While I am certain there are longtime users of Facebook who look at the recent opening gates and extensibility as the end of the Golden Age, I am not one of them. This is mainly because I didn’t start doing anything with my Facebook profile until this past May, despite having it for a year. I have been surprised at how little discussion there is on the site compared to all of the other interactions, and equally shocked at how much time I spend on the site each day just poking around for changes in my network.
Since founder Mark Zuckerberg shrugged off the lure of a $1 billion cash-out offer from Yahoo!, his Facebook community has exploded. In recent talks, he claimed the site was growing by 100,000 users a day with half of all members returning to the site on a daily basis. It is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S. Not everything was good news, though, as Zuckerberg had to apologize last September for a privacy gaffe with the release of the news feeds. He also had to weather the backlash of students who resented open registration. Since then, nothing but roses.
The release of the Facebook to third-party development on May 27 has had a tremendous effect on both usership and benefit to other communities. Everything about this process has been smartly done. The official release of the platform came only after the developers helped work out the bugs shape a very compelling developer API. Those beta testers were also able offer up some initial applications to add to Facebook profiles, and many other companies continue to work on hooks into the twenty million Facebook members.
Add to that list one of my favorite young communities, DandeLife (). This group blog is about storytelling and connecting personal histories in ways that might not be possible otherwise. I liked the idea and the design of the site even before they rewarded a testimonial I wrote with my first iPod. Kelley Abbott is very active in the Web 2.0 events and sent a tweet today about the imminent arrival of a new Facebook application, to go with my Magic 8 Ball, Causes and Graffiti.
My hope for DandeLife is a repeat of the iLike success story. iLike is a music discovery service for iTunes, helping find new artists based on your listening history and share music suggestions with friends. Since releasing their own Facebook application, the community has grown to 6 million members at a rate of 300,000 new registrations a day. By comparison, it took Skype seven months to reach that level of membership and a year for other rapid communities, like Kazaa and Hotmail. The success is due to a combination of building a reliable tool, having an interesting service, and benefiting from the viral properties of the Facebook newsfeed. Whenever a friend in your network adds an application (or removes one), you know about it. Proof of its effectiveness: I have yet to search for an application; I have only added them after seeing one of my friends add one.
By this time tomorrow, DandeLife should be hooked into the Facebook machine. Perhaps by Friday, they will have 6 million members, too.
7 replies on “Dandelife, the Facebook application”
Another Tweet from Kelly Abbott:
Thanks for the kind mention (again), Kevin. The facebook app is better now. More feature-rich. More stable. We even managed to get the timeline to show in Facebook too. That said, I noticed that the feeds are sometimes broken still. Sometimes. And very much less often than before. Still though, give it a shot and tell me what you think.
http://apps.facebook.com/dandelife/
K
Still having some difficulties. It won’t let me get past the login page to even add the app to my profile.
Hmmm. I wonder if it hangs if you are not logged into Dandelife first. Try being logged into Dandelife first. Then go to FB and add it. (Thanks for the help in bug tracking this.)
No luck. I’m logged into dandelife, but I’m still getting the same issue when trying to add the facebook app.
Thanks, Kevin. Back to code for me. I’ll figure it out.
K
[…] Many of them are simple hooks into other existing communities, and those success stories—like iLike—happen as much due to a good match between communities as an effective tool to make that […]