Facebook is one of the most popular Internet sites today. A key feature that arguably contributed to Facebook’s unprecedented success is its application platform, which enables the development of third-party social-networking applications. Understanding how these applications are installed and used is important for the function and utility of web-based online social networks, e.g. to better engineer them and/or to design advertising campaigns.

In this paper, we characterize the popularity and user reach of Facebook applications. We analyze application usage data gathered over a period of six months from Facebook and Adonomics - a Facebook analytics service. We also crawl publicly accessible Facebook user profiles and obtain per-user application installation statistics, for approximately 300K users and 13.6K applications. Our findings include that (i) the popularity of Facebook applications has a highly skewed distribution; (ii) although the total number of application installations increases with time, the average user activity decreases; and (iii) users with more applications installed are more likely to install new applications.

Web-based Online Social Networks (OSN), such as MySpace and Facebook (FB), are quickly emerging as a new Internet killer- application. We can view OSNs as natural extensions of Inter- net applications that establish relationships between users, such as email and IM. However, unlike those applications, OSNs not only facilitate direct communication between users but also allow them to post content that revolves around their profiles creating online personas that typically map to their real life personalities. In addition, OSNs explicitly expose a user’s social contacts, enabling users to browse each other’s social networks in search of common friends and interesting content. FB in particular, has approximately 67M users, while the total number of users in all other popular OSNs combined is around 270M.

In a successful attempt to enhance user experience and increase the site’s appeal, in May 2007, FB made a key innovation: they opened their platform to third-party developers [3]. Developers are now able to create FB applications that augment FB’s functionality or act as front-end to third party web-based services. The FB application paradigm is unique because the risk of development and promotion investment in third party applications is smaller than the risk of investing in stand-alone web applications. This is due to the simplicity of the FB application API and to the inherent capabilities of the platform. In particular, FB notifies its members about the applications their friends install and use, and applications themselves prompt the user to invite friends to install them.

Download pdf Poking Facebook: Characterization of OSN Applications