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Facebook Apps: Short or Long Tail?
By Reshma Kumar at December 13, 2007 0 CommentsEarlier posts from a few months ago by bloggers Tim O’Reilly and Chris Anderson concluded that the usage of Facebook apps do not follow a long tail. Were they looking at usage too early (October 2007) and so they didn’t get a chance to see the usage fully materialize?
The graph below shows Facebook apps rank ordered on the x-axis by the number of daily active users as of around 1pm PST on December 6, 2007 PST. There are 10,205 apps with a total of about 9,167 with one or more daily active users. Both axes of the plot are displayed on a log scale. There are approximately 40 million users using these apps with some users maybe using more than one app. Of the 10,205 total apps, the top 21 account for 20 million active users — only half of the total usage. The top 87 apps for 30 million, and so the remaining apps account for 10 million more — something that may be worth paying attention to.
Compared to sharp drop off shown in the log-log plot on Chris Anderson’s second blog post based on October data, the tail here based on December data looks much flatter – a change observed in a matter of 2 months. One interpretation is that the tail is expanding outward with time as more and more apps get written and people learn to tap into specialized interests.
Written and submitted by Devabhaktuni Srikrishna.
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