Dave McClure and Stanford Professor BJ Fogg (Captology lab)have been teaching a class on Facebook applications at Stanford over the past semester. The class is made up of about 50 students who teamed up to produce 25 applications. We got a look at the applications earlier. Today we received word that one of them, KissMe, has crossed 1 million installs as of 6:30pm this evening. Another app, Send Hotness is likely to break 1 million in the next few days. It’s pretty amazing considering a lot of professional apps barely register.
KissMe
– kiss your friends, basically by inviting them to use the application. Apparently this is the most popular application of the whole class in terms of the number of users it has (100,000).
Send Hotness – figure out your ten hottest friends; invite your friends to help you with rankings. You must invite at least ten people to see the rankings.
Just curious, how are any of these useful to anybody?
Typo: In the second sentence, you wrote “produced” instead of “produce”.
It’s nice to know that the FB community is still into these trivial applications. The apps are really cluttering up some profiles. The multiple walls are getting pretty irritating. Is anybody going to come up anything useful besides me? Most of these apps are going to die and if I could block all these invites to apps, I would.
I concur with the person above me. How exactly is it useful. It seems like the faster they go notch the counts, the faster they are going to fall. But perhaps by then it would be the time to move off.
KissMe sounds like it would do good ..hell who wouldnt like to kiss or be kissed but its too kiddish to go on for long until the next best thing comes out.
Regards
http://www.techbanyan.com
I’m so glad MySpace isn’t cluttered with this stuff yet, but now that OpenSocial has opened the floodgates. I am afraid. Because there’s already insane comment spamming on MySpace.
A class like this should be held through distance learning. A huge market of programmers & entrepreneurs are cut out. Anybody outside of Stanford or for that matter Silicon Valley has to learn this on their own.
Here’s your chance (Tim) O’Reilly.
blahh, blahh, blahh. I hate Facebook apps.
The facebook platform is turning out to be largely useless. Viral and useless. Anything useful gets buried.
Geez, looking forward to when Techcrunch reports on the next Facebook innovation – smileys anyone?
Gotta love it when the Stanford intellectual elite are devoted to producing such monumental drivel.
yesterday i removed over 250 invites for several applications. it drives me nuts. the way most aps are generating users (including the two mentioned in this post) is close to spamming.
holy smokes batman.
TechCrunch Comments looks like a fertile ground for spamming. Do they even check it! I hope they do
What the hell…
[deleted]
We are going to look back in 12-18 months (or less) and ridicule how stupid we all were for giving a crap about all these useless, inane FB apps. It is truly terrifying to see how much press all this is getting. This post basically illustrates how useless apps are turning FB into MySpace, which everyone loves to mock.
Bottom line: high schoolers and college kids are going to migrate somewhere else once they realize their parents and parents’ friends can see what they’re up to on FB.
Yeah, our students are KICKING ASS!
Dan
Lead TA
http://www.dan.ag
And to all of you griping about inane apps on FB, you’re just jealous.
we interviewed a couple dozen teens lately about their myspace/fb usage – one of the major complaints about FB was about ‘all these annoying apps’.
So while users migrated from ms->fb they are now migrating back to ms.
I wonder how they are really commercializing them. I prefer a group over an App, similar to the one I have created for my site http://www.uberinvestor.com on Facebook
http://www.face...?gid=5956823430
Everyone is welcome to join.
@15: You’re serious? Really?
“Let us help design your viral strategy.”
Listen, kid, we all admire your enthusiasm and clearly since you’re going to the poor man’s CMU you’ve got some brains about you but let me offer some free advice – practice your trade in a platform/discipline agnostic fashion. You don’t want to be 25 and looking back on all the mistakes that you made.
I wonder if the spammers are reading this article and coming up with new and novel ideas to use FB to spam us all into oblivion with similar “apps.”
@18: I do believe Stanford cs outranks CMU. That said, I don’t think the folks in this class are the ones pounding out the high power research.
Actually, Send HOTNESS achieved 1 million installs about two hours after KissMe did.
Five years from now, we will look back on this Facebook app bubble and say, “what the hell were we thinking?”
@1,3&4
As a producer of several “so-called” useful apps, I’d like to congratulate these kids for their success. Although its nice that we adults (I use the word loosely) can leverage facebook to extend the reach of our grown-up utilities and applications… that’s not what the spirit of facebook is about.
There’s a reason American Idol gets the viewers it does and it has nothing to do with its utility or functionality. If you spent 20 minutes in the media room at a college library (and I have) you’ll gain a real appreciation for how college students spend their time goofing off on facebook. So, lets give some credit to a group of college kids who managed to entertain 2 million + of their peers and connect with them in a way that few people ever will.
Cool?
David – I think you’ve got the key. It’s really about entertainment and lightweight social connectivity. And as our students’ successes have shown, if you can provide FB users with a new way to flirt, they’ll use it. KissMe, Send Hotness, Hugs, Share the Love, the list goes on…
No one is claiming that our students’ apps are breakthroughs in online web apps – but there is no denying that they’ve cracked the secret viral code of Facebook and with luck, these lessons will apply across any social network.
Dan
@YoungVC
You seriously do not get it. These apps are the beginning of a marketing bonanza that will make Google look small.
The apps let marketers gather demographic information on users. For example, age, gender and location. That information can then be reused to deliver better targeting when Facebook users do other things, such a search or read news.
No longer will advertisers be showing ring tone ads to 40 year old men or showing viagra ads to 20 year old women. That alone is going to radically alter click through rates.
I can’t believe I’m commenting on what is ostensibly a college “group project”. Sorry, but putting a pedigreed flag on an accredited college adventure does not convert it into industry news (PR fodder, YES… but not news).
Dan Ackerman Greenberg, please explain how this is even remotely noteworthy?
The innovation value of KissMe is exactly zero:
- Anyone who has coded a FB app can tell you that KissMe is absolutely trivial to implement.
- From a product perspective, KissMe is no different from a Poke.
@ Jason Moy
Last time I checked the valuation of a FB app is approximately $1.30/user.
That’s noteworthy my friend!
How many of those 1,000,000 installs were from people who wanted to see what an FB app with 100,000 installs looks like?
@Jason Moy (28)
What was the difference between friendster and myspace?
Using your methodology the innovative value of myspace should approximate 0 as well.
However, the platform took off because it found a way to connect with users. Looking at facebook applications one can see that certain ones “take off” and others do not. Kiss me and Hotness certainly fall into the former catagory. For whatever reason they’ve been installed by millions of users while other similar applications have not.
From a product perspective a lot of things look, smell and sound the same. However, these kids have found a way to make their’s the apps that have been installed. Not having used these apps I can’t tell you if it was packaging, marketing or just dumb luck. However, the emergence of two such highly popular apps from the same class make me keen to rule out the latter.
I’m not arguing for the salience or importance of facebook apps. I simply want to commend students on a job well done — assuming the goal was to produce highly successful facebook apps.
Finally, I can guarantee you that if you got one of these students in a room they’d surprise you by their understanding of viral networking and the social graph.
Kiss Me, Zombies vs. Vampires, Vampires vs. Pirates, Mardi Gras Beads… these are the apps that are poising the Facebook environment and giving all apps a bad name. I’m sure the Facebook people are aware of this, and want to kill these things, but they can’t. These apps are like heroin: very popular, and spread quickly, but they don’t do anybody any good.
(My app is actually useful. It organizes your books. Try it out: http://ubc.face...p?id=2397701323)
Last I checked, the hundreds of thousands of stuffed animals sold every month haven’t been very “useful” to anybody.
Sometimes things don’t have to be “useful.” Sometimes “fun” is good enough.
There are several multi-billion dollar industries out there based on making “fun” (yet useless) things to do. Don’t ignore them.
Hmm… is it me or are these things as useless as a wooden nail?
-_-”
Transcript from the KissMe team:
Person 1: “Wow I have an idea, lets invite people to use our application, but instead of calling it an invite, lets call it a Kiss”
Person 2: Ok, I am feeling ya…what does the application let them do when they have invited friends?
Person 1: Nothing, the whole idea is to invite people to use it, but it does not actually do anything, the coolness is in the invite
Person 2: OMG you are a genius! High Distinction here we come”
As per the existing comments, this is just retarded and I fail to see how such applications can be so popular…
Internet has provided a cheap way of marketing digital content globally. If used properly can create fortunes, but some CEO’s feel that technology has no ROI.
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
These numbers aren’t remarkable at all! It’s all about point of entry, and university students typically have between 250-500 connections on Facebook. Also given the ubiquity of Facebook in University, and the fact that these apps are built within the community, and you have a soup for this level of adoption.
Professionally created Facebook apps aren’t necessarily nested within such a well connected market of potential users from the get go.
It’s all about social network real estate! Location location location! Not just where, but who/where?
I agree with #10 [magnusdopus]. Asinine stuff, like the rest of Facebook.
Not only are the apps useless, this shouldn’t even be a university course. Teach the kids to think and they can read the FB API docs for themselves.
it’s funny to read most of the comments above.
1) these stanford students are not stupid..they are targeting basic needs in human behavior. Your social patterns might differ from 99% of the current facebook population, but that’s not a fault of the application.
2) these apps are turning from virality mode to engagement mode as you post.. a strategy that most of you seem not to understand.
3) 10% – 30% users are already returning to these apps on a daily basis.
4) these top apps are already generating these kids enough income that are allowing them to invest more time and resources in scientific and non-profit causes supported by social platforms.. something you are not aware of.
5) if some of you claim to be rocket scientists then WTF would you be reading this post anyway?
This is incredibly valuable and high quality work – exactly what you would expect from one of America’s finest educational institutions. We should all be proud!
If only all american schools could work to such high standards and ideals.
Keep up the good work!
(Yes, I am joking. I obviously just lost a hell of a lot of respect for Stanford.)
It’s good to know that having killed the arts of conversation and photography, F******* now has KissMe and Send Hotness to kill love and desire respectively as well.
According to this article http://en.wikip...iversity_people Stanford alumni include 18 astronauts, countless winners of Nobel prizes, Turing awards and the inventors of TCP/IP, Google and AltaVista. They’ve truly reached the pinnacle of academic excellence now they’re teaching students how to build Facebook apps.
The facebook platform is turning out to be largely useless. Viral and useless. Anything useful gets buried.
As a member of the Stanford class, I find this post and the discussion about the merit of these apps really interesting. I think the key takeaway is that the developers of KissMe and Send Hotness accomplished exactly what they set out to do–build an app whose sole purpose was to get as many users to install it as fast as possible. Given the time frame in which these apps have built their user bases, there is no argument that both developer teams hit a home run given their goals.
For those who complain about the avalanche of apps that are merely wrappers for the invite friends functionality–I consider myself part of this camp–the real person to direct this criticism to is facebook. The platform makes these type of apps not just possible, but incredibly easy. And developers have seen how successful this genre can be (the jury is still out as to why people would install 20 different versions of “poke”). So from a responding to enviroment perspective, it is no surprise that the vast majority of popular apps have followed this approach.
My team wanted to build something more substantial and focus on deep and continuous engagement. We adopted the classic board game Guess Who? and turned it social by creating boards with the faces of mutual friends when one person challenges another to a game (http://www.face...p?id=5225434263). We’ve had the app released for two weeks, and despite some major server problems, we’re only 100 users away from 1,000 daily active users (25% active user %). This is not bad, but it is far from the astounding growth of KissMe and Send Hotness.
What we care more about are metrics like:
- The average visitor goes to 7.6 pages. Nearly 7% of visitors go to 20+ pages–that is a veritable marathon for a web application.
- The average visitor spends over 6.5 minutes on the app.
- Perhaps most important, over 60% of our users have used the app more than 10 times.
I am thoroughly impressed with how many users KissMe and Send Hotness have acquired. At the same time, I am happy with the engagement metrics, despite relatively modest user numbers, our own app has garnered. Two different goals, two seemingly successful outcomes.
Facebook is the playground for useless and trivial apps. But then who would have thought that Twitter can be so popular, another time wasting site that appeals primarily to self-absorbed under 30s crowd.
(reposting this — my earlier comment last night still awaiting moderation due to links i guess)
to be accurate, i co-teach the class with Professor BJ Fogg, who runs the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, along with lots of help from Yee Lee (ex-Slide) & Jia Shen (RockYou), as well as our TAs (Dan Ackerman, Rob Fan, & Greg Schwartz). also the students number about 75-80 across 25 teams, and have built ~30 apps to date (the list of most of our Stanford student apps are here).
@ all the naysayers on this post: you’re entitled to your opinions on the merits of the class and/or the apps, but i challenge you to find another class where students can learn & apply their knowledge to generate such astonishing & measurable results in such a short time period.
while the goals of the class were not exclusively distribution-focused, it’s been impressive to see not 1 but 2 student teams create apps that in barely a month have registered 1M+ installs and 100K+ daily users. while the apps may indeed be straightforward & lighthearted, we’ve been amazed at the ability of our students to learn & implement viral methods on the Facebook Platform so successfully. and beyond the 2 apps noted, another 10 apps have registered 10K+ installs and 1K+ daily users — still quite respectable for student projects.
whether or not these apps are “useful” or simply entertaining i feel is missing the point — our goals for the class were to learn about building apps on Facebook, to understand recent viral techniques for customer acquisition on socially-aware application platforms, and to learn how to apply metrics & analytics in product design & product marketing. based solely on those objectives, we’re pretty happy with the results.
note: in addition to app objectives that were distribution-oriented, we also have a second set of objectives around apps that are user-engagement focused. we’re working on these apps now, and hope to have a few of them finished by the end of the year.
for more info on the class, please visit the class website at:
http://captolog...d.edu/facebook/
- dave mcclure
class co-instructor
I think the naysayers have it right when they claim these apps are useless. MySpace = “message spam” while Facebook = “app/widget spam”. Most of what we see on Facebook is garbage, but lets not forgot that the platform hasn’t really been around long enough to pass judgment.
That being said, it is obvious the purpose of this class was to understand Facebook as a community. I’m sure these students have a great understanding of viral patterns on Facebook, retention rates, etc.
Over time we will see clever apps that can gain users at astonishing rates with little to no formal marketing.
Apps in progress at Stanford FB Class: EatMe, PinchMe, KickMe, SuckMe, FxxkMe…I can guarantee all of them will pass 1 million-install mark in one week.
I think most of the apps on facebook are not very useful. There are few notable exceptions. I stumbled onto these recently
One is on self expression and opinions
Check it out “if you get time” http://apps.fac...k.com/ithinkapp
You can post opinions, what you feel etc and people can then agree/disagree on them.
You can start a opinion like Techcrunch Post quality has gone down.. AGREE|DISAGREE. and see what happens when people around the world start voting on it. The discussions are also very interesting…
There are some others like Travelpod-challenge which lets you play an atlas game… a good stress buster i must say…