Eighty four or 1.7 percent of all Facebook applications receive 87 percent of all usage. Now that's one, long, long tail ... and it sure makes you think twice about the economics of developing applications for the popular website.These stats come from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Research who has just released results from an in-depth study of Facebook. We've shown part of that depressingly long tail here ... and you can read more about it at http://radar.oreilly.com.
I think that's kind of a backward way of looking at it. As Han Solo put it, "Never tell me the odds." Discouraging developers from aiming for the bleachers by pointing out all the strikes is no way to try and create software that hits a home run. The reason why the vast majority of applications for Facebook don't get used is that they're dumb, pointless, and add neither utility nor value.
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Okay, maybe I'd better back up a little. Looking at some of the applications I get invited to join on Facebook, such as Zombies, Werewolves, Vampires, Virtual Flowers, and Movie/TV Trivia, maybe the reason why the vast majority of applications for Facebook don't get used is that they aren't dumb enough, pointless enough, and aren't lacking enough utility, and only provide nominal entertainment value, even for the easily amused?
Obviously, there's a market for stupid gimmicks on Facebook, but the question that needs to be asked is how stupid is stupid enough?
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