and communities and hope we’ll live up to the excitement that surrounds all our friends there. That said, we’re also quite different – perhaps the story behind it explains why.

Background

Eleven months ago, I was given the greatest gift imaginable, my son Aiden. It was, to say the least, life changing and has given me a new perspective on many, many things – large and small. Today, I am giving him the best thing I can imagine, a living memory book that celebrates his life and my love for him.

When I first got the idea for Lil’Grams, I was overflowing with excitement and lacked the right vehicle to vent through. As a social media enthusiast, I naturally considered a number of different options before deciding to build my own.

• Blogs – my first consideration was a blog, but it just felt wrong to me. As someone who’s blogged for years now, I knew that a blog was a lot of work and tends to make you feel bad when you don’t post.
• Twitter – Twitter, was really interesting as they were lightweight and had an awesome mechanism for notification, but it felt too open to me – yes I know I can make my updates private, but having two accounts was a hassle and more than I thought I wanted to suffer through
• Email – I was equally willing to consider just mailing out updates as thousands of parents do already but that’s just ridiculous – there’s no real archive.

No matter what I found that could be hacked in one way or another, none of them really got my needs as a parent.

Solving My Real Problems

As a first-time father, I’m essentially a fanatic. If you’re not one yet, or had the opportunity to be around a baby from its birth, you might not get what I mean – so you’ll have to take my word for it (for now). As a truly obsessed person, you tend to want to take lots of notes, pictures, videos and everything else. At the same time, you’re also very inclined to want to tell people all about your bundle of joy.

My Memories, My Way
One major problem is that lots of tools tell you what you are supposed to care about. The printed baby books come with pre-assigned slots for your baby’s milestones. Naturally, these are supposed to be the “big” moments in a baby’s life – but there’s far more than that and no place to put them. Blogs and related tools, while being more flexible, are equally abstract. None of the blogging or microblogging tools understood that the things I wanted to keep track of had special meaning to me and my family.

As a parent, it was easy to see the types of things I was keeping track of. We call these little nuggets Lil’Grams since they are short messages about baby’s life. There are six of them right now for tracking things like growth, foods, firsts and pictures too funny to lose. Of course, we don’t think we’ve got them all just yet, but we’ve designed it so we can add more whenever it makes sense.

Always Ready
When you’re chasing the baby around, time at the computer is a luxury. Many, many parents I’ve met have a physical baby book that they received as a gift. Most of them haven’t completed the book in any meaningful way. Why? Accessibility. Most parents don’t have the book around them all the time which means they have to remember to go back. Unfortunately, remembering to do things like that become harder and harder with time – have you seen how fast a baby can creep?

One goal we had with Lil’Grams was make it as accessible as possible. We decided from the beginning that we would support publishing from as many places as possible. The initial version starts out with web posting only, but we’ll shortly roll out posting from everywhere.

Built in Bragging
Now let’s not kid ourselves – you’re a mom or dad and your kid is the best. That’s what every parent has told me :) Kidding aside, we’re all proud of our babies and we want to share the love with our friends and family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called, emailed, or physically harassed by someone I consider a friend because I haven’t posted enough pictures of Aiden or given them an update on what he’s doing. There’s no shortage of pride, just one of time.

It’s hard work getting your memories down and even harder work pushing pixels out to friends and family. We built Lil’Grams so that you don’t ever have to worry about telling people (or about annoying them with the details you’re obsessed with). When you sign up, you build your own little private network for the baby and invite them to share in the fun. Once they’re in, they get updates (at whatever interval they want) when you post new updates – plain and simple.

Manage the Media
Not the kind coming after you for pictures of your baby, but the thousands of pictures and videos we take. For example, right now I don’t have a highlight reel of my favorite pictures of Aiden. I have started to put them into Flickr, organized as best I can, but that’s not really giving me the “Best Of” reel in any way.

We tackled this problem by letting parents associate photos and videos with their memories. During this alpha, we’re only focusing on photos and specifically photos from Flickr since we love them and they have the best API. Soon in the future, you’ll see lots more sources for your photos to come from and it’s all pretty seamless.

Two Applications for the Price of One

As we go ahead with this alpha, we’re releasing just a couple of the tools we’ve got planned. Here’s the details:

Baby Book
The Baby Book is your real-time publishing platform for baby’s memories, no matter how big or small. It tracks of all those cool details with ease and keeps your friends and family in the loop.

Shoebox
This is your digital media manager. If you’ve got photos or videos out there (be they in your own account or with friends) we’ll help you wrangle them into one place and rise the cream to the top.

All of our tools are completely private and not open to the general public. I hate creeps and don’t want them any closer to my son than I want them to yours.

Calling All Parents

Today, we’re announcing the start of our private Alpha. We’re looking for excited parents everywhere, though we’ve got a special place in our hearts for parents who use Flickr and Twitter at the moment.

You can sign up in the top right corner of our temporary home page: http://littlegrams.com.

Special Thanks

Special thanks go out to Daniel, Susie, Bernie, Ranvir, Shikha, Arjun, David, all the parents who’ve provided input and to my happy little boy Aiden for not breaking all the keys off the computer so daddy could write this post.

Technorati Tags: aiden, baby, bluewhalelabs, greg+narain, media+sharing, memories, moms, parents, littlegrams, puppy, social+media, twitter

Inside Facebook speculates that Facebook may be in the process of adding Friend Lists, aka Buddy Lists aka Contact Groups to a future release of the platform:

The two new API methods are:

friends.getLists
friends.getListsMembers

Based on these method names, “Friend Lists” could be buddy lists that you might use to organize your friends. For example, “Work Friends” or, say… “Top Friends”.

If these are indeed upcoming features of the Facebook Platform, I think this has two major implications:

1. This could dramatically simplify privacy controls. Right now, users manage privacy settings per-feature or by managing their Limited Profile list. The addition of Friend Lists means one can now much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List. Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see another, best friends see yet another.

This will be a welcome change for everyone whose LinkedIn networks have migrated to Facebook. Consequently, this could mean accelerated LinkedIn attrition: per-Friend-List privacy settings could substantially decrease the need of many to actively maintain their LinkedIn accounts as well.

2. More significant, this would mark the first time Facebook has moved to directly compete with a top Platform application.

Source: Inside Facebook, “Speculation: Facebook adding Friend Lists; implications for Top Friends, LinkedIn?”

I’ll take the second part first, since I think it matters less. Anyone who has been paying attention to Facebook should have known that it:

1. has always had the option to make whatever it wants, even if inspired by an app on the platform
2. was probably on the long-term roadmap for Facebook for some time
3. should not be a surprise to anyone

In contrast, the first point about privacy and security is much more interesting to me, probably since I’ve been talking about it for years now (at least since March 2004) and it’s nice to see it making it into the usable, at scale realm:

SNS 1.0 is at risk from another powerful force, however. Although the feature sets of these tools will often fail to accommodate user’s needs, a far more fundamental problem may exist in the very foundations. As mentioned we all interact within different social zones and contexts. As mentioned, our circles are interconnected and often linear (although promotions and demotions can be accelerated for any arbitrary reason). I call this the Social Context Continuum. Relationships evolve, or devolve, over time. As more information is exchanged, the bonds change based on a number of criterion — trust being near the top of that list.

The dilemma is two-fold. One the one hand, there are not enough “shades” for tinting relationships in the current systems. Degree-based systems are meaningful only in term of understanding graphs. However, they do nothing to indicate affinity or opportunity. Graduated scales, going from Enemy to Friend only serve to collapse the value of categories as a whole — much like the junk drawer in most everyone’s kitchen which becomes a convenient catch-all for hard to place items.

On the other hand, the positioning of SNS is problematic to its long-term unevolved survival. For some users, SNS provides a unique social environment that encourages and develops new relationships. For others, the potential of SNS to create business opportunities provides significant value. Unfortunately, the quest for ubiquity at the same level as e-mail or cell phone address books is extremely difficult to pass, at least by current standards.

In the end, these two forces will come together and result in a growing sense of frustration for users. This frustration will stem from the inability to manage more of their network from a single location. The result will be that users will be forced to maintain identities in numerous locations without the ability to easily leverage previously efforts. Some may argue this will prove to be a much smaller problem than it seems, however, we live in a culture of consolidation and where time and other pressures continuously drive us towards new forms of “efficiency”.

Source: SocialTwister, “The SNS Differentiation Challenge”

Interestingly enough, Facebook could have the requisite level of engagement and momentum to materialize the “Social Context Continuum” for a large part of the internet populous.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, facebook+applications, social+architecture, social+networking, socialcontextcontinuum

There’s some very interesting discussion circling now about the use of channels in Twitter. Most every Twitter user is well aware that groups are a fundamentally lacking feature in the system – perhaps it’s a strength, not a weakness.

Chris Messina has prepared what can only be described a working specification for the implementation of Channels, a la IRC, in Twitter. There are some great observations, so I recommend reading the whole post. For the unwilling, here’s a few useful excerpts:

What I’ve realized is that this “channel” concept meets many of the aggregate desires expressed in various “Groups for Twitter” discussions while not inheriting a lot of the unnecessary management cruft that most group systems seem to suffer from, it is easily accessible adapting current Twitter syntax and convention, it’s easy to learn and lightweight, it’s very flexible and entirely folksonomic and works with people’s current behaviors, rather than forcing anyone to learn anything radically new. It also keeps the interface aspects to a minimum (as I’ll soon explain), invents little by borrowing from age old IRC conventions also adopted by an existing web application and, from what Britt said so far, actually works consistently on cell phones (whereas, for example, the star key does not).

[...]

Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

Source: “Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels”, Factory Joe

I’m quite keen on the notion of “metaprogramming” against the Twitter OS – largely related to the various hooks we’ve built for LittleGrams. Curious if Chris’ model could work, I attempted to setup an account to no avail. Chris’ approach relies on the # (pound) symbol as the marker that a channel tag is ahead. Unfortunately, there is an implicit meaning to the # in URI-based systems which could be a source of conflict going forward.

But wait! Twitter does allow us to register names that have the _ in them. To give this a try, I’ve registered _littlegrams on Twitter. I’ll attempt to use this as a channel for making announcements regarding the product – the actual littlegrams account is used for posting to the application. I am ok with the signal that an _ is meant to be channel as opposed to @ being direct.

That being said, I’m just not sure I want this in my stream in general. I see Stowe’s taken to using them in his tweets but I find the whole affair a bit messy. Twitter serves up too small a triscuit for any real meat – and that’s a strength, not a weakness. In fact, what I would prefer to see is some pre-processing happen on messages. Let me explain using LittleGrams as an example.

For our system, we wanted more robust messaging via Twitter, however, for a number of reasons (efficiency, security, etc) we opted to work via direct messages. To this end, you could say that we setup a Channel Director. With our app, you send a message to the director like so:

d littlegrams word bye-bye

Our system polls for the commands and then is able to parse that into two distinct things: an instruction on what to publish and a notification back out to the network. If we were to adopt this to the current problem set, I might be able to do this:

d _channel #barcamp #chris+messina Can’t wait to get to the Block!

As we’re doing, a processor for _channel could be setup (or Twitter could offer one) that was able to make the channel descriptors into metadata instead of direct data. The message that would be broadcast out to those individuals following either of these channels would be a short, cruft-free message:

Can’t wait to get to the Block!

The other thing I like about this approach is that it quarantines someone’s accounting work. While tagging is a great thing that continues to subvert systems everywhere, I think it is still largely personal. That may fit well with the nature of most Tweets today, but is that the future?

I think that all the other mechanisms Chris has are awesome and could easily see them working out well, especially if the fine folks at Twitter can make the dream into a reality.

That’s my 20 cents. For some more background, check out Stowe and Brian’s posts.

Technorati Tags: brian solis, channels, chris messina, groupings, littlegrams, stowe boyd, twitter

It’s been quite some time since I’ve had enough spare time to even think about the URL for my blog. We’ve been overwhelmed with work at Blue Whale Labs for the last few months and that has quickened to a near-death pace in the last several weeks as we pushed out projects for some of our clients. I will blog about that separately as they deserve their own time and place.

At the same time, I have been toiling in the background on a new secret application that’s been described as many things:

• Dogster for Babies
• Facebook for Parents
• Pownce for Parents
• Twitter for Babies

I don’t think I have a favorite – I like them all. The project is truly a labor of love, driven more and more by the obsessive pursuits of a first-time father. I started thinking about the app back in February (though I had another version of it in mind a couple of years ago). It wasn’t until May that I undertook the building process in earnest. Unfortunately, setbacks run wild and borrowed cycles from an ever-increasingly-busy development team has made it a bit harder to get things done in the time I would have liked.

To help push me in the right direction (and to get a little good old-fashioned buzz going), I decided to enter the TechCrunch20 competition. I’m sure most of you are aware, but it’s like a smaller scale Demo event sans the expensive fees. Mike Arrington and Jason Calcanis organized the event and now share that role with Heather Harde. There was some fierce competition, to be sure. It seems there were close to 700 applications, no doubt accelerated by the $50,000 prize that will be awarded to first place.

It’s going to be a great event, I am sure. I say that just a little disheartened, of course, since we won’t be on stage. Announcements went out via e-mail today to the winners and, erm, the losers. Needless to say, a nice note from Heather dropped into my inbox this afternoon. Ahh well, that’s how these things go. I’ll spare the details of what happens to those of us who lose. I do look forward to see how has made it into the 20 – I think that’s reward enough, to be honest. In due time, I am sure they will make a formal announcement on their own.

So now I’m in the 21+ crowd. It doesn’t buy you much, but you’ve got to toss your card in the hat if you want to play the game. And play on we will.
Update: So I guess it’s even worse than originally anticipate. Apparently they selected 100 semi-finalists, and no, we weren’t even in that group. Now that is depressing.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship, events, heather harde, jason calcanis, michael arrington, techcrunch, techcrunch20, web2.0

Facebook applications are experiencing tremendous growth, for better or worst. It’s not often we get to look at a set of truly astonishing numbers compressed into such a short period of time. InsideFacebook, a blog that has grown to be near the center of this emerging world, has a summary on the growth in the past month.

We’ve gathered data from all the top apps on Facebook now that we’re one month into Platform, and one thing’s clear: Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire. In fact, to the tune of 65 million net application installs over the course of the past 30 days. That’s an average of 2.5 installed applications per every registered Facebook user. And I may even be missing some.

20 applications now sport over 1 million Facebook users. 35 more have over 100,000.

Source: InsideFacebook, “Facebook users add 65 million apps in first month – average of 2.5 per person”

While most are intrigued by the opportunity, it’s not entirely clear if the universe of applications will ultimately serve as a platform for doing business. Some companies, however, aren’t waiting to find out. So far, there have already been 2 acquisitions for Facebook applications. ReadWriteWeb outlines these purchases noting that, so far, the cited reasons are largely to acquire users or talent. The conclusion puts a finger on the pulse of this matter:

So will Facebook acquisitions continue? I think that’s probably highly likely. With more than 38,000 developers already using the Facebook Developer app (which helps you create applications for the platform), buying popular apps is a good way for companies looking to get into the Facebook ecosystem to screen developers. And with the Facebook platform continuing to grow in popularity among its rapidly expanding user base, it seems inevitable that companies will try to buy their way to the top, especially given the relatively cheap price of purchasing Facebook apps (Favorite Peeps, for example, was had for only just over US 4 cents per user).

Source: ReadWriteWeb, “Facebook Acquisitions: Fad or Proof of Platform Success?”

I’m not sure that I would expect the valuation for users to remain consistently low. If anything, would estimate that as the nature of applications evolve into, well, more traditional applications, and developers loose their stage fright regarding monetizing their actions, that the lifetime value of a user will increase significantly. I can say for sure we’re making that bet.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, facebook applications, facebook+applications, ilike, monetization, slide