Monday, January 28, 2008

Where do you ski?

We just released our latest application on Facebook: Ski and Snowboard.

Over the last couple of months, we've had to scale quickly to handle the growth of our applications. This has kept us from getting this app released until now, but it is finally out and has been live on Facebook for a few days now.

This app, at the simples level, lets you tell your friends what your level on the slopes is, and have your friends confirm it. You can browse nearly 1200 ski resorts around the world and mark the ones you've been to. For every badge you mark visited, you get a snazzy looking logo of the resort on your profile -- very much like how we collect those ski passes on our jackets through the season!

The app also lets you collect set of ski resorts that you want snow reports for and see them all on one page. This makes it so much easier to decide where to go skiing this weekend! Trip planning and sharing is also built into the application, and each trip gets its own place to share pictures, wall comments -- and you can always see the ski report for that resort on teh trip page itself!

Where do you ski?

Storm gathering in Facebook Application world

There has been significant rise in the Facebook user community against applications that "force" users to invite 20 of their friends before they get to use the application at all. Users regard this as highly negative and spammy -- at least some users do. Users have formed groups, and are in the process of signing petitions. The most active group on this topic has 64K members, and there are several related, smaller groups as well (e.g., this one, and another one that lists the dirty apps). The petition is making the rounds, and if things catch on, Facebook might take action on this front.

It's been blogged a bit: on allfacebook for example, and Alec Saunders.

The developer forums have been active on this topic. Most developers participating on the forum seem to prefer the world without forced invites. A poll that showed up on the forums seems to show 50% of users do install these apps and send out invites ("depending on the app"). That statistic might itself make more app developers to resort to this tactic.

The reason the app developers are resorting to this is that they are finding it increasingly hard to tap into the viral growth. Facebook's recent changes to limit the news feed publishes and similar earlier changes have stunted the virality of apps. This affects new apps much more than existing, already successful apps. This begs the question -- where are the facebook applications headed?

In his blog, Alec Saunders writes that all the top applications have lost their active user base somewhat in the last couple of months. Even so, the number of users of Facebook are growing. Our internal numbers show that the applications were slowing down in December, but growth has been huge in January -- but this is also a result of new features and changes we have introduced in our applications. Given the increasing set of users on Facebook itself, I would expect that even the apps who are losing an audience everyday are adding new users too. I've also started seeing posts decrying the "newbies" on facebook who go nuts over all the applications and go about sending invites to everyone around them.

Are facebook applications peaking? Though it is early to tell, I think not yet. But I do think I'd expect people to start engaging themselves in more interesting applications than just Ninjas and Vampires, but making these applications succeed on Facebook is challenging.

But I do think that the applications that have found success on Facebook already are well placed. Facebook applications are a great way to explore ideas and see what clicks with users. And new applications will probably have to pay their way to success.
Or resort to the tactics like the forced invites above.

Monday, January 07, 2008

A year in review

In brief, we went from 0 users to 1.5MM users in 2007 (already beyond 2M in 2008).

We launched our Jambool.com beta site one June 1, our first app on Facebook on Sep 17, our second app on Oct 1, and our 15th app in mid December.

We went from 1 server box in production to 3 boxes at the end of the year (and it's already up to 5 in 2008 now).

Our daily active users on Facebook applications at the end of 2007 counted at 100K (and already up to 150K in 2008).

We hit our first advertising revenue in December.

It has been a fabulous year -- but not without its challenges and learnings.

Happy New Year to all, and hope the best for 2008 for you!

Friday, January 04, 2008

We think we know scale...

And then one fine day, we are left scrambling to pick up the pieces as things start to crumble.

We've always believed that "scale" and "scalability" are different things. Scalability comes from design, and scale is largely implementation. Over the last few days, it's the latter that we had to think through again. Luckily for us, we've done decently well with the first part.

It's business back to normal. Check out our Facebook page, be a fan, and use the apps!

Happy new year and all the best to everyone for a great new 2008.