The good news about facebook is that over five thousand Facebook applications are currently working, and the best applications have tens of millions of installations with millions of active users.
The bad news according to our analysis is that about 87% of the usage is only on 84 applications and only 45 applications contain more than 100,000 active users. This is a long term marketplace with a vengeance ? but unfortunately, the economic models (for developers at least, though not for Facebook itself) all depends on getting into the very short head. The following graph shows the distribution of active users among the top 200 developers.As you can see in this graph, the drop-off is extremely steep. But this doesn?t mean that Facebook is not an important platform for developers, just getting Facebook application is not a short cut to quick riches. Requirements to embrace the Facebook opportunity are a lot more than optimism.
Our analysis focuses on the market for current Facebook applications, it seems that the future opportunity is less in Facebook applications per se, and more in the development of applications that use the social graph embodied in Facebook for entirely new purposes.
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