Facebook fbFund Winners vs. Decline of Application Popularity

Facebook just announced its application winners for their fbFund, which will receive $225,00 each to develop their products. There has been a question to whether the overall popularity of applications has declined. Facebook's new design has likely contributed to this trend since it helped declutter profiles and hid application boxes. I wonder if part of the initiative is to spur more interest in the developer platform as a counter. Although, the platform will likely continue to play an important role in shaping Facebook, I think Facebook Connect has been their smartest move.

ResearchLabs questions whether the $200 million that has been invested in Facebook applications as of July 2008 has been a good investment:

According to Mark Zuckerberg, more than two hundred million dollars have been invested in Facebook applications as of July 2008.  But is it a good investment if the number of unique monthly users visiting Facebook applications is decreasing?  I found that the average change in an application’s unique monthly users from September to October was a decrease of 87,997.

...Facebook applications are losing popularity, which could mean a huge loss of money for those people who have invested in the applications, as well as businesses which depend on people using these applications.

A review of a recent one month period showed that 66% percent of the top 250 Facebook applications experienced a decrease in the number of unique monthly users.  Out of that 66%, 16% was a decrease of more than 50%.

Anyway, my favorite app that won the fbFund grant is Kontagent, which provides viral analytics software for social networks. It's integrated directly with Facebook's API with plans on expanding to support OpenSocial and MySpace later.

The demand for this type of analytics software comes from a lack of alternatives. Google Analytics, and similar tracking programs, lack the degree of granularity and indepth analysis of viral factors that developers are interested in. "As social networks and their 3rd party application ecosystem have grown up and become more competitive since the introduction of the Facebook platform at F8 over a year ago, application developers and social media-savvy advertisers are employing more "metrics driven" ways of competing."

Below is a break down of how they compare to other services:

The other winners are GroupCard, MouseHunt, Weddingbook, and Wildfire.

Who the hell would want to plan their wedding within a social network? Probably the same type of person who would want to hunt mice on Facebook. Well, all of these people can now get together and make one of those GroupCards and send out a promotion through WildFire to invite their friends to their weddings and plan the next round of mice hunting.