The Face Race: The apps life cycle

I know… I’ve been a little harsh on Facebook in recent post on the book, but there’s something wrong with the whole apps concept. I think it benefits Facebok immensely, the app developers slightly, and overall hurts the web.

The future of the book.
Probably the best benefit to Facebook is that it no longer has to deal with the vicious cycles that come along with being trendy. Instead of putting out ‘cool’ products and new features on a regular basis it looks to the community for the work, and it reaps the ad revenue and traffic benefits. Nice work if you can get it. Eventually, it will likely make sense for Facebook to begin charging its largest developers a hosting fee for their apps and give them some sort of premium placement in exchange - essentially charging app developers to do the work for them. Pretty smart, right.

The future of the apps.
This picture isn’t as pretty for apps and their developers. For some app developers success will come, but those will really only be those that can put out a large number of apps, and add to their collection on a consistent basis. The one-off developers (the majority) are the ones that get lost in the shuffle. As I see it, the product cycle of a FB app compared to a web app looks something like this:

Crude, I know… but I think it illustrates my point. The hot-now apps are now the ones exposed to the ‘fate-of-a-trend’ life cycle. They are enticed by the early rush, but are left with little to show for it before long. Facebook has a huge user base to expose your app to, but really all that does is speed up your product life cycle. It’s quicker to start, but also quicker to die. The users don’t care about the individual apps, they care about a steady stream of ‘hot-now’ items. And as long as new apps come out to replace the dying apps, the book maintains its stance.

Should I care? Maybe not. But, I generally dislike this trend of large companies acting as lords over the smaller. It’s a strange re-ordering of web power that’s taking place right now, and I for one, will not be creating facebook apps.