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.